“Or they were listening,” he said, grim. “And who the fuck isthey?”
“Ever since Silas disappeared,” Maddox said in a low voice, his eyes fixed on the blood pooling at his feet, “every answer only gives us more questions.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I shifted to the side to let Sylvie sit up, wrapping my arm around her to steady her as she rolled forward on the mattress to study the body on the floor.
“He looks very dead.” She glanced at me for confirmation. I was as sure as I could be without taking the guy’s pulse.
“He is,” I agreed. “That’s one problem solved. Whoever hired him has our names, but my bet is they’ll focus on Silas. With their first assassin out of the game, I doubt they’ll waste the next on us. Not when we only made the list as collateral damage.”
Maybe it would have been better if the bomber had been arrested. The FBI had been hoping to collect a prisoner. Instead, they’d be picking up a body. He would have given us answers, but Sylvie was safer if he was dead.
We’d find the answers on our own.
“It’s okay,” I said, pulling Sylvie back from her view of the body. “We’ll need to lie low for a while, to make sure we’re clear, but I think the immediate danger is over. Even if they were listening, they know we don’t know anything.”
“Yet,” Maddox said.
Sylvie eased into my arms and lay her head on my shoulder.After a second, she whispered, “This problem might be solved, but until we know what Ghost Trace is and why an assassin was sent after Emily and Silas, it’s not over.”
I turned my head to kiss her hair, the tension I’d been holding for days draining away. She and Maddox were right. This wasn’t the end. We had more questions today than the day Sylvie had walked into Sinclair Security. But with the bomber dead, she was as safe as we could make her until we unraveled Silas’s secrets.
I could live with that. As long as I had Sylvie.
Epilogue
SYLVIE
Things quieted down faster than I would have expected. The FBI arrived at the cottage, and after a few questions, they removed the body. That was the last we heard of our mysterious bomber-assassin.
The team did some digging and identified him. He, like the data broker, went by a few aliases, but Maddox thought he’d most recently gone by Seventeen. A former NSA agent gone freelance, who’d taken his affection for explosives in the wrong direction. Basically, the opposite of Eli, who mainly used his skills to keep bombs from blowing up.
Our guy was responsible for a long list of murders and assassinations. Sometimes he used a bullet, sometimes a knife, but mostly a variety of explosives. The FBI had accepted that he’d been neutralized by an unknown party, though they would rather have taken him alive.
No one was happy that we didn’t know who’d set off the device that had killed him. While the team had managed to uncover the identity of our assassin, they’d been unable to determine who had hired him. The best lead we had was the mysterious Ghost Trace.
For my part, I was happy to leave that one in more qualified hands. I had enough to deal with getting my life back on track.
Eli had been right. No one minded my moving into his room at the barracks. The building was plenty big enough for everyone, and despite the fact that there were now seven people living there, we weren’t bumping into each other all the time. For one thing, Eli’s team were all workaholics. And though there was an office set up in the barracks, most of them preferred doing their work at Sinclair Security’s main building.
Though Miranda seemed to handle more administrative tasks and was sticking close to home, the rest of them were out of town as often as not on different assignments. Eli had opted out for the time being, saying even with me living in the barracks, he wasn’t comfortable leaving until we determined with absolute certainty that I was off the radar of whoever had hired the bomber.
I told him I was okay if he had to go, but he’d kissed me and said he wasn’t interested. Not yet. And I hadn’t argued because, while I was okay with it—this was life, and it was part of his job—I still hadn’t shaken the creepy feeling of being targeted by an assassin.
When Cooper Sinclair asked me to come on staff part-time doing research, I’d accepted happily. We’d agreed my hours would be flexible. If I needed to be on the road working on my podcast, no problem. And Eli had made Cooper and me promise that my involvement would start and end at research. Strictly a desk job. I’d agreed. Neither of us could forget how close fieldwork had brought us to dying. I wasn’t looking to get blown up again any time soon.
Cooper had only smiled and said, “A desk job works. For now.”
Eli had scowled. I’d let Cooper’s comment go, but every once in a while, I wondered exactly whatfor nowmeant. I hadn’t asked. I was happy with the projects the Sinclairs handed me. I wasn’t a hacker, but you didn’t have to be to find ninety percent of the information that was useful. You just had to know how to dig, where to look, what threads to follow, and when not to give up. Sinclair didn’t just research the cases they took on for clients; they also researched the clients themselves. They’d learned the hard way that you had to know who was hiring you before you took the job.
It was a good deal all around. They got access to my excellent research skills, and I got a taste of interesting cases along with coworkers I liked, a plush office space, and Alice to chat with at the front desk. The extra cash in the bank was welcome, since my next season would be inevitably delayed.
Cooper and I had agreed that there would be no podcast season about Emily Shaw. There were too many unanswered questions. I hated to give up a season I’d spent so much time on, but even I didn’t feel comfortable putting any of this information out in public. Whatever was going on, it was dangerous enough to remotely take out their own assassin. Not knowing who’d killed him, or why, or what the hell this was about, the wisest move was to walk away.
I could live with that. We’d gotten justice, in a sense. The bomber was dead. I’d rather have seen him arrested, in the hopes that law enforcement would have been able to get more information out of him than we had. But in the bigger picture, he’d taken more lives than we’d ever know—over twenty that the team had tracked down. Emily Shawwould be the last. His death wouldn’t bring back those he’d killed, but it felt like justice.
My insurance company had declined to pay anything on the destruction of my van, citing some bullshit clause about vandalism not being covered. And, according to the police report, the explosion had clearly not been an accident.
