“Look, dude, you were fucking insane, OK? We couldn’t bring you in until we knew you’d snap out of it. And you did. So she brought you here.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I brought her here.”
Merc smiles. “She’s damn good, isn’t she?”
“You set me up, Smurf?”
“Sorry,” she says. But she’s pretty proud of herself from the look on her face. “I was supposed to figure out if you were insane or not. Merc did send you to get me. But so did the Admiral. And Merc did send me out to the prairie to wait you out. But so did the Admiral. He’s playing you, James. He told me to kill you and that’s why he told you to kill me. And I’m pretty sure dropping Harper off was a bad idea, but we really did need to get rid of her.”
I scrub my hand down my face as I process all this. “And you let me put Harper in danger… why?” I look up again and they both stop smiling. I know that look. I don’t feel the change in me—I never feel the change in me. But I see the change in them.
“Now look, Tet,” Merc says as he squeezes my shoulder tighter. “You were not supposed to see her.”
“That’s bullshit. The fucking Admiral sent me to the beach to watch her.”
“He sent you to the beach so you’d bump into your assassin. But I paid that guy a visit before you arrived.”
“More bullshit! I told you on the phone before I ever went to the beach that I failed my psych exam and you practically hung up on me.”
“No, I said I didn’t have time for your whining. And I didn’t. I’ve got my own side jobs going, you know that. But the next day I took a trip down to SoCal and took care of your business.”
“Was it One?” I ask
“Is One dead?” Merc quips back. I just give him a snide look. “Obviously it was not One.” He waits to see if I’ll take another guess but I don’t. “It was Eight.”
“So all those assassinate-the-assassin jobs I did over the past two years?”
He shrugs. “Setups, I guess. I really have no idea, Tet. They wanted them to appear dead, but not be dead. You tell me. You know these Company people. I don’t. I have no clue how they think other than they want to get rid of me and I’m not gonna go easy.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Regime change, my friend,” Merc says. “Someone else wants to take over. Think about it. Harper poisons all those higher-ups when she makes her escape. You pick off your brother—for real,” he adds. “Then you find Harper and trail her like a good dog. One barges in and steals her file in the last second. Why?”
“They don’t trust me.”
Merc laughs. “Would you trust you?”
“Whatever.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t trust you for shit.” His smile says otherwise. “But I don’t think that’s the reason. I don’t think they know about this file we have.” He looks over to Sasha. “What do you think?”
She looks stunned that he wants her opinion. And why not ask her? She seems to be the one with all the answers, whether she wants to have them or not. Her expression becomes sad. Her eyes droop. “They know. They killed my dad for it.”
“So why two files?” I look at Merc for this.
“From what I can tell, there’s some kind of hack going on in the code. They need both files to access the money. And this makes sense. Because Ford and I tried like motherfuckers to steal money out of those accounts. I mean, shit. You dangle numbers in front of a hacker and that’s just what we do. But fuck if we could figure it out.”
“Nick would know.”
Merc and I both look at Sasha at the same time.
“Nick will know what to do with it.”
“Sasha,” I say softly. “Look, you can’t trust that guy. OK? You can’t trust him. He put Harper in danger. He put you in danger. He’s gotta be working for the Admiral.”
Chapter Six
Sasha
They shut up about Nick after that, so I take that as my cue to leave so they can share their secrets.
I understand what they’re saying. Nick is part of this. Nick is setting us all up. Nick is not on our side. And I don’t have the energy to defend him, because to be honest, I don’t know him all that well. But they don’t know him all that well either. Nick has been working other parts of the world his whole life. He’s only in North America because he took off last year on his birthday. I don’t think he’s bad. I don’t have any proof, I just don’t think he is.
So I go out into the mall area and look around. It’s near closing and there’s hardly anyone around. I walk through my dad’s corner booth—he has the largest one in the mall, it takes up the space of a dozen regular-sized booths—and my eyes rest on the other booth we run.
Mine.
He sold illegal guns to Company men and legal gear to the general public. But I sold girly stuff. Books. Jewelry. Knick-knacks. Dolls. I used to love dolls as much as I loved dinosaurs.
My fingers trace the glass-top cabinet as I walk into the little entrance of my booth and a layer of dust collects as I push it along. I used to man this booth myself and kept most of the stuff inside the cabinets. But I haven’t been here since—
“Sasha?”
I turn towards the voice and put on one of my many fake expressions I’ve mastered over the past seven months. “Hi, Mrs. Sheldon. Long time no see.” My plastic smile never wavers. I meet her tired old blue eyes as a girl who accepts that her life was torn apart and will never be the same.