Page 143 of Code 6
“Call my father. He needs to know all this.”
They stopped outside Patrick’s room, next to Kate’s.
“What if he already knows?” asked Patrick.
“Knows that she was murdered?”
“Yeah. I mean, what if—”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“Don’t be mad. I’m just thinking out loud.”
“My head is spinning.”
“Mine, too,” said Patrick. “I’m going to shower. If you need anything, I’m in the next room.”
“Thanks. Be ready to leave for the airport at five a.m.”
“No problem. I’m dead tired, but I’ll be shocked if my mind shuts off long enough for me to actually fall asleep.”
“You and me both,” said Kate.
Patrick disappeared into his room. Kate dug her key from her purse, the light on the electronic lock flashed green, and she opened the door.
Kate knew perfectly well what Patrick had meant, and the thought of her father having some connection to her mother’s death—hermurder—had her stomach in knots. It seemed impossible and contrary to everything she believed about him. But what if her mother’s call to 911 wasn’t a revenge call? What if Patrick knew something she didn’t? It was too much to think about. She closed the door and stepped inside.
The room was a typical hotel layout with a short entrance hallway, and Kate passed the bathroom on her right and the closet on her left before entering the bedroom and living area. She switched on the light and froze. The sliding glass door to the balcony was open, and the way the lace curtain moved in the breeze was eerily reminiscent of that horrible moment of discovery in her parents’ penthouse.
A hand came over her mouth, and she felt the cold barrel of a pistol beneath her chin.
“Not a peep,” a man said.
Chapter 67
Kate recognized his voice as the one she’d heard through Diego’s phone while circling the block around Club Siloé. It was the man who’d shot Jeremy Peel, his bodyguard, and Enrique. The man who’d pushed Olga off the roof and said, “I did it for Kate.” The man Patrick called Liu.
“Is that your mother’s perfume I smell?”
Kate wasn’t wearing any, and she knew he was messing with her, but she returned the volley. “How do you know my mother’s perfume?”
“She just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could she, your mother?”
The anger wasn’t just in his voice, but in the way he shoved the gun up under her chin. Kate was afraid to say the wrong thing and set him off.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Even Sandra Levy stopped at the point of finding out that the CIA was behind Naïveté. Your mother got dangerously close to finding out that Peel was about to sell it to the Chinese. Sandra got jail. Your mother, of course, got worse.”
“My mother took her own life.”
“Did it ever occur to you how easy it is to climb from the balcony of your apartment to the balcony of your parents’ penthouse?”
It was two stories. And a way to avoid security.
“What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying. I brought my own vodka, which was totally unnecessary. That should have been clue number one to you that something wasn’t right—that she was dead drunk and hadn’t touched the vodka from her florist.”