A big sigh.

“I love you. Give Livvy a kiss for me. I’ll let you know when I’m free.”

She had chills when he hung up. Carston thought it would be over by dinnertime? Or was he just placating his daughter?

More silence, more typing. He must be getting the updates electronically. Kevin was in the thick of it, Alex was sure. Was he talking yet? She didn’t have a clue.

There was nothing more until she caught up to the present time. She checked the tracker. Carston wasn’t going anywhere. Deavers must be handling his problem.

Still listening through her earbuds, Alex leaned her forehead against her arms. Carston was typing again.

She pictured him at his desk, poker face in place as he sent out directions or questions. Would he be flushed with anxiety? Would tension sweat drip off his pale, bald head? No, she was sure he would be cool and precise, no more worked up than if he were typing out a request for paper supplies.

He’d know the right things to ask, even if Deavers didn’t. He could manage the whole operation from his ergonomically correct desk chair. He’d see Kevin tortured to death, then run out for his dinner reservations without a second thought.

The sudden anger that flared up almost choked her.

What was happening now had nothing to do with national security or saving lives. Carston was running a private vendetta for a man who was quite possibly the kind of person who actually belonged on an interrogation table. Carston had crossed the line from arguably necessary black ops to purely criminal acts a long time ago, and it didn’t seem to have affected him at all. Maybe it had always been this way. Maybe everything she’d done for him, every inhuman action she’d performed in the name of public safety, had been a scam.

Did he think he was so untouchable? That these hidden choices would never touch his public life? Did he think he was exempt? Did he not realize that he had liabilities, too?

There were worse things than being poisoned.

Alex’s breath caught. Unexpectedly, a new avenue, something she’d never considered before, opened up inside her mind. It was a reach, and she knew it. There were a thousand things that would probably go wrong, a million ways to screw it up. It would be almost impossible, even with a year to plan every detail.

She felt Daniel’s hand on her back. Through her earbuds, she heard him ask, “Alex?” in a worried tone.

She looked up slowly. She stared at Daniel, assessing. She examined Val the same way.

“Give me ten more minutes,” she said, then she put her head down on her arms and concentrated once more.

CHAPTER 28

A

lex spoke quickly as she laid out her plan, emphasizing the details she was sure of a little more than necessary. She tried to make it sound well thought out, like she was confident about it. Daniel seemed to be buying her version, listening intently, nodding at certain intervals, but Alex couldn’t read Val at all. Her eyes were focused toward Alex, but almost like she was looking through Alex’s face to the back of her head. Her expression was politely distant.

Alex talked through the conclusion, which wasn’t nearly as fail-safe as she would have liked it to be, and she could tell she wasn’t selling the outcome as well as she had the preliminaries. She looked down at Einstein’s face resting on her leg instead of at the human faces, petting him more frequently as her discomfort grew. Trying to wrap it up on a positive note, she went on a little longer than she should have. She was still midsentence when Val interrupted.

“No,” Val said.

“No?” Alex repeated. She said the word like a question, but she was already resigned.

“No. I won’t do that. You’re going to get killed. It’s nice that you want to go back for Kevin, but be realistic, Alex. This isn’t going to work.”

“It might. They won’t be expecting this. They won’t be ready.”

“It doesn’t matter if they’re ready or not. There will be more than enough of them to make up for it. So you get off a lucky shot and take one down. The guy next to him will get you.”

“We don’t even know how many people will be there.”

“Exactly,” Val said in a flat voice.

“Val, they won’t pay attention to you. You’d just be an anonymous aide. These people see hundreds of assistants every day. You’ll be invisible to them.”

“I have never been invisible in my life.”

“You know what I mean.”

Val looked at her with a perfectly smooth face. “No.”

Alex took a deep breath. She knew it wasn’t fair to involve Val. She would have to make do.

“Okay,” she said, wishing her voice sounded stronger. “I’ll do it by myself, then.”

“Alex, you can’t,” Daniel insisted.

She smiled weakly at him. “I can. I don’t know how well I’ll do, but I have to try, right?”

Daniel looked at her, torn. She could see that he wanted to argue. He wanted to say no, she didn’t have to try, but that would mean walking away, leaving Kevin to die in agony. His was an untenable position. Now that there was any hope at all, how could he turn his back on it?

“Together, we’ll be able to get the first part done,” she told him. “It won’t take more than the two of us.”

“But the second you’re separated from Carston, he’ll double-cross you.”

Alex shrugged. “I’ll just have to sell my threat. If he thinks betraying me means the hostage dies, maybe he’ll play it clean.”