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  Another sip of coffee. “Oh, I didn’t say you can’t have her. I just said not yet. The plan has changed, Mr. Booker, but the end game remains the same. We would like you to be on call just in case your skills are needed. You’ve been a loyal employee, so I convinced our employer to keep you on retainer for these last few steps just in case you’re needed. I feel it provides this otherwise messy situation with some much-needed symmetry.”

  “You do want me to kill her.”

  “I want you to be available should the need arise. But as I said, the end game remains the same. The last vestiges of the Rasmund situation will be cleaned up in…” She looked at her watch. “Dang it.”

  “Something wrong?”

  She held up a finger to silence him, her smooth brow wrinkling in displeasure as she stared at the timepiece. She blew out an exasperated sigh. “This conversation didn’t take as long as I had planned. I had this planned perfectly. If you had taken a moment to read the menu, we wouldn’t have this delay.”

  Booker didn’t try to hide his enjoyment at her bizarre consternation. She stared at her watch, her raised finger now keeping the tempo of the seconds ticking by. Finally, she began to relax, a childlike smile returning to her face as the seconds brought her closer to whatever goal she had in mind.

  “Wait,” she said, “wait. Here we go. Okay and…”

  With a sharp inhale, Cara brought her hands down precisely where she had placed them before, perfectly framing her coffee cup.

  “As I said, Mr. Booker, the endgame remains the same. The last vestiges of the Rasmund situation will be cleaned up in,” a soft chime rang out from the timepiece. “In fifty hours.” Her face softened in pleasure.

  Booker did the math. “That’s, what? Two days?”

  “Two days and two hours.” Cara took another sip, setting the mug down carefully back onto its damp ring and wiping off the lipstick. “That’s nice, isn’t it? Fifty hours is two days, two hours? They wanted me to get in touch with you weeks ago and give you the news. Can you imagine how that would have sounded? To tell you we pull the trigger in one thousand seventy-four hours and thirty-five minutes?” She closed her eyes, smoothing out the perfectly smooth hair along her forehead. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, why orchestrate a plan without precision? Without symmetry?”

  “Troglodytes,” he whispered with mock outrage.

  The waitress returned with his platter of overcooked T-bone steak and undercooked eggs.

  Cara’s eyes flashed over his plate and up to his face. “Steak? T-bone steak for breakfast? One of the reasons I called for a breakfast meeting was to avoid revolting food like that. Bones. Bones at breakfast.” She closed her eyes, her lips pursed to a white line.

  “Before Rasmund, I would have thought you would appreciate precision. I see now that I was wrong. Try to live up to your former reputation, Mr. Booker. This project is very important and relies on a number of pieces falling into place in a timely manner.” Her smile became unpleasant. “In other words, this time if you get the order to kill that little bitch, get it done.”

  Booker smiled back at her, imagining the pleasure he would take in Cara’s slow death.

  Cara busied herself rummaging around inside her purse. Within the tidy bag, Booker could see all of the accessories within were housed in matching red leather. “To prove our commitment to this new venture, and to assure you there are no hard feelings, I’ve come with a small token of appreciation. Something I think you’ll really like.” She pulled out a slim tablet and laid it on the bar between them.

  “Well, go on,” she said when Booker didn’t take it. “Swipe the screen. See what it is.”

  At his touch, the screen came to life in a jumble of images and graphs that flickered and flashed until a map of the Eastern Seaboard came into focus. Another flash and he saw Florida, then Miami, then Key West, the screen image resolving itself once more to a red dot flashing on a chunk of land surrounded by water.

  Redemption Key.

  “There she is. Dani Britton, still on that little island where you left her.”

  “You’re tracking her.”

  “Of course. We have been all along.” She pushed the tablet closer to him. “Now you can too. This should be easier than sneaking off to Florida. You don’t strike me as the flip-flop type.”

  Booker stared at the glowing dot.

