英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

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Chapter 8
The door slid open, a hollow metal clank that let in better air, way too much light, and set Neeva’s pulse racing. 
It couldn’t have been five minutes since that… that person … he, she, “it”, whatever, had come to gawk, and visits were never this close together.
Teeth clenched, she positioned to a crouch, waiting for whatever would happen to happen. 
Bunch of freaking perverts all of them. Carry in a tray of food and then drop your pants, stare at the chick in chains, and jerk off before you go. 
Reasoning, questioning, none of that seemed to matter here. Even pitiful tears hadn’t worked. And, anyway, these assholes didn’t speak English.
No matter how many vile names she called them, they never reacted— except for the pretty boy. 
He’d smiled once when she’d been exceptionally creative, but that was sixteen meals ago and she hadn’t seen him again until today, when he’d brought that… person.
Maybe that person was the one running things.
Maybe that person knew the whole point of why she was here.
Maybe they’d explained the reasons in their gobbledygook and she just hadn’t understood, although that was pretty unlikely. 
Men didn’t do a whole lot of talking when they were getting themselves off, 
and whenever one of these Neanderthals did speak, it was only to grunt commands she didn’t understand or to swear at her, which she didn’t need to understand to know.
They couldn’t have brought her here just to feed her crap food and touch themselves, not even if they knew who she was. 
She’d dealt with crazy fans, even psycho fans— it’s wasn’t as if she’d never gotten sick stuff in the mail. 
But no matter which way she strung it, and she’d had plenty of time to think it through, this just didn’t fit the psycho-ax-murderer-stalker-total-creep-fan concept.
She’d kicked, fought, bit, and screamed, and not once had they hit her back. 
They wanted to— she could see that— sometimes it even seemed as if they would— 
but instead they’d retaliated by taking away the bucket that functioned as a toilet and tightening the chain so that she couldn’t reach the drain in the corner.
She hadn’t seen that one coming. Then they took the blankets and without them she shivered constantly.
The only good thing, if there could be a good thing, was that the worse the smell grew, the more they left her alone. 
It had been five meals since the last gorilla had dropped his pants. 
Oh, sure, they could get off just fine staring at her chained and degraded body. 
But now that she stank? Not so much. Assholes.
A shadow filled the doorway but didn’t enter. Neeva waited. Eventually he’d come closer, they always did.
With the door open, the incessant talking in the hallway was even louder. The noise was a lesson or something. 
Words in English and then in some other language, trading back and forth with the same blah-blah-blah that had been going nonstop at least four meals back, 
and which was a whole lot better than the sporadic crying she could hear before. Crying and screaming. Little girls, it seemed, or maybe teenagers. 
Sometimes the screams seemed older, crying out in a different kind of protest than the hell she was living here alone: hurt, desperate, hopeless. 
The words were never in English, and with the crying, they came and went, came and went, usually spaced between every five or six meals, 
until eventually there was nothing but the language lessons and what seemed like just one person down the hall.
The guard’s silhouette filled the doorway again, and in his hand was a rope… a lasso. No, a hose. 
Neeva waited for him to come closer, but he wouldn’t. They’d grown wise to her tactics, knew what she would do, and he wouldn’t make himself a target.
With a flick of the wrist, the shadow man raised the hose and an unexpected wave of water hit. 
The cold brought shock and pain, and Neeva screamed. The water hit her full in the face. 
He aimed not only at her but at the walls and the floor, as if he intended to flush the filth and smell down the grated drain in the corner, the same way a zookeeper cleaned the cages of his keep.
She gasped and choked, and when the stream moved to her chest, screamed again, and still it didn’t stop. 
Not until the walls were wet, the floor was wet, her clothes clung to the shape of her body, and the pad she’d been sleeping on was thick and heavy.
The water shut off, and the shadow left with the hose. 
He returned to the doorway, then entered and came close, and although she clawed to get away from him, she was chained and hurting, shivering, and had nothing to throw. 
He grabbed her head. She fought him. He pried her jaw open. She tried to bite. 
He squirted liquid down her throat and in a moment the strength went out of her.
He stood looking down at her as she lay shaking on the waterlogged mattress, staring up at him while the world tilted at long angles. 
With disgust in his voice he spoke, and although she couldn’t understand his words, she grasped the intent: Not such a tough one are you now, you filthy animal?

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Chapter 7
When the office door opened, Munroe didn’t turn. 
Her focus remained on the Doll Man, whose expression shifted with a fleeting glimpse of pleasure that passed as quickly as it had arrived.
“You’ve met Valon,” the Doll Man said, though he wasn’t looking at Munroe. 
The newcomer was the English speaker from the dungeon, the one important enough that he’d needed bodyguards, the one still more boy than man. 
Valon Lumani greeted his elder with reverence, then turned to glance at Munroe, studied her until the Doll Man arrested his attention.
Their exchange was in Albanian, and elation threatened to creep out from under Lumani’s skin as he basked in the sparse words of commendation offered by the old man. 
And then the Doll Man’s tone changed. “Show her,” he said, and Lumani responded by pulling a phone from his pocket. 
He thumbed the controls and with video playing and volume turned up, put it in front of Munroe.
Her body screamed in rebellion. Her lungs seized, the percussion beat harder, faster, while Logan, battered and bloody, refused to speak when ordered, refused to cry out when struck. 
The world turned a hazy black and white that blocked out everything but the man behind the desk.
The anvil hammered out the order to kill.
Blinded, unable to focus, Munroe pushed the tumult into silence, forced herself to watch the clip, to truly grasp beyond Logan to his surroundings— 
searching out clues to his location and finding them in split seconds of shaky footage that encompassed a table and window in the background.
A Ziploc bag and two-inch horizontal wooden blinds. 
Mainstays of American culture, available elsewhere but not with the convenience and price of the United States— certainly not in Europe.
In a house or an office somewhere in the U.S., Logan took another hit. More blood, more broken cartilage. A gun to the back of his head. 
Munroe gave no outward reaction. Inside, the pressure struggled to break free, to pull her out of the chair and over the desk, to wrap her hands around the Doll Man’s neck until his face changed color and his tongue lolled lifeless, and she stole from him his final breath the way he was stealing hers.
Lumani turned off the clip and tucked the phone away.
Munroe let air seep into her lungs in measured portions, afraid to breathe, afraid to betray the pain and fear that burned through her veins; 
guarded against showing the rage and hatred she felt toward this man and his protégé.
Debt.
Package.
Transport.
To kill the Doll Man now would pull the trigger of the gun at Logan’s head. 
She was too far away to save him from the repercussions before they exploded outward. 
Her mind reeled, searching for answers, searching for a way out. 
Munroe pointed toward the pocket in which Lumani had stashed the phone, turned to the man behind the desk, and said, “So I deliver your package, and you pay me by returning the life of that guy?”
A half-beat of disappointment registered on the Doll Man’s face before the sly smile returned and he said, “Yes, you will have repaid the debt, and I will exchange it by returning that life.”
Which was bullshit, of course. There was no way a man with the power to find her, kidnap her, and transport her across the ocean, a man who had a dungeon hollowed out below his building, would allow her to see his face, this hideaway, one of his businesses, if he intended to let her— much less Logan— walk free. 
But the illusion of his control, and the appearance that she accepted the lie, was all that mattered. She tipped her head in silent acknowledgment.
“We might have an understanding,” she said, and the Doll Man’s smile widened into a look of contentment and his body visibly relaxed.
“I’m so glad,” he said. “I much prefer to do business with a rational person. It keeps the mess to a minimum.”
A slow smile of agreement forced itself across her face. 
Given the state of Logan’s abused body, it would seem he didn’t dislike the mess too terribly much. 
“I should probably see the package,” she said.
He motioned toward the door. “Valon will show you,” he said, and then to the young man, disdainfully in their own language, with none of the passing tenderness he’d previously shown, “Bring the doll transport to me when you’re finished.”
Lumani nodded, his earlier elation replaced by something hard and expressionless. 
He turned to the door and, barely glancing in Munroe’s direction, nodded her forward and waited for her to move.
She stood, slow and languid. Stepped across the floor in no obvious hurry, thoughts jumping and hopscotching from one random piece of information to another, scrambling to assemble a composite of the present and make sense of the unexplainable.
The two sentries still stood outside the office door, and with Lumani leading the way, they followed Munroe back down the gold-worker-flanked pathway, through the metal door, to the underground again, beyond the cell in which she’d been kept, all the way to the end, while the same Hungarian voices droned on as background noise.
Against the far wall of the narrow hallway was yet another guard, who rose from a metal folding chair as the small group approached. 
With a flick of a finger, Lumani ordered him to unlock the last cell, and the man withdrew a chain from a pocket and from the chain a key.
Clanking metal reverberated through the tight space and then the door slid open. 
Munroe leaned forward to enter the low doorway and Lumani put out a hand to stop her. 
She paused, and in that pause a spoon flew past her leg followed by a rush of garbled slurs.
The voice was female, the accent West Coast USA, and as Munroe saw and smelled when she ducked to enter, the holding cell had the retching stench of a pigsty.
Lumani didn’t enter. Like the guards, he remained poised to allow Munroe to go in alone. 
Behind her, he flipped a switch and the dim light cast a macabre glow over the bedraggled creature that had retreated against the wall. 
Filth and rot overpowered the permeating wet of damp mold. 
Whatever food this girl had been given, she’d flung rather than eaten, mostly in the direction of the door. 
Munroe moved closer to get a better view. The girl was shackled, one foot chained to a metal ring in the wall like a prisoner in the goddamn Dark Ages. 
She couldn’t crawl far off the pad that worked as her bed and had been forced to soil herself. 
Her clothes were filthy, stained, and torn; her hair matted, her face and arms so streaked with grime, it was impossible to see what color her skin had originally been.
Eyes adjusted against the light, the girl moved toward Munroe in a crawl, spewing creative profanity. 
At her approach, the stench grew stronger and Munroe fought the urge to vomit. The girl lunged, then jerked, caught by the chain. 
Munroe remained just beyond her clawing reach, the creature cursing and screaming, straining at her bonds with all the anguish and rage of a wild animal taken into captivity.
In response to this, tears of anger and powerlessness welled hot beneath Munroe’s surface. 
Under other circumstances, violence would have erupted on behalf of this girl, whoever she was, and Munroe, unable to fight back the urge as she had in the hallway prior, or in the office upstairs, would have struck out to destroy the men who had done this.
Innocent life.
To save Logan would be to abandon this girl to whatever fate the Doll Man prescribed. 
To save the girl was to abandon Logan. The first wave of defeat crept toward the edge of Munroe’s soul, tugging at the upturned corners of thought, begging to be let in. 
She was a prisoner of the same story, her own chain just as solid, her walls equally thick.
Munroe turned. She’d seen what she’d come to see.
Outside the cell, where the air was bleach-tinged and free of the nausea-inducing, fetid, sick stench, she could breathe again. 
No words were exchanged in the hallway, not between the guards, not between Lumani and her. 
He simply nodded once more in the direction of the stairs and Munroe moved toward them.
From behind, the thud of a hose hitting the concrete floor was followed by the squeak of an unwilling tap and a rush of water. 
And then the girl’s scream again— that gut-piercing, wailing scream.
IN THE LARGE room, Lumani directed Munroe away from the doll office to a smaller room that turned out to be a bathroom with only a toilet and a sink with a speckled and aged mirror. 
With yet another flick of a finger in place of speaking, Lumani summoned and a young boy approached with a cardboard box.
Lumani took it and glanced at the contents, then held it out to Munroe. She didn’t move. “For your hair,” he said.
He paused, then pointing toward the bathroom added, “In your hands, that mirror is a dangerous weapon, yes? 
“You could kill me. Kill a few others. I take this risk. You understand that anything you do will come back to hurt Logan?”
Munroe, eyes steady on his, nodded.
“My uncle deals harshly with failure,” he said. “You understand?”
This young man, Lumani, this boy, had no right to Logan’s name, to spit it out so casually, with such familiarity, as if he were some long-lost acquaintance.
Munroe took the box, turned her back to him, and shut the door.
Slumped to the floor. The pit of blackness welcomed her to let go and fall into the murky depths where conscience and pain ceased to exist.
Hands to her head, face to the stone, screaming without sound, she pushed back hard. 
For nine months she’d tasted happiness, a chance at the closest thing she’d known to peace and a real life. 
For nine months the rage and violence that had defined so many of her years had finally ebbed, and now those who had no right had come with impunity to rip her out of this newfound calm, throwing her into an impossible situation where no matter what she did or what she chose, the end result would be a return to madness.
She breathed in rapid gulps. Needed time to think, to sort through details that made no sense; 
needed to find a way to reach Bradford and tell him to find Logan, to unloose her shackles, to buy her options, to buy her time.
Lumani pounded on the door.
“A minute,” she said. “Toilet first.”
She stood and flushed. Opened the box and found hair clippers. Located an electrical socket and plugged in the appliance. 
These people knew what drove her, knew what mattered, appeared to know everything there was to know about her, yet strangely they didn’t suspect she understood their language. How could they not? 
Albania and Macedonia shared a border— Albanian was frequently spoken in Macedonia, especially among the border cities. 
It was an oversight so basic that no one from this part of the world could have made it unless everything they knew about her had been fed secondhand from someone who wasn’t fully aware of the geographical implications of wars and borders and centuries of conflict.
Munroe flipped on the buzzer and stared at the broken, chipped reflection in the mirror. 
With hands skilled from practice and familiar with routine, she ran the buzzer from forehead to back, side to top, changing and adjusting blade guard heights as needed. 
Strands of dark hair fell away, shed into the sink. 
In the mirror’s reflection a young man with a military buzz cut and civilian clothes stared out with bloodshot eyes.
To create the gender roles and slip between them was a tool of the trade so long utilized in her working life that it had become as natural as blinking, and like her gift for language, was a skill with which her captors were familiar and clearly intended to put to use.
They knew.
Munroe straightened and tucked the clippers away.
Box in hand, she still studied the image in the mirror when Lumani opened the door. He hadn’t bothered to knock. 
She turned toward him, her eyes the last part of her face to leave the reflection.
He hesitated. Surprise faded into a grin that surfaced and spread slowly while he scanned her with the same blatant curiosity with which he’d first watched her in the cell. 
Finally he nodded, apparently satisfied. “The clippers,” he said, and Munroe handed the box to him.
“You go to my uncle,” he said, and she understood then that in the twisted way of this crazy world, the creature in the cell below was the doll of which the Doll Man had spoken.
Arben and his nameless counterpart flanked her again for the brief journey across the work floor to the office, a journey that mentally slowed while Munroe absorbed the details of the workstations, the miniature torches, the pointed tools, and the furniture pieces, each calling out to be put to use in the way of salvation. 
But this instinct toward survival and its rush to violence was futile, because choke chain to the junkyard dog’s neck, there was Logan. Always Logan.
THE DOLL MAN stood when Munroe entered, and once more, with the geniality of an age gone by, offered her one of the high-backed chairs facing his desk. 
He waited until she sat before returning to his own. He motioned to her hair. “Very nice,” he said. “The illusion is better than I had anticipated.” 
And then he smoothed his tie and placed his hands on the desk. Folded them. “You’ve seen the package,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I have questions.”
“Let’s take coffee, and we can discuss.”
He picked up the phone. “Mala, donesi nam dvije kave, brzo. I to u najboljem porculanu kojeg ima【马赛克1】, 【马赛克2】uje【马赛克1】?” Not English, not Albanian, not Macedonian, but close. 
She ticked more information off a mental checklist. 
Like her, this man spoke many languages, and as it was with her, language had nothing to do with his place of origin.
There was a knock and then a slight creak as the door opened. 
The Doll Man motioned curtly and a young woman entered carrying a silver tray with full china service. 
Munroe and the Doll Man stared at each other without breaking eye contact, while the woman laid out piece by proper piece, as if this was the end of a meal at the Ritz instead of some alternate universe where Logan had been kidnapped by a madman 
and to save him Munroe would violate every sense of self and self-preservation by delivering that girl downstairs to… Where exactly?
Alone again, the Doll Man, poised and proper, poured cream and sugar 
and when Munroe made no move to do likewise, he poured a second cup and took a sip from it before placing it in front of her. 
“There are no drugs,” he said. “And, please, what are your questions?”
“Where do I deliver the package?” she said. “And through what means?”
“You will travel by car. It’s a hard one-day drive, two days, perhaps, depending on circumstances.”
Circumstances. Like dodging borders, outrunning authorities, and trying not to attract attention to the animal in the front seat. Or did they intend to use the trunk?
“Tomorrow you receive details,” he said. “And the rules, and then the package will be your problem.”
“You have men,” she said. “You’ve got guns. You don’t need me to do this. 
“Why go through the trouble and expense— and risk— of kidnapping me and bringing me across the ocean just so I can deliver that girl— the package— to some location that’s only a two-day drive from here? You’ve already got what you need to do the job yourself.”
The Doll Man put down his cup and sighed. “Such trouble I’ve had, my friend, such trouble. 
“Issues with the delivery. Issues with the client. Issues with the package. 
“Far, far too many complications and too much attention. I won’t risk myself or my operation, so you will take her.”
Munroe picked up the cup that had sat cooling and, with elbows to the table and eyes over the rim, glanced at him. 
He’d had her shot, drugged, and abducted, held Logan hostage to guarantee compliance, then served her coffee in a fucking china cup and called her “friend.” 
This was like waking up in a Dalí painting of porcelain dolls.
She blew on the liquid. “I can’t transport her in her current condition. Not even locked in the trunk.”
The Doll Man smiled, his expression both chiding and tolerant. 
“She is custom ordered,” he said. “We would never send a doll to a client looking as she does now. 
“These details are our problem. When we have solved them, then the package is your problem.”
“Who is the package?” Munroe asked.
“Neeva Eckridge,” he said.
Munroe sat silently for a long while, mulling irony and cursing fate. 
To protect the one person who meant more to her than life, she would be forced to betray the one person she was contractually and morally obligated to save.
“Human trafficking is a serious crime,” she said. “The whole world is looking for her. If I get caught, I will kiss away years of my life. 
“What if that person in the video doesn’t mean enough? What if that girl in the dungeon doesn’t mean enough? What if I don’t fucking care?”
The Doll Man’s smile faded only a little. He said, “Hmm,” then stood and walked to a table behind her and picked up one of the dolls. 
He carried it back to the desk, holding it in the crook of his arm the way one might hold a cat. 
“You’ll care,” he said. “If not for him, then for another, and then another.”
He sat again. Stroked the doll’s hair and brushed his fingers along the dress with its intricate lacework. 
“She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?” he said. “She is perfect to me. I had her made to order. Like the package downstairs, made to order. 
“I’d no idea the problems this girl would cause. I’m late in delivery. You’ll fix it.”
“You don’t need me to do this job,” Munroe said.
The Doll Man’s smile remained though his eyes never left the toy child. 
“You won’t like the mess,” he said. He raised his eyes to hers. “Let’s avoid the mess. It keeps things pleasant for everyone.”
“Why me?” she whispered.
“I’ve already explained this,” he said. “You owe a debt, and so for you this is a fair exchange. Your difficulty in understanding baffles me.”
“I might be more compliant if you’d go over the details of this debt.”
“What more details do you need?” he said. “Because of you my American facilitator is in jail.” 
The Doll Man paused, shifted forward, and began again slowly, as if trying to explain quantum physics to a four-year-old. 
“First the facilitator goes, then the logistic problems begin. After that, the money loss follows. It’s quite simple, really. 
“So I leave it to you to earn the money back. This package is a high-high-dollar shipment. You deliver, we call it even.”
Munroe sighed and allowed him the visible triumph of her defeat. “Okay,” she said.
Very few knew who she was or how to find her. Fewer still knew of her attachment to Logan or had the balls to come after her, but throw a facilitator into the mix and only Katherine Breeden came to mind. 
In that instant of understanding, Munroe connected this crazy man to Bradford’s files, to the trafficker who made dolls of women; 
understood now that everyone she cared about was at risk, that agreement was the only way to purchase time, and on behalf of Logan and the treacherous waters they’d now tread, her soul grew heavy.

