Thrill Ride (Black Knights Inc. #4)(94)
It made Rock sick. His role in her deranged logic made him sick.
“What money?” he asked, having to swallow the bile that climbed up the back of his throat.
“My partner,” she frowned, “the man at the CIA who found the targets for The Project, signed on to help not because he believed in our cause.” And the way she used the word “our” made Rock want to vomit. “But because he wanted the money from the illegal accounts these terrible men had squirreled away. I agreed, of course, because I needed the intelligence he could gather, but I never thought to take a penny until Marcus needed a little extra to run a television ad campaign.”
And, suddenly, the picture, the whole sordid mess of it, was clear. “And Billingsworth discovered the questionable origins of this money used to bolster your husband’s campaign, which would’ve eventually led him to The Project, so you had him killed.”
“He was going to wreck everything!” she lamented. “I couldn’t let that happen. You can understand that, can’t you?”
The woman was a serious piece of work. That she could be a practicing psychiatrist was almost too terrifying to contemplate.
“Can’t you see,” she went on, “that his life was nothing when compared to the lives we saved by getting rid of the type of men who killed your parents, Jonathan’s wife and daughter,” she let her eyes slide to the man in question, “and my brother?”
And, yes, Rock had discovered what he’d assumed had been the impetuous behind her penning that thesis all those years ago. It had to do with her twin brother. Apparently, he’d been caught sleeping with a local drug kingpin’s mistress, and the kingpin had the guy shot in the head. But, like most kingpins, the dirty work was done by someone else, so he never received so much as a minute in jail.
Rock remembered that drug kingpin very clearly since he was the first target Rock ever interrogated. Rodrigo Vasquez.
“But he was an innocent man,” Vanessa whispered, obviously no longer able to hold her tongue. But her hand? God love the woman, she still had it pressed against the small of his back. A tiny, warm touch of assurance despite everything she was learning about him and the truth of his second job.
“It was the only way,” Donna Ward explained.
Dunn lunged, and had Steady not been standing directly behind the man, Rock had no doubt the guy would’ve gone for Donna Ward’s throat. As it was, Steady managed to hook both hands around Dunn’s shoulders, wrestling him back toward the bathroom’s door with Dunn yelling hoarsely, “You turned me into a murderer. A murderer!”
“That’s enough,” Rock said, reaching into his tuxedo jacket to click off the recorder he’d stored there. “We have everything we need.”
“What the hell are we going to do with her?” Ozzie asked. “We can’t let her go and then confront her boss like we’d planned. The crazy bitch doesn’t have a boss.”
“I’m not crazy,” Donna Ward insisted, the wild look in her eyes proving her words false. “I’m not—”
Boss slapped a hand over her mouth again.
“We take her with us and turn her over to General Fuller,” Steady announced, and Rock disliked that option with every fiber of his being, but he knew it was the only one that was viable, proven by Steady’s next words. “We don’t know who her accomplice in the CIA is. We don’t know what she’s capable of doing if we release her. Not to mention the fact she’d probably go to ground like wounded rabbit. No. We have to take her.”
Rock knew Steady was right, and now Donna Ward was struggling in Boss’s grasp again, her eyes rolling around like pinballs.
“What about the local authorities?” Eve asked quietly, and Rock would be forever grateful to her for getting them into the fundraiser. This mission would’ve been far more difficult, their ability to maneuver through the hotel nearly impossible, if not for the security badges now clipped to their clothing. “Couldn’t you just hand her over to them along with that tape you made?”
Boss answered for Rock. “The local authorities wouldn’t know how to make hide nor hair of all this. Plus, it started with a treasonous idea within the CIA, and those folks are known for covering their tracks. So, since we don’t know who her accomplice is, and unless we want Rock and Dunn to find themselves food for the fishes at the bottom of Lake Michigan, it’s better we take this all the way to the top.” He turned to Rock, “I’ll call General Fuller and tell him you’re coming.”
Rock nodded, a hard knot of regret vying for space in his chest beside the hard knot of remorse.
“Hallway’s clear out to the alley exit,” Ghost announced from his position by the bathroom door. “If we’re doin’ this thing, the time is now.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Rock glanced at the crowd gathered in the chopper shop, looking so incongruent in their fancy eveningwear against all the heavy machinery, and he felt like he’d just come back from one of those ball-busting, seventy-two-hour insertions into the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The ones he’d done back when he’d been with the SEALs and one of his many suck-ass jobs requiring him to scour caves and bunkers looking for Taliban insurgents.
He was body-weary from too much adrenaline coursing through his system and mind-weary because Donna Ward’s interrogation was the most disturbing of his life. You know, considering her revelations meant everything he’d always thought of himself, the man he was and the jobs he’d done, were all a big stinking pile of hogwash.