  Cara slid from the booth. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take my leave. I don’t have the stomach to watch you gnaw the flesh off that bone like some kind of animal. I’ll be in touch.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Freak,” Cara muttered under her breath as she watched the city pass from the rear seat of the SUV. Her driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror and then quickly looked away. Wise choice, she thought. Cara had had enough eye contact for one day.

  Jesus, those eyes. She unfolded and refolded the linen napkin she kept in her purse for just this reason. Fold, unfold, refold. A nervous gesture she didn’t bother to hide while in the privacy of her vehicle. Alone with her thoughts, Cara could admit that Tom Booker scared the crap out of her. She’d dealt with killers before – it was practically a job requirement – and sociopaths were nothing unusual at ISOC but Tom Booker claimed a private nook of nutty all to himself.

  She knew what made him tick, inasmuch as such a thing could be known. She’d been present when the drugs had been pumping, opening up all those delicious minds for ISOC to play with. So many dark corners, so many pedestrian fears and motivations. When she’d been brought in to finish the cleanup on that Rasmund shit show, she’d assumed it would be the usual mopping-up, body-dumping, trail-erasing charade she could do in her sleep. Instead, she’d walked through security at the Dunbarton medical facility and found a wonderland of possibility and mind-fuckery just waiting to be explored.

  How her supervisor had wrung his hands, cowardly putz. He and his cronies had called her, his voice as pinched as his butthole, insisting that she fly in immediately for damage control. Hands waving, phones chirping, respirators beeping, surgeons scowling, bodies piling up. Thank God she’d been called in. They had been this close to bleaching the entire scene, to wiping out and mopping up the remnants of the Rasmund mess with their usual brutal stupidity.

  They almost threw out the Baby Jesus with the bath water.

  Three bodies on the brink of death; three lives in her hand; three minds just waiting to be wandered through. ISOC saw disaster. Cara saw potential. And when she read their files, when she ascertained the true nature of their identities, Cara made a phone call three levels above her current supervisor. She was a facilitator. It was her job to know what people wanted.

  Lying there on the table, bleeding to death, was the key to their wildest dreams.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Booker stared at the tablet, watching Cara leave in his peripheral vision.

  What had Dani been involved in on Redemption Key? How had she gotten tangled up in that disgusting business on that filthy boat? Booker had enjoyed what he’d done to that greasy fiend on that hot afternoon. He knew he’d made a difference to the people who had watched him. Booker rarely killed in the name of justice – the word meant nothing in the grand scheme of things – but that particular slaughter had felt righteous.

  It was more than the audience. It was more than knowing without a shadow of a doubt that he operated on the side of right. Booker didn’t care about those things. What made that particular execution ring through his memories was the scene just moments before the blood began to flow.

  The dock. The heat. Dani. Small, brown, wet. So small, so toned. Water dripping off her body, mingling with the blood spattered across her arms and neck and face. And breast. Her small breast exposed as she gripped that rusted boat cleat, her eyes an inferno as a fat, filthy pig of a man gasped for breath at her feet.

  She had changed everything with just one statement to Booker.

  “You’re not the man I thought you
were.”

  She meant it as an insult. She had blood in her eyes and blood on her hands and the hunger for more blood to be spilled at her feet. She hated him and everyone at that moment. She was glorious and her hatred burned hotter than that hideous Florida sun.

  “You’re not the man I thought you were.”

  He’d been right all along. She’d confirmed that with one angry sentence. There was something between them, a bond, a connection and, in that bloody moment, she hated him because she thought he had betrayed her. He proved her wrong. He had taken apart a filthy human being and proven her wrong.

  He was the man she thought he was.

  The past few weeks had been excruciating as Booker struggled to regain his equilibrium. He had to be careful; they both did. Everything was different now. There was no room for error. That his employers knew he’d been on Redemption Key was inevitable. They weren’t stupid; they had obviously put two and two together, but they hadn’t quite come up with the correct sum. They wanted him to keep track of Dani. And he would.