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chapter 6

Boniface Akambe was a large man. 

Not only in his height and girth but in that he wore fine clothing, drove a new four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, and owned several successful businesses. 

He was also a good-looking man with soft skin and a desirable-size gap between his top front teeth. 

Akambe had twelve children borne by three wives, two of whom lived in Douala while the third, the youngest, kept house in Kribi. 

His situation had improved since Munroe had seen him last. 

He’d been younger then— they all had been— and he’d had only one wife, though if he’d had his way, Munroe would have soon become the second.

It was Akambe’s family name and political connections that bought him protection and helped the businesses that fed his large lifestyle, 

but it was a lesser-known enterprise that had compelled Munroe to make this trip.

Kribi was exactly as she remembered— a small and lazy town with only a few main streets connecting the parts of the whole and far too many hotels for its size. 

Several new buildings had been added, but otherwise little had changed, and it took only a few minutes for the taxi driver to find the place Munroe had described.

The office was nondescript, on the ground floor of a three-story structure with peeling paint on the outside walls and water condensation dripping in a steady flow from an air-conditioning box that protruded over the sidewalk. 

Inside the office it was cool and fragranced by the lingering smell of mildew, and in several places the linoleum on the floor turned up its corners. 

A receptionist sat on a wooden chair behind a metal desk worn of its paint and showing makeshift repairs done over the years. 

In front of her was a manual typewriter and to the right of it an arrangement of manila folders, haphazardly stacked.

In the nine years that Munroe had been away from Africa, not once had the Fang language rolled off her tongue, but it came now in a familiar burst. 

“Hakum ayen Akambe,” she said. “Please notify him that I am here.” 

She didn’t need to provide more information, that she spoke in Fang was her calling card. 

With a look of surprise, the woman stood and went for a door on the opposite wall.

And then from behind came the rumble of Akambe’s voice. “Es-sss-sa,” he said, drawing her name into three syllables. 

He exited the door of his office, arms wide in welcome and a huge grin spread across his face. “Essa,” he said again. 

He clasped his hands together and then placed them on her shoulders and, holding her at arm’s length, said, “It could only have been you. How have you been? How many years now?”

“It’s been a long time,” she said, returning the smile and relishing the warmth. “A very long time.”

“Come, take coffee with me,” he said, and then barked a few phrases to the woman who had returned to the desk. 

He stepped aside so that Munroe could pass into his office. 

In contrast to that of the front room, the furniture here was new, the flooring and paint clean, and his wooden office desk so large it nearly filled the back wall. 

Akambe sat in the oversize chair behind the desk and Munroe on the sofa that rested perpendicular to it.

“Essa,” he said again after the coffee had been served. “Where have you been hiding yourself all of this time?”

“I’ve been across the ocean, studying and working.”

“Ah,” he said, and he leaned back and placed his hands on his wide midsection. “You went to your people. 

“Quite the trouble it made when you left. Francisco spent a small fortune trying to find you. He finally stopped when he knew for sure that you were alive and had left the country.”

A stab of guilt and the hollow ache that followed brought on a chorus of voices, chanting and calling her name, fighting for attention. 

She held eye contact with Akambe and, when the internal din had ebbed, said softly, “Have you heard from him?”

“I see him when he is in town, every few months.”

“He hasn’t left Africa, then?”

“He remains.”

She winced and took another sip of the sweet coffee. “How is he?”

Akambe stirred another spoon of sugar into the creamy brown liquid and said nothing for a while, then looked up. 

“He’s different. He works harder and plays harder, spends more time with women, drinking, behaving less like you and more like me.” 

He gave a hearty laugh and continued. “And then he leaves for periods of solitude. He built himself a place near Ureca on the island.” 

He paused, adding another spoon of sugar. “Time ages a person’s soul,” he said. “And they leave him alone as long as he supplies them now and then.” 

Akambe was quiet for a moment. “You should make a point to see him, Essa. He deserves at least that.”

She shrugged and put down her cup. “I will if I have the time. As it is, I am here for work and am pressed. I need your skill. Do you still make papers?”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” His head tilted right and left as he spoke. “What do you need?”

She handed him passport photos of herself and of Bradford. “I need two sets of residency cards for each of these.”

“That I can do,” he said.

“For both Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.”

“Ah,” he replied, drumming his fingers on his desk. “Equatorial Guinea will take longer. And cost more.”

“Preferably diplomatic status,” she said, placing the rest of the photos on the desk and then laying a wad of cash on top of them. “If it’s not enough, I’ll pay the remainder when I return.”

He flipped through the bills. “It’s enough,” he said. “Where are you staying? I’ll have your papers delivered in five days.”

“Hotel Parfait Garden,” she said, and she stood to go.

Akambe raised his hand for her to pause and, full of importance, said, “Essa, I am looking for a wife.”

She smiled at the predictability and then attempted a straight face. “Boniface, maybe one day I’ll take you up on your offer, but not today.” 

In the taxi she allowed herself an audible chuckle. Wife number four.

From Akambe’s office the driver took her south of Kribi and turned onto the narrow dirt road that went past the beach house. 

A thick hedge ran the length of the property, blocking the view from the road, and the driver stopped beside the metal gate that was the single visible entry point. 

Munroe stepped onto the gravel driveway and stood, staring at the barrier that divided what once was from life as it was now. 

Voices from the past rose in unison, and she pushed back the screams into silence, fought the urge to ring the gate bell, and instead returned to the car. 

They drove north to Douala. By the time Munroe reached the hotel, it was dark. 

She purchased a bottle of water, headed for Bradford’s room, and let herself in. 

Dim street light filtered through the curtains, and Bradford’s breathing was steady and rhythmic against the hum of the air conditioner. 

She poured water into a glass, knelt beside the bed, and leaned forward to lift his head.

She touched the back of his neck, and his hand snapped around her wrist, a movement swift and exact. 

He pulled her close until her face was inches from his and in a whisper said, “You ever do that to me again and I swear I’ll radio tag you.”

She smiled and relaxed into him, and he let go. She slipped a hand under his head, raised him up, and put the glass to his lips; he drank greedily. 

When he had finished, he lay back on the pillow with his eyes open a sliver and said, “Why the hell did you do it?”

“I had some things I needed to do. Alone.”

“Next time just ask. I’ll give you space.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll ask.”

She stood and turned toward the door. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she whispered, and with the click of the latch, waves of internal tumult boiled over.

…Cry for sorrow of heart and howl for vexation of spirit…

With deliberate footsteps she walked across the hall, opened the door to her room, and, for Bradford’s ears, made the effort of both closing and locking it.

