She shook her head. “I betrayed him. Chelsea’s right. He can’t forgive me.”
“Then he’s an idiot and you move on. You did what you had to do to protect your sister. She was your responsibility.”
“Yeah, I seem to have fucked that up, too.”
“No. She’s the one who chose her path. She should have followed your example. She’s…a very interesting woman, but at the end of the day, she’s been broken and it’s made her cold. You didn’t do that. Forgive yourself and move on. Forgive yourself for Ian, too, and you might have a shot at making it work.” Simon stood up, brushing his dress shirt back to an unwrinkled state. “You did your penance. I’m working on mine. Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we? Tea fixes almost everything, my mother used to say. A bullet tends to fix the rest.”
He went about preparing tea, but Charlie just stared out the window. Nothing was going to fix this, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.
She looked out at the yard that could have been hers and wished she’d made different choices.
Chapter Twelve
Ian stared at the evidence in front of him, a series of e-mails from his lovely bride to Eli Nelson. He’d read over them three times since they had gotten into the office. There wasn’t anything in those e-mails that truly damned her. They were written in a somewhat flat, intellectual tone with none of Charlie’s sweet flirty nature in them. They were the correspondence of one professional to another.
Simon set his cup down on the conference room table. “My question is how did these assassins know your lovely wife would be in town now? Unless they’ve been here watching for her. Even then, I’m not sure how Denisovitch could be certain. She didn’t fly into Dallas.”
“No,” Adam replied, taking the seat next to Jake. “She drove, and I couldn’t find her face on any of the traffic cameras between here and Florida. If I can’t find her, I doubt they could. Someone had to have very good intelligence. He wouldn’t send so many men in without a relative certainty of where the target was.”
Unless the target had been talking to her former lover. Unless she wasn’t really the target. That red laser line hadn’t shown up on Charlie’s chest. It had shown up on his. Was Eli Nelson using her to take him out? He knew damn well Charlie didn’t like to do her own assassinations.
So why did she take out the man last night? Think for a second. It would have been easy for her to do nothing and let it all play out. Maybe he gets you. Maybe you get him. She didn’t allow that to happen.
Sometimes his dick was too logical.
“The man we caught is Zhukov. I confirmed it with the Agency and with known intelligence we have on him,” Jake said.
Adam placed a file on the desk. “I busted into the feed at immigration at DFW and ran some facial recognition software and found the two we had to bury last night. I think I slipped a disc trying to toss the nail gun victim into the ground, by the way. I’m filing for workers’ comp. I found at least two other known assassins who came into town in the last twenty-four hours. Do you think they got a group rate tourist fare?”
Fuck and double fuck. Why had he even gotten up this morning? “Did the Agency take Zhukov?”
He hadn’t waited around. He’d come straight to the office after his shower. He hadn’t done more than glance Charlie’s way since then, though he wanted to. His eyes kept straying to Phoebe’s office where she was sitting quietly. She hadn’t asked him again. She’d simply followed him, her arms and legs moving but not in their graceful fashion. She’d been like a marionette, and he was the one pulling her strings.
God, she was killing him. He wasn’t sure how much he could take.
“Yeah,” Alex said, his face grim. “After a long discussion with the Brits, a man named Ten took him. Is that some sort of weird CIA name? Like Mr. Black?”
Ian felt the tiniest smile curl his lips up. He was glad he’d gotten Charlie out of there because Ten would have been all over her. Then he would have strangled his second man of the day. And he considered Ten a friend. “No, Ten doesn’t play those games. He’s what the Agency likes to call a maverick. Tennessee Smith. Southern born and bred. He’s a good guy.”
If Ian even knew what that meant anymore.
“He’s a flirtatious asshole,” Alex shot back.
Eve grinned. “Hey, sometimes a girl needs to know she still has it. Of course, he wasn’t attractive or anything.”
Liar. Ten was six foot four, two hundred twenty pounds of pure muscle. He was known for being able to get a woman to tell him anything. If Ian had been the hardass, then Ten had been the lover. He gave new meaning to the term “close cover.”
There was a knock on the door, and Grace poked her head in. “I have two things. First, some flowers came for you. Yellow roses. Really pretty. No card.”
Very likely it was Charlie. She’d sent him flowers before. “I don’t want them. You keep them. Or you could give them to Phoebe.”
That way Charlie would get the message. He wasn’t a flowers and hearts kind of guy.
“All right,” Grace agreed. “And Damon Knight and Basil Champion are here to see you. They said you promised to cut them in on anything you learned.”
He nodded. He’d made some spectacularly shitty deals to keep Charlie with him, and now he just wanted to get away from her.
Knight walked in followed by his partner. There was a frown on the agent’s face. “I thought we were supposed to be in on this meeting.”
“I thought you would be on your way to DC.” He’d been counting on them to follow Zhukov.
“No such luck for you, mate,” Champion said, tossing himself into a chair. “We have another agent on his way. We’ve been assigned to work with you. Such fun.”
Well, if they were working together, maybe the Brits had some information he didn’t. “Zhukov was talking about Nelson possibly working for the syndicate. Have you had any luck tracking him?”
“A little.” Knight pulled out a tablet, his fingers finding the files he needed. MI6 had finally gone high tech, it seemed. “There are reports of a man matching Nelson’s description traveling to Novokuibyshevsk three times in the last year.”
“That’s in the Samara Oblast.” There was a nice-sized pipeline there.