Blood Trust

subdue him but not to harm him, because you’re the one who’s going to put a bullet in the back of his head.” He glared into Jack’s face. “Are we clear?”

“Absolutely, but Alli is coming with us.”

Paull hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “Do you really think I’d risk the life of my friend’s daughter?”

“She’ll be a help to us,” Jack said. “She brings unique—”

“No.”

“She can take care of herself.”

“So we’ve seen.”

Jack thought a moment. “How about this. If she can take you off your feet, she comes with us. If you put her down, she stays.”

Paull snorted. “You can’t be serious. She’s only a wisp of a thing.”

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Fuck, no. But—”

“But nothing.”

Jack went to the foot of the stairs and called to her. A moment later, Alli came down to them. He told her what he had proposed.

She stared up at him. “Are you insane?” she whispered.

“Do you want to come with us or don’t you?”

He took her over to where Paull stood. She didn’t waste a second, but strode inside Paull’s defenses, extended her left leg, hooked her boot behind his ankle, and yanked him off his feet.

He sprang up and went after her. Alli calmly stood her ground and, when he reached out for her, grabbed his arm with her left hand and drew him forward. Using his own momentum against him, she drew him around and, as he stumbled, she kicked out. He went down on his face.

He lay there for a moment, one hand beneath him. When he rolled over, he had a Sig Sauer pointed at her.

Alli kicked to the side, the sole of her boot pinioning his gun wrist to the ground.

From his position flat on his back, Paull stared up at Jack. “You fucker,” he said.

* * *

STAKEOUTS WERE the worst, Naomi thought, as she shifted her position behind the wheel of her car. First, your filled bladder caused your head to throb, then the cramps started behind your knees, then your ankles started to swell from a combination of the inactivity and the salty snacks you consumed out of sheer boredom.

Sitting several car lengths down the block from the entrance to McKinsey’s building, she had cause to think of the blood spatter she’d found at the Stem. Was it Arjeta Kraja’s blood? Was Jack right, was she dead?

She was Secret Service, not a homicide detective. She’d had no experience with murder investigations—with murder at all, for that matter. She’d been trained to preserve life, to forfeit her own in order to protect the POTUS and the FLOTUS. Heinous crimes were beyond her ken, and as she sat shivering in the night, waiting for something—anything!—to happen, she was haunted not only by the murders of Arjeta Kraja, Billy Warren, and the two men in Twilight, but by the specter of the person or persons capable of such extreme cruelty, such contempt for life. Who were these people and what were they doing infecting her country? She was gripped by both fear and a sense of outrage. She harbored fantasies of doing to them what they had done to their victims. Christ, she thought, the world is a terrible place. And she was in a position where it chose to reveal that side of itself over and over. Not so for her sister, Rachel, happily married to a divorce attorney who made seven figures a year. She lived in a huge house in Maryland, had two beautiful children, an Airedale named Digger, and a seven-series BMW. For Rachel, the world was a dream come true, filled with roses and candy canes. Naomi might be jealous, except for the fact that she’d suffocate in the banality of that life. She was quite certain she was not cut out to be a wife with two children. When she’d been younger, she had envied Rachel, but now her sister’s life terrified her.

Shifting in her seat again, she stifled a moan. Her butt was killing her and she was dying to get out of the car and stretch her legs, but she couldn’t take the chance of being spotted. So here she sat like a spider in the center of her web, waiting for a fly to entangle itself in the sticky strands.

Her thoughts returned to the Stem and its slavery auctions. Dardan had been part of it, certainly, but in his phone call Jack had mentioned someone named Mbreti, Albanian for “king.” Who the hell was Mbreti? She had so little to go on—just the name—it was like trying to find a needle in a warehouse full of haystacks.

And then there was McKinsey. It was no coincidence that she had seen Pete coming out of the Fortress Securities building. Connected with Fortress, he had to know more about the three guards than she did, yet he’d failed to mention it over dinner. He was hiding something from her, maybe a great many things. The thought chilled her to the bone. The one person she needed to trust now seemed to be entirely untrustworthy. Minute by minute, she felt the ground slipping out from beneath her.

Several times she had tried calling Jack back, but either he wasn’t answering or he wasn’t in range of a cell tower. He hadn’t said what he was doing with Dennis Paull and she knew better than to ask. Still, she wished she could talk with him, wished even harder that he was here with her, because she knew that he was the one person who could unravel the mysteries that confronted her. In order not to think about Jack—about how she really felt about him—she flooded her mind with anger toward Pete McKinsey. Armored in her anger, she felt safe from emotions that would otherwise swamp her, emotions she’d rather not examine too closely.

But then she heard Rachel’s voice in her head: “You make a fetish of not feeling anything for anyone. You think you’re incapable of feeling deeply, but it’s not true. You’re just terrified; you think you’ll be crushed.” She had shaken her head. “You’re too strong for that, Nomi. You’re a tank.”

To her horror, Naomi discovered that she had begun to weep. Oh, God, no, she thought. But she knew that the heart wanted what the heart wanted. It was simply that what her heart wanted was unattainable.

Wiping her eyes, she shook her head. Grow up, she berated herself. Just grow the fuck up.

Was that her voice, or her brother’s? The oldest of the three siblings, Damon had had an iron personality, a volatile temper, and a great love for his sisters. But his idea of love was to be even tougher on them than he knew the world would be.

“Girls get shafted,” he’d tell them, “and here’s why: Girls are weak, they knuckle under to men all the time, they can’t take the hard knocks of life. Bottom line: They’re not tough enough.” Rachel had told him to go to hell, but, entirely without knowing it, Naomi had swallowed his philosophy whole.

“That’s why you get into trouble,” Rachel had told her once. “That’s why you’re alone.”

By that time, Damon was dead, the body shipped home from Afghanistan. Their mother had collapsed in grief and had never recovered, dying thirteen months later. The doctor said it was a stroke, but Naomi knew it was a broken heart.

Naomi thought of her brother often, and when she did, he increased in stature, until he was larger than life. Every month she went to Arlington Cemetery to lay a wreath at his grave and to talk to him. She missed him in the way a child misses her father. Her sorrow was bitter and unending.

The night was growing thin. The gray sky, as fragile-looking as an eggshell, wavered as it tilted toward dawn. Cathedral Avenue, where McKinsey’s huge Art Deco apartment building rose like the prow of the Titanic, was coming alive with traffic. A light rain fell and then, as abruptly as it started, ceased, leaving the road and sidewalks as slick as the surface of a skating rink. McKinsey’s Ford was still parked down the block, cold and deserted, mocking her.

A gust of wind swept trash up into the air, sudden movement on a lonely, deserted street, and she shivered again. She was deathly tired; even her bones ached with exhaustion. She had been working nonstop for the last two days without even an hour of sleep. Unconsciously, her head tilted back, her eyelids closed, and she slid from awareness, only to snap herself awake. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror, which reflected a face as pale and sunken as a corpse’s.

Damn, she thought, I need a vacation.