Chapter Twenty-Three

Magnus

"You've got a mole, Anderson."

Jade sat beside my hospital bed, holding my hand. Her face, pocked with cuts from broken glass, looked wan and pale. She'd badly sprained her right wrist in the attack and admitted to being bruised and very sore all over. Me? I had a concussion, needed stitches to close my myriad number of cuts, and wished the nurse would grant me morphine.

Anderson shook his head. "Impossible. I've worked with those people for years. They've no connection to DeLario."

"That you know of," Jade remarked calmly. "What's that guy saying?"

"Not a word." Anderson leaned his butt against the windowsill, his hands in his pockets. "Nothing. He sits in interrogation and won't even say his name."

"Let's offer a big what if," I said. "What if the dude just went ballistic and decided he wanted to roll people over? How likely is it?"

"From what we know from his coworkers and his wife, he'd been quiet, did his job, ate supper, watched TV. Nothing remarkable about him. He's worked for the construction company for ten years, never a problem until now."

"Any extra money added to his account?" Jade inquired.

"We're working to get a judge to authorize a search warrant for his house, his bank accounts, and his car. I'm keeping the DeLario angle quiet for now. Until we have some evidence your old man is indeed behind this."

"I don't suppose you're looking at the lists for any familiar names," Jade commented.

Anderson sighed. "Yeah. We are. My partner and I, and I trust him absolutely. So far, we haven't found a name associated with any government agency. Until I have proof otherwise, this was the fault of a dude on a bad trip."

"Drugs in his system?"

"Not that we've found, but toxicology is still looking at that."

"Look at the blackmail photos," Jade said slowly, her eyes vacant. "Look for our boy among them."

"Why would DeLario want to blackmail a road construction worker?"

"Arnaud has him screwing a sex trafficked woman," I continued for Jade, my head pounding. "Tells him, ‘I might need you. When I do, you do what I say or your wife finds out'. Is it a coincidence this happened mere blocks from your FBI headquarters?"

Anderson frowned. "So DeLario kept this guy handy in case you showed up here with evidence? That's a stretch."

"Not just us," Jade replied. "Anyone who might be a threat. If any loose cannon rolls on him to the feds."

"I still think you're reaching. DeLario wouldn't have had time to set something that elaborate up."

"We were in your office for hours," Jade pointed out. "His plant in your agency reports us. Arnaud calls this dude. ‘Run ‘em over'."

"And just how would DeLario know you'd take that particular route?" Anderson demanded. "You could have gone anywhere."

"He's got us," I said to Jade. "We could have gone in the opposite direction."

Jade nodded, nibbling her lower lip. "Maybe."

"This dude just went off his rocker," Anderson went on. "No connection to you or DeLario. However, if you're proven right and I'm wrong, I'm putting you both under protection."

"With a plant in your people?" I snapped. "Not likely."

Anderson sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'll order our computer analysts to run scans on everyone in our department. If any suspicious e-mails, communications, pop up, then we'll know. And I'm telling you, there's no plant."

"I suppose that's as much as we can ask for," I admitted. "I'd find it easier to believe in a plant than someone followed us across the country."

"Driving different cars in relays." Anderson shrugged. "Could be done without you detecting them."

He glanced at his watch. "Look, I've got meetings. Where are you staying?"

"I've no idea," I replied. "I'll be kicked out of here this afternoon."

"And I stayed all night with him," Jade added. "We don't have a car now."

"All right," Anderson said. "I'll send a car and driver to you in a few hours. He'll take you to our safehouse. It's a place for you to stay, I know where you are, it's got food, cable, nice beds. Agreed?"

"Just you and the driver know where we are," Jade warned him. "No one else. Agreed?"

"I'll send someone I personally trust. I promise."

After he left, Jade stood up to stretch, limping to the window. "Can we trust him, Magnus?"

"At the moment, we have to. We're both incapable of doing much, we don't have a car. They brought your backpack, right? With the money?"

"It's by the bed."

Her back to me, she stared out the window.

"You're thinking we should just fly out of here, aren't you?"

Turning, Jade leaned her butt against the sill as Anderson had. "Yeah. Maybe we should."

I gazed down at the needle under my skin, attached to a tube feeding some sort of shit into my bloodstream. "We're still needed here. For a while longer."

"They can finish what we started," she answered. "They can arrest him, put him in jail. Why should we risk our lives any more than we have?"

"I want to see this through, Jade." I met her gaze. "I want to see him jailed, humiliated, crawling at my feet. He's done too much for me to want to just leave it in Anderson's hands. I'm not running from him again."

Jade crossed her arms over her chest. "I see."

Her expression gave me no clue as to what she thought, or what she wanted. If she wants to fly to Greece, I'll let her. I don't want her hurt.

"So you'll go?" I asked. "You'll fly away?"

Her upper lip curled. "Are you nuts? Where you go, I go."

