'I told you last night,' Camille said as she drove the rented car through heavy traffic.
'I've been thinking about it, all night, as it happens,' Jenny said. 'I don't believe you.'
Camille glanced carefully at her, trying to gauge the anger that had been building inside her. The idea was to turn it against Bravo, not to let it bleed onto herself.
'Why on earth would I lie to you?' Camille hit the horn as she maneuvered around two ancient autos, whose drivers were screaming at one another.
'You said it yourself. Bravo is like a son to you. You'd sacrifice me to protect him.' Jenny turned to Camille. 'What you don't seem to get is that I want to protect him, too.'
'Even after what he's done to you? Accused you of murder, of being a traitor. Even after he's threatened to kill you himself?'
'I love him, Camille.'
'He's given up on you,' Camille said. 'He said as much last night.'
'It doesn't matter.'
Camille shook her head. She was genuinely perplexed. 'I don't understand you.'
'Isn't that what love is all about? A feeling that transcends difficulties, misunderstandings, disappointments, seeming betrayals?'
For the first time in her life Camille felt stymied, at a loss for words. Her confusion stemmed from her memories of Dexter. Her anger at him, at his betrayal, had been monumental, all-consuming. Now, facing Jenny's immutable emotion, she was forced to confront the flicker of her own. She had loved Dexter, yes. She had been gripped by a fever that had threatened to turn her inside out, turn her from her avowed purpose. It had, in fact, frightened her so thoroughly that she had shut down the feeling, gritted her teeth, gotten on with the job of turning him against those he loved the most. Only it hadn't worked. She had failed, which was bad enough. But, far worse, there had come a moment when she recognized that she herself might turn against those she loved most. For him. For him.
She slammed the wheel with the heels of her hands.
'What is it?'
'Nothing,' Camille said thickly. 'Nothing at all.'
Lies. Lies, lies and more lies. It was Dexter she had cared for, only Dexter. And Jordan? She'd had her chance to love him, but instead she had fed him bile and hatred with her milk. She had raised him for one purpose: to be her instrument for revenge on the Knights as well as on the Order. She wanted to bring them all down. Now it was too late. He had moved too far from her, as far as the dead moon was from the earth. When it came to Jordan, she could feel nothing at all.
'I don't believe you.' Jenny's eyes searched Camille's face. Again, the murmur of Arcangela's voice resounded in her mind, the echos of courage, vigilance, daring, perseverance. These were, she realized now, the same qualities that Paolo Zorzi had sought to pound into her with every blow he had struck at her. All at once, she felt renewed strength flow into her from a source she never before had known existed inside her. She saw Ronnie Kavanaugh, and Dexter, too, in their rightful places. They, along with Paolo Zorzi and, of course, her father, had been part of her rite of passage, elements of the crucible in which the person she was now had been forged-in pain and misery, both of which had only made her stronger in the end. She knew that now, with a certainty that pierced her through and through.
'What aren't you telling me?'
Camille, alert as a hunting dog, glanced at Jenny. Another thunderbolt came at her. Something had happened while she hadn't been looking. Jenny was no longer the lost, vulnerable, betrayed woman she had seemed just a short time ago. Camille felt the danger prickling along her arms. The silken hairs stirred at the back of her neck. Jenny would no longer simply accept her lies. She would have to do something that went entirely against her grain: she would have to tell her the truth.
'I envy how you feel about Bravo,' she said, fighting a certain nausea. Telling the truth always turned her stomach. 'Because I can't feel any of that. I'm dead inside, Jenny. Dead.'
'Camille, what are you saying? I know you love Bravo-and you must feel the same about your son.'
Camille stared hard at the traffic snaking up the steepening hill. She felt lost, and alone. What of it? She had her purpose-her decades-old plan-to snuggle up to. Vengeance was a warm and cozy curl-up. Best of all, vengeance couldn't betray you.
'Listen, what Bravo and I spoke about last night-I offered to be his mole with you, to report to him about you.'
'You didn't defend me, you didn't tell him the truth?'
'He wasn't in any mood to listen, trust me.'
'But why play into his horrific delusion?'
'It was the only way I could get him to tell me where he was going next.'
The lie felt good on Camille's tongue, like melting butter. In fact, it was Cornadoro she was following, but, of course, she had no intention of telling Jenny that. Telling the truth in the service of her vice she could tolerate. Other than that, never. Never again.
Like a remora stuck to their side, Damon Cornadoro wasn't going away, Bravo reasoned, until or unless they put him away. This strain of logic had a certain unmistakable appeal. 'There's no point in trying to outrun him or hide from him. I've tried that, and it's worked against me,' he had told Khalif last night.
When Khalif had suggested a decoy car, Bravo had shaken his head. 'We're following the wrong train of logic. What we need to do is to make his extraordinary expertise work for us.'
So he had proposed his plan and Khalif had relayed it to Mikhail Kartli, who had approved it. Or so Bravo and Khalif had believed. Apparently, Kartli had had his own ideas. His people had tried to gain their revenge on Cornadoro prematurely by ambushing him and had failed. Worse, Cornadoro now knew they were on to him. Going after him now would be like putting their heads into a wasp's nest.
If that weren't enough, the Glimmer Twins in the backseat were restless, their mounting anxiety palpable.
'It's essential that we keep to the original plan.' Ostensibly, Bravo was speaking to Khalif, but everyone in the car knew he was addressing the Glimmer Twins. 'We've worked out how to take him at the mosque, and that's what we must do.'
'We have a better idea,' said the Glimmer Twins in almost perfect unison.
Djura opened a long canvas bag that lay across their feet and took out a pair of McMillan Tac-50 rifles, each equipped with a Leupold 16x sniper's scope. The rifles used huge 12.7-millimeter ammo that, even with a near miss, would tear a human being apart. With a sickening jolt Bravo thought of Mikhail Kartli's order to have Jenny shot to death in the bazaar.
'Let us off a hundred meters ahead,' they said, their intent perfectly clear.
'Your people failed at that once, what makes you think-'
Before Bravo could continue, his phone pulsed against his hip.
'Emma.'
'Thank God I got through.' She sounded breathless and not a little frightened.
'What is it?'
'You were right to have me keep on with the assignment Dad gave me. Vetting the London intel wasn't make-work.'
She swallowed so hard Bravo could hear her.
'It turns out he wanted me to help him with ferreting out the traitor, after all.'
'Hold on.' He told Khalif to pull over. 'Don't let them do anything stupid,' he added as he got out of the car. With some trepidation, he walked a little away, put his back to them. He watched the ghostly creep of the sun behind a bank of misty cloud. 'All right, go on.'
'I assume you know that for the last several years Uncle Tony had been working out of London.'
'Of course,' he snapped. 'Emma, what did you find?'
'Everything seemed okay, until I got to Uncle Tony's weekly intel report-the most boring, routine stuff.'
'The ones no one would look at twice.'
'Right. Except Dad.' The sound of her breathing was communicated along the signal. She was so distant, and yet she sounded as if she was in the car with Khalif and the Glimmer Twins, every tiny sound revealed to him,