…leave your name for a curse unto my chosen…

There would be no sleep tonight, not after Kribi, not after the gate and the beach house.

…the Lord GOD shall slay thee…

Munroe followed the staircase upward until she could go no farther and from there located the door that led to the rooftop.

…and call his servants by another name…

The air was cool with the relief of night, and in the darkness there was solace. 

She found a spot, dry and open to the sky, and lay back, face to the pattern of stars, familiar as they had been once before, as they had been on that night.

In the silence the voices in her head chanted and rose in crescendo: The way of the wicked is death.

She didn’t fight them, didn’t try to shut them off— there was no point. 

Tonight they were strong; tonight they would take her, and she would allow her mind loose to follow where they led, inevitably to where they had begun: the night she’d killed Pieter Willem.

That night the camp had been temporary, the structures quickly thrown together. 

The spot was well concealed and had access to the water and to the boats hidden in the mangrove swamps not far from the tributary that would carry them to the Muni River. 

There were six in their group, and the thatched-roof shelters that acted as home were spaced unevenly in the small clearing. 

The plan had been to remain until the delivery and then move back to Francisco’s house in Kribi while they waited for the next shipment to come in.

Voices had carried in the stillness, and she’d crept closer to listen. 

Francisco and Pieter were arguing. Dusk was settling, and the pitch-black would follow in less than an hour. 

She could smell a storm coming and felt the change in the air. When the rain started, it would be impossible to overhear, 

and so she crab-walked until she could lean up against the shaky walls that held Francisco’s shelter together.

Life had been good until two and a half years earlier, when Jean Noel and his mercenary buddy Pieter Willem had been added to the team. 

Jean wasn’t bad; he saw her for what she was, a barely fifteen-year-old kid stuck out in the jungle, way out of her league but a necessary component to getting the job done. 

He was kind to her in his own way. When he wasn’t working, he taught her how to make rope, tie knots, set traps, poison darts, and hunt noiselessly in the dark. 

He also showed her how to take care of a gun and how to use it. It was Pieter who taught her to kill.

A small man of hardened muscle, Pieter was charming and a master of words that endeared him to the listener. 

It was his eyes that she couldn’t trust; from the day he’d arrived in Kribi, she had avoided him.

With Francisco’s approval Pieter had taken it upon himself to train her to fight— “to defend herself” were the words he had used when presenting the idea. 

Even if Pieter had returned to South Africa, he still would have been too close. 

Yet she was forced into his presence for hours every day. She couldn’t refuse. 

Francisco had given the order, and she worked for Francisco— more, she revered him. 

Eleven years her senior, Francisco was the older brother she’d lost when she was barely old enough to understand why.

Pieter’s training had started as he promised— as training. 

Away from the rest of the camp, he set about teaching her to fight. 

The location of the camps changed, and sometimes so did the country as the crew moved nomadically with the pickups and deliveries, but her being in Pieter’s presence remained constant. 

She didn’t know where he’d learned his technique or what exactly he taught; he claimed to be a master in several martial arts, and she wouldn’t have known one way or the other. 

She knew only that no matter how much she learned, she would return to her shelter bruised, bloody, and aching. 

And nobody at the camp would say anything about it. Those were the good times.

As her skills progressed and she learned to fight back, Pieter would keep at her until she was spent and unable to move. 

Every day it ended the same, with her flat on her back, held down with a knife to her throat as he raped her, whispering taunts into her ear while his sweat dripped into her face.

He threatened to hunt down her family and kill them if she left camp— she had no doubt he would make good on his promise, 

and no matter what she felt about her family, death and torture by a sadistic madman was not what they deserved. 

They had no idea where she was, and even if they had, there was nothing they could do. 

The only person who would care if Pieter slit her throat would be Francisco, and physically he could never best Pieter— none of them could.

Then Pieter brought the knives into the training session. 

Each time the sparring began, she wasn’t sure if she would live through the fight. 

Pieter deliberately cut her and regularly threatened to kill her. 

She fought to win, she fought to make him bleed, to end it, for the hell to be over. 

When her knife would connect with his flesh and the red liquid of life would smear across the blade, a shock of euphoria would go through her, 

always followed by the pain of his knife slicing another part of her body, and still it would end the same.

The better an opponent she became, the more Pieter tormented her. 

In an attempt to escape him, she refused to fight and then announced to Francisco— within earshot of Pieter— that she was trained and didn’t need more. 

Pieter came to her that night and gagged her. 

He pinned her down on the ground and slit one of her wrists, mocking her as she struggled against him. 

After she had lost considerable blood, he pulled her out of the dirt and bound her wrist to stanch the bleeding. 

He stroked her face gently, kissed her, and told her that if she ever defied him again, he would slit both her wrists and dump her in the Atlantic for the sharks.

He left her alone for a few days, and she knew it was to provide time for her to think about what he’d said and allow recovery from the loss of blood.

Then she had tried to manipulate him off the team by begging Francisco to send him away. 

Unable to tell the real reason, she hoped he might indulge her, and when he didn’t, she weighed the risk of the truth and chose life.

Then the sparring sessions were no longer enough to satisfy. Pieter began to trap her around camp. 

She never knew from which structure, tree, or rock he would appear; he seemed to take pleasure in devising ways to startle her. 

There was no place of solace or peace, and she lived on an emotional razor’s edge.

Staying away from Pieter consumed her waking thoughts, and she found safety by sticking with other people. 

If Francisco was there, she stayed by his side, and if he was away, she sought out Jean Noel. 

She could sense Pieter hovering, and if he caught her eye while she was under the protection of company, he bore her a sweet sadistic smile. 

When she escaped during the day, Pieter would come at night, and so she took to sleeping away from camp in hidden places. 

The better she became at avoiding him, the more he seemed to take pleasure in hunting her down; the harder she fought, the more he came back.

With his viselike grip around her throat, he would draw the flat of his blade across her cheek and goad her with what he was capable of. 

He would pull her face toward him so that her eyes could not avoid him, and he would laugh.

“You will never be as strong or as fast as I am, Essa” was his taunt. “You cannot escape me.”

She had no idea how old he was or how long he had been fighting for money, nor if the sadism came with the job. 

He told stories of coup attempts, of murder, of violence. That he was a killer she had no doubt, but she held everything else suspect.

Relief came from making runs to Kribi or Douala for supplies, or while on a delivery. 

They traveled to Kribi by boat, using Francisco’s trawler and leaving the faster cigarette boats behind. 

On a delivery, during the two or three days it would take to motor or trek through the jungle on remote, soggy footpaths, she would be left alone to do her job, 

and when it was over, the torment would start up worse than before.

Knowing that escape was impossible, she subsisted on thoughts of revenge, 

and hearing Francisco and Pieter argue had given her hope. If there was a disagreement, Pieter might leave.

And with that thought her throat constricted, cut off the air, and she struggled to breathe.

It would not be beyond Pieter to force her to go with him. Her hands began to shake, and her mind raced. 

She was worthless to Pieter. If it was convenient, he would just as easily dump her overboard as rape her. 

But she was worth a tremendous amount to Francisco, and spite would be reason enough for Pieter to haul her out of the camp. 

The argument turned to shouts. And then Pieter stormed out of Francisco’s structure and headed for the mangrove swamp that led to the boats. 

Darkness was coming, and the wind blew stronger, thunder drew nearer; the rain wasn’t far away.

She hadn’t thought; she’d merely acted. 

She traced her way back to her bed and the stashed tranquilizer gun that no one else had use for and that Jean Noel had let her keep. 

She knew the routes as well, if not better, than Pieter, and she circled behind him, walking barefoot through the sludge, following from afar, alert, cautious not only of Pieter but of the elements. 

The last thing she needed now was to run into a mamba or any other poisonous creature that infested the lowlands. 

She would need to have a perfect shot, couldn’t risk getting close; he was faster and stronger, and if she missed, she was dead.

His back to her, he untied the mooring of his boat. If he planned to leave in this weather, he would be preoccupied with getting out as quickly as possible, 

and so she risked shortening the distance. She crept closer until she could clearly see him. 

Aimed. Fired. The discharge, like nearing thunder, shattered the stillness of the jungle.

The dart hit Pieter between his shoulder blades. He stumbled and fell to his knees. 

When she was certain it had begun to take effect, she moved closer, fired the second for good measure, and then stood over him, one foot on either side of his body. 

His eyes rolled up in their sockets. She drew a knife and paused; the words of the Old Testament screamed, Thou shalt not kill.

She pulled his head back, knelt on his chest, and slit his throat. 

The blood gushed from his veins in spurts like a broken fountain staining her. 

She watched him bleed and felt nothing, then let his head drop to the ground, stood over him, and whispered, 

“The race is not to the swift, nor battle to the strong, nor yet favor to men of skill; time and chance happens to them all.”

She couldn’t leave him on the path; better to drag him into the jungle and let the animals have his body. 

She went to his boat and checked the fuel supplies. It was enough to get to Douala if she emptied every extra storage container. 

She brought the engine to life and guided the boat upstream. 

With Pieter Willem gone, nobody would look for it— she needed to sort out the options.

The rain began to come. It started in slow, large drops of water, and the downpour intensified until the torrent was powerful enough to sting. 

By the time she crept back to the camp, darkness had long enshrouded the jungle, and she dripped water. 

There was not a sign of blood on her; the rain had washed away the evidence. 

