Page 14 of The Saint

“Me? I can’t.” He couldn’t say that he was Titan or not CIA. He couldn’t say squat.

“You don’t even know what helping would entail. How can you say no without knowing what I want from you?”

His mouth pinched. “All right, Amelia, forget the fact that my boss would fire my ass on the spot for even having this phone call. Call me curious. What do you want from me?”

Amanda and Shah crept closer. Camden waved them back.

“Are they listening? Your boss, I mean?”

He glanced around the operations center with its surveillance equipment and technology that could probablytrack a fart on the International Space Station. He didn’t know and wouldn’t lie to her, so he punted the question with a half answer. “This is a secure line.”

“A secure line,” she repeated with a dry laugh. “My sister didn’t teach art history, did she?”

Is anyone just an art history teacher?If they lived in the Washington, DC, metro area, the answer was probably a fifty-fifty chance they were an art-aficionado-slash-CIA-operative. “You know she did. Everything you know about her and her husband was real.”

“But there was more. Another layer I didn’t know about. Right?”

Camden wouldn’t answer her, but he didn’t have to. Amelia already knew. Cops had probably talked to her then swiftly deposited her into the capable hands of men with obscure badges and dubious backgrounds. Their conversations would have had far more substance but somehow without any information to decipher.

“What does a secure line mean?” she asked. “Like in the movies? Untappable. Untraceable.”

He shrugged. “Just as it sounds. No one can access the line. It’s safe.”

“For people like my sister to call into if they’re in trouble.”

He repositioned and leaned back in the office chair. “Look, Amelia. It’s late for you. The middle of the night, right? You should get some sleep and forget this phone number. All right?”

“Even if I wanted to, I can’t get the permanent marker off the inside of my forearm. I woke up and thought the whole thing had been a nightmare. But then I looked down and saw my sister’s chicken scratch in black Sharpie on my skin. I think I’m going to see your phone number in my head for the rest of my life.”

Fuck.That wasn’t going to help her move forward from whatever she’d stumbled upon.

Camden didn’t have any advice. “You should talk to someone—”

“I am. You.”

He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Her stubbornness was a pain in the ass. But he sort of appreciated her tenacity. “Someone who knows what to say. Because…” He sucked in his cheeks and tried to play out a few responses. She deserved the genuine truth, and he didn’t have that. “I don’t feel like I’m doing right by you or this conversation.”

The phone line was quiet. He wished she would hang up and forget everything. At least, part of him wished that. Another growing part of him was curious. He wished Amanda and Shah weren’t listening.

She broke the silence. “You know…”

Hanging up was the right thing to do. Reporting the conversation was another right thing to do. But according to his track record, doing the right thing wasn’t his usual modus operandi, at least according to Boss Man. Camden never thought he was doing wrong, necessarily. He just wasn’t falling in line.

“Camden, you’re the only person who talks to me for more than two seconds. Even if you’re trying to get me to hang up first.”

He laughed quietly but kept listening.

“And you’re the only person who isn’t actively trying to make me forget what I think I saw.”

“Yes, I am.” But that was interesting. He wondered what the spooks in badges were trying to convince her had happened. He bit his tongue to keep from asking. She was giving him all the more proof that he needed to hang up the phone. “Take care of yourself. Okay, Amelia?”

She didn’t answer. Camden needed a second to realize she’d hung up on him. Well, she probably threw her phone across the room. He didn’t blame her.

“That was interesting.” Amanda perched on the edge of the table in the center of the operations center. “First, you stay on the phone long past when you should.”

“Second,” Shah continued, “you talk to her…” He gestured as if there were more to the story. “Because, why?”

“She needed someone to talk to.” Camden scanned the room for the football and found it nestled in a chair on the far side.

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