“The day after I killed the last of them. I told Balin I’d seen too much—sacrificed too much.”
Signing those papers felt like freedom. The rest of my life ahead of me. Whatever that was worth. Teddy Balin—my SSO—tried to convince me to stay, but…
“Shit!” I throw the coffee mug against the wall. Austin and Trevor stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. “Balin showed up in Venezuela the morning after I sent in my paperwork. At my fucking house!”
“Don’t tell me you used your GPS to find those assholes?” Trev asks.
“I’m not a goddamn idiot.” I sink back down. “Or…I didn’t think I was. I used a paper map. And when Balin showed up, I hadn’t burned it yet. I was in the middle of that shit when he knocked. Fucker asked for a cup of coffee. He was alone in the room with my files for at least five minutes.”
Everything makes sense now.
“Leo Francis Basher.”
“When I met Cortez, he called someone to vet me. He had my entire dossier in under ten minutes,” I say. “He wouldn’t tell me who he called, but said my reputation was of an ‘incorruptible intelligence officer whose powers of observation were unmatched.’ And that I had no sense of self-preservation.”
Trevor laughs so hard, he has to brace his hand on the wall to catch his breath. “Well, he got that right.”
“There’s more.” I can’t believe I didn’t put all this together earlier. “He called me ‘Leo Francis Basher.’”
“It’s your name. What else was he supposed to call you? Bugs Bunny?” Austin asks.
I shoot him a look I hope says, “Dumbass,” before I continue. “The CIA is theonlyagency with my full name. My driver’s license, P.I. license, my apartment lease? All the records from my civilian cover identity? No middle name. And those fucksticks who tortured me in Venezuela knew it too. Along with the assholes from the Ministry.”
Trev drops into a seat across from me and runs a hand through his hair. “The CIA is in on this. We’re fucked.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Leo
“I’d givemy left nut to get Sampson here right now,” Trevor says, staring at a sheet of butcher paper tacked up on my living room wall. “Never seen anyone with his tactical skills.”
Austin scrubs his hands over his face. “He’s going to call in thirty.”
“Yeah, but he won’t be at the church tomorrow.”
I look up from my laptop. The blueprints Zephyr sent me are starting to blur with how hard I’ve been staring at them. “It’s an eight-hour flight from Seattle, and since we have no idea who’s watching us…”
“The day West can’t figure out how to hide his entry into a foreign country is the day he tattoos his middle name on his forehead,” Trevor mutters.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I cut my gaze to Austin, but he’s just as confused as I am.
“Filbert,” Trev says. “Westley Filbert Sampson.”
For a full minute, the three of us laugh so hard, everything else falls away. Until I stop to catch my breath. Then the weight of what we’re trying to do slams back down on my shoulders.
“He can do his thing from Seattle.” Though Austin and Trevor argued with me for an hour, it was my call to keep the three members of Hidden Agenda—a K&R firm that partners with Trevor’s employer, Second Sight—from flying to Panama City to join us. “All we can control is what happens inside these walls. Zephyr’s monitoring the cameras you installed around the building, but we have no fucking clue who’s watching us from across the street. Down the block. A rooftop two kilometers away.”
After muttering something about me being right—I should have asked him to repeat it so I could get it “on tape”—Trev goes back to sketching the layout of the streets around the church.
Zephyr’s face pops up on my screen. “Tracing the call from Domina’s phone was…difficult.”
“But not impossible?” I ask.
She frowns, taps her keyboard, and shows me a map of North, South, and Central America. Red dots flash all the way from Canada to Zimbabwe. “They routed the call through a dozen different countries. I had to hack into Domina’s mobile carrier, but once I did that, I managed to trace the signal. But they’re not taking any chances. The call pinged off five different towers in a ten-mile radius aroundyourapartment complex. Best guess? They drove in circles the whole time.”
“If she’s close—”
Zephyr stares at me, and even over a video call from Boston, her expression is crystal clear. “These guys are pros, Leo. I’d bet all the tea in this city they purposely drove around your building to distract you—us—so we wouldn’t look for her anywhere else.”
