Twenty

The conference room was warming under the midafternoon sun despite the dark curtains that covered the windows. Baldwin sat at the rectangular table, Garrett Woods by his side. Atlantic’s round moon face was superimposed on the wall, the plasma screen that they used for secure video feeds connected to Berlin, his home base for that day.

Baldwin was bleary-eyed. He needed sleep. Soon. He ran his hand through his hair and yawned, then rubbed his eyes for a second before he continued.

“Sorry about that. Just a little tired. Didn’t get the whole story put together until breakfast.”

“Not a problem, Baldwin,” Atlantic assured him.

“Okay, let me continue. The first name I flagged was Ali Fatima, traveling from Lisbon to Paris three weeks ago. He stayed there for a week, we’ve got hotel records for him under the alias Andre Guigernon. He flew under the Guigernon name from Paris to Montreal, where he also stayed for a week. It’s going to take more extensive searching to determine what he 210

J.T. Ellison

was up to, but we can revisit that. You may want to notify the French and Canadian authorities, see if they have any unsolved murders from those two weeks that our boy might be responsible for.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Garrett said.

“Okay. In Montreal, he became Alexandre Cadoc, flew to Seattle. We had a bit of luck there, SeaTac has a convenience corridor for international passengers which allows people to move more quickly through customs. The cameras in the corridor got a beautiful shot of him. He exited to baggage claim, left the building, and returned two hours later, checked in as Arthur Bleheris, flew to Denver. We have him renting a car there, and that’s it. BOLOs are out on the rental, but there’s been no trace of him since he started out from Denver. The rental agency has GPS in their cars standard, he specifically requested one without the device. The clerk remembers him saying he preferred to get lost, that was the only way to truly see the country.

“That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I don’t know where he is, what he plans to do. There’s still no word on who’s contracted a hit in the States.” He slumped in his chair, stared Atlantic dead in his cold eyes. “Where was his tracker? How could Aiden have engineered all of this so quickly without our knowledge?”

“The tracker is dead.”

Baldwin narrowed his eyes. “When?”

“Florence, four weeks ago.”

Florence? Baldwin and Taylor had been in Florence four weeks ago. He’d bought her a new ring, they’d giggled like teenagers. And then it hit him. Aiden. Taylor. Both in the same city, with Baldwin as the common denominator. He exploded out of his chair. Judas Kiss

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“You knew. Damn it, you knew. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“We don’t know his intentions.” That was all Atlantic would say.

“We don’t know them,” Baldwin said. “Right. He may be on a job, a hit that no one has a record of? Come on. A few weeks ago, he just so happens to be in the same town where my fiancée and I are on vacation. His tracker is found dead, and he comes to the States. What the hell do you think his intentions are? He’s after me. He vowed to take me down after the debacle with his family. And here I am, in Quantico, insulated as hell, when I should be back in Nashville making sure he doesn’t blow up my life like I blew up his.”

Atlantic merely tipped his chin down and said, “We need you to find him, Baldwin.”

Baldwin was too tired to fight. Arguing with Atlantic was fruitless, he’d learned that long ago. He turned to Garrett. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this. You know that I need every ounce of information to find this fool. You held back the most important piece of the puzzle. Jesus, Garrett. I thought I could trust you.”

Atlantic cleared his throat. “He was acting on my instructions. We didn’t want your judgment clouded. If you thought he was targeting you, you wouldn’t have been of any use to us.”

“Of course. Because that’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? That I give you what you need. Screw you.”

Baldwin stormed out of the room, went back to his makeshift office. Damn them all. They were going to get people killed, and for what? To preserve their gravy train of illicit activities? It hardly seemed worth it. 212

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He put it aside for now. Somewhere out there, Aiden was driving a car toward a certain destiny, and Baldwin could only pray that he’d find him in time. Twenty-One

Using the information Tony Gorman gave her, Taylor set Lincoln to verify his story. Gorman didn’t realize just how valuable the information he’d provided was. Taylor immediately recognized the makings of a massive federal case, and knew she didn’t have much time.

She’d let Gorman go; Marcus escorted him to the front doors and found him a cab. She didn’t think he’d be back for more any time soon. He wasn’t a player in this operation, just a willing voyeur. As long as they were of age, there was nothing blatantly illegal about watching other people have sex. He’d be a good boy and stay quiet, Taylor was sure of that. The child porn threat had been a good guess, he looked like a man ready to get home and erase his hard drive as soon as humanly possible. Score one for her talent of reading people. If he got caught up in arrests later, she wouldn’t mourn for him.

Drumming her fingers on the desk, she thought about her next steps. She needed to get to the cabin. 214

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The scene of this humiliation. She’d kept it as a rental property—her first home, there was no way she was going to sell it to a stranger. Instead, she’d rented it to two girls from Belmont University. Which meant that one of them had a camera pointed at her bed. Baldwin. She knew she needed to tell him what was going down. Knowing she was just stalling, she promised herself that she’d call as soon as there was more time to actually talk. She couldn’t just call him in the middle of the day to cry on his shoulder about what was turning into the most colossal bad day she’d ever had. Worse than having her throat slashed by a suspect. Worse than being kidnapped on her wedding day. Worse than having to arrest her own fucking father, for the sweet love of Christ.

Stop that, she commanded herself. She bottled up her own emotions, tossed in a liberal dose of the thought of Baldwin’s disappointment in her and put in the cork. There was work to be done.

Despite everything happening, her number one priority right now had to be the Todd Wolff case. It felt like she’d been divorced from the process for years instead of an hour. Not trusting herself to make the walk down to central booking to see how things were coming along, she called Fitz’s cell phone.

“Heya,” he answered. Blessed man. He knew nothing of the craziness that had just ensued upstairs. If Taylor couldn’t face Baldwin’s disenchantment with her, how was she going to handle things when Fitz found out? She swallowed hard at the thought and put on her brave face.

“Heya back. How’s the processing going?”

“Wolff isn’t a happy camper. But that’s to be expected. It’s Miles Rose we need to watch out for right Judas Kiss

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now. He marched out of here about ten minutes ago, swearing high and low that he was going to call a press conference and let the world know how his client is being railroaded.”

“Funny, Miles doesn’t strike me as the press conference type.”

“Me either. But he and Wolff had their time to confer after we did the DNA swab. They both came out of it looking like the cat who ate the canary.”

“He doesn’t know we have his wife’s blood in his truck. He won’t be feeling too great when we clue him in about that. What else is going on?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t give us anything different, no new alibi, nothing like that. He’s making all the right noises about being booked. But I got a feeling something’s up.”