Reckless

“You and me,” Cameron said. “Being together. That can’t be easy for him.”

Tracy blushed scarlet. She wanted to say, We’re not together! Who said we were together? But this didn’t feel like the right time. Besides which, she really didn’t know what her romantic feelings were at this moment, for Cameron, or Jeff, or anyone.

“You told me yourself he has a temper,” Cameron went on. “It makes sense, Tracy.”

“It doesn’t. Move on. What’s your other theory?”

“General Frank Dorrien.”

Tracy’s ears pricked up. “Go on.”

Cameron outlined his theory. Like Jeff, Dorrien knew where Tracy had been that night and could easily have followed her after dinner. Perhaps he knew about the harddrive Tracy had stolen from his house in England, the evidence tying him to Prince Achileas’s death? That alone would be motive enough for him to try to kill her. He’d made no secret of his dislike of Tracy from the beginning. Now, according to Greg Walton, Dorrien’s MI6 bosses were equally displeased with her efforts to corner Hunter Drexel privately, not to mention her failure to make progress on Althea.

“No one in Whitehall would be crying into their Earl Grey tea if you met an untimely end, Tracy,” Cameron said bluntly. “They want to catch Drexel first. They want the glory. That’s why they brought Jeff Stevens in in the first place, to cut you off at the knees.”

Tracy thought, It’s possible. Jeff basically admitted as much over dinner.

“What if Dorrien saw his chance and he took it?” Cameron warmed to his theme. “But he screwed up. You didn’t die right away. There was a witness. So he swoops in as a ‘bystander,’ has you brought here, controls all access to you. He didn’t even tell the CIA you’d been attacked until a day and a half after the fact. That doesn’t strike you as suspicious?”

The problem was, everything struck Tracy as suspicious. She was more than prepared to believe that Frank Dorrien had attacked her. She knew for a fact he was capable of it, especially if he felt impelled by some warped sense of duty. Or even just to save his own skin. And yet something was niggling at her. Something that didn’t quite ring true.

“What about Hunter Drexel?” she asked Cameron.

“What about him?”

“He could have attacked me. If he thought I was close to finding him. Close to finding out the truth.”

“It’s possible, I suppose.” Cameron sounded unconvinced.

“Or Althea?” Tracy mused.

“No. That makes no sense. Why would she go to so much trouble to get you involved in this in the first place if all she wanted was to kill you? Besides, the witnesses described a man.”

“It was dark. A tall woman with her hair up could easily look like a man.”

Cameron shook his head. “I think it was the British, Tracy. Either Dorrien or Stevens. They’re on the same team now, after all. And it’s not our team. All this talk of ‘cooperation,’ it’s total bullshit.”

That much Tracy agreed with. “I know.”

She squeezed Cameron’s hand.

“You can’t trust Jeff Stevens, Tracy.”

“I know that too. I was planning on working with him, not trusting him.”

Cameron looked confused.

“Jeff would never hurt me,” Tracy explained. “But if he sees finding Hunter and Althea as a competition between us—and I think he does—then he’ll stop at nothing to win.”

“So why work with him?”

Tracy smiled weakly. “Because I’ll stop at nothing to win, either. And I usually do. In the end.”

They talked for a few more minutes. Then Tracy started to feel tired. Kissing her tenderly on the top of her head, above the bandages, Cameron left, double-checking on his way out that no one was to be allowed past security.

HEADING BACK TO HIS hotel, Cameron couldn’t help smiling to himself, thinking about the first time Tracy had woken up.

“The way you smiled at me,” he told her today. “The look in your eyes when you said ‘it’s you.’ I can’t tell you what that meant to me.”