  Everything was different now.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jinky’s Inlet Fishing Camp

  Redemption Key, Florida

  Thursday, October 8, 2014

  2 p.m. – 43 hours to trigger

  Everything was different now.

  Dani gripped the edge of the bar, her fingers white against the scarred wood. She tried to remember the advice Mr. Emerson had given. Kind Mr. Emerson with his walker and his wife and his Tanqueray and tonics who had seen the distress in her eyes. He hadn’t had to look hard to see distress. It was everywhere – the damage in the bar, the darkness in her eyes, the ranginess in her overworked muscles.

  “You should take a day off of running.” That’s how it started. Mr. Emerson had been a sports therapist before retiring to Florida. “The human body wasn’t meant to train that hard that often. You’re running too much.”

  “No shit,” Dani had wanted to scream. But she held it in. She held it together. Let Mr. Emerson think she was obsessed with exercise, maybe even suffering from anorexia. Body dysmorphia – the inability to see the body as it truly was. Imagining yourself fat when you are dangerously underweight. Not seeing yourself as you truly were.

  Dani didn’t suffer from that.

  She knew exactly how she was.

  She was fucked. Trapped. Unsafe. Everywhere.

  As that hairy gray panic descended upon her, her inner secretary ticked off the recognized symptoms. Sweating, shallowing breathing, heart racing, vision down to pinpricks.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  She told herself to go through the list Mr. Emerson had given her to fight off panic.

  “Five things you can see.”

  Rows and rows of alcohol.

  Peg’s leathery neck and shoulders bent over the sink.

  The shotgun that used to be hidden under the bar but was now kept in a more prominent position after having recently been too late to save Mr. Randolph from danger.

  Plywood covering the shattered mirror and Mr. Randolph’s blood.

  The door to the kitchen – a way out that led nowhere. No way out.

  Breathe.

  “Four things you can touch.”

  The scarred wooden bar where Mr. Randolph had been shot.

  Where Choo-Choo had slouched.

  Where Mr. Randolph’s Fed friend had threatened him.

  Where she had sat cross-legged, flirting with the tall handsome Canadian who—

  Breathe.

  “Three things you can hear.”

  Peg swearing at Rolly in the kitchen.

  Drunk women laughing on the deck.

  FBI helicopters in the sky. No. (Breathe.) Motors in the inlet.

  Breathe.

  “Two things you can smell.”

  Fried conch fritters.

  Fear sweat.

  “One thing you can taste.”

  Fear.

  The funk that covered everything – her taste, her touch, her hearing – everything started and ended with fear.

  Everything was different now.

  Just over a month ago, Mr. Randolph had been shot. So had his FBI friend. Two sadistic tweaked-out smugglers had died badly at Jinky’s, one of them at her hands. Tom Booker had killed the other.

  Tom Booker had found her on Redemption Key.

  That should have made her throw her few belongings in her old maroon Honda and haul ass out of Florida faster than a hurricane. It should have made her call the FBI and beg for their help. At the very least it should have made her call the Canadian phone number she had memorized, the number given to her by an undercover Mountie who had promised to get her out of the trouble she was in.

  None of that happened because if there was one lesson Dani Britton knew as well as she knew the gunshot wound on her leg, she had no place to run. Tom Booker could find her; the U.S. government could find her. Hell, now even the Canadian government could find her. Next month she would mark the one-year anniversary of her life being blown sky high, one year of confusion, betrayal, terror, interrogation, suspicion, surveillance, and predators beyond her wildest nightmares. The most dangerous people in the world could put their fingers on her anywhere she went.

  She might as well stay where the gin was.

  And where Choo-Choo was.

  Beautiful, strange, scarred Sinclair ‘Choo-Choo’ Charbaneaux – her only friend in the world. He’d been with her that terrible night in D.C., when Tom Booker had pursued her relentlessly. He’d worked with her at Rasmund, as innocent as she of the horrible crimes committed beneath their feet. He’d taken a bullet that night, just like she had, and he’d been imprisoned and interrogated in the same secret military hospital.