更多英文有声读物中英对照同步视频请加V.X.g.z.h：yyxxzlk

CHAPTER 5 DALLAS, TEXAS
Palms against the glass, Miles Bradford stood precisely where he’d been when Munroe had toppled. 
His eyes roamed from the frontage where she’d fallen to the neighboring buildings and then over and across the Dallas North Tollway, 
up one office tower and down the next, creating a mental map, searching out the several positions a shooter could have used to make the hit.
The fear was gone now. Shut off, tamped down, and replaced with the same emotional detachment that kept him alive in combat, allowed logic to replace panic, 
and made it possible to block out the anguish of holding a bleeding friend to the last breath, in order to go on to fight and survive.
This was a war in which the fight had been brought to Bradford’s doorstep, 
and in place of fear sat only the mission: track the enemy, find him, destroy him, and take back what had been stolen.
From behind, Walker said, “If it was me, I’d be perched over there.”
Bradford turned and watched, silent, as she strode across his office to stand beside him. 
Paul Jahan had come with her from the war room, but he remained in the doorway, arms crossed and leaning against the frame.
“Or there, or there, or there,” she added.
Bradford followed the line of her finger as it jumped from building to building, returning finally to her original target: a twelve-story at ten o’clock, with an attached parking garage.
“It’s a clear line of sight,” she said. “The garage offers a place to stash a vehicle during the wait without worrying about it getting ticketed or towed, 
“and it’s close enough for a half-assed shooter with a decent rifle to guarantee a hit. 
“Even if he’s an expert marksman, if he tranquil her, then he’s using something special, something modified, and that’s going to affect the calculations, maybe limit distance, 
“so he’s going to want to get in as close as possible for accuracy. If it had been me set up there, I’d be gone before the ambulance even got here.”
Bradford nodded and returned to staring out the window. Out of the many points from which to choose, Walker had singled out the same location he’d zeroed in on. 
He pounded the glass, a brief hit of frustration, and then straightened, took a calm step back, and said, “Go find me my building, Sam. Call me when you’ve got it, and we’ll pick up the leads from there.”
He would have preferred to work with her directly, hunting clues, staying updated to the instant, 
but Walker would find what they searched for more quickly than he could and he needed to see what had become of Logan’s place after the call to 911. 
She lingered at the glass and Bradford waited until she turned and passed by him into the hall, watched her go and then moved to head out.
Jahan stepped into his path. Impatient, Bradford attempted to brush past, and Jahan shifted fully into the doorway. 
Bradford said, “Get out of the way, Jack. Don’t make me knock you on your ass.”
Jahan put a hand on Bradford’s shoulder. Maneuvered so that Bradford couldn’t avoid his eyes. 
“Listen,” he said, “I know you’ve gotten a lot of flak from all of us for bringing Michael onto the team, but we’ve got your back on this, okay? She was ours, too.”
Had the words been said yesterday, Bradford would have countered wise-ass to wise-ass, 
but at the moment he had nothing but a desire to get out the door, to keep moving, so he nodded a silent thanks and gave Jahan’s shoulder a jab of camaraderie.
Jahan caught his fist. “You’ll feel it eventually,” he said. “You know you will, and when that happens, don’t take it out on someone else or get yourself killed or arrested; you come to me.”
Bradford held his place, kept silent, until Jahan released his hand, and then continued to the exit without a word. 
The concern was warranted, but getting killed or arrested wasn’t on the agenda, he was smarter than that.
BY MAKING THE call that he hoped had turned Logan’s place into a crime scene, Bradford had added manpower and resources to the task of solving, at the least, Logan’s disappearance. 
He wanted latents that might lead to whoever had taken Munroe, and there was no point in doing what local law enforcement was better equipped to handle. 
He made the trip to confirm the level of interest in the broken and bloodied office, 
a shortcut to figuring out whom to pressure, where to start calling in favors— or, as the case may be, discover where new friends needed to be made.
The parking area in front of Logan’s building was busy, as much a result of the morbidly curious as from city vehicles and the official personnel. 
The crowd was a good sign, meant crime scene techs had been called in, and if anything was worth having inside that building, he could eventually get to it.
Bradford drove to the end of the block, parked in front of an upholstery wholesaler, and walked the slow trip back to the yellow line— just one more face in the gawking crowd— until seeing all he’d come for, he made the return trip to Capstone.
Three blocks from the office, his phone chirped. On the other end, Walker, excitement in her voice, said, “I’ve got it.”
Bradford checked his watch. If she’d truly found what they wanted, she’d done it in under two hours: fast, but not surprising. 
Walker wasn’t shy about utilizing sexism’s dirty flipside, casually oozing sexuality and preying on hormones and the stupidity they induced to get what she wanted. 
He expected that right about now, in a building somewhere along the tollway corridor, a security guard was hiding a hard-on and jumping all over himself to get the lady whatever she wanted.
He’d never asked that behavior of her, but if that’s what she chose to do to get the job done, then like an exotic weapon used in battle, he was glad it was on his side.
The address came by text and Bradford swung a right to accommodate it. 
The building wasn’t the one they’d originally targeted but the one next door, of the same height and with access to the same garage.
He found her exactly as he’d expected: holed up in a room the size of a large walk-in closet, surrounded by closed-circuit monitors, and with two guys in uniform trying, and failing, to avoid staring at her chest. 
When he stepped through the door, the room fell silent. She waved a cursory greeting in his direction and leaned across the desk to control one of the machines. 
Jeremy Justin, according to his ID, slid out of her way, just enough to avoid appearing rude but not enough to avoid her brushing against him.
Walker, oblivious, said to Bradford, “You’ve gotta see this.” Her fingers flew across the machine’s controls to rewind a recording, 
her explanation a staccato faster than the grainy video, until she froze the process, leaving on the screen the image of a late-model Impala.
The face of the driver was blurry and he wore sunglasses, but the license plates were clear. 
“I’ve been running time stamps,” she said. “Searched for ins and outs based on our estimates. 
“We know he was holed up before ten but have no idea when he got here. Better, we know when it happened. 
“I figure our guy would want to get out as fast as possible. He’d be an idiot to stay on foot, so for now I’ve focused on parking. 
“For most of these buildings, free visitor parking has a time limit, and”— Walker paused, and in an instant personality shift, smiled kindly at Justin, whose face reddened at the attention— 
“Jeremy here tells me visitor parking is patrolled hourly and violators towed. 
“This garage is gated and vehicles need a pass card. No cards reported lost or stolen, so…”
She scanned backward, running the machine at high speed, and pounded the stop with a force that made Justin twitch. 
“There,” she said. “Tailgating into the garage. One other car did this in the same time period, so I ran through the interior cameras. 
“There’s not a lot we can use, nothing that takes this guy up to the roof, but look by the elevators.” She hit the stop again.
“The time stamps coordinate, the tie and pattern on the shirt match the person in the first car. Briefcase,” she said. “Check the size of that thing.”
Bradford leaned in closer. “Can you zoom in on his face?”
Walker stepped back and to Justin sweetly cooed, “Can you zoom?”
Justin leaned forward and handled the controls, maneuvering the image to capture as much of the face as possible. “That’s the best resolution we can get,” he said.
There were similarities between this face and the one they’d captured on Logan’s surveillance disk. 
Walker reached for the control again, brushing her hand over Justin’s in the process, and went back to the original image of the driver in the Impala. 
“Check the time stamp on the exit.” The driver had headed down the ramp and out toward the street at the same time Bradford had run for the office door.
Justin said, “What about the briefcase?”
Walker smiled. “It’s awesome, isn’t it?”
Bradford said, “You have the plates?”
Walker handed him a piece of paper.
“How many sites did you visit?”
“Three so far.”
“It’s good work,” he said. “I’ll get Jack on these, but let’s assume we missed something, okay? Keep looking.”
Walker nodded.
Justin said, “What about the briefcase?”
Bradford headed to the door, and behind him, Walker, full of sugar, said, “I want one for my birthday.”
FROM THE VISITORS’ parking area, Bradford called Jahan with the plate numbers and then dialed the first of several contacts within the Dallas Police Department. 
If this request didn’t stick, there were other possibilities. 
Favors begat favors, and Bradford, in this world of walking the gray lines of the law, had done many. 
A return back-scratch like this was easy to put out, and if there were prints, if the police had any suspects or leads, he’d eventually get the details, although not nearly soon enough.
It was a seven-minute drive to the office, and when Bradford got there, he knew Jahan had worked his magic. 
Leaning back with his palms behind his head and grinning like an idiot, Jahan swiveled his chair. 
When Bradford stepped into the war room, Jahan said, “Plates go to Enterprise rental, and I’ve traced the ambulance.”
Bradford paused midstep, then continued to the board. This was good. This was progress. 
But it had also been five hours since Munroe was taken, and if his and Walker’s earlier conclusion was correct, if the entire ruse was only intended to be a temporary distraction, 
then Munroe and Logan could be anywhere by now and every piece the team uncovered might come too little, too late.
Bradford studied the Michael diagram, mentally placing the surveillance footage of the parking garage.
The chair squeaked.
Bradford said, “Talk.”
“You were right about the out-of-service depot. 
“Getting into the GPS system was easier than pinpointing the ambulance, but no question, that’s where it came from and where it returned. 
“I’ve yanked chains to see what we could flush, but far as I can tell, everything we’re looking at there is low-level: 
“misplaced paperwork, dubious signatures— hallmark signs of a few well-placed Ben Franklins— no masterminds or anything.”
Bradford turned. “The paramedics?”
“Nothing.”
“So the ambulance is a dead end.”
“We could go digging,” Jahan said, “but I don’t think it’s worth our time. Not if we’ve got the plates on that rental.”
“We could be wrong on the rental.”
“Could be,” Jahan said. “But the way Sam tells it, it’s pretty convincing, and she’s bringing over the footage for me to analyze. 
“Where there’s a rental, there are credit cards.”
“Can you get them?”
“Yeah, eventually.”
“I guess that’s our focus.” Bradford paused. “Where did the ambulance go between Michael and the depot?”
“There’s an unexplained four-minute stop,” Jahan said. “Then Medical City, then back to the roost.” 
He fiddled with the keyboard and pointed to the screen on his right. “X marks the spot. What do you have on latents?”
“I’ve got calls in,” Bradford said, and walked to the street map. Stared. 
The stop was a parking lot, of all things, as if the fuckers didn’t even care if they were observed.
Jahan followed Bradford’s line of sight. “You’ve gotta admire their balls.”
Bradford turned just enough to glower at him.
“Or not.”
“Zoom this thing out,” Bradford said, and when Jahan had enlarged the surface area of the map, Bradford studied it for a long while, processing. 
He had the what and he had the when. If he could trace the how or even the why, he could find the who and take this fight to a whole new level. 
Finally he straightened and swore under his breath. “The airport,” he said. He reached for the phone and dialed Walker. “What’ve you got?”
“So far, that parking-garage footage is the best lead we have. I could go further on the search, take it to fifteen hundred yards, but I dunno.” She paused. 
“To make a hit like that from that kind of distance…” She let the sentence fade.
“You did good,” Bradford said. “Come on in, I need you.”
SIX HOURS SINCE Munroe’s take-down, and with the critical time window to manage a speedy find-and-rescue fast closing, the airport was another hunch that might just be more misdirection. 
But it also made perfect sense. If the shooter had been prepared, then Addison Airport was, quite literally, the fastest route out of town. 
A small head start would have been enough. Bradford pulled to a stop outside the administration building.
The bulk of the complex lay in the tarmac of the seventy-two-hundred-foot runway and its smaller twin. 
Straddling these sister strips were more than one hundred fifty hangars in a range of sizes, hundreds of thousands of square feet of office-related facilities, an FAA tower, and a lot of open field.
He stepped from the vehicle and tossed Walker the keys. What he hoped for were flight records to point him in the right direction— 
everything and anything that had departed out of Addison since ten that morning, more specifically between eleven and one, 
but if the shooter hadn’t wanted to be traced, pulling these records would mean throwing around a lot more weight than a phone call or two, which was once again why he’d brought Walker.
The main office was quiet, most of the staff already gone for the day, and Bradford waited a full ten minutes before a well-kept woman, who introduced herself as Beth Evans, operations manager, greeted him. 
He handed over a private investigator badge, opted for a simplified version of the truth, 
and when he had satisfied Evans’s questions, she offered to take him into the hangar area as soon as she’d finished what she was doing.
Walker was waiting when they stepped outside, leaning against the hood of the Explorer, the same position she’d been in when they’d convened outside the hospital. She held a sheet of paper.
Bradford introduced the two, then to Walker said, “What’d you get?”
“Not much,” she said. “Most of what comes in and out are prop planes. Little. And most are private. 
“I figure we’re looking for something a bit bigger, a little more charterable.” She handed Bradford the page. 
“Within that range, eight flights left between ten and three. I think we should start with the larger hangars.”
They rode with Evans in her car and she took them to where the lights were brightest and the highest number of employees congregated, 
but even with her guidance, it took showing Munroe’s and Logan’s pictures to the employees of three hangars before they scored a hit.
One of the ground crew picked up Munroe’s photograph, and Evans kept by the car while Walker and Bradford moved in closer.
Like Evans, the man hovered close to either side of fifty, balding and heavy around the middle, and he lit up in Walker’s presence. 
“I think I saw her,” he said. Paused to catch Walker’s eye and then skimmed over her chest to stare at the photo again.
“Yeah, I guess that was her. Hard to say, really, because she was sick or asleep or something. She was in a wheelchair.”
From a few feet away, his workmate put down a wrench and wiped his hands on a rag. “That was the wheelchair flight?” he said. “Let me see that.”
Walker handed him the photograph. He smiled at her and she smiled back.
He glanced at the picture for a moment and returned it. “I guess that was them.”
“Were there men with her?” Bradford said.
The first guy said, “Just one. Clean-cut, dark hair, about your height, maybe. Young.”
“Did he have a briefcase?” Walker asked.
“Yeah, a big one. Almost looked like a suitcase.”
“What about other luggage?”
“I think they had a couple of carry-ons. I wasn’t really paying attention, you know, so I can’t say for sure.”
“Any idea where they were headed? Tail number, maybe?”
“Bahamas, I think. 
“Not sure about the tail number, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get from the office. Was a G550; don’t get as many of those passing through.”
Bradford peeled off a hundred and shook the guy’s hand. Not five feet away, heading toward the car, Walker said, “That’s our plane.”
“Yeah,” Bradford said. “I want you back here first thing in the morning. If they’re flying international, then it’s possible they dealt with immigration, which means they’ve got a passport for Michael. 
“I want names— especially what she’s traveling under. And there’s no mention of Logan,” he said. “What’s that tell you?”
“The condition he’s in? He’s still here.”
THE WAR ROOM was empty when Bradford and Walker returned, but on the desk were two copies of the transaction record for the credit card that had been used for the rental car.
Walker picked one up, looked through it, and said, “Nice.” At the end of the hall a toilet flushed.
Bradford picked up the second copy, got to the first page, and stared, stunned. Fought for air. 
And for the first time since he’d shoved it away this afternoon, he felt the fear. He had no words, no voice, and struggled to remain standing.
Walker paused from leafing through the pages, turned to him, and then seeing his face, retreated a step. “Miles?” she said.
He held up a finger and closed his eyes. Pushed the panic back, stomped on it, shoved it away to where it couldn’t touch him and he could think again, rationalize again. He drew a breath and felt the cold.
Jahan entered the room and stopped midstep. He looked first to Bradford, then to Walker, and back again. “What?” he said.
Bradford tapped the pages, and the words came mechanically. “I know this name,” he said. “This company.” 
He turned toward the window, stared out at the darkening sky, and after a long moment turned back. “Fuck!”
He moved toward the doorway and then his office, where he turned a slow circle, trying to decide where to start. 
Walked to the fireproof cabinet in the far corner and dug for the key on his key chain. Unlocked it. 
Flipped through the hanging folders until he found a manila envelope and pulled it out. He straightened. 
Jahan and Walker blocked his exit. 
“War room,” Bradford said, and wordlessly, they turned, Jahan following Walker, Bradford following Jahan.
Bradford opened the envelope, took out the documents, and tossed the contents onto Jahan’s desk. 
Searched through the stack of papers until he found what he was looking for, a spreadsheet and an old newspaper article, and shifted both of them to face Walker and Jahan.
“This is who we’re hunting,” he said. “This is our shooter.”
The collected papers from the envelope were over an inch thick: bank records, company records, notes, and threads that detailed a web of evil that wound out of Europe and across the globe. 
After a moment of flipping through them and scanning the data, Jahan paused and stared at Bradford. “Where did these come from?”
Bradford tapped the pages in his hand. “About two years ago,” he said, “Michael took a missing-person job in Central Africa. 
“Was the first time I’d worked with her and the case took us places we had no idea we’d go. These came out of the aftermath.”
“You were dealing with this?”
“No, I discovered these at the end, here in the U.S. in the safe of a guy who died.”
Walker said, “If this had nothing to do with Michael, why would people like this come after her and Logan?”
Bradford moved to the door. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I know where to dig.”

