Hard to Trust (26 page)

Jake stared at her as if he were shocked by her confession. "I can't get myself to open it." He rubbed his hands down his face. "All I remember is seeing a picture of his wife and three kids tacked up to the wall by his dead body."

"Somebody wanted you to be unnerved. Hell, you don't even know if those were his kids. Or his wife. Either way, it doesn't matter." She ripped at the envelope, determined to set him free. Fear of the unknown was so much worse than fear of the known.

"Don't—"

 She held up her hand when he reached for the envelope. "No, Jake. You need to hear this. It's so much better than allowing it to eat you alive. Believe me, it will help you move on."

He glared. "What if I don't want to know? Who are you to decide? That's my personal business." His words meant to stop her weren't working.

Ignoring him, she opened up the letter and began to read out loud. "Dear Jake, I want to thank you for all you tried to do for my husband, Trevor. He knew the risks going into the area, and I'm sad that he had to pay the price. Family was important to him, but not as important as doing what he loved. I have confidence you did your best to help him, but it was all too late."

"Damn it, you need to stop." Jake had a pleading look in his eyes.

"You're not the bad guy. You didn't kill that man. She knows it. Your boss knows it. The only one who doesn't know that is you."

"I do not want to talk about this." He folded his arms across his chest and glared.

"Fine." She sat next to him on the couch. "Can we talk about this Cleo woman? She's the one we need to pick apart and find out more about. None of this is coincidence. We both know that now. But which came first? Alex's hook-up with her or her targeting you?"

"Not sure at this point. Let's assume she's a Russian agent."

"The guys at the warehouse spoke Russian, so that fits. The guys in Afghanistan spoke Russian, assuming my faulty memory isn't as bad as I imagined…"

She trailed off as she realized the potential implication. Further confirmation that Alex was behind what was happening to her. Too crazy to even contemplate. Too much evidence to not believe.

Jake examined the photo once again. "I can't say one hundred percent, but that woman sure as hell looks like Cleo."

"That would mean they conspired together to take us down. There's got to be a connection."

"Maybe you were the bonus. Cleo didn't want to kill me then, even though she could have. She wanted to make me suffer. And somehow knew exactly how to do it."

"Helping me is suffering?" She didn't know where he was going with this.

"Something in my head keeps tying her back to Petrovich. Maybe it's guilt over what I did back then." She could tell he wanted to say more, but instead he emitted a sigh. "Let's think this through. Jennings believes that the video of Alex is legit and he's dead. If he's right, how does that figure in?"

"Alex is alive. It's the only thing that makes sense. If he set me up so perfectly, and he's dead, why am I still in danger? Why are people after me asking for information I don't have, never had, and never will have. None of it makes a lick of sense. Tell me the truth. Do you think Alex is alive or are you humoring me?" For some inexplicable reason she needed to know he believed her.

"There's enough to make me believe it's a possibility."

"That's a politically correct statement if I ever heard one."

"I'm not an expert in videos, but something about it seems staged. It's not the usual 'terrorist kills an American' kind of thing. For some reason I keep thinking, why didn't they behead him? It sounds morbid, but they like a flashy display. That kind of stuff plays better on YouTube with the bloodthirsty crowd. Still, they take him out with one shot, no brain matter scattered across the screen, and
bang
, the chair flips back from the force of it. But how do you make that niggling doubt into something tangible?"

She suppressed the spring of hope bubbling up inside her. She needed him to believe her. If he did, then maybe there was a chance she wasn't going crazy.

*  *  *

Jake was an asshole. A prime asshole. Instead of being honest with her, he'd slept with her. Geez, could he stoop any lower? Confronting her with what he'd been told had been on his agenda, but somehow he couldn't.

The close confines of the safe house left very little room for privacy, so Jake turned on the shower before emailing Jennings on his phone.
Some things are not adding up. Is Reddog the person that hired me? I need to know ASAP

The idea of throwing her to the wolves made him practically break out in a rash.

It felt wrong on so many levels that he couldn't even begin to count them. But what was the alternative? And could he trust his instincts on this?

It didn't take long for the response to come back.

Our information confirms what we already suspected. Reddog was Alex's father. He died over three years ago in an explosion during an op for the CIA. Any message she said came from him is a lie. She set up both Alex and Eli. Probably killed Nick as well. We need your confirmation. Can you make her confess? They've scheduled you to drop her off at the warehouse at 52
nd
and Front Street.

They wanted him to what? The idea stung his chest. He fingered his phone with the picture of her holding the gun to Eli's head. The backdrop of the Afghan countryside in the distance. He ignored the possibility and focused on the other loose end he had.
Triple-check
on the possibility that Alex Cromier is still alive. Whoever was in his house came after us and tried to kill us. Somebody is lying.

Are you sure it isn't her? All the evidence and the information is in my earlier email.

That was the million-dollar question. One he hadn't quite figured out yet, which was the only reason he agreed to go along with Jennings' crazy plan. Sort of.

*  *  *

He'd brought his phone with him when he went to take a shower. There was only one reason he would want to do that. Tessa had sensed a change in him yesterday, but he didn't say anything. Which could only mean one thing. Now she knew it wasn't her imagination. Why was she always so foolish to get sucked into the whim of a man each and every time? First it was the father she never knew, who'd abandoned her mother. Then a string of imperfect boyfriends who always turned out to be losers, then Alex and Nick. Now Jake.

Somehow that hurt the most. After everything that had happened between them, he should trust her more than he did. Shouldn't he? It would be better for her to break out on her own and take her chances.

This whole fiasco involved Alex. She'd finally come to terms with the fact he'd royally screwed her over. There wasn't even a smidgen of doubt in her mind. After she learned about Alex's father, she knew it would only be the beginning.

