Page 137 of Hard Heart

Jez glanced at Fisk and the blonde. “Bullets seem to work pretty well.”

“What would you aim at? Compass isn’t a group; it’s a loose alliance. A series of cells linked by a shared ideology. Identifying them isn’t easy, and if you take out one, another steps into the vacuum. Compass isn’t flags and a website and a manifesto, it’s after-dinner discussions in the Hamptons, quiet conversations in Courchevel, lazy lunches on a yacht in Porto Cervo. Rich, powerful men carving up the world between them and laying out a roadmap for decades to come.”

“And that son of a bitch?” Jez pointed at Fisk.

“A tool.”

“Why is he after us? Why did he kill Ruby?”

“Ruby and Tina stole some files that belonged to him. They thought it would protect them, but they vastly miscalculated.”

“Is Tina dead too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’ve been embedded with these people for my entire life, and you don’t know?”

“I heard someone had been sent to silence her, and I got there first. But she panicked and jumped out of my car, and when I say ‘jumped,’ I mean she went over a bridge parapet.”

“What about Ruby? You didn’t try to help her too?”

“Fisk already got to her. If I’d found out a day earlier that the situation had deteriorated, I would’ve tried to get her out of there, but the cells operate autonomously, much like your point teams. Communication isn’t always reliable.”

His words should have brought relief, but instead they were a punch to the gut. If Jeremy Pope was familiar with the point teams, he clearly had friends in high places. At the CIA. At the Pentagon. Jez had spent years trying to find out what happened to her father, and those same people had pleaded ignorance. Who knew he was still alive? Who had looked her in the eye and lied? Demelza? Priest?

He mistook her groan for pain. “They’ll medevac you.”

“Fuck this shit. I should’ve stuck with bartending.”

“There are times when I wish I’d done the same.” Jericho smiled for the briefest moment, and then his expression turned serious again. “I always hoped that someday we’d meet, but I never wanted it to be like this.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now, you go to the hospital.”

“Who are they going to send after us next?”

“Probably nobody. This was Fisk trying to cover his own mistakes, and he doesn’t—didn’t—know how to take a loss.”

“And you? You’re just going to drive off into the night and pretend this never happened?”

“I can’t throw away over thirty years of work. Next year’s an election year, and we’re heading for a world of trouble.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jez asked, but her neurons were already firing. James Harrison, the current president, had proven to be a steady pair of hands, but the media branded him “boring” because empathy and diplomacy didn’t bring in ad revenue. Their current darling, Dax Prescott, was a former movie star who was promising everyone cheap gas, lower taxes, and a free puppy if only he got the keys to the White House. “Dax Prescott?”

“You got your mom’s brains.” Jericho nodded. “He’s their candidate.”

“So you do know where to aim?”

“You want to risk turning a man into a movement? His father runs a media network.”

TV channels, newspapers, radio stations, a movie studio. A factory that churned out fiction for the masses twenty-four-seven.

“So it’s better to do nothing?”

“I’m not doing nothing; I just shot his handler. Dax is pathologically incapable of not doing something foolish if left to his own devices.”

“You think he’ll sabotage his own campaign?”