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Chapter 4 ALTITUDE 29,000 FEET, U.S. AIRSPACE, OVER THE GULF COAST
Valon Lumani looked down at the woman lying on the bench seat, so docile, so relaxed. 
Studied her face and tracked the length of her long body, and as he’d done the first time he saw her, he scoffed.
Because she was a woman. This was the solution he’d gone through such effort to secure on behalf of his uncle.
Lumani understood the need for expertise and the need for a stranger, 
but not why so much energy and expense had been put toward this one in particular, even if the nonsense was true— and really, maybe half was about right.
She was even less worrisome up close than she’d been from a distance, dressed in black on that black motorcycle. 
Even so, he’d used a heavy dosage calculated for her height and estimated weight, and he’d give her another during the trip to keep her unconscious until it was safe. 
But the rest of it? The rules and the talking— so much talking? Bah. Superstitious nonsense.
Do not let her hear your language, the source had said, she will use language as a weapon. 
Keep the area around her free of objects, everything will be used as a weapon. Stay clear of her reach, she doesn’t need a weapon to kill you. 
Don’t use restraints, she will find a way out of them, and they will only give a false sense of safety. 
Do not touch her, the source said. Leave her in peace, and treat her respectfully, only then will the violence stay muted. 
Disrespect these and make no mistake, she will kill you.
Lumani smiled and made his fingers into the shape of a gun, placed it to her forehead, and pulled the imaginary trigger. Bang.
In the end, this woman was no different from any other piece of merchandise. Disposable. 
He patted her face, the way he would a dog, as if to say Sleep well, little animal, until you are needed. 
And then he straightened and moved to the fore of the cabin, where a drink waited for him.
He took no alcohol today because until he delivered, the job wasn’t complete, 
and because once started there would be no stopping until his own inner carnival ran dead. There would soon be time enough for private celebration. 
Lumani took a sip of the soda and checked his watch. They flew against the sun, seven time zones east, on a Gulfstream G550, 
an extravagant expense toward speed and flying range that nudged the overhead for hunting down this one woman to the same level as for a run on merchandise, maybe more.
Who could say if she would be worth it? He was only the right-hand man, the doer. 
Extract, Uncle had said, and so Lumani had performed, and perhaps in having executed this job so perfectly, he’d achieved enough to earn a smile, or a Well done, or something, 
because to solve the problem would bring enough to lease this jet outright for years, if that’s what Uncle wanted— although he wouldn’t. 
Only idiots kept toys that attracted such attention.
Another glance at his watch. Once beyond U.S. airspace, he would notify the pilots of the change in plans: 
They would land in the Dominican Republic to refuel and then continue on to Tenerife, where he had connections and could charter something smaller and more affordable— something European, less ostentatious and easier to hide.
Not that he really worried. He’d taken precautions within the United States to buy time, and once they were international, he might as well have become invisible. 
The switch in the Canary Islands was one last precaution in case the pilots talked when they returned, 
because someone highly motivated would come looking for this woman, and Lumani knew better than to lead a straight path to her.

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Chapter 3
Down the hall and through the glass walls, Jahan shifted away from the monitors, watching their approach, swiveling the chair back and forth until Bradford entered the war room.
Before Bradford spoke, Jahan said, “Confirmed the VIN numbers to the ambulance. 
“Found the service depot and am working on tying in to Dallas Fire-Rescue records and GPS systems so we can figure out where it came from and where it’s been.” 
He paused. “News on Logan?”
Bradford shook his head. “He’s missing, too.”
Walker handed Jahan the disk. “Don’t know if it’s current, but we pulled a surveillance backup.”
Jahan stared at it for a moment, then turned to the computer and inserted the disk into a DVD tray.
Bradford and Walker leaned in closer. At their crowding, Jahan put his palms against the desk and rolled the chair backward. “Please,” he said.
They both straightened, then took a step back. Jahan waved them on farther. “Go do what you do and let me do what I do.” 
When neither of them budged, he slid lower in the chair, stretched his legs, and tilted his head upward. “I’ve got all day.”
Walker glanced at Bradford, and when he offered no reassurance, she took another step in retreat, headed for the hall, and paused in the door frame just long enough to lean back in. 
Said, “You’d better call me if there’s news, Jack— you leave me out of this and I swear I’ll find a way to make the rest of your life fucking miserable.”
The click of the wall segment followed a half-minute later.
Jahan muttered under his breath, his right hand making a talking motion, “As if she doesn’t trust me!” 
When, after a long silence, Bradford didn’t move, Jahan glared up at him. “I need to watch,” Bradford said.
“No, you don’t. I know you think it’ll help you feel better, keeping busy, being up-to-the-second on what’s going on, and all that. 
“But standing there breathing in my ear while I pull this apart is only going to give you anxiety— is going to give me anxiety. 
“There are new notes on the board and you have a business to run.” Jahan motioned across the room toward the whiteboards. “Go that way.”
Bradford sighed, shifted away from the computer and everything he hoped, and fought against hoping, to find.
Hope. The activity of the impotent. 
His was a world of action, of relying on his own wits and ability to create the luck that kept him alive, and yet here in a moment of weakness he was a mendicant hoping for alms.
He turned away, a concession to a friendship with Jahan that went back far enough that privately they still called each other names earned during rougher and cruder times.
Jahan’s career path had taken him from army intelligence into Bradford’s mercenary fold. 
At thirty-seven, he was a second-generation American, semi-attached to an extended family in Mumbai, and having spent the predominance of the last eight years working private security in the Middle East, he could now, at least on the surface, as easily pass for Pakistani, Saudi, Persian, or Syrian as he could Indian— 
sometimes Mexican or Colombian, depending on a person’s prejudice, and there always seemed to be plenty of prejudice to go around.
Jahan had a snarky way of bringing bigotry to the fore, and as it wasn’t easy to argue with a smartass who had a penchant for mockery and an IQ of 152, his words often provoked blows. 
Dodging, mocking, he would laugh and taunt, claiming that jacking with intolerance was the best free entertainment around. 
It didn’t take long for the Capstone term of endearment to follow.
BRADFORD FACED THE whiteboards and the diagram he’d put up this morning when the image of Munroe toppling off the motorcycle was still fresh and raw and hadn’t felt like two weeks of decay smothering his airway.
He rubbed out his previous words and replaced them simply with Michael. 
Then, as if on autopilot, filled in the blanks with what little he knew: 
They, whoever “they” were, knew Michael was in the country, knew where to find her, knew she was a woman, knew who Logan was to her, and knew how to find him and that his place was wired. 
In the heaviness of the unanswerable, Bradford’s eyes wandered along the boards to Jahan’s latest updates on the team in Peshawar. 
The satellite phone bill on that job alone was going to bankrupt him.
Seven of his core team were currently out on assignment— the two in Pakistan, plus four in Afghanistan and one in Sri Lanka. 
With the exception of himself, who as boss and owner got to cherry-pick for his own schedule, the overseas assignments were rotated with homebase operations and factored by time and expertise.
Home was nice, but the big money was in the hazard pay. 
It took a certain mentality to sign on for something that meant more time living rough in shithole situations than with hot water and clean sheets. 
The job was difficult on relationships, if you were lucky enough to have them, and it seemed at times that a good portion of running the business involved weeding out the lunatics.
Dozens of others worked under Capstone’s umbrella, foot soldiers who came and went, but like partners in a law firm, these nine— ten if you counted Munroe— were vested: 
they were Bradford’s people, tried and proven, a breed apart from polite, or even impolite, society. 
Their motives for staying with the company varied, but one thing was consistent: They were each very good at what they did because the incompetent didn’t live long.
VIABLE FOOTAGE WAS sparse, but not for the reasons Bradford had expected. 
Though the intruders had grabbed the original disk, they’d still taken precautions against being recognized. 
They were a pack of three, with a leader who had let himself in with a key, followed by two accomplices with baseball bats, their faces shielded from the camera by caps and lowered heads. 
The fight, which had taken place in the kitchen, was off camera but had lasted a painful four minutes.
Three against one. For four minutes. When they’d hauled Logan out, his right leg appeared to be broken. 
He was cut and bleeding, but so were two of his assailants, and he still fought, still took a beating, all the way out the front door.
The final scene was cued at 10:13 A.M., minutes after Munroe had arrived at Capstone, and for a long while the war room was cocooned in stunned silence. 
Almost simultaneously, Bradford let out a stream of expletives and Walker went off in Brazilian Portuguese. 
Jahan remained quiet, his fingers tap-tapping against the desk. Finally he said, “Did they take out Michael to get to Logan, or take out Logan to get to Michael?”
The question was more or less the same line of inquisition Walker had raised in the car and Bradford didn’t want to run through it all over again. 
“Put out a run for information,” he said. “See if Logan owes anyone money or if there are any jealous lovers in recent history. 
“My bet is he’s clean. He’s got too much to lose, is too focused on living life and reconnecting with his daughter.”
Jahan said, “But—”
Bradford cut him off. Said, “Michael is the target, Logan is the collateral.”
“Collateral for what?”
Bradford closed his eyes. Pressed the base of his palm to his forehead. Another go through the same information. 
“Collateral to save their own lives. Protection. They just grabbed Michael,” he said. “Michael.” He paused for emphasis. 
“Assuming she’s tranquilized now, what happens when she wakes up? Logan is the cage, the shock collar, the shackles…” 
He stopped. This was pointless. A waste of time. In his peripheral vision, he saw Walker shush Jahan. 
She’d tell him later. They would hash out reservations and alternate theories on their own. 
At the moment the motive didn’t matter half as much as moving quickly with what little they knew.
Bradford paused, waiting for argument, for contradiction, and got nothing. 
Said, “Besides those of us here in this room, those on our team, how many people know the role Logan plays in her life?”
Walker shook her head. Jahan turned palms-up.
“There can’t be many,” Bradford said, “and that does us some pretty big favors in narrowing the playing field.”
Jahan stood and strode to the whiteboard. Added notations to Bradford’s scrawl. He turned to the others. “Where do we go with this?”
Bradford said, “Find Michael, find Logan,” and turned back to the screen, where the image of the intruders stood frozen in time, two heads down, the leader’s tilted up just enough that the side of his face showed to the camera. 
There was a look of youth in his posture, an arrogance that hadn’t yet dimmed through time and experience. 
“That son of a bitch knows it’s there,” Bradford said. “And he’s smirking.”
Walker came to stand beside him, then drew closer and also focused on the image. 
Jahan said, “Perhaps we’re giving them too much credit for sophistication. Maybe they’re bumbling idiots, figuring it out as they go along.”
Bradford and Walker stared at him.
“Or maybe not,” he said. “But while I have your attention, and without intending to sound callous or change the subject, “with Michael out of the picture and our available resources put toward finding her, what do you want me to do with the Tisdale assignment?”
Bradford paused and blinked, a long, slow open-and-shut, then turned to look at his office, where, although he couldn’t see it, the Tisdale folder still sat on his desk and the signature page Munroe had signed this morning waited to be faxed. 
Tisdale. The reason she’d come into the office today.
Tisdale wasn’t a security gig or one of the peace offerings Bradford handed Munroe to entice her to hang around longer. 
This was different, a request for her services, though it hadn’t named her specifically, and it hadn’t arrived through normal Capstone channels.
The plea had come to Bradford personally from two frantic, desperate parents in California, in the hope that he might know where and how to locate Munroe. 
They might not have known her by name, but anyone who was anyone within the upper social strata knew the story of Emily Burbank, missing for four years in Africa and presumed dead, and how Munroe had found her. 
Bradford was still connected to the board of trustees that had bankrolled the search. 
Henry and Judith Tisdale, one a Silicon Valley giant, the other a United States senator, with their combined power and influence, hadn’t needed much time at all to track him down.
Neeva Eckridge. Missing person. Could Munroe find her?
Bradford had made no promises, given no indication that he even knew how to locate Munroe, told them he’d see what he could do. 
And now Munroe was missing, too. If the Eckridge kidnapping had been a ruse to pull her in, it was a goddamn masterpiece of ruses, because the whole world was looking for Eckridge and nobody could find her.
Two weeks ago, the girl had been an up-and-coming B-list Hollywood starlet and now hers was the most recognizable face in the country. 
Amid a busy schedule and a flurry of appointments, she’d vanished in the only one-hour window that she would have been unaccounted for. 
No signs of foul play, no eyewitnesses, no details: It was as if she’d simply vanished.
What started out as sensational gossip soon turned into a media feeding frenzy, because until Neeva Eckridge had gone missing, nobody, not her agent, not her boyfriend, not her Hollywood friends, had had any idea that the Tisdales were her parents. 
Speculation buzzed as much over Neeva’s true and fabricated pasts as it did in regards to what could have happened to her, and regardless of the angle— sensational, fearmongering, alien abduction, or otherwise— Neeva’s picture, and her parents’, were everywhere.
Bradford continued to stare at his office, toward the documents. 
Munroe had wanted the assignment, had been eager for it, but if she was the Tisdales’ best hope for finding their daughter, then at the rate things were going today, it was a lost cause.
Walker drew near and stood beside him, the top of her head reaching his shoulder. 
When he’d shifted straighter, taller, and had obviously returned to the present, she spoke. “Do you think they’re connected?”
“I can’t see how,” he replied. “But the timing is freakishly coincidental.”
“We have Michael taken down,” she said, “Logan being held as a hostage, and all of this possibly connected to Neeva Eckridge, who also disappeared with no witnesses. What thread draws them together?”
“I wish I knew,” he said. “Because if I had that piece of information, I’d find the bastard who’s behind this that much faster.” 
He turned to her and she looked up to meet his gaze. “I will find him,” he said. “And I will destroy him.”

