PORTIA
“He knows.”
Portia didn’t like the sound of her own quivering voice, but worse, she didn’t like that she was here at FBI Headquarters in TriBeCa. It was a cab ride away from the Cromwell building, but with round-the-clock, Manhattan traffic, it might as well have been in a different state. The distance made her nervous but not as nervous as what she was about to do. Update the Feds. The ‘punishment’ Nathan had inflicted—first in his office then continued some floors above in his penthouse suite—had hardly been penalizing, much less abusive, though admittedly, she’d feared it could have been both. She’d enjoyed it. She enjoyed him. This was getting messy.
Sitting across from her at the sleek conference table was Agent Jennifer McBride, a polished brunette, who kept her hair slicked back in a neat ponytail and her expression neutral. Portia had never seen dirt under the woman’s fingernails or a crease in her pantsuit. She was serious and determined, attributes which might make for a great Fed, but caused Portia to question her intentions. The woman had always given her the feeling that if Portia, at some point, became ‘collateral damage’, Agent McBride wouldn’t so much as bat an eye. She was aiming to take down the Cromwell Corp. and its owners. Anyone else who perished during the investigation was expendable in the first place. Of course, McBride had never conveyed this out loud.
A common enemy.
Mutual interests.
These had been what brought them together.
But while Agent Jennifer McBride could hide behind her shield and thick office walls, Portia had volunteered to be on the frontlines of this silent war.
A confidential informant.
Anything to bring down the people responsible for her family’s ruin.
“You don’t know that,” Jennifer said with a profound lack of both concern and compassion.
“I’m telling you, he knows,” she repeated, leaning forward.
“And I’m telling you,” she countered, her tone and expression as chilly as ever, “until we get an admission on tape, we’ll keep providing you with bugs to plant. It was a major loss that they found and removed our first set, but we have you now.”
It was like the woman wasn’t hearing her.
Portia considered detailing for her all that she hadn’t listened in on, everything that had transpired up in Nathan’s penthouse—surely, it would’ve sounded brutal had another recording device been in that private playroom—but Jennifer wasn’t the type to take her at her word. If it wasn’t evidence, it belonged in immediate question. Doubt everything until proven otherwise was Agent Jennifer McBride’s mode of operation.
Feeling the agent’s cool gaze on her, Portia asked, “Can you send me back with a number of them? More bugs? I don’t like having to slip away and find packages under tables.”
“That system is for your own protection,” Jennifer reminded her. “We want to minimize the amount of time you have such devices on your person.”
“Well, I’d like to minimize the amount of time I’m wandering off throughout Manhattan,” she shot back.
Jennifer cocked her elegant brow at that and obliged. “That can be arranged.”
“Thank you,” she barked.
“Let’s talk about tactic,” said the agent, lacing her fingers together, hands clasped, on the table. “You were pushing way too hard.”
“So it’s my fault he knows?” she blurted, taken aback.
“I’m not saying that.”
“Look, you got me in there doing the one thing that requires absolutely no talking—”
“Look, Ms. Rothschild,” said Jennifer without giving her an inch of slack to make her point. “You came to us. You had your suspicions and you came to us, because you wanted to make yourself useful—”
“Suspicions?” she challenged, offended. “I had evidence.”
“No, you had a letter from one of your brother’s comrades.”
“A letter which informed my parents that Trystan shouldn’t have died in that mission. A letter that states Maxum basically sacrificed him, because he was catching on to what they were really doing. And not only that, they used his body—desecrated his corpse—just like all the rest.”
“Which you couldn’t verify because not only had your parents not opened the letter—”
“They thought it was another condolence card like the hundred others they’d gotten. Reading those things only drove them deeper into their grief.”
“—But they also had Trystan cremated,” she plowed through Portia’s interjection. “All this is to say that no, a letter written from a man who had served with your brother and then worked beside him as a private contractor with Maxum amounts to nothing more than ‘hearsay’. It’s not evidence, but it did raise your suspicions, which brought you here.”
“My brother was murdered,” she stated. Voice trembling or not, she spat out each word. “He was gutted like a fish. They stuffed drugs in his body, sewed him up, and shipped him home. All funded by the Cromwell Corp.”
“And that’s what we need on tape. That’s our evidence. That’s what we can act on and use to take down everyone who was responsible for not only your brother’s death, but the deaths of all the other American soldiers who had the grave misfortune of getting hired by Maxum after their years of service.”
Portia wanted the same thing. But she felt like she was a million miles from getting there. If the Cromwell’s had discovered the FBI’s bugs—and they had—and if Nathan distrusted her enough to comment in the way he had last night, smugly asserting that he’ll never get caught, then Portia had little hope that even in her absence, he and Guinevere would speak candidly about Maxum and the drug smuggling operation they had been behind all these years.
“Hey,” Jennifer said softly, pulling Portia’s attention back into the conference room. “You are someone who sat across from Karen Flores at The Infidelity Corporation and said what had to be said in order to get assigned to our target. You convinced that woman to match you to Cromwell without ever using Nathan’s name. That took ingenuity. Courage. It took determination and the dramatic acting skills of Meryl Streep.”
Portia had to laugh. “Hardly.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You have great instincts, Portia. I’ll tell you right now, we were spinning our wheels in our Maxum-Cromwell investigation. It was only percolating until you came along. Now it’s cooking. We have other targets. The CEO of Maxum being one of them. The Corporeal overseas who strategizes these operations being another. But we don’t have anyone like you on them. We don’t expect much there. Everything is riding on you. We’ve put all our manpower behind you—it might not look like it or feel like it from where you’re standing, but we have. What happened to your brother will be exposed, and everyone responsible is going to go down for it.”
“Okay,” she breathed.
“Planting the bug in Nathan’s office was a good start,” she complimented. “I’m working on getting some agents on the cleaning crew to plant more around the Cromwell building, but they won’t have access to his penthouse nor the Long Island estate without your—”
“Right,” interrupted Portia, following her implication. “That’s why I’d like as many bugs as possible.”
“I need to keep your hands clean,” she reminded her. “If you’re strip searched at a moment’s notice,” she warned with a wry smile—Nathan’s proclivities were no secret, obviously—“or if your belongings are seized and searched, I don’t want them finding any devices.”
“So, what the hell am I there for?”
“I need you to be a decoy, in a manner of speaking.”
“A decoy?”
“When I need my undercover agents to get into Nathan’s office, you’ll need to lure him away first. When I need to sweep through the Long Island estate, again, you’ll lure him elsewhere, get him to take you to, hell I don’t know, Montreal. As soon as you’re both in his jet, we’ll move in.”
It certainly sounded like an easier job than planting bugs and trying to get Nathan to unwittingly confess on tape…
“It’s going to be more complicated than that,” Jennifer warned, “but you get the idea?”
“More complicated, how?”
“Tonight, for example…”
“I believe we’ll be in his penthouse on the top floor of the Cromwell building,” Portia supplied.
“The Cromwell elevators, the foyer of his penthouse, and select rooms in his penthouse are equipped with surveillance cameras which the 24/7 security department has their eyes on. My guys are going to have to first hack into the system, set up a loop to record, then get it on playback before you and Nathan leave. That way, when you slip out, his entire detail will already be watching domestic bliss.”
Or violence, thought Portia, suddenly disturbed at the prospect that anyone could have been watching her with Nathan this whole time. The FBI’s bugs were bad enough, knowing she could be heard… But seen? It turned her stomach.
“How will we communicate?” she asked as she searched Jennifer’s expression. The agent had gone from warm to stone cold again. “How will I know when to leave with Nathan?”