TALIA KEPT HER DISTANCE from the others during the return to Switzerland. How had she gotten there, trapped in an aluminum tube with a French bomber, a Scottish enforcer, and an egomaniacal Australian cat burglar with a clear death wish? Not to mention the man at the helm, a questionably former assassin who had made cameos in her nightmares.
Jordan had once warned Talia that a CIA operations officer might often find herself in a den of thieves. Talia had pictured an unsavory pub, not a Gulfstream flying over the Ardennes. The private jet was plush and clean, but a smoky, back-alley dive seemed safer. In her imagination, there had always been a door marked EXIT—one she could use at any time.
The group reached the chateau in the wee hours of the morning. Eddie met them at the door, and Talia tried to signal him with a something’s not right look, but he only had eyes for Darcy. He followed the chemist into the great room, chattering away.
Darcy dropped her bag beside the fireplace, looking utterly confused. “Wait. You are the Red Leader?”
“Yes—” Eddie coughed, dropping his voice to an ill-fitting baritone. “Yes I am.”
“But you are so small and . . .” Darcy repeatedly snapped her fingers. “What is the word?”
“Weak,” Mac offered.
“Yes. Weak.” She poked Eddie’s arms as if inspecting a life-size doll. “Weak is precisely the word.”
If Eddie hadn’t ignored her when the group walked in, Talia would have felt sorry for him. He stood there as the chemist removed his glasses, looked backward through the lenses, and then returned them to his face, somewhat askew. She made a pbbt sound with her lips and threw a hand in the air. “I am exhausted. I must sleep.”
“Of course, madam.” Conrad shot Talia and Tyler a cross-eyed glance as he bent to pick up Darcy’s bag. “Please follow me to your room. May I take your coat and . . . any explosive or incendiary devices you may be carrying?”
Talia did not see where she pulled it from, but Darcy slapped a gray cylinder with wires protruding from both ends into his waiting hand.
“I suggest we all sleep,” Tyler said, stepping to the center of the room. “We’ll reconvene for a late brunch.”
Eddie wouldn’t sleep. Talia knew that. He had likely slept a good bit already while the rest of them were riding home on the jet. She gave the others half an hour to settle in before she crept down the hallway to his room and lightly pounded on the door. “Eddie?”
He opened it an inch. Talia pushed inside and closed the door behind her. She wrapped him in a hug. Despite his buffoonery with Darcy, Eddie was the only person within a thousand miles she could trust. She laid her head on his shoulder and let out a breath as if she’d been holding it since London.
“Um . . . ,” Eddie said. “This is new.” He pried himself away. “If this is about Darcy, I swear I won’t let my relationship with her affect our friendship.” He cocked his head, narrowing one eye as if something else had just occurred to him. “And if this is about competition with Darcy”—Eddie stretched his lips back in a this is awkward grimace—“we’ve known each other a long time and I’ve only recently come to grips with the fact we’re—”
“Eddie!” Talia punched him in the chest before he said anything that would haunt her eidetic memory forever. “This is not about Darcy.”
Glancing around, she found a pen and pad on the nightstand and wrote a quick note, holding it low between them.
Sweep for bugs and cameras
He lifted a puzzled gaze to Talia. She twisted her features into a Just do it already frown.
If there were any cameras in the room, they got quite a show. Eddie launched into a terrible mix of pantomime and forced conversation as he opened an app on his smartphone and began wandering around the room. “Thanks for dropping by, Talia,” he said with mechanical rhythm, waving the phone across the wall. “How about that Gulfstream?” He bent backward, limbo-style, to scan a bedside lamp. “Pretty cool, right?”
Shakespeare, he was not. But—Eddie’s performance aside—the scanning app hadn’t picked up any bugs. He showed her the green check marks on the screen. “No transmitters. No cameras. We’re in the clear. What’s this about? Why am I scanning a room in Tyler’s house?”
“Because Tyler is not who we think he is.” The dam burst. All the thoughts and fears she had been suppressing since London came flooding out—her nightmares, the vision she had when she crashed into the pool. “Tyler was there, Eddie, at my dad’s accident.”
The validation she wanted—needed—never appeared in his expression. Eddie retreated to his bed. “Talia, the mind is a funny thing. New images blend with the old. Remember what we learned about interrogation pitfalls at the Farm. Memories get mixed up all the time.”
“Not mine. I saw him, Eddie. Tyler was involved in my father’s death. And I think he may have orchestrated the attack on Avantec too.”
She expected Eddie to write that theory off as well, but he looked up at her, nodding. “You found an extra bruise when you were checking his back.” He shrugged off Talia’s look of surprise. “I heard your conversation over the comms. I can read between the lines.”
“Yes. On his right shoulder.” The old pain in Talia’s side began to ache, and she suddenly felt as if her legs would not support her. She pulled the chair out from under the room’s small desk and sat down. “I shot the man who killed Ella Visser. I heard the grunt when I hit him.”
“And the placement of the wound, the development of the bruise—it all works out with your shot and the timing, assuming the killer had been wearing a bulletproof vest, correct?”
She nodded.
“It’s thin.”
“I know.” Talia didn’t say anything else for a while. There was something safe about leaving the implications of it all in the realm of mere theory. But theory wasn’t what she had trained for. She rubbed at that annoying ache in her side and took the first step down the road before her. “We need more intel—hard evidence. Start with my dad’s accident.”
“Talia . . .”
“I’m serious. If Tyler was involved, then the Agency was too. Dig into the records. See what you can find.”
Eddie looked down at his fingers, fidgeting. “That’s against policy.”
“Not if we can tie it to the active mission. Solving one mystery may lead us to answers for the other.” It was a long shot. But Talia pushed her friend. “Eddie, I need this.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can find. In the meantime, get some rest.”
Get some rest. An easy thing for a concerned friend to advise. A harder thing to execute when bedtime arrived in that surreal stretch between way too late and dawn.
Talia’s mind wouldn’t stop grinding on the vision of Tyler. She rolled over in bed, flipped on the lamp, and reached for her worn copy of The Cat in the Hat, but then she noticed the Bible resting beside it on the bedside table. What had Tyler told her? Look into a man named Saul of Tarsus. He was the one looking after the coats.
Talia knew enough to look for Paul, instead of Saul. The translation was readable, not one of those old-English King James versions, and it had an index at the back. The list of entries led her to the seventh chapter of Acts. A man named Stephen gave an impassioned sermon amid his own trial, and at the end he accused the men before him of murdering “the Righteous One.” They stoned him for it. Such a brutal execution must have been sweaty work, because—as Tyler had said—they laid their coats at the feet of a man named Saul.
Talia read on into the next chapter and found the next mention of the man. Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. The image that came to her reminded her of the Nazis, dragging innocents from their homes. She closed the book. She knew the rest of the story. On the Damascus road, during his purge of the new church, Saul met Jesus in the form of a voice and a blinding light. He became Paul, one of the most powerful and zealous leaders of early Christianity.
What had Tyler meant to accomplish by directing her to Paul’s story? She had an inkling. Paul had watched the stoning of Stephen with approval. He had stormed homes like a Nazi to drag off early Christians. Yet God had forgiven him. Maybe Tyler saw himself that way, an assassin who met with his own light on a Damascus road. His actions at the Shard, throwing his body between her and the guard’s bullets, spoke of a man so reformed. But Talia’s suspicions about his involvement in Dr. Visser’s murder spoke of someone else entirely.
And how did Tyler fit into her father’s accident?
Talia winced as the pain in her side flared. She tossed back a pair of painkillers and rolled over again, letting her worries dissolve into chaotic dreams.