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CHAPTER 2
Samantha Walker was five-foot-two, brunette, buxom, wide-smiling, and naturally tanned. 
She was the type of inviting cliché that men in bars mistakenly groped and called “honey,” only to later call “bitch” after she’d broken their nose.
Walker was a military brat: an only child, a dual citizen with a U.S. Marine sniper for a father and a Brazilian exotic dancer for a mother. 
At twenty-six, she was not only the youngest member of Bradford’s nine-man team but also the only woman, besides Munroe, who was temporary.
It was easy to mistake Walker for Capstone’s mercy hire— the token female brought into a man’s world to appease civilian workforce standards— 
or for eye candy, especially when she sat behind the front desk, but those were ignorant assumptions based on not knowing Walker— and on not knowing Bradford. 
At Capstone, where an assignment often meant life or death, egoism, sexism, and racism were wastes of time. 
If you could do the job, you got the job, end of story. 
This was the internal culture that kept the team tight, and as far as Bradford was concerned, Walker was one of his best— which was why he’d brought her with him to the hospital.
She sat in the Explorer, eyes closed and thumb pressed to the bridge of her nose, doing that thing she did: 
remembering, retracing steps, imprinting details that meant nothing in the moment but which she might need later. 
Bradford took the Explorer out of the parking lot, pulled the phone from his belt clip, dialed Logan, and was once more connected to voice mail.
On an average day, Logan not answering would be an understandable oddity, but today the silence screamed of complications. 
Bradford tossed the phone onto the front console, yanked a hard left on the steering wheel, and swerved. Cut across two lanes to pull a U-turn. 
A lady in a red Mazda hit the horn and let it blow. The guy behind her was more explicit and gave Bradford the finger.
Walker grabbed the hand bar for support and through clenched teeth said, “Where are we going?”
Bradford swung tight and punched the gas. The Explorer lurched forward just fast enough to keep from being rear-ended. 
“Logan’s not answering his phone,” he said, and though Walker wouldn’t fully grasp the implications, she knew enough to save him an explanation.
When they were once again moving with the flow of traffic, Walker said, “Why the body double in the hospital? Why’d they even bother to plant the wallet?”
Bradford looked away from the road and stared at her a second too long. 
Shifted his focus back to the traffic and answered with an audible growl. 
Twice now, so intent on getting to Munroe, he’d run in the wrong direction, hadn’t seen the maze before Walker asked him to.
She answered for him. “They knew we’d come looking and gave us a distraction, not for long, just long enough, because they had to know as soon as we got to the hospital the ruse would be up.”
She paused. “You asked Jack to run plates, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he get?”
“Valid Dallas Fire-Rescue,” Bradford said. “Nothing reported stolen.”
“But your gut says the paramedics weren’t the real deal.”
Instinct told him many things, none that he wanted to articulate. He said, “At this point, it’s all conjecture.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “If they were real, we’ll find her eventually, so let’s agree they weren’t and that Jack is right. 
“Where’d they get the ambulance? Emergency vehicles aren’t exactly easy to drive off with, not without causing a commotion we should be able to pick up.”
“I’d use an out-of-service unit,” Bradford said. “The city’s got to keep them stored somewhere.”
“It’s a lead.”
He reached for the phone and tossed it to her. “Get Jack on it,” he said, and swung the vehicle down a semideserted industrial strip.
FAR ALONG THE street on either side and in both directions were squat block buildings, businesses divided one from the next by narrow windows and truck bays. 
The signage on one, scripted in large metallic block letters, read LOGAN’S, and Bradford pulled to the front of it.
The parking area was empty, and from the ground level the building appeared quiet, if not deserted. 
Concrete steps under a roofed walkway led up to a mostly glass front door. 
Beyond the entry, all was dark, and daylight reflecting off the glass created a mirrored effect. 
The door’s latch rested against the frame as if someone in a hurry hadn’t realized the spring was broken.
Bradford reached for the weapon holstered under his arm and toed the door open. Walker, following suit, went in behind him.
The hallway was a straight, empty shot forty-five feet back to another door, which led to the warehouse area. 
Off the hall on both sides were the four rooms that made up the entire office— two in the front for workspace, two to the rear that had been used as a kitchen and a bedroom for as long as Logan had leased the place. 
At the moment, the only light was what filtered through the front door.
The interior was silent, the floor littered with glass shattered from one of the large framed posters that had once hung high and now lay disjointed at the base of the wall. 
Bradford stepped beyond the shards, moved from one room to the next, staying in each just long enough to confirm it empty.
The primary evidence of a struggle was in the kitchen, where the table was broken and dishes lay shattered on the floor. 
Dried blood streaked across the floor and counters. He found a light switch and elbowed it on, adding a garish illumination to the mix, and then, seeing what he needed to see, backed out, nodding for Walker to take a look.
She stopped just before the chaos, and after a moment her eyes cut to his. 
He continued down the hall to the door that led to the warehouse and the restrooms, though he knew he’d find nothing out there. 
Whoever had done this had come for Logan, found him in the kitchen, taken him, and left.
The warehouse, double the width of the front office, was spaced with machines, tools, and storage. 
Bradford stood in the oversize area listening to the buzz of electricity that ran through unseen wires to powerful lights. 
In the silence, he holstered the weapon, then turned a slow circle and willed the facts to come to him.
The events of today were too connected to be coincidence, were too well informed to be new. 
There was a history that pulled everything together, something from their past, someone who would have known where to look and who to grab, and somehow all of this tied in to today. 
The events of Argentina tumbled inside his head. He pushed past Walker, who guarded the egress.
In Logan’s bedroom, he dug through dressers and drawers, scanned the walls and surfaces, added almost as much to the mess as those who’d come before him, searching for photographs, artwork, personal touches, anything that would lead from Logan to Hannah, Logan’s daughter, who’d been the catalyst for Munroe’s infiltration in Buenos Aires.
He found nothing. Like Munroe, Logan was careful not to leave anything that traced back to the ones he loved, and this one relief was drowned out by several more destructive possibilities. 
Bradford paused, then looked up to find Walker studying him. He straightened, ignoring what she left unsaid. 
No matter how it might appear to her, his weren’t the actions of a man who’d witnessed the abduction of his girlfriend. 
Walker didn’t know Munroe’s history, didn’t understand how Logan factored into the equation, and without having seen it, lived through it— survived it— she could never understand the place from which his fear was born.
Vanessa Michael Munroe was a killer with a predator’s natural instincts; she could take care of herself. 
What scared him— terrified him— was what would happen if she was pushed too far. 
He’d seen that place of destruction, had witnessed firsthand what the darkness could do to her mind, and if whoever had taken her had also taken Logan…
Bradford let the thought die and cut off the murky places to which it led. He stood in place, deliberating, analyzing, then whispered, “Surveillance footage.”
Walker’s head tipped up and around. He said, “Fiber optics.”
They found the security system racked inside the kitchen’s closet, the miniature cooling fans still blowing and signs of hurried disturbance along the walls. The recording tray was empty. 
Bradford scanned behind the equipment, where clusters of wires fed to and from machines through the wall. 
He used the closet walls to brace himself and shimmied up to the faint outline of a cutaway. 
Pushed up, and the segment of ceiling lifted and slid away on rollers.
The area above the kitchen was clean, had been decked, and the heating and cooling air vents redirected to include this small area— everything opposite what one might expect in an unused crawl space. 
A foot away from the opening were two servers and next to them a small rack of jacketed DVDs. 
He punched the button to open the recording tray, ejected an unmarked disk, slid it into a sleeve, and dropped it down to Walker.
They moved from the kitchen back to the front area, where the computers had been destroyed and the hard drives removed. 
Hunted for logs, journals, notations on paper, anything that might direct them to Logan’s last visitor, but what they were searching for, if it had ever existed at all, had probably ended up on a scrap of paper tossed out with yesterday’s trash.
They didn’t speak again until they were back inside the Explorer and Bradford had found a random pay phone from which he made an anonymous call to 911.
“What’s the connection?” Walker asked. “Michael and Logan?”
Bradford, eyes fixed on the road ahead, didn’t respond. 
He didn’t have the words to articulate the jumbled confusion of experience and history, the obscure paths Munroe had trod, from them the murky depths they were about to wade.
Walker sighed and turned back to the window. Said, “You know things I don’t know and I can’t help solve this thing if you insist on playing the role of grieving boyfriend.”
Bradford stole a glance in her direction. Said, “Whoever did this came after Michael and took Logan as collateral, as a hostage.” 
Paused. “Either that or they took him as a setup to a revenge killing— for Michael to witness before they kill her, too. One of those two.”
A long, heavy silence filled the car and eventually Walker said, “Wow.”
“It’s all just conjecture,” he said, “but you wanted to know.”
She shifted in the seat so that she faced him. “I don’t understand. Logan races motorcycles for a living. Why the hell does he need his place wired like that?”
“He races, he retools performance engines, but he’s also got a supply business that has nothing to do with his machine shop. 
“Logan’s kind of a go-to guy. If you need something military-grade and difficult to get, he’ll do the getting.”
“But no alarm system?”
“Nothing that would bring law enforcement to his doorstep.”
“And you don’t think what happened today might possibly be because of him and”— Walker air-quoted— “his supply business?”
Bradford shot her another glance and turned back to the road. Whoever had done this had taken Munroe clean while Logan’s place was trashed and bloody. 
Even without knowing the history, it didn’t take a genius to follow the logic. 
He waited until he’d exited the freeway and stopped at a traffic light before answering. 
“It may be intertwined with his business somehow,” he said, “but ultimately this is about Michael.”
“And you know this how? More gut instinct?”
“Stop sniping at me,” he said. “I know you see it. 
“Whoever did this grabbed Michael in public and in broad daylight, went through a hell of a lot of effort to create a diversion. 
“This is not an amateur, so let’s just assume that if all he wanted was her dead, Logan would be here grieving over her body with us, “but instead he’s missing, too. The only reason to take Logan is to control Michael.”
“Fine for a theory,” she said, “but why take Logan specifically? Sure, he’s her friend, but if the idea is some sort of hostage situation, why not take you? Why not me for that matter, or some kid on the street?”
Bradford waited again before speaking. How to explain who Logan was to Munroe? 
“Holding Logan hostage is the best weapon they could have come up with,” he said. “She’s tighter with him than with any blood bond.”
“Someone knows this?”
Bradford nodded. Someone knew. Who was the big fucking question.

