As she read it again, she felt no despair as she had felt last time—instead, anger slowly built with each line. Already bitter from Painter’s abandonment, she recognized that John Hawkes was trying to do the same. To shuck her off when there was the least bit of trouble.
After all I did . . . all I risked . . .
Before she could think otherwise, she hit the reply button. She didn’t intend to send the response. She just needed to vent, to get it off her chest. She typed rapidly, unloading her fury through her fingertips. She wrote a long, rambling letter, declaring her innocence and explaining how she was actively clearing her name without any help from WAHYA. She underlined that last part. It felt good to do so. She expressed her disdain for the lack of loyalty and support shown to one of their own. She listed all of her accomplishments and contributions to the cause. She also let John Hawkes know how much WAHYA meant to her, how this betrayal and mistrust of her wounded her to the marrow of her bones.
By the time she typed those last words, tears were welling up in her eyes, blurring the screen. She knew they came from somewhere deep inside, from a wound that would not heal. She wanted to be loved for who she was—for the good, the bad, the noble, and the weak—and not to be tossed aside when her presence grew inconvenient. In the end, she recognized a truth about herself. She wanted to be loved like her father had loved her. She deserved that. She wanted to scream it at the world.
Instead, she stared at the screen, at the letter—and did the next best thing. She reached out, moved the cursor, and allowed her finger to hover. Painter said the Internet connection was vigorously encrypted.
What could be the danger?
Taking back a bit of control over her own life, she hit send.
9:18 A.M.
Salt Lake City, Utah
Rafe smiled as the in-box chimed with new mail. He checked his watch. It was hours earlier than he’d anticipated. Matters were moving forward splendidly. He straightened with a luxurious stretch, wearing a plush hotel robe and slippers, his hair still damp from a shower.
He glanced around the presidential suite, situated at the top of the Grand America Hotel at the heart of Salt Lake City. For the first time since arriving in the States, he almost felt at home, ensconced amid all the European appointments of the room: the handcrafted cherrywood Richelieu furniture, the Carrara marble in the spa bathroom, the seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries. From his perch atop the hotel, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto breathtaking views of the mountains and down to the meticulously tended parterre gardens far below.
A sniffling sob dampened his good mood.
He turned to the scrawny young man, stripped naked and taped to one of the Richelieu dining chairs. Duct tape sealed his mouth. Twin lines of snot ran from his nose. He gasped, struggling for air, eyes wide and glassy like a wounded fox.
But he wasn’t a fox.
He was Rafe’s hawk . . . a hawk he’d sent hunting.
The biographical data on Kai Quocheets had listed her affiliations, including her participation in WAHYA, the fierce young wolves fighting for Native American rights. It had taken less than an hour to determine where the organization’s leader had squirreled himself away. He’d come to Salt Lake City to be close to the action in the mountains, ready for the exposure that came with such a tragedy. But apparently John Hawkes had other needs, too. Bern had collected him out of a strip club near the airport. Seems the Native American activist liked his women white and blond, with perky fake breasts.
Another whimper rose from the chair.
Rafe held up a finger. “Patience, Mr. Hawkes. We’ll get back to you soon enough. You’ve been most cooperative. But first let’s make sure your hunt was successful.”
It had not taken much to convert John Hawkes to their cause. Two of his fingers still pointed toward the ceiling. Ashanda had snapped them back as easily as breaking small twigs. Rafe, with his brittle bones, knew that particular exquisite pain. Over the course of his life, he’d broken every one of his fingers and toes.
Not always by accident.
Eventually they won Mr. Hawkes’s cooperation, gaining all the necessary insight and personal details about Kai to craft a letter intended to draw out Rafe’s little escaped bird. And it had apparently worked.
Much faster than I expected . . .
In the e-mail sent out, he’d set a noon deadline for her to respond. She wasn’t wasting any time. He didn’t intend to either.
“Sir, we’ve succeeded in decrypting the e-mail’s text,” the team’s computer asset informed him.
Rafe turned to the man. The technician went simply by the name TJ—but Rafe had never been curious enough to ask what those initials stood for. He was an American, emaciated, often hyped on stimulants so he could run code for days at a time. The expert stood before a bevy of mini–mainframe/servers, all interconnected by Cat 6 cables and hooked into a T2 broadband line.