At least not by me. I’d signed my life to this. I’d told them I would appear on record. I gave them everything they asked. Except I wouldn’t live long enough to take it to trial; my life was going to end. I was a soul worth maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars, minus the debt—probably zero dollars. Nexovex was worth billions. I was a mosquito in their eyes, trying to bleed them.
The only thing I wanted was the truth.
The truth would set me free.
Whoever said that was a fucking liar.
Because I was face-to-face with a tall, tanned guy with two wavy brown strands of hair framing his face and the rest of it pulled up into a tight knot on the back of his head. Kalen O’Ryan. I remembered him now, and there was some relief to seeing him, but I didn’t want to leave, even with him.
“You’ve got literally no time,” he said, tapping his wristwatch while holding a black baseball cap in the other. “Put this on. We’ve got a van downstairs and we need to move now.”
“I’m waiting for someone,” I said.
“Jacques Harlan isn’t coming anywhere near this operation,” he said through clenched teeth. “You’re lucky we’re not going to wait here and arrest him as well.”
I yanked the baseball cap off. “No,” I said. “Jacques saved my life earlier. He’s the reason someone from—from Nexovex didn’t kill me. They came for my life. And apparently they’d been in here before, while I had the evidence boxes.”
Kalen sighed, rubbing at his eye where I noticed a mark on his eyebrow—the type you got from a piercing in that area. “You—you’ve just admitted that the evidence we’ve got could’ve been tampered with.”
“Or removed,” I said, not wanting to add to the clear breakdown he was going through—but I had it worse, he’d broken into my apartment, and now he was telling me I had to leave. “I still have my clearance, so I can make sure—”
He held his hand up at me, rudely shutting me up. “All we need is you alive and in the van. Everything else can wait. So pack a bag, quickly. And put the hat on.”
“I’m not a baseball cap wearer,” I said, but I didn’t get a response from him.
There was a real timer on me packing a bag, and as I rushed around the bedroom, I found the old pair of boxers that belonged to Jacques. They went into a backpack, alongside a very quick selection of shorts and jeans. I didn’t know what I needed.
Back in the living room, there was someone else there collecting things. A woman in an FBI windbreaker who looked familiar. I had no energy left in me to ask what she was doing. And she smiled.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Dina Castellano. We’ve spoken. I’m the lead on this. And I’ll be taking over from my colleague.”
As I turned around, Kalen was right there, smiling at me and shooing with both hands to keep me going forward.
“I need someone to make sure my boy—my friend knows where I’m going,” I said. “And he’s not answering his phone, and—”
Kalen pulled my phone from my hand after I’d taken it out of my pocket. “You can’t have this,” he said. “We’ll pouch it; better than destroying it.”
“Pouch?”
“A faraday pouch to block GPS tracking,” Dina said. “It’ll keep everything safe.”
Some relief swept through me. “So I’ll be able to contact Jacques, then, when we get to the safehouse?”
They were smiling at me like fools. I knew they didn’t want him to come and see me, but they needed to understand, he was the only person I could trust. He wouldn’t turn on me, and even though I was the one who’d gone to the Bureau, I knew they didn’t have my interests at heart. They were either complicit in silencing me, or they were going to bring down a giant company and throw me to the wolves.
Clearly in the throes of a panic attack, I was malleable to do anything, and they got me into to the back of their van, telling me everything was going to be fine. Any time I mentioned Jacques, it was met with zero acknowledgement, as if I hadn’t mentioned him at all. But I knew he was going to come for me, he had to.
***
The drive took thirty minutes or so. The blacked-out windows of the van made it impossible to see where I was. They commanded me to follow them, and I did, through an old apartment lobby, the baseball cap I was wearing pulled down in the front. I saw my feet and the dirty grout-filled tiles as we walked over them, then up through the stairwell, several flights until we reached a room.
“You’re going to be in here until we can find somewhere more permanent,” Dina said, leading me inside a hotel room that hadn’t been updated in years—yellow walls, trampled carpetfloors that brought back nauseating memories of being a child and getting carpet burn in school.
Dina and Kalen followed me into the room with my things, no sign of my phone or computer. They’d taken them both for the foreseeable future. It was just me, a TV, a box of DVDs, and whatever I’d packed—which they’d rummaged through to make sure I wasn’t bringing in anything that could be tracked.
I sat on the end of the hard bed, then dropped back on it, and the ability to scream had completely left my vocal cords. The curtains were closed, so at least I knew I’d have a view.
Nothing the agents said sank in after basically telling me I wasn’t a prisoner in this room. I stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours. I finally sat upright and found my brain to be better adjusted now—there was no spin or warping—nope, that’s just how the room made me feel. Sick to my stomach.