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CHAPTER 1 DALLAS, TEXAS
Palms to the glass, watching the lot from his office window, Miles Bradford saw her topple. 
The fall was a slow-motion sort of thing, the type of tilt and drop that made him hesitate, unsure for a long second whether to laugh or worry. 
He held his breath, urging her up. Any second now, knowing he was there, she’d turn toward the building and wave. They’d laugh about it later.
But she didn’t move. Made no attempt to edge out from beneath the motorcycle that pinned her leg to the pavement. Didn’t even raise her head.
Seeing though not understanding, moving as if treading water, Bradford backed away from the window. 
Then turned and bolted out of the office, down the hall, and past reception. 
Bypassed the elevators for the stairs, took the five floors at a run, and emerged from the stairwell into the lobby, where he pushed through the big glass doors only to find an ambulance blocking the northern lot access and Munroe on a stretcher, being lifted into its interior.
Bradford yelled, swung his arms to attract the attention of the paramedics so they would wait a moment longer, and allow him time to get across the lot so he could ride with her. 
But they never turned, never looked. The stretcher slid inward, the doors shut, and Bradford ran again, racing the distance, arriving seconds too late.
The ambulance, siren blaring, pulled out onto the service road.
The Ducati lay on its side, shoved slightly from where she’d been pulled from underneath, engine off and keys still in the ignition. 
He stooped and heaved the bike upright. Straddled the machine, hit neutral with his foot, punched his thumb into the starter button, and compressed the clutch handle only to find that the impact with the pavement had snapped it off.
He swore and stared in the direction the ambulance had traveled, frustrated and motionless, catching his breath, processing, while the wail faded and traffic began to flow again. 
Had he run directly for a car instead of the ambulance, he might have had a chance to chase it down, but he was too late for that now. 
Bradford glanced back toward the building, where the small crowd of onlookers had already begun to disperse.
Two decades of working in the line of fire, of watching his back and chasing images from shadows, and he still had the tendency to think like a civilian on his home turf. 
What were the odds that one of the people on the ground floor had made the call and an ambulance had been close by? Not impossible, but not highly likely, either.
Bradford dismounted and rolled the Ducati to the garage, to the out-of-the-way nook Munroe typically stashed it, and then jogged back to the lobby with the mental tape of her fall playing inside his head. 
Watched her jerk and then glance down, saw her pause and the way her left hand had wandered over her thigh, the long hesitation before she slumped and toppled. 
Hers weren’t the motions— the sudden drop, the collapse— of someone passing out.
At the elevator he jammed a finger into the up arrow and ran through a list of possible alternatives— allergies, medical conditions, recent sicknesses— and drew one blank after another.
By the time Bradford returned to his floor, he’d gone through the replay a dozen times, more frustrated with each rewind. 
He pushed through the wide doors that separated Capstone Security Consulting from the hallway, crossed the plush reception area with its rich furnishings and oversize logo— corporate tokens that implied something other than the blood-and-guts outfit beyond the wood-paneled wall— and came to a full stop at the reception desk and Samantha Walker who sat behind it.
She stared up at him with her big brown eyes and the same give me the sitrep look she always got when his stress level soared. 
“What the hell was that all about?” she said. “You look like death paid a visit. Talk to me.”
Bradford ignored her with a vacant half-smile and leaned across the desk for the Post-it stack. 
What else could he do? Tell her that based on his gut and a ten-second memory loop that wouldn’t stop, he was pretty sure the woman he loved had just been tranqued and shoved into an ambulance?
He scribbled the few digits he’d caught off the plates when the vehicle had peeled out onto the service road 
and, with eyes still on the pad, said, “Where’s the closest emergency room?”
“Medical City and Parkland.”
“Call them, will you? Find out if Michael’s there?”
She gave him that look again, then reached for the mouse and her monitor came alive. “Am I calling about Michael or some other name?” she asked.
“Michael,” he said. Because unless Munroe was working, that’s who her ID said she was, but the inquiry sent his mind bolting in two directions, and while Walker searched for numbers, he forced thought fragments and scattered images into a coherent question: 
He’d watched Vanessa Michael Munroe being lifted into the ambulance, but to those who’d done the lifting, was it Michael they’d taken or another of her incarnations?
He struggled to draw from the ether some sense of why, of who would have had the means and motive to put her into that ambulance, and, more important, how she’d been traced. 
Munroe had surely made enemies in her life, trading secrets and buying souls, but she’d worked with disguises and aliases, had stayed away from home for so many years, that there were few who knew who she truly was or how to find her.
Walker cleared her throat, picked up the phone, and gave Bradford a decided stare that said she’d make the calls but not while he stood there listening and micromanaging.
He moved to get out of her way, swiped a key card through a scanner.
A segment of wall to the right of the desk clicked open a sliver. Bradford pushed against it and stepped through. 
Beyond the paneling, the interior hallways and facing walls were glass, with privacy blinds kept open, giving the entire floor a sense of light and space. 
He moved past the offices to what most businesses would consider a conference area but which was to Capstone the war room, the nerve center, the place from which the business tendrils reached out for thousands of miles to support and supply the private security gigs running at any given time.
There was no door, only a frame where one used to be, and at one of the desks facing a wall of oversize monitors, Paul Jahan swiveled away from a keyboard.
Bradford nodded, said, “Hey, Jack,” and handed him the Post-it. “Dallas Fire-Rescue plates. Can you run them?”
Jahan took the purple square with its three handwritten digits, gave it a look, and then stuck it to the nearest monitor. “Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ll see what I can get.”
In the ensuing silence, Bradford strode to the marked-up whiteboards that functioned on the right wall as the monitors did on the left. 
He followed the note changes, minor updates on the two-man team in Peshawar, but read them without really seeing. 
His mind was elsewhere, still running, still torn in the two directions Walker’s innocuous question about Munroe’s identity had sent him.
Having nothing to answer the first, he shifted to the second: If something happened to Munroe, Logan’s number was the emergency contact in her wallet. 
No first name, no last name, just Logan. He was her surrogate brother, soul mate, partner in crime, the man whose history was nearly as convoluted as her own and who guarded her back as fiercely as she guarded his.
Bradford checked his watch. Checked his phone. Ten minutes, if that, since he’d watched Munroe take the bike down with her fall. 
Still early if he meant to start tracking, but that didn’t matter. 
He pulled from speed dial the number known to few, the phone Logan always carried and almost certainly answered.
Called and was sent directly to voice mail. Bradford hung up without leaving a message.
Thumbed through the contacts for Tabitha, Munroe’s eldest sister, hit call, and then ended it before the dialing began. 
No one in Munroe’s family had any idea of the life she led off the grid and she took care to shield them and leave nothing that would trace back to them. 
It was still too soon for this kind of call, and he wasn’t ready to step into the resulting quagmire of explanations if Tabitha should happen to pick up. Needed to script a plausible cover story first.
From across the room Jahan said, “Looks like those digits belong to valid Fire-Rescue plates. I can’t say for sure with only half of them, but they seem to check out.”
Bradford turned from the whiteboard wall. “Is it a stolen vehicle?”
“Not that I’m showing, although it might not have been reported yet.”
“What about a trace on the GPS? Can we figure out where the ambulance ended up, maybe where it’s been?”
Jahan swiveled his chair around to face Bradford and then shifted a couple of inches to the right, then left, and back again in a maddening fidget. 
“I might be able to do that,” he said, and stopped. “When do you plan to let us know what’s going on?”
Bradford sighed. Walked to the nearest blank spot on the whiteboards, picked up a red marker, and drew the beginning of a diagram. 
Wrote: Michael— passed out or taken down?
He turned. “That’s all I’ve got.”
Jahan’s mouth opened for a full second before he spoke. “You’ve gotta be kidding.” And a beat later: “What did you see?”
“Not enough.”
Jahan’s index finger moved toward the whiteboard. “But enough for that?”
Bradford’s posture sagged and he glanced again at the diagram.
Given Munroe’s lifestyle, it was more than enough, but there was nothing he could point to for confirmation. 
The nine months since the infiltration in Argentina had been quiet, her initial week in Dallas had turned into months, the occasional overnight stay at his place lengthening into more, until she, who had no home of her own, gradually grew comfortable in his. 
He’d offered her security contracts as a way to delay the inevitability of her leaving, but they’d been small and relatively inconsequential— the longest had been a month in Abuja, Nigeria, which had evolved into an adult baby-sitting gig— definitely nothing to write home about, nothing he could connect to today.
The intercom crackled. Walker said, “I’ve got a Michael Munroe at the emergency room at Medical City.”
Jahan raised his eyebrows; Bradford shook his head. “It’s too soon,” he said.
Jahan’s head tilt was subtle, an acknowledgment of trust rather than agreement. 
Bradford reached for the key rack, lifted off a set, and moved toward the door space. 
“Keep an ear for the phones, will you? I’m closing down the front and taking Sam with me.”
Bradford and Walker took the elevator down to the ground floor and crossed to the parking garage, to an Explorer, one of three vehicles Capstone kept on hand. 
Bradford got in behind the wheel. Walker slid into the passenger seat, buckled up, and kept her focus beyond the windshield, biting back, he knew, questions she wouldn’t ask.
Her silence now was part of the same dance of avoidance that had descended on most of the team when Munroe had first come onboard. 
Suspicions of preferential treatment tainted the waters. 
Bradford had brought Munroe into the company, it was no secret that he was sleeping with her, and he’d already dropped everything once before to watch her back. 
Until proven otherwise, this little jaunt to the hospital was Bradford’s overly paranoid, overly protective private mission, and as such, a waste of company resources.
THE EMERGENCY ROOM at Medical City, like most emergency rooms, was harshly lit and filled with depression. 
Seating took up the bulk of the waiting area. 
The next-of-kin story got Bradford and Walker beyond the wide swinging doors that divided the helpless from the helped and into the hallway, where the smell of antiseptic filled the air and the glare of fluorescent tubing illuminated nothing Bradford wanted to see and everything he didn’t.
He found the room and passed through the curtained entry, only to back out as quickly as he’d gone in.
Walker, close behind, nearly collided with him in the process. She jumped sideways to avoid impact.
“What the hell?” she said, and when his only response was to search out the room number again, she gave him that look and continued past.
The room held one bed, an assortment of medical equipment, and a small space to move about. 
Bradford joined Walker beside the bed, where, expression clouded over, she stared down at a stranger, bloodied, stitched up, and doped.
“You want me to check with the nurses?” she whispered. “Find out if there’s been some mistake?”
Bradford drew the curtain fully around, and motioned for her to keep watch. 
Belongings lay to the side of the bed and he searched through them, rifling through clothing, shoes, and purse until he found a wallet. Munroe’s wallet.
There was nothing else to indicate who this person was— no notebook or gadgets, no phone or identifying items. 
Only the folded leather that had, until this morning, been in Munroe’s back pocket. 
Bradford flipped through it and pulled out the ID, turning it toward Walker long enough for her to get a good look, then nodded his head toward the exit. She turned and left.
He continued past the driver’s license and credit cards, which were still there, searching for the emergency numbers and the cash, which should have also been there but were not. 
Bradford pocketed the wallet, lifted the sheets slightly to see what lay underneath— a violation of privacy to whoever was in that bed, but he needed to confirm what he already suspected— and then having done so, slipped out.
Walker waited for him at the Explorer, arms crossed and leaning against the hood, and when he was within hearing distance she straightened and said, “The woman was brought in at about ten-twenty this morning. Michael didn’t leave till eleven-thirty. The timing doesn’t work.”
“Except Michael got to the office around ten,” he said. “The timing works if they were waiting for her to arrive, if they knew they’d get her on her way out.”
“They’d have to be watching your place,” Walker said.
“Maybe they are.”
Bradford opened the doors and slid in behind the wheel, a hundred questions charging through his head, all of them superseded by guilt. 
Munroe would never have been found if she hadn’t been in Dallas, and she’d stayed in Dallas for him.

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Chapter 39The departure area was filled with those waiting to board the nonstop flight to New York. The crowd was a mixture of teenagers and twentysomethings, with their scruffy clothes and beat-up backpacks, interspersed among the well-heeled and the economy tourists, all of them jammed into a small space that, in spite of appearances, amounted to little more than a cattle car.Munroe and Bradford stood at the departure gate, watching the last of Logan, Charity, and Hannah as they continued down the Jetway. The perks of being a recovered abducted child were few, but priority boarding that put them first on the flight was one of them.And then they were gone. The assignment was finished.The pressure was over, and the resultant vacuum was like a stadium of shouting people gone instantly quiet.Munroe tipped her head against Bradford’s shoulder. They stood there a moment, staring after the empty space, and then Munroe turned to Heidi and Gideon, who had remained several feet away. She offered Heidi a hug and Gideon a handshake. “We’re heading out of here,” she said, and after the expected reciprocal niceties, turned to Gideon. “Last chance to come with us.”He shook his head. “I’m good,” he said.Munroe looped her arm in Bradford’s, and together they strode toward the exit.Gideon called after her. “Hey, Michael!” he said.She turned.“Thanks,” he said. “Not just for getting Hannah, but you know, for everything else.”She nodded. “A deal’s a deal,” she said. “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”Gideon tipped his index finger from his forehead toward her.There was always the chance he’d come for her, but Munroe held out for him finding peace through Hannah’s homecoming and the changes it would bring.International child abduction was no small crime, and proof was ample that Sunshine, or whatever the hell that woman’s name was, was directly tied up in Hannah’s trail. For the first time in nearly a decade Gideon had hope, and when Charity and Logan were ready to move forward, they might all experience a shared taste of justice.The reunion between Hannah and her parents had been tear-filled and charged with drama— Charity first, and then a near repeat with Logan twenty minutes later. But it came, it passed, and if there were any parents better suited to deal with the issues their daughter faced, Munroe would be hard-pressed to find them. Charity and Logan understood The Chosen, understood from personal experience both the mind-set and the process a child went through in shedding the upbringing. They would know how to work through it. It would take time, but Hannah would heal; she’d be all right.From inside the helmet, the world took on that muted tone that amplified the clarity of adrenaline. White stripes pulsed beneath the wheels, a rapid sequence that nearly blended into a solid line as Munroe kept the speedometer climbing. It was that earliest hour of the morning when the sun had yet to crest the horizon, and she was flying toward it on open, empty road. The bike was there beneath her, driving her forward, but she didn’t feel it. Felt only the exhilaration of freedom, of power, and of flying.When Munroe opened her eyes, Bradford was next to her, propped on an elbow, watching her with a curious smile.“You were dreaming,” he said.She returned the smile, that groggy, satisfied smile of deep, comforting sleep.“Yes,” she whispered, and then smiled again. “I was.