She opened his computer and got into Jake's email with ease. First she checked the inbox and found a picture of her holding a gun to Eli's head. What the hell? She'd never…oh wait…they were practicing what to do in case of a takeover…oh my God, Alex had encouraged her to play the part of the enemy. Somebody took that as factual? Next she spotted records of an account in the Cayman Islands with her name and over a million dollars in it. The icing on the cake was an email where his boss had asked him to turn her over to the CIA, sent a few minutes ago.
Get her to confess.
She wiped the tears that had burst from her eyes.

While she itched to confront him, that would never work with a man like Jake. He'd tried to charm her. God knew he'd already been successful in doing the exact same thing from the get-go.

How they ended up in bed together the first time, Tessa couldn't really say. It was like something had been simmering beneath the surface since day one. Still, she couldn't say she was sorry. She couldn't say she was pleased, either. Sex had a way of altering things.

But now that the physical barrier had been broken, there'd be no turning back. She had to live with whatever consequences happened as the result.

Intense circumstance. Maybe the constant adrenaline rush had played into it. But ever since he'd held her hand while getting the tracker removed, something changed inside her. When he talked about his family, it only increased the feeling.

They'd been adversaries, now lovers. How could anything ever work between them when they were both so calloused by what went on before, especially now that the gauntlet had been thrown?

Without a second thought, she threw everything into her backpack, even though part of her wanted to confront him. She didn't trust herself to not be swayed by his smooth-talking ways. No doubt he'd try to convince her he was on her side.

When she heard the shower turn off, she knew she had seconds to make her getaway. She sprinted out the door and into the cavernous garage. Alex and whomever he was working with had set her up so completely that Jake and The Alliance had played right into their hands. The only thing she could do was leave the country. But she'd need her passport in order to do that.

The idea Jake thought she was guilty made her knees weak. Every inch of her body ached. The betrayal sank through every fiber of her being as his words scraped and clawed at her skin like an angry cat.

She had to give up the fight. It was what it was. Trying to convince him she wasn't what he thought wouldn't be productive. It would only be a lesson in futility.

The words in the email circled through her head until she wanted to scream. Double agent? Where had that come from? Did Jake really believe that?

She'd bought his compassion like a newbie rather than a skilled CIA operative. She'd fancied herself a much better reader of people. Then again, he'd been schooled by Petrovich from a young age. Why should she even doubt the abilities and talents he'd acquired under that tutelage?

Betrayal swept up her back and pounded against her like waves breaking along a rocky shoreline. She thought she could trust him, but his weird behavior had forced her to fall back on old habits of assuming the worst. For once she wished she were wrong about her instincts.

The things she'd told him about her life she hadn't told anyone else. Why had she given into the urge and trusted him in the first place? She should have known better than that.

Alex, now Jake.

Without much further thought, she walked out the way she came, but this time alone. She figured this was the way it was meant to be from the beginning. In order to track down the ghost of Alex, she needed to do it alone. That was always how she'd done her best work.

Jake let the hot water sluice down his back, allowing it to erase the tension building in his neck. He'd spent more time than usual in the shower, thinking through his options without coming up with anything that made him feel okay. Should he trust his less-than-stellar gut, or should he go with the flow of information sent to him by The Alliance?

Neither one was a surefire way to allow him to sleep at night. In his head, he couldn't imagine turning her over to the powers that be at the CIA and having her face an uncertain future based on bureaucratic justice.

Maybe he should be honest with her and see what happened. If she didn't try to kill him on the spot, he might have a halfway decent chance of figuring out fact from fiction. He needed to unravel this mess of lies one at a time.

Then it hit him. Why would she have an account in the Cayman Islands that could be easily discovered when she could have put it into an untraceable account in Switzerland? If she were trying to hide money, that would be the way to go. She was neither stupid nor naïve. Whoever had set her up had been lazy and had gone for the obvious.

He needed to look at that video from the bank. Then examine the photos she'd taken in Istanbul. His photos as well.

He pulled up the video on his phone, and it confirmed what he'd suspected all along. People saw what they wanted to see.

This was not a buck-naked kind of conversation. He wrapped in a towel and walked into the room. "Tessa." When she didn't respond immediately, he glanced around the small place, knowing there was no place within these walls she could hide.

When he spotted her bag and computer gone, he knew. He rushed to his own computer and discovered she'd accessed his email. The evidence of her scrutiny glaring like a road flare on his computer screen. She didn't bother to hide what she'd found.

He hated to be naïve, but if she were some kind of super spy wouldn't she have absconded with every drop of information he had as well? What would prompt her to leave other than guilt? But if she were guilty of what she'd been accused, wouldn't she take something of his and hope to use it for leverage? That would only make sense if she were the conniving sort. Texting or calling Jennings wasn't even a passing thought. Conviction he was on the right path roared like a freight train inside him.

First he needed to figure out where she might go, and the answer was obvious. She'd head back to her townhome. Over the last few days she'd referenced her home on more than one occasion. They were close to Alexandria. She had a car there to get her to the nearest airport if she wanted to leave the country. From there he could only guess where she might go, or what she might do.

Speculation wasn't doing him any good. Instead, he got dressed as quickly as possible and set out to find her. She couldn't have much of a head start. And since she'd need to take the train to her home, he had the advantage.

Betrayal
was the only word she could have thought when she read what he'd written. What Jennings had written as well.

That was when it hit him. This wasn't about her, except as a victim of unfortunate circumstances. This was about him. This was personal. Someone had it out for him. And he knew with certainty it circled back to Petrovich.

But where was Cleo
or Marta
or whatever she was calling herself now? Damn, how could he be so foolish as to not have seen the connection? What he still didn't understand was why. Why had she come after him in the first place? And how did she hook up with Alex?