***

Anderson's trusted agent took us to a decent sized house in Arlington, Virginia, a colonial type with white pillars holding up the porch roof. It sat in a quiet residential neighborhood, and I observed a few kids riding bikes along the sidewalks. A pair of lady fitness buffs jogged past, and a big dude walked a tiny Chihuahua on a leash.

"Nice place," I commented as the agent drove the sedan into the driveway.

His finger on the remote button rolled the two-car garage door up, and he drove inside. The door rolled back down. The entire trip out here to the sticks had been silent, none of us talking at all. The agent never introduced himself. Nor did he speak now.

He led the way into the house, again without speaking, then stood by as we explored. I opened the refrigerator, and found it stocked with milk, bread, beer, cold cuts, cheese. The freezer held ice cream and ice. The cabinets soups, canned meat, veggies, chips of various varieties, coffee, sugar, and cereals.

Beyond the kitchen was the dining room, complete with chairs and a tablecloth. Jade started to open the curtains covering the sliding glass door, and our agent spoke for the first time.

"Don't. Keep them closed. Don't go outside."

Shrugging, Jade turned away. I clicked on the big, flat-screened TV in the huge, front sitting room with the remote, and surfed the channels for a moment. All the good movie channels were included. Cool. "Can we order take-out?" I asked, shutting the TV off.

"No. If you need anything, I'll get it for you."

Neither young nor old, our mystery agent appeared perfect for this job. He owned the sort of face you forgot a moment after seeing it. The invisible man. Sort of.

The set of stairs led to the bedrooms on the upper floor. As Anderson said, they looked comfortable. The master bedroom had its private bathroom, and a small pellet wood stove in the corner. I hope we're not here long enough to need that.

"Is the Chinese food good around here?" I asked the blank-faced dude.

"There's a menu in the kitchen."

Not just Chinese take-out, but also Mexican, pizza, Thai, and a barbeque joint also had to-go options. I leafed through the menus, then asked Jade, "What sounds good to you?"

She studied the Chinese menu. "This. I've a hankering for pork lo mein."

The agent departed after we told him what we craved for dinner. Inside the garage, the big door slid open, and the invisible man drove away. I parted the curtains just enough to watch him drive placidly down the street. "Is he creepy or what?"

"Very," Jade answered. "So much that I doubt he's a plant. I'd think someone on your dad's side would be overly friendly, put us at ease."

"You may be right. The opposite of thugness."

"That's not a word."

"Don't care."

While we waited for our dinner, I sat on the sofa to find a movie to watch. Jade examined the shelves of books that stood against one wall, often picking one up to read the blurb on the back.

"I guess they don't want us bored," I commented, selecting an old Stallone flick and set the remote down.

"I'll lose my mind in two days," Jade said, flopping onto the couch beside me. "I guarantee it."

"Maybe we'll only be here until tomorrow," I said, pulling her under my arm, her head on my shoulder.

"I hope Agent Creepy isn't staying here with us."

"What a thought you just planted in my head. Thanks."

Agent Creepy returned thirty minutes later with bags of Chinese take-out. He set them on the dining room table.

"Stay inside, here's my card. Call anytime. I'm available twenty-four seven."

"Thanks," I said.

With that, he turned, entered the garage again, and drove primly away.

"We should call him every two hours for something," I said, standing up. "Just to drive him crazy."

"No, we won't." Jade accompanied me to the table and started to sort boxes. "That's not nice."

"You're too nice a person for this sort of thing."

She took her boxes and her chopsticks back to the couch. "I want to sleep. Not drive someone bug shit."

***

Anderson arrived the following afternoon with less than wonderful news. "DeLario's missing," he said, leaning against the kitchen counter. "We sent agents to his home with a search warrant. They turned that house upside down, questioned his cook, and found nothing. He'd taken even his computer."

I exchanged a glance with Jade. "He's on the run."

"The cook said he hadn't been there since the day before yesterday."

"When that worker tried to kill us," Jade said, scowling. "Could he be here? In DC?"

"That occurred to me," Anderson admitted. "I'm putting agents on this house. Two will be in here with you at all times."

"Not Agent Creepy." Jade rolled her eyes.

Anderson frowned. "You mean Carlson? Jade, that man has the tenacity of a pit bull. And he can shoot a pig's eye at a hundred yards. As a protector, you can't ask for anyone better."

"Sorry, he's just strange."

"Okay, so his social skills aren't much. Just don't give him a hard time, okay?"

"No worries."

"I'm working with local agencies to find DeLario," Anderson went on. "And his house of cards fell in." He smirked. "Shit has hit the fan for the governor and all those who participated in his schemes. We've arrested dozens in his organization, shut down his human trafficking ring, set to shut down more in coming days."

"You work fast, Anderson," I commented. "I thought shutting him down would take longer."

"I had a system in place for when we'd get the evidence and warrants," Anderson replied. "I just gave the word."

"So he has been on your radar," Jade said.

"Oh, yeah. And you gave us exactly what we needed."