Morgan got out of the car and zigzagged his way to the barn door, taking cover behind Boyle’s Mercedes, and then running to stand flat against the barn itself. He peered through the cracks in the decaying planks that made up the wall. Light filtering in through the crumbling roof revealed Boyle standing in the hayloft, holding a weapon in his hand, his eyes fixed nervously on the door. Alex was there, too, sitting beside him on a bale of hay and sobbing quietly. If it were anyone else, he would go in guns blazing. But not this time, not while Boyle had Alex.
He pulled the heavy barn door, and it creaked loudly. The drifting dust motes glowed in shafts of sunlight that poured inside. He walked in, hands raised. Boyle moved fast, grabbing Alex by her hair and holding his gun under her chin.
“Cobra!” said Boyle, looking down at him from the hayloft. “How nice of you to show.”
“Dad!” screamed Alex.
“Stay calm, sweetie,” said Morgan. “I’m going to take care of this. It’s going to be okay.”
“You got a gun, Cobra?”
He reached for his weapon, tucked in the rear of his pants at the base of his back, and, holding it by the muzzle, dropped it at his feet.
“Kick it away.”
Morgan did. It scraped noisily against the dirty barn floor.
“And the chip?” said Boyle.
He took the small black square from his pocket and held it up for Boyle to see.
“I’ve got a little something else, too,” said Morgan, and he took Lowry’s phone out of his shirt pocket. “Marvelous things, these phones. Did you know I can get an Internet connection all the way out here? Did you know, in fact, that I can send an e-mail to the editors of every major newspaper with the click of this one tiny little green button?”
Boyle glared at him, understanding plainly what Morgan was really telling him. Morgan went on.
“There were an awful lot of incriminating files on that chip. It would be a shame if a handful of them happened to be attached when this e-mail message goes out.”
“You’re bluffing!” said Boyle. “There were layers of encryption on that chip. There’s no way you could have broken it already.”
“No, there’s no way. Unless, of course, I happened to know the password.”
Boyle glowered, his eyes slits, and then burst into derisive laughter. “Nice try, Cobra. But you’re a rat backed into a corner. There’s nothing you wouldn’t say to escape. Do you really expect me to fall for that?”
“ ‘You failed, and now I’m sending Wagner to finish what you couldn’t do, Natasha.’ Sound familiar, Boyle?”
Boyle’s gloating expression took an apprehensive turn, and he looked at Morgan in angry, stunned silence. Then he screamed, “Drop the phone. Drop it now! Or the little bitch gets it!”
“You touch a hair on her head—”
“And what?” Boyle pulled harder on Alex’s hair, and she whimpered. The two men looked at each other in silence, furious. Then Boyle said, “You think I care about my reputation as much as you care about your daughter, Cobra?” Morgan just looked at him, concentrating to keep his anger in check. In another situation, he might try to go for his gun and shoot. But if he did, he knew Alex would be the first to die.
“See, Cobra, that’s your problem. Your attachment to your family. It stops you from going all-out. Keeps you from taking the risks that made you a great operative. Keeps you from making the hard decisions.”
“Like you did, Boyle? Betraying your country? Was that a hard decision?”
“You don’t know the first thing about patriotism, Cobra,” he fumed. “You risked your life, yes, but you hid behind your code name. You still do. And you never had to make the decision to kill a person, or twenty. You just followed orders. You were never ultimately responsible for the security of this country. You have never made a decision to kill fifty people today to save a hundred tomorrow. You don’t know what it means to make that kind of decision!” In his anger, he pulled Alex’s hair. She sobbed.
“Look, Boyle, I don’t care,” said Morgan. “You did what you did for your own reasons, and I don’t give a shit what they are. I just want my daughter back. So I’m forcing a draw. You toss away your gun, and we make the exchange. My daughter for the phone.”
“Are there any more copies?”
“This is the only one,” said Morgan.
“Suppose I believe you. How do I know that no one at the Agency has seen this?”
“Do you really think that they would let me come out here alone?” said Morgan. “This place would be swarming with Feds if I had told them.”