Anne noted with satisfaction that the yard crew had come in her absence. The flower beds had been readied for winter. She’d tried working outside — it seemed so domestic, so in character for her new persona — but it had bored her profoundly.
Sooner or later the surrounding area would all be developed. But for now, the woods baffled the sound from the nearby state road. The little neighborhood was both peaceful and cordial. None of the homeowners were out in their front yards, though at the end of the cul-de-sac, a couple of teenage boys were shooting hoops on their driveway.
The grinding noise of the garage door opening seemed very loud. Anne eased in, parking neatly in half of the space. She’d begun leaving the other side open for Holt’s truck.
There was a movement in the corner of her eye. Anne’s head whipped around. Someone had slipped in with the car and run to the front of the garage, quick as a cat. The intruder was a small, hard woman in her forties with harshly dyed black hair.
Anne thought of pinning the woman to the garage wall. But the intruder was smart enough to stand off to the side, out of the path of the car, and also out of the reach of a flung-open door.
This was Anne’s day for encountering dangerous people.
The woman pantomimed rolling down a window, and Anne pressed the button.
“Hello, Cassie,” Anne said. “What a surprise.”
“Lower the garage door. Turn the engine off. Get out slowly. We’re going inside to talk.”
There was a gun in Anne’s center console, but by the time she’d extracted it, Cassie would have shot her. At least the knife was still in Anne’s pocket.
“Hurry up!” Cassie was impatient.
Anne pressed the button to lower the garage door. Following Cassie’s repeated instructions, she put the car in park and turned it off. She could not throw her knife at the best angle to wound Cassie. There was no point delaying; she opened the car door and stood.
“It’s been a long time.” Cassie looked rough. Anne’s former subordinate had never worn makeup, and she certainly hadn’t gotten that dye job in any salon.
“Not long enough,” Cassie said. She pushed her hood completely off her head. Dark hoodie, dark sweatpants. Completely forgettable.
“If you don’t want to talk to me, why are you here? Why the ambush?”
“We need to have a conversation. I figured you’d shoot first and ask questions later,” Cassie said. “All things considered.”
“Considering you threw me under the bus?”
When Senator Miriam Epperson’s daughter had died in the mountain-survival test, Cassie had laid the blame directly on Anne’s shoulders. At the time, Anne had thought that strategy was understandable, even reasonable. It didn’t matter that Cassie had been the one who’d kept telling Dorcas Epperson to suck it up when the girl claimed she was ill. Anne clearly understood that the buck would stop with her, because she was in charge of Camp East. There was no need for both of them to go down.
Understanding Cassie’s motivation did not mean Anne had forgotten.
“It was my chance to take charge,” Cassie said. “Let’s go in the house. Get out your keys, then zip your purse.”
“So why aren’t you at the farm on this fine day? Snow training will begin in a few weeks,” Anne said. She unlocked the back door and punched in the alarm code. She walked into the kitchen slowly, her hands held out from her side.
From behind her, Cassie said, “Have you seen David Angola lately?” Anne had expected that question. She kept walking across the kitchen and into the living room. She bypassed the couch and went to the armchair, her normal seat. She turned to face Cassie. “I’d be more surprised to see David than I am to see you, but I’d be happier. He’s still running Farm West?”
“He was,” Cassie said. She was savagely angry. “We’re both on probation until... never mind. I figured he’d head here, since you’re such a favorite of his. I just found out Greg is here too. He was always David’s man, to the bone.”
“Surely that’s a melodramatic way to look at it?” And inaccurate. Holt was his own man. At least Anne had believed so.
Now she was leaving margin for error.
“I don’t know why both of you are living new lives here,” Cassie said. “In the same town. In North Carolina, for God’s sake. No two people have ever been placed together.”
“Most people get dead,” Anne said. “The point of being here is that my location is secret.”
“It took some doing to find out,” Cassie said. “But by the usual means, I discovered it.” She smiled, very unpleasantly.
“Coercion? Torture? Sex?” Anne added the last option deliberately. Cassie didn’t answer, but she smiled in a smug way. Sex it was.
That’s a leak that needs to be plugged, Anne noted. She should have taken care of it the first time someone from her past had shown up in her house and tried to kill her. At the time, Anne had dismissed it as a one-off, a past enemy with super tracking ability and a lot of funds. Now she knew there was someone who was talking. A weak person, but one who had access to records...
“Gary Pomeroy in tech support,” Anne said, making an informed guess. Cassie’s eyes flickered. Bingo.
“Doesn’t make any difference, does it?” Cassie now stood in front of the couch, still on guard, a careful distance away. She gestured with the gun. “Strip. Throw each garment over to me.”
Anne was angry, though it didn’t show on her face. No one can tell me to strip in my own house, she thought. But what she said was, “What are we going to talk about?” She stepped out of her pumps and unzipped her pants.
“Where Angola hid the money,” Cassie said.
“You’ll have to tell me what you’re talking about,” Anne said. “I’m totally out of the loop.” Anne’s jacket came off (her knife in its pocket), then her blouse. When she was down to her bra and underpants, she turned in a circle to prove there was nothing concealed under them. “So, what money?”
Her eyes fixed on Anne, Cassie ran the fingers of her left hand over every garment, tossing the jacket behind the couch when she felt the knife. “Someone in accounting sent up a flare,” she said. “After that, the accountants settled in. Like flies on a carcass.” Cassie waved her gun toward an easy chair. After Anne sat, she tossed Anne’s pants and blouse back within her reach. While Anne got dressed, keeping her movements slow and steady, Cassie sat on the couch, still too wary and too far away for a successful attack.
“Both camps got audited?” Anne said, buttoning up her blouse.
“Yes, the whole program. Our accounts got frozen. Everyone was buzzing. Bottom line, in the past few years over half a million dollars vanished.”
Anne was surprised at the modesty of the amount. It wasn’t cheap to run clandestine training facilities staffed with expert instructors, much less to keep a fully staffed and equipped infirmary. “The money was missing from the budget? Or from the enemy fund?”
“The fund.” Both farms contributed to a common pool of money confiscated — or stolen outright — from criminals of all sorts, or from people simply deemed enemies. The existence of this fund was known only to the upper managers and to Oversight... and, because it couldn’t be helped, a high-clearance branch of the tech team responsible for data handling also had access to the figures.
Cassie continued, “It would have been too obvious if it had only disappeared from David’s allocation. It came from the undivided fund. Oversight’s pretending they suspect David. I know they really think I did it. I’m suffering for it. Even when I’m cleared, and I will be, and get reinstated... they’ve halved the number of trainees for next year because of the deficit. I’ll have to let two instructors go.”