Say It Again (First Wives, #5)(82)

AJ ran a hand through his hair.

“Who does Pohl work for?” Sasha asked.

“He’s nothing but a pimp. He gathers assignments, farms them out. I never had contact with the actual client.”

“Just so we’re clear, you’re an assassin.” AJ’s anger was measured by his words.

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Brilliant deduction, Watson. I’m sure your girlfriend here has already told you that.”

“My sister would never associate herself with you.”

“You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? Makes it easier. Truth is, Amelia and I were close at Richter. I left the year before her. We stayed in contact using the senior computer.” Olivia looked at Sasha. “Amelia was gifted in her ability to encrypt messages and use of computers. To the point that by the time she graduated, she’d devised an entire system that erased all correspondence within minutes.”

“Why the camera at her home?” AJ asked.

“I disappeared from Pohl’s radar six months ago. I insisted on the camera and recordings to track when she wasn’t home. Just like I did on the flat in Germany. Just like I’m sure you do, Sasha.”

Sasha nodded toward AJ. Her bare-bones studio flat she almost never slept in had more booby traps than Fort Knox.

“There isn’t anything I’m going to be able to say to gain your trust. I wouldn’t if I were you.” She pushed off the counter and grabbed a glass before moving to the sink. “Pohl wants me dead. Rogue assassins get their heads patted with shovels. I knew that less than six months in. He recorded my first assignment. It was a test, he told me. Make sure I could take care of myself while gathering information for his client.” Olivia turned on the water, her back to them. “He set me up. It was kill or be killed.” She lifted the glass in the air after it was full. “I’m still here.”

Sasha saw what would have been her had Alice not been there to direct her toward other places. “Who do you want dead?” Sasha asked her.

“Pohl . . . but that’s too easy, isn’t it? Lodovica farms for the man, cultivates and nurtures us. Who’s to say Pohl is the only one she sends sacrificial lambs to? You take her out and then what? The board appoints another who does the same thing?”

AJ and Sasha exchanged looks. One that said they were both thinking of his mother, who once served on the board of directors of the school.

Sasha thought about her private conversations with the headmistress, the things she revealed. “The secrets are in the vault.”

Olivia turned. “What vault?”

“Lower level. Below the range.”

“I thought Claire said they’d sealed up the downstairs,” AJ said.

“That doesn’t mean they cleared everything out first. If they were smart, they did.”

“Why not just destroy incriminating files?” AJ asked.

Olivia snorted. “Because it’s impossible to keep all the players in line without all the dirt you have on them. A school as old and dirty as Richter would take a bomb to clean up.”

AJ sat on the edge of one of the two beds. “I can see why you wouldn’t go to the authorities and blow the whistle on Richter, but what about you, Sasha? Or Claire? Pohl went on television and called you out as a kidnapper and labeled Claire as a troubled teen in need of guidance.”

“I have enemies. And if they have dirt, or created dirt on Claire as a troubled teen, who is going to listen to her?”

AJ tilted his head to the side. “What enemies?” AJ asked Sasha.

She opened her mouth to answer, her father’s name on the tip of her tongue.

“Seems you have more powerful friends than you ever did enemies. Those same friends who are surrounding and protecting Claire right now. I may not have been involved with my father and all the diplomatic crap he did while serving as the ambassador, or even helped while he worked the Democratic campaign trail . . . but I did witness my fair share of organizations cutting their losses and distancing themselves from bad press. Who is to say that going to the embassy and filing formal complaints won’t blow this whole thing up?”

Olivia set her glass down with a heavy hand. “The wheels of justice turn slowly. You put this Claire girl up or Sasha, and targets follow them. Dead within six hours. Guaranteed.”

An itch started in the back of Sasha’s brain. “Legitimate agencies recruit from Richter.”

“It’s not the legitimate ones we’re concerned with,” Olivia stated.

“No. But legitimate agencies will want to keep places like Richter going. Look at Claire,” Sasha said to AJ. “Look how quickly she found a place on the team. She’d put any high school graduate in the States to shame. I didn’t like the rules and restrictions, but I’m smarter for them.”

“What are you suggesting?” he asked.

“If you bring the militaristic training aboveground, then what do you have?”

“A military boarding school.”

“Right. You remove the secrets put in place after the Cold War and you have nothing more than a strict military school you can find all over the world.”

AJ was staring at her. “I’m following you, Sasha, but I don’t know where you’re going.”

“The school is on lockdown. Classrooms are boarded up, students are being diverted to PE and self-defense classes. Lodovica knows something is coming. If I were running Richter and thought an investigation was in the pipeline, I’d be building brick walls and calling them abandoned fallout shelters. I’d be preparing the students for changes and maybe even reassigning some students to other schools.”