Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(96)

The only thing she could be certain of was the ropes lashing her wrists and ankles to this chair. That and the compact Walther still strapped to her thigh. At the airfield, Ogden and her father had been thrown to the ground and searched, but she and her mother hadn’t warranted such treatment. From the way Emerson Soto Flores spoke, Lea didn’t believe he held women in high regard. He and her father had that much in common. She hoped for the chance to make both men reconsider their prejudices.

A door opened, and the room fell silent apart from the whirl of an approaching electric motor. An older woman’s voice broke the silence.

“I send you for two, and you bring me four.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. It seemed wise to let you decide for yourself.”

Lea recognized the man’s voice from the airfield. Emerson Soto Flores’s words showed respect, but the tension in his voice suggested that son and mother did not see eye to eye.

“We will see. How many did we lose?” the woman asked.

“Five. Tomás will not see the morning.”

“So many?”

“There were more than we anticipated. It was . . . difficult.”

“That is disappointing. Make Tomás comfortable.”

“He is.”

“And their killers?” There was a silence. “Good. The airfield is cleaned up?”

“The cars will be discovered, but no one will make sense of what happened there. The bodies have been prepared.”

“Good. Then let me meet the two extras you have brought.”

A rough hand gripped the nape of Lea’s neck as the hood was tugged free. She blinked and looked around, confirming her suspicion—she’d been returned to Niobe. She’d never spent a night at the Wolstenholme, but there was no mistaking the faded opulence of the presidential suite. On her tour of the hotel, Jimmy Temple had recited the proud history of the hotel and shared anecdotes about its many illustrious guests. She wondered now if, in the last century, there had ever been a gathering quite as strange as this one.

Her fingers were numb and had turned a light frostbite blue. She flexed them, hoping to coax blood back into them, but the knots that bound her to this chair hadn’t been tied with her circulation in mind. Beside her, Damon Ogden groaned under his hood; he’d taken the worst of it at the airfield. Her parents completed the row—four fools tied to chairs.

She counted six armed men spread around the room, many of whom she’d served at the Toproll over the last few weeks. Emerson knelt on one knee beside a woman in an expensive wheelchair with a plush burgundy leather seat. The woman was a lion, a proud dignity to her posture. No jewelry. A conservative black dress fell to her ankles. Lea guessed her age as sixty, and thought she might once have had a kind, maternal face, but the thick scars that bloomed at the woman’s throat, fanning up her jaw and across her cheek, had burned all that away. The woman’s silver hair, drawn back in a modest bun, made no effort to hide the melted scab that had been her left ear. Lea saw no kindness in her eyes, no signs of empathy of any kind.

“It’s rude to stare, girl.”

“It’s rude to tie people to chairs,” Lea snapped back, before she thought better of it.

The right side of the woman’s face smiled. “Who is she?”

“Mother, may I present Chelsea Merrick.”

“That explains her manners. Welcome, my dear,” the woman said, and gestured for the next hood to be removed.

The guard moved down the row like a hostess in a game show revealing the prizes. Off came Ogden’s hood. A length of rope had been used as a crude gag. That interested the old woman, who held up a questioning finger.

“Why is the black one gagged?”

“It was either that or cut out his tongue.”

“Who is he?”

Emerson whispered in her ear, and Lea saw her smile.

“CIA? Well, what an unexpected windfall.”

The final two hoods came off. The Merricks looked around in a panic. There were standard questions that came with the removal of hoods: Where am I? Why are you holding me? But no one asked them. Charles and Veronica Merrick knew better than to open their mouths. If they thought to question why, they could always refer to the swollen imprint of a pistol barrel that ran along Damon Ogden’s swollen jaw, across his left eye, and up to his forehead. An object lesson in who was in charge and how the rules had changed since the firefight at the airfield. Rule one: Charles Merrick wasn’t blustering his way through this. Rule two: No one gave a damn that Damon Ogden worked for the CIA.

“Do you know who I am?” the woman asked Merrick.

Merrick shook his head, downcast eyes showing a deference Lea never thought she’d see. Apparently, it took a pistol-whipping to teach her father a little humility.

“That’s not unexpected. My name is Lucinda King Soto. Although you never met face-to-face, my husband worked for many years to move your money out of the United States. I’ve come for that money and for the honor of my husband, Montel Soto Flores.”

Lea didn’t recognize the name, but her parents and Damon Ogden certainly did. The three of them looked at the older woman in shock and fear.

“That’s not possible,” said Ogden. “You died in Mexico.”

“Yes,” Lucinda said. “Thank you for that.”