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Chapter 38
The necessities of the evening over, Munroe took the stairs up; ten floors in a slow climb that allowed her mind to purge everything left after those two hours at the restaurant. 
Of the four who’d gathered at the table, Munroe was undoubtedly the only one who had stepped away with a lighter burden.
Predictably, Bradford opened the door before she reached it. 
He’d taken time to put his jeans back on, although the rest of him was still bare. 
She reached the threshold and he grasped her hand, drew her to him, pulled her inward and down to the sofa. The door shut.
She laughed, and he, hands wandering and mouth grazing hers, said, “I missed you.”
Those three words, so basic in their simplicity, encapsulated far more than either would admit. 
It felt for the moment as if language could never suffice for what touch communicated. 
Bradford’s hands roamed, hers reciprocated in kind, and she kissed him with the same intensity with which he’d drawn her to him.
His skin was warm against hers as the clothes fell away, and again their bodies tangled on the couch, each moment timeless, until they were spent to exhaustion and lay wrapped in each other’s arms.
Munroe rested her head on Bradford’s shoulder, body up against his while his fingertips stroked through what was left of her hair, the silence long until Bradford finally spoke. 
“The guy’s name was Patrick,” he said.
Munroe shifted, chin to her hand atop his chest so that they were face-to-face. “The guy I tossed into the garbage?”
Bradford nodded. “Devin Patrick. He carried a badge, but he wasn’t NYPD.”
“What then?”
“An impersonator,” Bradford said. “He used the badge as a weapon, and he’s been at it for a few years now. 
“The more the department digs, the more they find, and the less they like what they see— so, in a way, you did them a favor.”
“Are they burying it?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say burying,” he said. “Back shelving, maybe. 
“But unless someone throws some evidence in their direction I don’t think they’re planning to look hard.”
Munroe returned her head to its resting place. “It’s good news,” she said. “Not necessarily that they aren’t looking, but that what I did might have been justified.”
“You already know it was justified,” Bradford said, “but I’m sure the confirmation is welcome.”
Munroe allowed the silence to swallow her. Bradford was right, the confirmation was welcome. More than welcome.
“Will you sleep?” he said.
“No,” she whispered, “not tonight.” And it wasn’t that she was afraid to fall asleep, afraid to dream or of the nightmares. 
She was nearly certain that the dreams weren’t coming back, but not certain enough to tempt fate tonight. 
Not with Hannah sleeping in the other room, and not when they were so close to the assignment’s end.
The nightmares had vacated, leaving a delicious weightlessness in their wake. 
Perhaps the change had come because she was back on assignment or that so much killing had caused a pressure release, but she knew better. 
For the first time in as far back as she could remember, she had allowed herself to feel the one thing she desperately craved from those closest to her but never afforded herself: acceptance.
She had a gift, and without fighting against it, without loathing her own nature, she’d let it serve her. 
Bradford’s insight— his words— had meant something,and although she’d never been and would never be one to need approval or another’s validation to be whole, in this one weakness, where she was so desperately alone, another hunter had shown his face.
Sometimes it’s not wrong to kill.
There would be time later for sleep. For now, the gift had saved a child, and then she’d lived to tell of it,
and if the pieces fell into place as Munroe planned, tomorrow the last of the remaining strings would be brought tightly together.
Bradford shifted into the rhythm that had come to symbolize peace, and Munroe slid off the couch, squeezing his hand in reassurance as she left.
She pulled her shirt over her head, found a blanket, and placed it over him, and wandered into the other room of the suite. 
She sat on the edge of the bed, and, her mind draining itself empty, watched Hannah sleep while the clock made its rounds and the predawn eventually arrived.
At six Munroe stood, removed the IV, collected the paraphernalia, and pulled it into the living room. 
Her call to room service brought Bradford’s eyes open, although she expected that he’d been awake from the moment she’d begun moving about. 
He joined her at Hannah’s bedside a few minutes later. “Why don’t you go clean up,” he said. “It’ll be a few before she starts to pull out of it. I’ll keep an eye on her.”
Munroe nodded, headed to the shower, and a long, hot ten minutes later, returned.
“It’ll be soon,” Bradford said, and they both turned toward the door and the heavy knock that reverberated from it. Hannah’s eyes twitched.
“I’ll get it,” Munroe said. “Take a shower while you can, because once she fully wakes, I want you and all of the equipment permanently out of sight until her mom gets here.”
Bradford nodded and turned. Munroe followed after him toward the door, collected the tray, and returned to the girl. 
Only these last remaining hours until she fully discharged her duty, to Logan, to Charity, to Heidi and Gideon and to all of the children of The Chosen.
The bathroom door opened and closed, followed shortly by that of the main door as Bradford left the suite. 
With this last, Hannah’s eyes rolled open. Her eyelids fluttered in the gradual open-and-shut of groggy cognizance until she slowly turned to face Munroe.
The room was still dim, and Munroe knew from experience that focus would come slowly. 
Hannah would sleep and come back again several times before she was fully aware. Munroe took Hannah’s hand and squeezed it.
Hannah’s first instinct would be to question, but her body’s physical needs would beg priority, and this was to Munroe’s advantage.
“How do you feel?” she said.
Hannah turned toward the sound of her voice. “I have to use the bathroom,” Hannah said. “Really, really bad.”
“I’ll help you up,” Munroe said. “We’re going to go slow, okay? Because you’re weak and woozy, and if you’re not careful you’ll stumble.”
Hannah nodded and licked her lips in that dry fuzzy-mouth way of having been under the influence of the chemicals in her blood. 
The girl struggled to sit, and Munroe slipped an arm behind her, helped her to her feet, and kept her balanced. 
In the bathroom, Munroe held the door open for light and kept the fluorescents off. 
Not only to spare Hannah the harsh glare, but so that the girl wouldn’t catch a glimpse of Munroe’s face and be prematurely frightened.
Mission accomplished and the return made less wobbly than the way there, Hannah lay back down and, eyes closed, said, “Where am I?”
“Montevideo,” Munroe said. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” she whispered.
Munroe brought the tray to the bed and placed it where Hannah could both easily see and reach it.
Hannah turned toward Munroe and said, “Who are you?” but the intensity of the question was quickly dispersed when the girl caught sight of the assortment of facturas on the plate.
“My name is Miki,” Munroe said. “We spent the day together in the kitchen, do you remember?”
There wasn’t any reason to spell out the amount of time that had since passed. Being put under wasn’t like waking from sleep. 
Hannah would have no awareness of the lost hours, and as far as the girl knew, it was now the morning after.
Hannah nodded at the familiar reference, and as the mental fuzz faded, creased lines of worry crept to her face, but panic didn’t set in. 
This was the bonus of having kidnapped a child who’d spent her life being shuffled from one place to the next, and handed to one stranger after the other.
“You look different,” Hannah said. “What happened to your face?”
“I got in a big fight,” Munroe said, and she smirked. “The other guy was ten feet tall, I had to climb on a chair to reach him, but I beat him up anyway.”
Hannah smiled. “Maybe a ladder,” she said, and she ate. 
Between bites, the questions came. “Where are we? Why are we here? Where is Sunshine?”
Sunshine? Ah, Sunshine, the name of the woman that Gideon hunted.
“She didn’t come with us,” Munroe said, the kinder, gentler version of she had no right to keep you.
Hannah took another bite, and then another, eyes down toward the bed, processing, thinking. 
“Why am I here?” she said. “I shouldn’t be here, I don’t have permission. Where’s Elijah, where’s Morningstar? Where’s my mom?”
“There are some people who love you very much who want to meet you.”
Hannah was quiet again, putting away more food than any child her size had a right to consume,but then, food like this didn’t come often in the Havens, and that had been part of Munroe’s reason for having ordered it. An easy bribe.
“Are you the reason they sent me away from the Haven? Did you take me away from Sunshine?”
“Yes,” Munroe said. “I did.” Her voice was soft. Tender. Provoking what was to come wasn’t easy, but she had to do it.
Hannah’s face reddened. Tears welled. “Why? Why would you do that? I need to go back.”
“Tell me about your dad,” Munroe said.
Hannah’s voice went up a notch. The tears gave way to anger. 
“If you’re trying to find out where he lives, you’ll never get that from me. I don’t know where he is, but even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I would never. 
“That would be—” Her voice broke, as if fighting for the right word. “That would be disloyalty to God and to The Prophet.”
“All right,” Munroe said. “Tell me about your mom.”
“Which one?”
“Your real mom.”
Here, Hannah grew silent. She wasn’t the confident, defiant child from the kitchen, nor the angry one of a second ago. “My mom didn’t want me,” she said.
“Do you remember her?”
Hannah began to cry again. Hearty drops trailed a line from her eyes to her chin and down her neck. 
In spite of the bravado she’d displayed in the kitchen, Hannah was an abandoned little girl aching to be wanted, yearning to matter to someone. 
Munroe reached out and pulled the girl to her shoulder, held her tight until the tears subsided,and then whispered, “What if I told you that your mother wanted you? That she wanted you very much?”
Hannah sat up and pushed away, wiped a defiant hand across her face. “It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “She’s of the Void.”
“The Void is a scary place, isn’t it?” Munroe said.
“God can’t protect you or keep you safe in the Void,” Hannah said,“and even worse, when you’re outside The Chosen you can be taken over by the Devil.”
“Like your mother?”
Eyes to the bed, Hannah nodded.
There was no point in countering the fear or the belief; anything said would only create mental dissonance and be rejected out of hand. 
Hannah would learn in her own time and through her own experiences which fears were founded and which weren’t, and that was the only way it could be. 
What the child needed now was only to be heard and to have her current emotions validated, and she needed this before she was reunited with her mother.
“It’s scary to think that it could happen to you too, isn’t it?” Munroe asked.
Hannah nodded.
“But even if she’s of the Void,” Munroe continued, “it still feels better knowing that she wanted you, doesn’t it?”
“Even if it doesn’t change anything, it still feels better.”
“Your father wanted you too,” Munroe said.
Hannah sniffed. Wiped her nose along her sleeve. “I know. But God’s work comes first.”
“I meant your real father.”
“He is my real father,” Hannah said. She paused, looked to Munroe, as if she wasn’t completely sure, and added, “Isn’t he?”
Hers was the tone of hopefulness, the voice of an abandoned child setting aside everything she believed to be true,even against the path to her own salvation, in the hope that maybe there were parents somewhere who truly wanted her. 
This was dangerous ground, to be trodden carefully.
“I don’t have all the answers,” Munroe said, “but I have known your mom and dad— your real dad— for a very long time. In fact, your real dad is my best friend.”
“Did they send you to come get me?”
“They did,” Munroe said. “They’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
Hannah started crying once more, this time a slow silent well of tears that dripped steadily onto the bedcover, and Munroe understood the tormented conflict. 
There was relief in the idea that she was wanted, but this was overcome by the terror of the Void and being taken outside the protective covering of The Chosen. 
Munroe placed a hand on top of Hannah’s, and the girl, eyes red and swollen, looked up.
“I don’t know your life, Hannah,” Munroe said. “I don’t know all the places you’ve been or the people you’ve met, who you’ve lived with or who you haven’t,“but I can tell you what I know, the things that happened before and things that you probably don’t remember. 
“I can tell you that Magdalene is your aunt— your mother’s sister, and that David kidnapped you away from your parents, and that he was only your mom’s boyfriend at the time.”
Hannah’s eyes glazed in disbelief and she returned her focus to the bed. 
“My dad and I look the same, we have the same last name, and Magdalene may be my aunt, but she’s American and I’m Venezuelan, and so is my dad.”
“I have passports from three countries,” Munroe said, “and I don’t carry a passport from where I was born and raised, so what does that make me?”
Hannah was silent, her eyes still on the bed, and Munroe said, “Have you ever wondered why you move around so much?”
“We all move.”
“But you have moved more, haven’t you? Did you know that David is wanted by the police or that he used to carry an American passport,“but he couldn’t get it renewed without getting arrested? Did you know that you used to carry an American passport too?”
Hannah looked up again, eyes accusing. “Is that true?”
“Yes, it’s all true. And although I don’t have the proof with me, it’s easily found if you are willing to look for it.”
Hannah was quiet again, sullen.
“I’m going to tell you a little story,” Munroe said. “After that, if you have any questions I’ll answer them. 
“And then, if you would like to get cleaned up, I have a change of clothes for you, because in about”— Munroe paused and stretched for the clock— 
“I guess in about an hour or so, your mom will come walking through the door— your real mom, the one who never wanted to let you go,“the mom who has spent eight years trying to find you and who has saved up all that love just for you.”
Hannah was fighting back tears again, but she did well at putting on an air of bravery. She crossed her arms. 
“And this guy you say is my dad?”
“He’ll be here soon after.”
“And then what?”
“What would you like to happen after that?”
Hannah looked toward the window. “I should go back to the Haven,” she said.
Should.
Munroe said, “But is it what you really want?”
She’d asked a question Hannah couldn’t answer without betraying The Prophet and The Chosen.
In giving Hannah the opportunity to meet parents who loved and wanted her, Munroe had offered the largest apple this little Eve could desire. 
But the apple was in the Void, a forbidden fruit, the great unknown: the evil fear. 
And to a child raised in The Chosen, it was much better to return to the Devil she knew than to face a Devil she didn’t. 
Hannah had no concept of free choice, hadn’t the ability to grasp that it was permissible to want what her heart wanted, and so Munroe pressed on.
She told of David Law and the steps he’d taken to steal Hannah away from Charity and Logan. 
She spoke of the events that followed, and went on to describe Charity down to the intricacies of her personality. 
Munroe followed these with stories about Logan, shenanigans that a child could appreciate, until Hannah began to smile naturally and occasionally laugh. 
When Munroe was certain that the girl’s defenses had been lowered, that a small bond had been forged, and that Hannah felt comfortable with the territory they would soon cross together,Munroe gathered the change of clothing that Heidi had brought and nudged Hannah toward the bathroom.
They were sitting cross-legged on the bed, picking the best parts from another round of food that Munroe had ordered, when the phone rang. 
Hannah’s eyes grew wide, and the worry creases made an instant comeback. 
Munroe stretched to reach the bedside cradle, and in response to Bradford’s voice on the other end said only, “Yes, go ahead.”
To Hannah, Munroe said, “In just a minute the front door will open and your mom will come in. 
“When she does, I’m going to step around the corner to give you two some privacy, okay? But I’m here, and if you need me, you call for me, right?”
Hannah nodded, the fear self-evident. On instinct, Munroe ruffled the child’s hair. 
Hannah squirmed to get away and ran her fingers over the top of her head to straighten out the mess.
Munroe laughed. “Just like your dad,” she said.