He smiled, rubbing his thumb along the throbbing blue vein on the underside of her wrist. “I thought you might. God, woman, I love how your mind works.”
Honey concentrated on what was important. Not his disheveled, sexy, too-long, black hair. Not his midnight eyes filled with heat. Not his rough jaw that needed shaving, which had left whisker burns on the inside of her thighs.
Catherine “Savage” Seymour.
“Catherine’s smart and plans ahead. We know that because Mihm, Geary, and Gipson represented Savage’s trainee nine years ago. Charged with disclosing classified secrets to the media, if I recall correctly. The case went on for five months, and Savage was the defense’s star witness. Catherine researches
everything
. I believe she made it her job to discover the weaknesses and Achilles’ heels of everyone in the law firm. She had plenty of time. Stuck in San Francisco for the duration, she wasn’t able to leave the country. MG and G is a large, successful law firm, so she knew they’d be around a long time. I believe she used her time wisely while she was stuck there.”
“Fast forward to her arrest for treason five years ago. The minute she’s arrested, she requests the same law firm that got her protégé off for treason years before. The trial takes a year. She’s plotting and planning. They send her to prison. Solitary. One hour a day of daylight. Still plotting.”
“No access to comm, computer,” Rafael pointed out. “Not a whole hell of a lot of human contact either.”
“Doesn’t matter. Before she walks through those gates, she knows she’ll be walking out of there sooner than later.”
“You think the attorney was in it with her?”
Honey frowned. “No. Possibly, but probably not. I think she had someone else. She needed Garland to stay in play until it was time to move ahead.
This
woman.” She scrolled back. “The three women might all look identical, but one was Stephanie Garland, the second woman unknown, and the woman exiting the supermax is Savage. Catherine requested a meeting with her attorney. She knows Stephanie Garland has a bad heart—”
“And you know this how?”
“Research. It’s what I do. I hacked into her medical records while you were getting beat up on a London street. Garland had a bad knee and a bad heart, Alisa Mann has complications from lupus. Both were on borrowed time. Either would’ve been the perfect patsy. Garland pulls the short straw. Garland departs San Francisco-on the seventeenth. Thirty days ago. Arrives in Colorado at fourteen hundred and rents a gray Ford Fusion at fourteen twenty-five. Shows up at the prison at sixteen-hundred.
“Between the time of her arrival in Colorado, and the time a woman pretending to be Garland arrives at the prison, the real Garland is administered-injected to make it
look
as though she’d died from a heart attack an hour later. Who knows how the mystery woman made contact? A hitchhiker. A flat tire. She kills Garland, applies the prosthetics, takes her clothing, and hides the body for later.”
“Jesus.” Navarro ran his fingers through his hair, sitting up against the headboard. “This scenario is incredibly complex and leaves her wide open for failure every step of the way.”
Honey looked up. “Catherine doesn’t do failure. She doesn’t like to lose.”
A change came over Navarro’s face. It was just a flicker of emotion, turning his features grim, and then it was gone. “I can attest to that.”
“Why, what—”
“Later. Tell me the rest of your theory,” he said tersely.
She took a deep breath. “Here is where things got complicated.”
Navarro arched his brow.
“More complicated,” she amended. “With the real Garland close to dead and stashed somewhere, the fake Garland walks right in, shows her credentials, and visits her client for forty-seven minutes. Then she leaves, gets in the rental, drives off, takes a detour—because Catherine had to put that car and Garland’s body on the train track—makes the exchange, and crashes her car.” She glanced at Navarro to see how he was taking her theory. He gave her a “carry on” nod.
“COD heart attack moments before impact.” Honey turned off her mobile device, curling her fingers around it in her lap. “I believe the woman who went into the prison as Garland is the woman our two guys IDed as Savage inside supermax this morning. I think Catherine had a backup plan, and she pulled off the switch of the century.”
“We need DNA—”
“Nielson’s on it.”
“You think Savage could apply prosthetics—in a prison setting—
that
well and that fast? The two women don’t have any physical traits that are even
close
to similar. Different heights, different weights, different bone structure.”
“I think she applied the prosthetics in
half
that time and spent the other half patting herself on the back for how damned clever she was. She’s the one who trained me. I’m fast. She’s faster.”
“It seems pretty farfetched that she could get anyone to switch places with her. Solitary, shit conditions, and then a death sentence?”
The disbelief in his voice was insulting. What the hell did he think she’d been doing on the computer all those hours, playing solitaire? She’d researched the hell out of this, compared times, dates, analyzed data up the yin-yang. She didn’t form half-cocked theories.
“People will do untenable things for any number of reasons. Money. Blackmail. To protect people they love. Who knows
what
Catherine promised her? Why don’t we ask her? Nielson left for Colorado a few hours ago go. She wants to be hands on. She’ll personally take whoever is in that cell back to Montana for debriefing.”
“The whole scheme sounds insanely risky.”
“That’s Catherine. Taking insanely high risks, calculated to exactly what she wants. She had a hot fling with you, didn’t she?”
Rafe’s eyebrows raised a fraction. “And you think this- Why?”
“She told me-in graphic, sickening detail how good you were in bed. No secret. Everyone at HQ knew about your relationship.”
His eyes absorbed the light. “We didn’t have a relationship outside of T-FLAC. Period. I never slept with her. She made several passes that were in no way subtle. I was married when she started that crap, and I firmly told her no. Not to mention that as beautiful as she is, there was always something about Savage that creeped me out. I trust my instincts and I’m telling you there was always something slightly off-kilter about that woman. She’s a sociopath.”
