TRACY OPENED ONE EYE and saw a hummingbird hover just in front of her, plunging its long beak into a bright orange kou flower before flitting away. It was no bigger than a moth, and so delicate with its iridescent feathers and frantic, dance-like flight. Magical, like everything in Hawaii.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
Cameron Crewe wandered out onto the balcony. Tracy lay on a sun lounger, her athletic figure already turning brown. Cameron had taken Tracy to the Ritz Carlton in Maui for a romantic getaway, booking them into a palatial suite with ocean views and a private balcony so full of flowers it was more like a miniature jungle.
Group 99’s Neuilly massacre had gotten to both of them, but especially Tracy. Her own teenage son might have been murdered at the group’s hands, after all. When Cameron called her from Poland, he could hear the strain in her voice. She feels guilty, responsible somehow, because she hasn’t found Althea yet.
He needed Tracy to know that none of this was her fault.
More important, he needed to be with her. Flying straight home from Warsaw, he’d expected Tracy to put up a fight about coming away with him, with the CIA’s fight against Group 99 at such a crucial stage.
I’m needed here, he could hear her saying. We can focus on us later.
But she hadn’t. To his surprise and delight, Tracy craved intimacy now as much as he did.
“I wasn’t asleep,” she murmured groggily. All this sun was making her drunk. “Just relaxing.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you.”
Perching on the end of her sun lounger, Cameron began rubbing sun cream into her back. Tracy closed her eyes again. Everything smelled of coconuts. She could hear the waves crashing below her. How wonderful it would be to stay here forever and forget everything, to melt away.
Well, almost everything.
She would never forget Nick, of course. And she would never rest until she’d learned the truth about what had happened to him. But slowly, with every hour Tracy spent in Cameron’s company, the raw anguish of his absence was fading. It wasn’t her love for him that she was losing, but the pain of that love. Just a little. And it was a relief.
Other things were harder to let go. While Tracy was here, sipping Kahlúa cocktails with Cameron, Group 99 were still out there killing people. Killing kids.
I shouldn’t have come, Tracy thought now for the thousandth time. I should never have let Cameron talk me into it. But the truth was she was so exhausted she knew she was close to the breaking point. Physically, Tracy’s body greedily accepted the rest. Mentally, it was a different story.
The French security services had yet to catch the other gunmen from the Neuilly attack, and with each passing day it looked less and less likely that they were going to. Meanwhile, despite the fact that good intelligence pointed to Hunter Drexel having conveniently been in Paris at the time of the school shootings, Greg Walton and Milton Buck were doing everything they could to keep Tracy off Drexel’s scent.
“You’re here to find Althea,” Greg Walton reminded her, whenever Tracy raised Hunter’s name. “You’re the one with a connection to her, Tracy. Let us focus on finding Hunter. You mustn’t get distracted.”
And yet they hadn’t found Hunter Drexel. Once again he’d slipped through the net. Even Sally Faiers was claiming he’d gone to ground.
“I haven’t heard anything in weeks,” Sally told Tracy. “I’m worried about him.”
So am I, Tracy thought. The little voice inside her, telling her that Hunter was the key to everything that had happened, had become a deafening roar. She also couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that if Walton and Buck did find Drexel, she might never learn the whole truth.
“The CIA think he was involved in the Camp Paris shootings, don’t they?” Sally asked Tracy bluntly. “They think he’s a terrorist.”
“I honestly don’t know,” Tracy replied. “If he was in Paris at the time, it certainly raises suspicions.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Sally said fervently. “I know he ran from the Americans in Bratislava. And maybe he does have some sympathy with Group 99’s beliefs. He denies it, but I could see him going native to some degree. Being turned by them or whatever. But he would never, never be a part of something like what happened at Neuilly. I know him.”
Do you? wondered Tracy. Do any of us really know anyone else, deep down?
How many murderers and rapists are there in prisons around the world right now, whose girlfriends didn’t have a clue?
Still, she shared Sally Faiers’s concerns. The fact that Walton and Buck were being so secretive about their search for Hunter didn’t bode well. Did they really want to rescue him? Or to silence him, permanently? Tracy didn’t know the answer. But the question haunted her. Because whether he was a terrorist or not, Tracy needed to find Hunter Drexel alive. She couldn’t get answers from a dead man.
Tracy sat up suddenly. “I feel guilty,” she told Cameron.
“Why?” He kissed her neck lovingly.
“Because I shouldn’t be here. I should be in France right now. And we both know it.”
Cameron sighed. “Come on, Tracy. We’ve been over this.”