Savage Recruit (Ryan Savage Thriller Series Book 8), стр. 24

“How are you holding up?”

“Fine. But knowing that Kathleen isn’t is wearing on me.”

“She’s tough, Ryan. You know that. Whatever someone wants with her, I’m sure she can hold out until you find her.”

I opened my mouth to tell Charlotte about finding one of Kathleen’s kidnappers murdered but then thought better of it. “How’s Zoe doing?”

She sighed into the phone. “Not well. I told her to stay home from school today. I’ll probably let her stay back tomorrow too. She doesn’t know what to do with herself. I can’t say that I blame her.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, get some sleep. I have a feeling you’re going to need it. I love you. Be safe over there.”

“I love you too.”

I have yet to sleep on a cot that doesn’t feel like a suspended slab of concrete. I laid there trying in vain to find a comfortable position and clear my head. I kept running back through every angle, every possibility, looking for anything we might have missed. I knew we hadn’t, that plenty of other people were working to find some thread we could pull, but it didn’t feel right trying to sleep with Kathleen still out there somewhere.

And there was an entirely different matter that I was still trying to digest: the newfound facts surrounding the death of my parents.

My mother and father died when I was five years old, and for my entire life since, I had been told that it had been due to a car accident. They had been on vacation in Europe, and Dad had been driving through the French countryside during a rainstorm when he was sideswiped by a delivery truck that had lost control. Their car ejected off the road and landed head on into a tree, killing both of them instantly.

That was what I had always believed. It was the narrative I’d been fed.

But it was a lie, and I never knew any different until just a few days ago.

Last week, while I was running across South America, trying to bring the mission Jonathan Watts had given me to a conclusion, I stumbled into a mercenary army deep in the jungles of Brazil. Their leader was an American named Daniel Lasseter, and before he escorted Brad and me onto a cargo plane headed for Rio, Lasseter pulled me to the side, sat me down on a fallen log at the edge of the jungle, and confessed to being the reason that my parents had died over thirty years ago.

As Lasseter relayed it, my parents had indeed been on vacation in Paris. But my mother, who everyone thought worked for the State Department, was actually a CIA officer. My father had been the only one who knew the truth of her real profession.

At the time, Lasseter was a young CIA officer riding a desk at a black site in Paris, and one of his field agents had intercepted a data packet from the Russians. Per protocol, they left it at a drop site, but no Paris-based agents were available to retrieve it. Langley knew that my mother was currently in Paris for some leisure time, so they had Lasseter reach out to her and to ask her to retrieve the packet and get it out of the open.

This was in the early ’90s, at a time when the Cold War was ending. Publicly, it was thawing, but behind the scenes, spying between the two countries was no different than it had been. Neither country trusted each other—a sentiment that exists even to the present.

My mother agreed to the operation. She left her hotel room early that morning and made the trip across the city. A lack of time and minimal operational details put Lasseter in a position of being unable to plan the operation effectively, ensuring both its success and my mother’s safety. My mother successfully retrieved the packet but was intercepted soon after she returned to the hotel room, where a Russian agent shot both her and my father in cold blood, recovered the data packet, and disappeared.

Lasseter’s revelation jolted me, left me reeling, and before I could ask him any of the dozens of questions swirling in my head, he died in my arms, in the lobby of a Rio high rise when a rogue bullet intended for the leader of a regional cartel caught him in the neck.

Any easy answers died with him.

Now, I found that I wasn’t so angry that the truth had been withheld from me all this time, as much as I was fuming over the awareness that whoever had murdered my parents was most likely still out there somewhere. My father had missed my ball games, my mother my graduations, not because they had gotten in a freak car accident, but because of someone else’s volition, because someone had singled them out and murdered them.

As soon as we found Kathleen and brought her safely home, I was going to call in every favor and would pull every bureaucratic lever I knew of to get my mother’s file at Langley unsealed. Then I would find out who pulled the trigger on my parents. I wanted a name, a face, an address. I wanted to know if they were still playing for the other team. And then I would pay them a visit.

I was alone with my thoughts until well past midnight, trying to quiet them with little success. In the early hours of the morning, I drifted into sleep.