  She’d told him about Bermingham, aka Special Agent James Tucker of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and his offer to get her out of trouble. She told Choo-Choo that the Canadian thought she was protected by someone, that she willingly worked for someone with the power to keep her existence a secret. She told him that he promised he could get her free of the hold they had on her.

  Choo-Choo had listened with that scary good hearing of his, knowing that she’d had feelings for the Canadian, knowing that those feelings had morphed into a rage strong enough for her to have nailed his foot to the ground. He listened to everything she said and all the things she didn’t and then he asked her the million-dollar question.

  “Do you trust him?”

  And there it was, the reason why Dani Britton still hauled ice and poured mojitos and washed rental sheets. Why she swept peanut shells and shrimp tails across the bar floor, digging a little deeper where necessary to clear the debris from bullet holes and a deep gouge created by the screwdriver that pierced a man’s foot. The reason why Choo-Choo didn’t return to the well-tended family compound on Martha’s Vineyard but worked as first mate on the infamous party pontoon Lady of Spain.

  It was why night after night, when sleep wouldn’t come, Dani and Choo-Choo lay side by side on two crooked camp cots underneath the mosquito netting in the little kayak shack on the edge of the inlet. They’d lie side by side, barely touching, listening to the other drift in and out of nightmares and cold sweats.

  Everything was different now, but they still had no place else to go.

  The tourists were back, and they all seemed determined to pack in as much sun and alcohol as they could. It made the tips sweet for Dani and that was just fine. Just because she didn’t have an immediate escape plan didn’t mean she and Choo-Choo hadn’t discussed putting the foundations of one together. She had almost forty thousand dollars in cash hidden in her car and the kayak shack. After the events of August, Dani knew she had to set up an off-site hiding place soon.

  Cash was freedom, she’d learned that young. And while that might not be as true as it had been in the past, thanks to the government’s unflagging interest in her whereabouts, cash at least opened options and gave her a better chance a
t a running start should they decide to flee. For now, they were staying put and Dani used the influx of new tourists to work on some other skills she had let slide. Reading people and predicting their behavior was the best antidote yet for holding off the panic.

  Two couples argued over the check along the south railing. Dani watched their body language. Husband A and Wife B were definitely hooking up behind the backs of their respective spouses. She had never seen four people work so hard at having no fun.

  Unlike the six older women across the deck from them who had started their drinking on the Lady of Spain party boat that morning. Choo-Choo had escorted them and a dozen or so others up to the bar before eleven that morning and from the looks of it, they hadn’t slowed down the drinking at all. Wisely, they’d switched from the cheap margaritas the pontoon’s captain served to buckets of beer. Each bucket made them laugh harder, talk louder, and swear more creatively. When the littlest one on the left side of the table began to nod off in the hot sun, Dani knew it was time to ensure her tip.

  She’d watched them at the bar this morning. They pooled their money, letting just one member of the group pay the bill from a pink plastic envelope so there would be no separate checks. Like all servers in the free world, Dani took this as a sign of superior breeding. It also made it easier to pick her target.

  The woman with the envelope had carefully looped the strap of her purse over the back of her chair, tucking the bag itself against her hip. Several hours, many beers, and multiple trips to the bathroom later, the bag swung freely from the chair. On her last pass to deliver a bucket of drinks, Dani had nudged the strap with her hip while leaning in to pick up empties. The strap had slipped over the knob of the chair and the bag slid to the deck unnoticed.

  A quick kick and the envelope skidded across the deck.

  She stepped away to wipe up other tables and kept her back to the group as the first panicked cry went up. Chairs scooted around; the contents of the purse were dumped on the table in vain. Before any of them had the sense to look farther afield than the table itself, Dani strolled back toward them.