Honey got off the bed and walked over to the ornate desk. Turning, she leaned her hip against it. She knew Catherine was behind the bombings and the scheme to incriminate her. Knew it, but there was still a part of her that wanted not to believe that a friend—okay, not really a friend, but a mentor, a coworker—would be that calculated and evil.
“She’s always been tough,” she said evenly. “But she was a friend to me. She can be really charming when she wants to be.” Honey had been second-guessing her friendship with her mentor for days. Now that Navarro was spelling it out, she realized that she’d been conned, but good, by a master.
“A known character trait. She was always dangerously grandiose and had an elevated view of her own self-worth.”
“Because she was always excellent at what she did. She was our best sharpshooter until AJ Cooper came along and dethroned her.”
Navarro’s jaw tensed. “And I was there when Savage tried to kill her. She’s manipulative, has no behavioral controls, and refused to take responsibility for any fuck-ups on her ops. Let’s not forget that she’s doing whatever the fuck she’s doing to make
you
her scapegoat, and we don’t know what the hell that’s about right now. But knowing Savage, it ain’t good. I’d say that all adds up to a sociopath, don’t you?”
Honey sat down on the chair, realized she’d just sat on her belly, and did a little up-down-up to pull it free. She placed it on her lap and stared at Navarro. “There’s that other element I discovered in London. I found an interesting worm. Highly encrypted of course, but the first line of the code read ‘Archenemy Rise Out of the ashes of destruction.’”
He gave her a blank look. “And?”
“And ‘Archenemy Rise Out’ is an anagram for Catherine Seymour.”
“Typical Savage, has to have the last word. I’m not surprised by this development at all. She doesn’t give a crap if we know it’s her. She
wants
us to know. This sucks.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Yes, it is.” Given the furious undertones in his voice, she had to ask. “Do you think Savage had something to do with your wife’s death?”
Honey had read the basic facts in his dossier. His ops were easy to retrace, but his personal data, like everyone’s at T-FLAC, was almost impossible to access. She’d had to dig deep and go through multiple layers to find anything personal about him. Even then, it was scant and little more than dry facts.
All she’d discovered was that Rachel Navarro, twenty-nine, brown and brown , had died in the line of duty eight years ago.
Navarro swung his legs off the bed, sat for a moment, then got to his feet. He walked when he had to think, she noticed. Walked, paced. He did so now.
“Rachael was on an op in Argentina. A series of bombings were flagged. Interestingly enough, by Nielson, who was an operative back then. Savage was in the country, under deep cover with the local Islamic Jihad tangos as one of their assets. Several high-level US politicians scheduled a visit. High assessment for a potential attack at the embassy. The Jihad threatened the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.”
“Rachel posed as a secretary . . . Two days later, they blew up the consulate, killing forty-three people and injuring over two hundred others in nearby buildings. What we didn’t know at the time was that Iranian tangos had kidnapped twenty staff members and held them at another location.”
Honey marveled that he could tell the story so dispassionately. He’d gone through hell to find his wife. She didn’t need him to tell her. She knew Navarro.
“I arrived three hours after the bombing. Savage blew her cover to pick me up at the airport. It took us five hours to ascertain that Rach wasn’t one of the charcoaled bodies inside the embassy. Then another twelve to figure out they’d taken the others hostages. Then another three days to find the warehouse and man an assault.” He reached the window and turned back, then stood there, fists shoved in his front pockets.
“They systematically tortured, then killed them, one at a time. No demands. Just a video feed to the local news station. Held and tortured, for seventy-two fucking hellish hours, they saved Rachel for last. Every nanosecond of the torture was televised for everyone to see.”
Bile rose in Honey’s throat. Her eyes burned with unshed tears. “God, Rafe—”
“The Jihad categorically denied they were responsible. Same MO but not them.
Savage
swore they were lying. She’d been one of them for months. She was with me when I—When I found Rachel’s body. She sat with me when I drank myself into oblivion for three days afterward. She poured me onto the jet and took me back to HQ. Tried, quite desperately, I might add, to fuck me any way she could. And in every way I could, I told her the only way I’d screw her was telling her to fuck off. I’d just lost the love of my life, and she wanted to crawl all over me like a two-bit whore. It was only weeks later, when I got my shit together, that I recalled fragments of conversations with her and realized she’d known
exactly
where to find Rachel’s body in that labyrinth of bombed-out factory buildings. I was literally only minutes too late.” He pressed his fingers into his eye sockets, dragged in a breath, then said hoarsely, “Her body was still warm. . .”
Honey felt sick to her stomach and pressed her hand to her midriff. “Are you saying—?” Goose bumps rose on her arms. “If not the Jihad, then who were the tangos? Black Rose?”
Catherine was a known Black Rose asset. No.
More
than an asset. Catherine
was
Black Rose. Then Catherine was responsible for Rafael’s wife’s death.
Grim-faced, he answered that question with another. “The thing tying all this in a nice neat bow? Andriy Kobevko was the bomb-maker.”
TWENTY-TWO
H
oney’s eyes narrowed as she shifted forward in the chair. “Catherine was involved in your wife’s kidnapping and death.”
Wasn’t a question. It was too soft, disbelieving, and furious. He knew the feeling. He’d had time to adjust to the idea. She hadn’t.
“Yeah. The concept that Savage was involved with the embassy bombing in Buenos Aires—and was possibly responsible for Rachel’s
death—
isn’t
new. A year after Argentina, we went to Chile. Four-man kill team. Leftist Chilean guerrilla group’s activities had escalated from protests and general mayhem to bombing several churches in protest of whatever the hell they were protesting at the time.
The death toll escalated quickly as they got their feet under them. They seemed to enjoy the killing, blackmail, and kidnappings a hell of a lot more than their previous penny-ante activities.” His voice strengthened as he moved away from talking about his wife, thinking about her death.