Stone led the man inside and pushed him into a hard wicker chair.
Ames looked for Jana, but saw only a closed bedroom door.
“Alright, old man, talk,” Stone said.
“What?”
“You know what,” Cade said.
“I, uh. Well, I’ve been out a few months.”
“And what about that?” Stone said as he examined the ID card. “When I run you through NCIC, am I going to find you’re a fugitive now? “
“No! No, I served my time. Twenty-eight years and thirty-six days. I paid my debt to society. I’ve been released.”
Cade said, “Paid your debt? They should have buried you under the prison.”
Ames looked at his feet.
Stone was all business. “Out with it. How did you find us?”
Ames shifted in his chair.
“Hey!” Stone yelled.
“I, uh. I found you . . .” He looked directly at Cade. “It was him.”
“Him?” Stone said. “What do you mean it was him?”
Ames looked back at the closed bedroom door. This time he saw the shadow of two feet underneath the door. Jana was standing just on the other side.
“When I got out, all I could think about was her. Actually, she’s all I thought about on the inside as well. I hadn’t seen her since she was a baby.” His voice became choked with emotion. “I had to find her. But no one would tell me. No one would tell me anything.”
“And?” Cade said.
“I started doing internet searches, looking for her. It took no time to find all the articles. FBI agent, stopped those terrorist bombings. She’s not exactly a private figure, you know?”
“Yeah, well aware,” Cade said. “But there’s nothing online that would lead you to her home address, phone number, workplace, nothing. And there’s sure as hell nothing that would lead you here.”
Stone towered over Ames and crunched a stiff hand onto his shoulder. Ames winced. “I’ll ask you nicely. How did you find us?”
“I placed a music box on him,” he said as he nodded to Cade.
“A music box?” Cade said.
Stone squinted at Ames. “The term music box is CIA parlance for a radio transmitter. How in the hell did you place a radio transmitter on him?”
“Not so much a radio transmitter. A tracking device. It wasn’t that hard.”
Stone clamped harder. “Why don’t you explain it to me before I become impatient?”
“Jesus, alright,” Ames said. “I started sending Jana letters a good six months before I got released. I didn’t have her address so I sent the first one to FBI headquarters in DC. I figured they’d send it to whatever field office she worked. But the letter got returned. They marked it as ‘no longer at this address,’ presumably meaning she didn’t work at the FBI anymore. I didn’t know what to do so I sent another letter. This time they forwarded it to her apartment address.”
“How do you know that?” Cade said.
“Because they got something wrong. They forgot to include the apartment number. So when it got there, the post office just marked it ‘return to sender’ and the letter came back to me at the United States Penitentiary at Florence. Now I had her home address, minus the apartment number. I started sending letters there and those were never returned.”
“Yeah,” Cade said, “I was looking after her place when she disappeared. I had worked with the apartment manager and asked the postal-delivery guy to flag all her mail. I was collecting it. Holy shit.”
“That doesn’t explain how you found this place,” Stone said.
Ames continued. “When I knew the letters weren’t getting returned, I figured I had the right address. I kept writing. Then when I got out, I sent a box of candies.”
“The marzipan,” Cade said.
Ames looked at the bedroom door. “They were her favorite when she was a little girl.”
“And?” Stone said.
“Inside the box I hid a Tile.”
“A Tile?” Stone questioned. “What the hell is a Tile?”
Cade’s eyes flared at the familiarity. “A Tile?”
“Yeah. Little Bluetooth tracking device,” Ames said. “Bought a couple of sets on Amazon. They’re great for locating your missing wallet, finding your car in a giant parking lot, or . . .” He looked at Cade. “Placing in the bottom of a box of candy.”
Before Stone could ask, Ames said, “It’s not always easy to locate your Tile because they don’t use the cellphone network for location tracking. If they did, it would be easy. You’d just pop open the application on your phone and find the device’s location. Instead, they use Bluetooth. Everyone who owns a Tile installs the Tile app. There are millions of users. If you need to locate one of your Tiles, you tell the system to locate it. Then, all the users become a network of devices that look for your Tile automatically. If someone comes within a hundred feet of it, their device sends a notification. In this case, I got lucky.”
“How so?” Stone questioned.
“When I mailed the marzipan to Jana’s apartment complex, I didn’t locate it on the tracking app at her apartment. I located it when this guy,” he pointed to Cade, “took it back to his own apartment, which is a different complex from where I believed Jana lived. At first, I didn’t know what that meant, but assumed maybe she moved or something. I traveled from Colorado to Maryland and staked out the apartment, hoping to see Jana. But all I ever saw was him. I staked out her apartment complex as well, but she never showed up.”
Cade scrambled to keep up. “Wait a minute. You were the one that sent me the package of—”
“That’s right,” Ames continued. “Like I said, it isn’t all that easy to locate a missing Tile, even with millions of users out there. The ping showed up on my Tile app probably because someone in your apartment complex had it. But I had to make sure you installed the Tile app on your phone. That way, if you ever hand-delivered the candy to Jana, your phone would ping its location.”
“What package? What did he send you?” Stone said to Cade.
“I received a free package of Tiles in the mail. It said it was a free sample. Hell, I thought it was cool.”
Stone rubbed his eyes. “So you installed the app on your phone so you could track your cute new little tracker devices? Let me guess. You put one in your car, one in your wallet, and one, wait, in your satchel in case little Timmy stole it from you at recess.”
“Kiss my ass, Stone,” Cade said.
“And when he flew here,” Ames said, “and the box of marzipan came with him. I could easily track where he was. It was only a hope, a long shot, that he would deliver the candy to Jana.” He looked at the bedroom door again, the feet were still there.
Stone slung the rifle behind himself and crossed his arms. “What were you thinking, sneaking up here like that?”
“I didn’t know,” Ames said. “I mean, it’s a tropical island. It’s not as if I thought she was on an op or something. She doesn’t even work for the FBI anymore. I figured she was on vacation.”
Stone said, “You almost got yourself killed.”
“I’m going to be sore in the morning, that’s for sure,” Ames said as he rubbed his ribs. “I take it you guys are on an op? But I don’t get it. It’s just the three of you?”
“We can’t discuss anything with you,” Stone said.
Ames shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like much has changed. Back at the Agency, I’d set up operations all the time. Damned if someone wouldn’t screw the pooch though. Somebody would pull the plug and my guys would be on their own. No support.”
“Screw the pooch?” Cade said with a smirk. “You really have been out of circulation. I don’t think anyone has used that particular phrase in a couple of decades.”
“If it’s just you three,” Ames continued, “maybe I can help.”
From behind the bedroom door, Jana’s voice boomed. “I want that man out of this house, right now!”
“Doesn’t sound like you’re invited. Time to go, sir,” Stone said as he pulled Ames to his feet.
Cade walked him down to the beach toward the boat. “Looks like your anchor came loose,” Cade said. The stern of the boat had slid closer to shore and bobbed gently against the sand.
“Yeah, guess I’m not much of a captain,” Ames replied.
The two spoke for several minutes. He handed Ames back his wallet. “Let me help you get this boat pushed back out.”
Once they were done, Ames began to climb aboard. Cade said, “You went to a lot of trouble to find her.”
Ames looked down at him and spoke through a tightened throat. “She’s all I have left. She’s all there is.”
Cade shoved the boat and Ames fired the engine and motored out.