Page 26 of Spy With Me
“I can’t believe you rang up her mum,” Lacey said under herbreath.
He ignored her. He could see the small runway up ahead. Theywould take off from there, land at a private airfield in upstate New York, andmake their way to the UK from there. “I’m afraid she’s asleep.”
“You mean you drugged her.” The sound became muffled asthough she put a hand over the receiver. She still talked loud enough he couldhear her. “Theo, calm down. I don’t think he wants to hurt her.”
Devi’s dad would be way harder to deal with. “I don’t. I’mtrying everything I can to make sure she doesn’t get hurt.”
“Well, you could turn yourself in,” Erin pointed out. “ThenHuisman wouldn’t need to grab Devi.”
She didn’t know the whole situation. “Oh, but he would. Iassure you he would grab her, and I would find myself needing to break out ofprison. He doesn’t want me in prison, and he’ll do what it takes to have me outhere in the field where he wants me.”
“Why does he want you, Zach?” Erin put the question outthere. The question he hoped to never have to answer.
“Because my mother is the bombmaker.”
A whistle came over the line that proved Erin knew more thanshe should. “Damn. All right. This is probably already way more classified thanI should be involved in.”
“I can send you everything I have. My career is alreadyover, and we both know there are two ways I get out of this.”
“Prison or a coffin,” Erin answered with a weary sigh. “I’msure that’s what you think, but you have to know Ian has some pull.”
“Which he isn’t going to want to use on me. I lied to myteam. I had my reasons, but I lied to them.” Here was the big one. “I lied tomy brother for years.”
“No one cares about that.” He heard Theo talking in thebackground, so it was a pretty good bet they were on speaker. “Who doesn’t havea sibling or two who shows up out of the blue? It’s the kidnapping my daughterpart that I’m upset about.”
So everyone knew.
“Zach, what my husband is trying to say is you handled thesituation the best way you could, but now it might be time to come in and letthe family figure out what to do,” Erin said in that reasonable tone.
“I’m close to finding my mother,” he told her. “I’m workingwith some people I trust, and once I make sure she’s safe from Huisman, I’ll doexactly that. I’ll turn myself in to Langley.”
“You will fucking not turn yourself in,” Erin practicallysnarled. “Zachary Reed, you listen to me. I am trusting you with one of themost precious people in my life. If you are lying to me or playing her then youshould turn yourself into Langley because they might, and I mean might, be ableto protect you from what I’ll do. If you’re not, then all you will be doing isputting your team in the position of having to break you out. You fix this andyou come to Dallas and we will find a way out.”
“Or he could drop our daughter off with her cousins and goabout his business,” Theo said in the background.
He was not going to cry. Nope. He’d been alone and hungryand cold for freaking weeks. He’d felt his singularity in ways he neverimagined before, and the fact that Erin Taggart wanted him to come home… Home.That fucking word. Had he ever truly had one? “I can’t, Theo. It’s toodangerous. I’ll find a way to get what intel I have to Ian, and I’ll setsomething up so you can talk to Devi. If I think she’ll take her safetyseriously, we can talk.”
“I expect a call tomorrow,” Theo said.
“When you settle in,” Erin corrected. “Tell my daughter Ilove her and we’re going to have a long discussion about what it means to havea bodyguard. Or apparently two. She got away from the one she knew about andthe one she didn’t. So there’s that. Don’t take your eyes off her, Zach. I willhold you personally responsible for her safety from now on.”
It was how he wanted it.“I’ll take care of her.”
“Also, tell her Eve survived. Barely. She’s going to beokay.”
His heart squeezed at the news. Cooper had only told himpart of the story since they’d been preoccupied with saving their women at thetime. Devi had been through a lot of traumatic shit today. “Good. I’ll let herknow. Talk to you soon.”
He hung up, rolled down the window, and let the burner flyout to the highway.
“Well, she seems like an interesting woman,” Laceycommented.
“Like you don’t know her. I’m sure you have a file on allthe Taggarts.” Lacey kept copious files on everyone she came into contact with,and that didn’t have to be physical contact. In her world, Lacey was consideredan expert on intel gathering. She knew where all the bodies were buried, whoburied them, and how much dirt they got under their nails while doing it.
“Not for the reasons you think,” she admitted. “They’re noton my organization’s radar. Look, the Taggarts don’t have anything to do withthe people I work with. They’re strictly about saving lives, and I appreciatethat. I have nothing against them, but they are Agency and have ties to lawenforcement across the globe who could try to stop my friends from doing whatthey need to do.”
Save the planet. It was what Lacey Rook wanted to do. Evenif she used some fairly illegal tactics to do it. It was precisely how she hadcontacts who knew his mother. “The Taggarts have never been involved in thegreen underground, so you have intel on them because they’re connected to me.”
She turned slightly and gave him that uptick of her lipsthat always made him think she knew more than she was saying. “They’reconnected in ways you haven’t thought of yet. But I do trust them to do theright thing for the most part. What I worry about is the people who want totake them down. Wasn’t that part of your job?”
