Troublemaker Read online

  “She isn’t the speaker, but she’s important in D.C. Plus her son had been kidnapped, could have been killed. I’d say the answer is yes.”

  “So the position of the boat wasn’t suspicious?”

  “No. If I’d anchored, I’d have done the same.”

  “What did you see as you drove toward her?”

  “She was standing at the railing, waving. Her husband was on the deck with her, but he went below.”

  She put her fork down, tilted her head at him. “How do you know it was her husband, if you weren’t close enough to know for certain it was her?”

  Morgan paused, thinking, his gaze absent as he looked into the past. “I didn’t, not from that distance, but he was wearing a blue shirt and when he came back on deck he was still wearing it—Fuck!”

  “What?” Bo asked, so startled by his verbal explosion that she dropped her fork; it hit the plate with a clatter. She grabbed for the fork to keep it from bouncing to the floor.

  “He was buttoning the shirt when he came back up.” Morgan’s tone was grim, as rough as ground glass. “Over a white tee shirt. But I didn’t see any white when he went below.”

  “What’s wrong with—Oh. I see. Why was he buttoning it if he’d already had it on?”

  “Exactly.” He sat silently, mentally tearing the details apart. “The man who went below deck had gray hair, as far as I could tell. Dexter Kingsley’s hair isn’t gray. I couldn’t swear to that, because the angle of the sun can mess with hair color, but . . . yeah.” This was resonating with him, the way something did when you knew instinctively it was right.

  “Then there was someone on the boat they didn’t want you to see. She’s a politician, so I have to say that isn’t completely unexpected. What happened then?”

  “I pulled up close to their boat, shut mine down. We chatted. She asked me to come aboard for a drink.”

  “Well, that doesn’t make sense. Why would she ask you to come aboard if she didn’t want you to see who was on the boat with them?”

  He flashed her a look that chilled her; his eyes were blue ice, his jaw so hard she knew his teeth were clenched. “To kill me,” he said flatly. “Even though they pulled a switch, they couldn’t be sure I’d bought it. If I’d been someone else, maybe, but she didn’t know who was coming toward them until I got my boat closer. I work in counterterrorism, I’m supposed to notice every detail, but I missed that one. They couldn’t know that, though, so they had to take care of me.”

  This time she didn’t drop her fork; she put it down carefully, all appetite gone. She’d thought dragging out every detail for examination might help, but she’d kind of hoped it wouldn’t. Now she had to deal with the fallout; everything would change fast, and whatever happened, she had to focus on how this would help Morgan. Her emotions were secondary, and something she would simply have to handle, though it was hard to get around the reality that someone had so coldly planned to kill him.

  “But couldn’t you have already reported it? What good would killing you do?”

  “Reported suspicious behavior, yes, but she knew that I couldn’t have recognized the other man any sooner than she recognized me—not as soon, actually. I was driving a boat, concentrating on where I was going and what I was doing; traffic on the river was heavy that day, with a lot of boats crisscrossing. Besides, thinking something is suspicious isn’t the same as knowing something bad is going down.”

  “But you didn’t know,” Bo insisted. “Even if you’d reported something suspicious and questions were asked, all they had to do was deny anyone else was onboard. There was no proof.”

  “My best guess? Because of what I do, even if I hadn’t seen the other man well enough to recognize him, I have the resources to do some digging. There are cameras everywhere in the D.C. area, plus a lot of places have private security cameras; they wouldn’t be sure they were completely under the radar. If they showed up anywhere on camera with the other guy, Axel could likely find it if he simply knew the direction to start looking.”

  “Then Axel would be able to identify the other man.”

  “Possibly. That would depend on whether or not he’s in any of our databases, or if we could get a license plate or credit card receipt that would tell us.” Then he shrugged and said, “Yeah, the odds are we’d find something. As it was, even if I had noticed something, I couldn’t have started looking while I was on the water. My boat is just an old fishing boat, not set up for anything like that. If I’d wanted to do some digging, it would have had to wait until I went back ashore. They got my boat registration numbers and set things in motion. Probably they couldn’t find which marina I used, so instead of waiting for me there, they had to get my home address and set up an ambush.”

  “But you had a cell phone, didn’t you? Why couldn’t you have called whoever you would have called, and gotten the ball rolling before then?”

  “I can only guess that they had no means of taking a long shot at me, plus the shooter would have to be a trained sniper to hit someone in a moving boat. I was heading down river, instead of back toward D.C., so likely they assumed I wasn’t immediately suspicious. If I started thinking about it and called in before they could get to me—nothing they could do unless they wanted to chase me down on the river and have a gunfight there, with potentially hundreds of witnesses. They played the odds that I hadn’t noticed anything, and they were right. If they’d left it like that, I’d never have given that meeting a second thought.”

  Bo got to her feet and took her plate to the kitchen. She was a logical person, but this was taking strategic thinking to a degree that was foreign to her; her head was actually aching a little from trying to think of all the possibilities, probabilities, ins and outs, and angles. “But they tried to kill you and failed. So now you have them arrested—crap. You can’t. You have no proof they did anything.”

  He got to his feet too. “Now I call Axel and get the ball rolling. The first step is trying to identify the other man on the boat. At least now we don’t have to wait for them to trigger an electronic trap by trying to hack the system again to find out where I am.”

  “And then what? You still have nothing.”

  “We have a string to pull. Eventually the ball of yarn will unravel—one way or another.”

  Bo watched him bound up the stairs to get his burner cell phone to call Axel, almost afraid to consider what that “one way or another” would entail. No, she was definitely afraid because the only clear way she could think of to draw them out and force them to commit some act that would get them arrested was to stick with some version of the original plan, which was to use Morgan as bait.

  Morgan pulled out the burner cell—not a smartphone, just a simple phone that didn’t have GPS—and called Axel. When he heard the familiar voice, he said, “I got it. Call when you can.” Meaning use a burner on that end too, or get to a phone away from any agency network that could be hacked. However he made contact was up to Axel, depending on how paranoid he was feeling that day. Morgan didn’t bother leaving his name because not only had they been making phone calls to each other for years, on the off chance Axel hadn’t recognized his voice, he would still recognize the burner number. The bastard was crazy good at things like that.

  Axel must have been either in a meeting or feeling very paranoid because it was over half an hour before he called back. By then Morgan and Bo were sitting on the couch watching TV, waiting for the sun to get farther down in the sky before they took Tricks for a walk.

  “Who was it?” Axel asked in his usual brusque tone.

  “Congresswoman Kingsley. There was someone else on the boat with them, a man. When they saw me coming toward them, he went below and when Dexter Kingsley came up, he was buttoning up the other guy’s shirt.”

  “And you’re just remembering this now because—?”

  Fuck you, Morgan thought without heat. If he took offense at everything Axel said, he’d have beat the shit out of him a long time ago. Because it amused hi