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“I asked a question!” the man shouted. “Are you negotiating with Peel?”
“Please, I was just—”
“Answer me!”
Javier swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yes.”
The gunman’s expression relaxed a bit, but he seemed no less determined to finish the job.
“Well done, Javier. I already knew the answer. But for being truthful, you shall be rewarded. Olga? Should he live or die?”
Patrick felt her arms stiffen, her elbows burrowing into his back in reflex-like reaction to a question no person should be forced to answer, even if it was the worthless life of a sex trafficker hanging in the balance.
“Ah, never mind,” the man said. “There’s no option here. I’m afraid this is not going to end well for you, Javier. But truth telling has its virtues. So I’ll make this quick.”
Patrick heard the distinctive discharge of a silenced projectile, saw the slight recoil in the shooter’s hands, and gasped at the sight of Javier’s head snapping back, blood and gray matter splattering against the wall behind him as Javier’s lifeless body fell to the cabin floor.
Olga screamed. Patrick didn’t know what was coming next. But this was definitely no “rescue.”
“Be quiet, Olga,” he said, as he relaxed from his stance and lowered his pistol.
Her screams dissolved into muffled sobbing.
The man came out from behind the counter and stood over Javier’s body, admiring his work. Then he looked at Patrick.
“Just another day inlo-co-lombia,” he said, his Spanish-language wordplay on “crazy Colombia” not nearly as clever as he seemed to think.
Chapter 49
The Uber driver dropped Kate at her father’s house in Georgetown. He was on a Zoom video conference when she arrived. Kate didn’t technically interrupt, but she waited right outside the French doors to his study, making herself visible, repeatedly checking her watch, and all but tapping her foot to get him to wrap things up. Whatever his conference was about, it couldn’t have been more important than the reason for her visit. She gave him five minutes and then opened the door, stuck her head into the room, and said, “Dad, I’m going to Cali.”
He stopped in midsentence and looked at her as if she’d just announced a trip to the moon.
“Guys, I need to call you back,” he said to his virtual guests, and the rectangles of talking heads vanished from his screen like popping bath bubbles. At his invitation, which sounded more like an order, Kate took a seat on the couch.
“I assume this is about Patrick,” he said.
“And Jeremy Peel.”
In five minutes she told him all that he needed to know—or, at least, as much as Kate thought he needed to know. He considered it for a minute, then spoke.
“No surprise that it was Jeremy who shipped him off to the Andes and put him out of the DOJ’s reach. I swear, sometimes he thinks that because we’re part-owned by the CIA, we can act like the CIA.”
“What about the kidnapping?”
“What about it?”
“Do you believe he had nothing to do with it?”
“The man has been my business partner for twenty years, Kate.He’s a lot of things—chief among them, a royal pain in the ass. But he’s not a kidnapper.”
“Why do you defend him? He hates you.”
“He doesn’thateme.”
“Dad, I see it in the way he looks at you. I hear it in his voice.”
“There’s resentment, no question about it. But not hatred.”