“Is there a reason for that information?” Ella asked, a queasy feeling in her gut.
“I’m not sure. Maybe we can figure that out. But allow me to continue,” Vivi answered. “Caine was just beginning his stint on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Harold Moeller was the ambassador to China. I’m digging, but I’m thinking we’ll find out these two families were close, and no, I don’t know what role that plays in things.
“Anna Beth and Cameron were schooled at Saint Pius, and there are hints that when the Moellers died in a car crash, Piper took on the raising of Gabrielle Moeller. Gabrielle and Anna Beth both dual-enrolled at Johns Hopkins University their senior year in high school and entered medical school the summer after they graduated from college. Gabrielle’s focus was plastic surgery. Anna Beth’s was psychiatry. But again, though they graduated, they never completed residency. Where was Cameron through all this though? I searched and searched and couldn’t find Cameron, and then I turned to your dad’s files, Allie, the ones you sent me last night?”
Allie nodded, disquiet marking her features.
“Dresden wants Gabrielle Moeller because of her specialty,” Ella said aloud, the possibility too great to ignore.
“He wants to disappear under another face?” Brody asked in horror.
Ella nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Silence reigned for a few moments as everyone absorbed that tidbit.
“Big risk to take…letting someone who never even completed their residency carve on your face.” King pondered the thought.
“Back to the files.” Vivi spoke up again. “Cameron is mentioned once and never again. She entered a CIA training camp at age seventeen at the behest of her father.”
“My dad took a seventeen-year-old on to train?” Allie asked in surprise.
“Guess who trained her,” Vivi urged.
Allie swallowed hard, but it was Ella who answered. “Loretta Bernstein.”
Vivi slow-clapped. “Bitch shows up everywhere. But I don’t know where Cameron went after training. There’s no mention of her again, and there’s not enough information for me to build a code to search for her aliases or operative code name.”
“She married Yevgeny Markov, now deceased. And Cameron, known as Svetlana, is dead now. I think Dresden is responsible for the sniper that took her out in Moscow. She took a bullet to the chest and head, but not before she gave up the thumb drive’s location and asked me to tell her dad to protect her sister,” Ella bit out. God, it played out like a bad movie behind her closed lids. Svetlana Markov, a.k.a. Cameron Caine, had married the devil to get further into Dresden’s organization. Had her father groomed her for that duty? And if he had, that meant he’d known Dresden was about to go rogue. How would he have known that ten years ago? And why in the hell would he use his daughter to keep track of the bastard? Maybe Dresden hadn’t been his initial objective.
Ella’s head hurt trying to figure it all out.
“Jesus Christ,” Brody muttered. “Who are we working for?”
King held up his hand. “There’s more, Vivi. I can see it in your face.”
She nodded. “While Cameron Caine was becoming Svetlana Markov, her sister, Anna Beth, was hitching her flag to our good old buddy, pal Horace Dresden. They became engaged shortly after Dresden graduated from BUD/S training. There are no society pictures, only a small announcement in the Washington Journal, but it’s there.”
“Something happened though,” Ella began. “Because they most definitely are no longer engaged, and that was six years ago. Move forward two years from their engagement, and Dresden is betraying his teammates in the Hindu Kush and moving on to world domination. Four years later, Anna Beth Caine is a prisoner in Dresden’s cells.”
Vivi mumbled something around her pen tip before she sighed. “I’m trying to account for their whereabouts the last two years. It makes no sense that they simply disappeared, leaving their lives incomplete and hanging, and now they’re both back on the scene. Moeller in Burundi, right in the heart of Abrafo Nadege’s backyard. And we all know where Anna Beth Caine is.”
King turned to Ella. “Tell me how you found out about Anna Beth.”
“After I left you, Rook, and Jude in Russia, I returned to Ukraine. Dresden was going to want answers about what happened in Moscow, how his grand deal had gone to shit. When I arrived, he said he had something to show me. It was Anna Beth Caine—living in the same cell I’d resided in after Beirut.”
“You okay, Ella?” Brody asked. He’d know what thinking about that time in the cells would do to her.
She gave him a small smile. “We’ve got to get her out, Brody.” Ella tapped her finger on the table and swallowed hard. “Dresden told me about Svetlana Markov being Cameron Caine and how Anna Beth was his former fiancée and Cameron’s sister. The connection to the Piper was right there, and Dresden taunted me with it.”
“The link was there the whole time, but we had no idea to look for it. The Piper has a connection with Dresden—and it’s so goddamn personal he created an entire team to take the bastard down?” King asked in exasperation. “It doesn’t play out to me. There’s information we’re missing.”
Ella both agreed and disagreed. “It’s more than personal, but don’t any of you fool yourself, it’s also very personal. So Rook, you guys want to share what happened in the Hindu Kush?”
Rook closed his eyes before he drew in a deep breath and opened them again. Ella swore she could see the memories in them, violent and ruthless.
Vivi covered her man’s hand and looked over at King. “Let me handle this?”
King and Rook nodded at her.
“When I first met Rook, he was at Leavenworth Correctional Facility. Rook had saved my brother long enough for me to say goodbye. That alone merited my help. But when I started looking into the reason behind his incarceration, I discovered he’d been tried and imprisoned
