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I sigh heavily and drop my hands at my sides, the syringe filled with a cocktail that would’ve put Woodard to sleep long enough to get him back to my house quietly, dangles from my fingertips.
“Three minutes,” I say.
“O-OK…three minutes,” Woodard stutters. “I’m not a traitor.”
“So, you’re a liar,” Dorian says from beside me.
“No.” Woodard shakes his head. “I did sell information to Marion Callahan, the guy who dropped me off in the parking lot. But—”
“Sounds like a traitor to me,” Dorian adds and then raises his gun, pointed right at Woodard.
I reach out and place my hand on the cold steel, lowering it. The last thing I need is for Dorian to kill my victim and leave me with no one to put in my chair. Or, the gun to go off that close to my ear and make me go deaf.
“Clock’s ticking,” I say to Woodard.
He puts up his hands momentarily and then drops them on the tops of his legs covered by khaki pants.
“I wanted to prove to the new bossman that I’m worth keeping,” Woodard says. “Because I knew I was on my way out the first day Norton was killed and you guys took over. Look at me. I’m not necessarily considered an asset at first glance. And I couldn’t get a face-to-face meeting with the new boss.” He sighs. Already, I’m feeling a wave of disappointment begi
“Two minutes,” I remind him.
He nods and goes on:
“I met with Callahan twice and gave him two flash drives. Bogus information. Nothing on those drives is real. False names. False locations. Hell, I even made up details of a mission that never happened.”
“Why would you do that?” I ask.
As much as I need to deal with Cassia, I equally need to deal with this. It is my job, after all, and I could never bring myself to give Victor Faust less than one hundred percent of my effort.
“Because I looked into Callahan,” Woodard says. “I know my way around computers and information. I have backdoor access to FBI, CIA, Interpol—shit, I can get information on anyone from any database. But Callahan, he wasn’t in any databases. None. I took his fingerprints from the business card he gave me. I ran him against everything for two weeks. Nothing.”
“Well, that’s not entirely unusual,” I point out. “Given his profession.”
Woodard stands from the chair, so deep in thought that he probably doesn’t even notice. I let him. Dorian does, too, but keeps his gun at the ready down at his side. Woodard begins to pace, stopping every few seconds to look back at us, gesturing his hands intensely as he explains.
“Come on,” he says as if we should know better, “there’s always some kind of record, even if it’s hidden on a Girl Scouts application. No one is a ghost. Not like this guy.”
“So then he’s using a fake name and his prints have never been recorded,” Dorian says, getting as impatient as I was moments ago. “So fucking what. That doesn’t prove anything other than he’s good if there’s no record of him.”
Woodard smiles chillingly. “Not if he’s a Boss.”
That gets our attention.
Dorian and I look at each other briefly.
“Do you have any proof?” I ask.
“No,” Woodard says. “But think about it, the ones at the top of the food chain, they’re the most protected. They have no ties to anyone other than their right-hand men and their gatekeepers. They trust no one and they kill at the first sign of betrayal or suspicion. It’s why the bosses are harder to find.” Woodard points at me, still smiling darkly. “Have you ever seen Vo
“No,” I answer. “Not face-to-face.”
A grin spreads across Woodard’s heavily cracked lips.
“Do you even know his first name?”
I don’t answer, but I imagine the confused look on my face does that for me.
“That’s what I thought,” Woodard says.
He’s feeling much more confident now about this whole situation. I, on the other hand, have surpassed the feeling of anxiousness about getting back to Cassia in time, and am now more concerned about the things Woodard is telling us.
Dorian shoves the barrel of his gun into Woodard’s chest and forces him back into the chair.
“What the fuck are you trying to pull?” Dorian demands. “Marion Callahan has been reporting your stubby ass up the chain of command. Our boss knows what you did. If Callahan was the leader of another organization, why would he be messing with you at all? Why not just go to the source and take out our boss if he’s such a ghost?”
“Because Callahan can’t get to our boss,” I say, pulling Dorian by the shoulder to move him away from Woodard. “He’s trying to get in the old fashioned way, by working his way up that chain of command, gaining trust by pretending to weed out traitors.”
“OK, but since when do bosses go out in the field and get their hands dirty like that?” Dorian brings up a good point. “Why risk himself by putting himself out there? Why not just get one of his men to do it?”
“Because the best place to hide is in plain sight,” I say. “And if it was me and I wanted to take out another leader, I’d probably do it myself, too.”
Woodard nods at me as if telling me he couldn’t have said it better.
Even Victor Faust is guilty of this, wanting to be the one to take out the leaders. It’s like another badge on his shirt, a trophy, and completely understandable. When Victor sent me to France to get the key to the deposit box in New York from François Moreau, he didn’t send me there to kill their leader, Sébastien Fournier. He insisted that he’d be the one to take Fournier out.
“There’s one thing to prove before anything you’ve said can be taken into consideration.” I sit down on the ottoman in front of Woodard again, making sure he has a good view of the needle dangling from my fingers in-between my knees. “The information on those drives that you sold to Marion Callahan.”
Woodard’s chin jiggles again as he nods rapidly.
“It can be verified,” he says putting up his hands in surrender. “I swear it.”
I glance at Dorian still standing at my left. “Looks like you’ll be babysitting tonight,” I say and he looks instantly argumentative. “I’m going to get in contact with our employer after I leave here and tell him everything that was said here tonight.”
“Fuckin’ A, man, you can’t be serious,” Dorian contends, waving his gun hand out beside him. “I can’t fucking stay here. It smells like cough drops and…,” he wrinkles his whole face, “…cheese.”
I get up from the ottoman and dig in my pocket for the protective cap, slipping it back on the needle.
“If his story doesn’t check out,” I say as I start to walk past Dorian, “then you can shoot him,” I add with my hand on his shoulder.
Despite knowing I’ll never hear the end of this from Dorian later, I leave him there with James Woodard and set out to do what I have to do. First, I call Victor and tell him everything about our visit with Woodard. He instructs me to wait until I receive word about what to do next, which thankfully got me out of doing anything else about it for the rest of the night.
Now I can focus on Cassia.
My teeth are on edge, my throat is dry, my head is spi