Page 57 of Agency
The guys and I all exchanged more looks. Surely she couldn’t be serious about believing any of this. She had to be lying. Had to be. There was no way she actually thought Stella was the leader of some drug cartel.
Or… maybe she did? I really had no point of reference to determine if she was lying.
After all, nine-tenths of my interactions with her had been false.
Jericho was shaking his head. “Trust me, your information is, at best, inaccurate.”
“You’re sure?” she shot back. “What if she’s the one lying to you, and my intel is correct?”
“Well, first of all, she doesn’t even know for sure who her father actually is,” Andrew said. “Her mother lied. That’s why she’s here in St. Louis.”
“Shewhat?”
“The man she’s trying to get a DNA sample from is here. In Missouri. Not Mexico. He’s—”
Jericho raised a hand, cutting Andrew off. “Okay, okay. We’ve given up some details on our side, told you that whatever you have is false—”
“Doesn’t mean it actually is,” she replied. “She could be lying to you. Or, you could be lying to me.”
“Have we lied to you yet?”
She looked to me. “Well, he said he works in software sales. That was a lie, wasn’t it, Morgan?”
I shrugged. “That wasn’t a lie, that was just a cover we sometimes use. I at least gave you my real name. You haven’t even given us that much, Ms. Kettle.”
“Ambyr,” she spat, then her eyes went wide. She looked as if she would have slapped a hand across her mouth., had either been free.
“Ambyr what?” Jericho asked.
Taking and holding a deep breath, she looked to each of us. Finally she exhaled.
“Ambyr Jaros.”
The name fit her, and far better than either Carmen or Candice had.
“Alright, Ambyr Jaros,” Jericho replied. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You said whoever contracted you to do this hit lied to you…?”
“Not directly contracted,” she said. “But, the dossier I was provided had details about Stella Beltran, her organization, and why she was here…”
“And none of it mentioned anything that we’ve discussed?”
She shook her head.
I touched Jericho’s shoulder and, getting his attention, I nodded back to the living room. Together, the three of us stepped out of the impromptu holding cell.
“What do you think?” Jericho asked in a harsh whisper.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I mean I want to believe her…”
“Why? Because you fucked her?” Andrew asked, no ill-intent to his voice, despite the harshness of his choice in phrasing. “Or because you actually think she might be telling the truth?”
“You jealous I found her first, or something?”
“No.” He grinned and shrugged. A moment later, after seeming to have thought over what I’d said, he nodded. “Okay, maybe a little.” He paused again. “She does seem more like an Ambyr, by the way. Doesn’t she?”
He was right, and I was about to say so. But something occurred to me, and I was immediately asking, “What if she still has the dossier?” Neither man at first responded. “She had a dossier on Stella from her company, or agency or whatever the hell she called it, right? Well, what if she still has the file? What if she’s still got a copy of it, and it’s full of the same bullshit she’s trying to feed us?”
“What would that matter, though?” Jericho asked.
