I looked away. He turned my chin toward him. “It’s you. It has to be you.”
“I don’t do that stuff anymore. I told you. I want to find my birth family. I’m focused on my art through the podcast I’m creating. I’m focused on this journey. Even if I wasn’t tie
d up in the bottom of the plane, I still wouldn’t want to help the FBI. No offense.” I grimaced. “I gave it up for a reason. It took me a long time to figure out how to make all this work for me, but I’ve done it. I’m not going backward.”
“What if they find your parents for you?” he interrupted.
“What?”
“You are the one with the ability to negotiate. You could get whatever you wanted, Syd. It’s your chance to play that chip. Have them work for you. Everyone knows you don’t need the money. The FBI will be at your disposal if you accept the assignment.”
“The same assignment that is responsible for me being tied up down here?” I emphasized the ties on my wrists. They hurt like hell.
“Unfortunately, yeah. It’s shitty. I don’t know how the files ended up on the marketplace, but now that the underground knows you’re an FBI asset, you need to go in. Let them protect you. I need you to agree that you’ll accept their security.”
I thought about all the bizarre things that had happened over the past six months. The way I always felt as if someone was watching me. The creepy as hell emails. The nightmares. The insomnia. And now this. An entire plane had been hijacked to keep me out of the hands of the FBI. I was possibly being delivered to my death. There was no way to know what the new buyer would want.
“I can’t think about Project Compass. I want to get off this plane.”
“That’s fair, but promise me, if I don’t make it.” He swallowed. “You’ll take their help. Promise me, Syd.”
I couldn’t say no to him. Not like this.
“All right. I will. But, and it’s a huge enormous but, only if you die.”
He huffed. “Deal.”
“I want a deal in return.” My eyes locked on his.
“What kind of deal?” he asked.
“I want you to promise me something when we leave here together.”
His swollen eye looked worse than it had a few minutes ago. He needed to see a doctor. He smiled. “Always the cautious optimist.”
“We are leaving here together,” I repeated. Any other option wasn’t something I was willing to accept.
“I work in facts. I always have. You need to be prepared for the worst. That includes neither of us making it once the exchange is complete. They need you on the ground for a short time at least. If these bastards are smart, they’ll try to keep you, Syd. They’re going to want your skills and knowledge just like the FBI does.”
“I’m not going to work for a bunch of thugs.” The suggestion was insane. “I won’t help them.”
“Ok. Ok. I trust you.”
The amount of sadness that hit me was almost too much to bear. Too much to breathe through. “Would you have said that six months ago?” I asked.
“Come on, let’s not go backward. Our near-death confessions are out. You know exactly how I feel. How I’ve felt.”
“Then, there’s nothing else to hide,” I admitted. “Before you started following me. At the beginning of all this. Would you have trusted me, AJ?”
“It’s not like I didn’t want to trust you.” I saw anguish in his eyes. “I haven’t been the same agent since us. So much has happened in five years. So much I want to tell you. Things I want you to know about me. Things that happened.”
“That’s the promise.”
“Huh?”
“We walk off this plane together and we end the secrets. We tell each other the truth. All of it.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.” His voice was deep and pained.