“Can I hit her?” Orlando asked.
“Not yet,” Quinn said.
Mila looked around, exasperated. “Let me out!”
Again, she reached for the door next to Quinn. This time when he shoved her back, he leaned toward her, his face stopping a few inches in front of hers.
“Stop it,” he said, his voice low but firm.
Her eyes narrowed. “I wish Julien were here to see this. He would never let you do this to me.”
With a sudden jerk, the SUV pulled to the side of the road, and braked to a stop. Nate shoved the vehicle into park, and whipped around so he was looking straight at Mila.
“We all realize you had a pretty raw deal. But as I understand it, you wouldn’t be breathing right now if it wasn’t for what Quinn did. Twice, actually.”
She glared at Nate.
“And let me tell you something about your friend Julien,” Nate went on. “He would have never questioned anything Quinn did. He gave his life helping Quinn. Maybe you should think about that. Maybe what Quinn’s doing right now is not so much motivated by his desire to help you as by his desire to repay his friend’s sacrifice for him.” He paused. “If there is anyone in the world I would want on my side, it’s the guy sitting next to you.”
He stared at her a moment longer, then put the car in drive, and pulled back onto the highway.
The rest of the car was silent. Even Mila sat unmoving, her lips pressed together while the anger on her face faded away.
The only one who seemed unaffected was Daeng in the front passenger seat. His eyes were closed, as they’d been since not long after the group left the farmhouse, and his head was leaning against the door.
The merest suggestion of pink began coloring the eastern horizon as they continued on their way toward Venice. Since the incident at the side of the road, no one had said a word.
Eventually, Quinn had tried to fall asleep, but had failed miserably. Instead, he’d gone over and over the information Peter had given him about Mila’s termination order in 2006. He was torn. Should he try to hide her again? If he did, this time would be different. The others would know she was still alive, and would do everything they could to find her. The only other choice would be to tackle them head-on as Mila seemed hell-bent on doing. It was something he couldn’t fault her for. But how could it be done?
“I need to use a toilet,” Mila said.
Quinn looked over.
“I really need to go. Please,” she said.
He held her gaze for a moment, then nodded and said to Nate, “Wherever you can find a place to stop.”
A few minutes later, Nate pulled into a petrol station that looked like it had just opened for the day. The attendant gave directions to the bathroom, and Mila, with Orlando tagging right behind her, headed off.
The stop finally pulled Daeng from his sleep. As Nate and Quinn stood silently near the pump, the half-Thai man climbed out of the car and stretched. When he dropped his arms, he smiled at the other two.
“I can drive if you want,” he offered. “Give you a chance to sleep.”
Nate shook his head. “Thanks, but it’s not far now. Should be there within the hour.”
“The offer’s there if you change your mind.”
The two women returned a few minutes later. Quinn gave Orlando a look, silently asking if there had been any problems. She shook her head so only he could see.
Soon, they were back on the highway heading toward Marco Polo Airport on the mainland, just north of Venice.
At first, it seemed as if the silence that had prevailed before would continue, but then Mila glanced at Quinn and said, “What…what happened to Julien?”
He thought about sugarcoating it for her, leaving out the details and just saying Julien had died in action. But Mila had worked in the business. She knew the harsh realities. The truth might have been difficult to hear, but she deserved that respect.
“He was shot.”
“In the head?” she asked, her emotions hidden.
“In the chest.”
Her head dipped. “Is that any better?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sure he died right away,” Nate said.
“How do you know that?”
“I was the one who found him.”
“And couldn’t you have stopped it from happening?”
“I said I found him, not that I was anywhere near him when it happened,” Nate said, patiently. “I was with…”
“He was with my sister,” Quinn finished.
Nate looked at Mila through the rearview mirror. “Without Julien’s help, both Liz and I would be dead, too.”
When she spoke, her voice was just above a whisper. “I don’t know how to balance that. Julien’s life for yours and…” She looked from Nate to Quinn. “Your sister’s? I don’t know if it’s a fair trade-off.”
Daeng leaned into the gap between the front seats. “There is no right answer to that, only ones that are skewed by how they affect those left behind.”
“Your monkness is showing,” Nate said.
“What the hell are you talking about? That’s a direct quote from Mr. Archibald, my history teacher at Hollywood High.”
“Smart guy,” Orlando said.
Daeng grinned. “Yeah, he wasn’t bad. For a teacher.”
In the silence that followed, Mila seemed to be contemplating something. Finally, she nodded at Nate and said to Quinn, “Was he right? Are you trying to help me to pay back Julien?”
“In part,” he said, but it wasn’t the only reason. As he’d told Peter, acting like there was no right or wrong didn’t mean it was true.
“All right,” she said. “Then what’s the plan? How do you want to help me?”
“We can get you someplace safe,” he said. “Where you can start again.”
“No. Not an option. I haven’t exposed myself like this just to forget about what I was doing and disappear again.”
A part of him had hoped she would take his offer despite the fact it was a far-from-perfect solution, because he still had no idea how to solve her problems otherwise. “All right, then I guess we help you do what you want to do.”
“How?” she asked.
He shifted in his seat so that he was facing her. “We can start with you telling us why all this is happening in the first place. Before you showed up in Tanzania. Before Vegas.” While Peter had given him much of the details, Mila would come at it from a different perspective. And this way the others would know exactly what was going on, too.
Mila held his gaze for several seconds, then nodded. “Sometimes my clients would have me piggyback on someone else’s travel arrangements. A month before Vegas, I was on a run in Atlanta, where that’s what happened.”
The beginning of her story about her trip to Portugal was typical enough. A prescheduled flight going her way, and a client trying to save a few bucks. Quinn had had similar experiences himself.
The exception, of course, was the prisoner. While it wasn’t unheard of that inmates would be moved out of the country, it was unusual. But these would always be foreign nationals, and more often than not they were being returned to their home country.
Where the story began to diverge from the norm was when Mila described her run for the toilet, and the prisoner’s subsequent outburst. That, Quinn knew, was the moment a date with an assassin became a certainty in
