“That’s not what the paperwork says, love. It’s just hard to believe you’re here. I was there the night you died, you see. I actually got a decent look at your body. Damon and me had to get Big Tag away from the police. Our bosses thought he might suffer a bit in jail.”
He likely would have been killed there. Nelson would have sent an assassin and then he wouldn’t have had to worry about Ian Taggart screwing up his plans. She’d known it, but she’d still taken that pill. Maybe she didn’t deserve to be forgiven. Maybe this had all been a huge mistake. “I’m sure he was grateful.”
Baz took a long draw off the beer before replying. “Nah. He was too upset. I remember thinking this was supposed to be some sort of superhero. You know, he was kind of a legend even though he’d only been working for a few years. I thought I was about to meet the real shit, but he was kind of broken, know what I mean?”
She felt a little broken now, but she still didn’t want to talk about her personal life with an MI6 agent. “So you’re here to drag me kicking and screaming to England?”
He huffed a little, an arrogant sound. “No way. We wouldn’t conduct this particular interview on British soil. Damon is being a bit of an idealist. I suspect we’ll take you back to London and you won’t make it out of Heathrow before the big bosses take you off of our hands and whisk you away to someplace nice and outside the confines of all those pesky human rights laws we have. Really, they’re so confining when it comes to torture.”
So she would be taken to some friendly government in Africa or the Middle East and they would torture her until she gave up the info. What they didn’t realize was that Chelsea was the one behind most of the information brokering. Charlie was mostly muscle. The information Charlie had dealt to specific governments hadn’t made them any money, but probably saved a bunch of lives. Chelsea hadn’t been happy with her those times. Chelsea was the brains, but she didn’t intend for that information to get out. “I haven’t directly come up against MI6. Why are you coming after me now?”
He sat up, his feet hitting the floor. “Are you going to play dumb, then, love? You hacked our systems three months ago. You were polite about it. You got in, took three files, and got right back out. If we didn’t have some very observant techs, we would never have known you were there at all.”
Fuck. Chelsea had promised her she would stay out of MI6, the Agency, and China’s MSS. They were the three countries most likely to catch her and string her up, though in this case it would be Charlie on the end of the rope. She settled in. It wasn’t the first time she’d been forced to cover for her sister. “I wasn’t trying to fuck with MI6. I just needed a couple of files.”
“On Eli Nelson? Were you working for Taggart?”
Ah, her interrogation started now. At least she could answer those questions. “Eli Nelson is after me. I am not now nor have I ever worked for Ian or McKay-Taggart. I have, however, worked for Eli Nelson. We had a bad parting of ways.”
“From what I can tell, you parted ways on your terms, not his.”
He was well informed. “I never meant to work for the man on a permanent basis.”
“No, you just used him to kill your father.”
She shrugged a little. “It would have been difficult to do the job myself.”
It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought about it, dreamed about it. She just hadn’t figured out how to do it and save Chelsea and herself at the same time. It was why she’d taken Nelson’s devil’s pact.
“But you’re quite effective at other work. You could be very valuable to someone like Nelson. Or someone like Taggart.”
She laughed a little. “You can’t imagine that I’ve been working for Ian all these years. He had no idea I was alive. I think that’s funny since you and your partner obviously did.”
An innocent look came over Baz’s face. It was a handsome face, but there was something dark about the man. “Now, I’m deeply offended. I assure you if Damon had known that Ian Taggart’s long lost wife was alive and well, he would have contacted the man. He’s very loyal when it comes to his friends. No, we’ve only known you as The Broker. We started to suspect The Broker was a woman last year when a million dollars stolen from the Taliban showed up in a fund for educating women in Afghanistan.”
That had totally been Charlie’s idea. It had been a fun day all around. “I’m a feminist.”
“You’re an anarchist,” Baz retorted, but there was very little judgment in his tone. “And you’re playing with fire. If your ‘clients’ ever figured out that you play them against each other, you’ll have more than your uncle and Eli Nelson out to kill you.”
A girl had to have a hobby. Hers just happened to be causing chaos for some of the world’s worst terrorists and criminals. It was fun. “I tend to be very careful about who I do business with.”
Chelsea usually had a deft hand about not getting caught with her fingers in the cookie jar. Which was good because the cookie jar was probably rigged with explosives.
“But you really got on our radar a year ago. We had an operative in one of the terrorist cells you did some work for.”
A little smile crossed her face. She’d enjoyed that little side project. “Sorry. I shut that down faster than your operative could. He was slow.”
They had received information about a cell working to strike at several of Europe’s public transportation systems in a coordinated effort to topple the economy. She kind of liked Europe. It was really hard to plan an operation like that when all the money disappeared.
“Our operative was working his way up the food chain. You blew the whole thing right out of the water. The cell turned on each other. Our operative watched while they accused each other of taking it. He was accused as well. He barely made it out alive.”
So they had multiple reasons for disliking her. She’d upset their plans. “I wasn’t in on the MI6 project. I simply saw a problem and I solved it. They were planning on releasing sarin gas into the air filtration systems of the undergrounds in London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome. They were ready to buy the gas. Your operative was too slow. I wasn’t willing to risk a couple hundred thousand people and the European economy because your guy wanted to move up. I also think you’ll find that I tipped off the cell’s plans to the Agency.”