Forsaken Duty (Red Team #9)(82)

“Did she tell you she’d killed Mom? That her role in your life was premeditated?”

“Not until years later. Things had not been good between us for a while. I wanted to divorce her. That’s when she told me.” His face tensed. “By then, I’d brought her fully into my world. Not just with you kids, but my friends, my peers, Washington influencers. I was how she got in, got access to everyone.”

“That was when you started aggressively training Owen and me. What tipped you off?”

“I started to come out of my fog. Roberta had a lot of power…power I’d given her. I began to question things. Owen’s mom had died the same year as Mom. Nick Tremaine always questioned his wife’s death. The coroner said she died of anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. Nick said she wasn’t allergic to bees.” Dean leaned back in his seat, his gaze lost in memories.

“Nick warned me about Roberta, about how coincidental her appearance in my life was, coming just when it did. We even had a falling out over it. Roberta made me feel alive again. I didn’t think she could have done anything wrong.” He looked at Jax. “So when I began to be suspicious, I confronted her. She denied it. That gave me plausible reason to doubt my fears, but they never went away.

“When she invited the Whiddons over for dinner, I was concerned again. Everyone knew Senator Whiddon was dirty. I didn’t want him in my home. Nor did I want anyone thinking I had an association with him. Roberta brokered a deal on some legislation I’d been wanting to bring to the floor. After that deal, there were others. When I told her it had to stop, she fought back, saying if I exposed her now, not only would my career be over, but all the legislation I’d fought so hard for would become suspect. Everything in my life would be undone. And it wasn’t like we could dig Mom’s body up and redo an autopsy. She’d been cremated.” Dean sighed. “I had a circle of close friends, ones I trusted with my life and had since Vietnam. Nick Tremaine and Henry Myers.”

Jax knew this part of the story. Those two men had been frequent visitors to their house when he was a kid. It was through Nick that Jax met Owen. Even then the adults had been prepping him and Owen for a fight against an enemy neither of them fully understood.

Only one of his dad’s trio had turned out to have any kind of conscience at all. But his dad didn’t know that he knew, so Jax let him spill. There were ears listening. He’d told his FBI contact about this meeting. They were out there now, in a moving van across the street, waiting to make a run on the house when Jax gave the go-ahead.

First, though, Jax wanted everything on record. All of it. The lies. The justifications. The connections.

“I asked Nick and Henry for help,” Dean continued. “We couldn’t find anything connecting Roberta to the Omnis, but we knew Whiddon was under their influence. We agreed that I’d become compromised. They thought we could use it in our favor, that I could be an agent for the fight against the Omnis. I could use her as she used me. That’s when Nick faked his death. Henry, too, developed a secret identity that he used in the tunnels where the Omnis were building a fortress hidden from the world above.”

“You sent me to Henry when Addy was taken.”

Dean nodded. “He decided to make his part-time gig in the tunnels a full-time thing. He thought he could break the Omnis from within if he taught the tunnel residents to fight. Men and women, even kids.”

“Did you know that Henry’s granddaughter was in the tunnels?”

“I knew the Omnis took her.”

“The Omnis didn’t take her. He did. He stuck her like a pig. She bled out so profusely, it’s a wonder that she, a toddler at the time, lived. He gave her over to the monsters.”

“The Omnis sent an assassin to his house. They fought. It wasn’t Henry who hurt Ace. It was the assassin.”

“He let it happen.”

Dean sighed. “Nothing is black and white in this. Henry had to choose between losing his entire family or making a tithe of one member. It was the lesser of two evils. He couldn’t get her out without putting the rest of his family in jeopardy. He went in after her, developed his Santo persona so he could watch over her.”

“Bullshit. The Omnis forced her into prostitution and he did nothing.”

“Women are made for sex.”

Jax felt sick. “She was fourteen.”

Dean waved that away. “He taught her to fight. She’s the warrior she is today because of him.”

Jax had to take a breath. This meeting wasn’t about him…he had to remember his goals, had to keep his dad talking. If he didn’t get it on tape, who would believe such a crazy story? Besides, he didn’t want to say anything that would get Ace into trouble.

“So, go on,” Jax prompted. “You figured out Roberta was an Omni plant, that she’d killed Mom. The three of you decided to fight back, leaving her in place.”

“Yes. While you and Owen were at West Point, we laid the groundwork for the Red Team. It was supposed to be completely dark, but Roberta found out about it.”

“How’d that happen?”

“I don’t know. We suspected Whiddon. He was chair of the subcommittee responsible for the funds. Anyway, he redirected the original intent of the Red Team to focus on terror threats outside the U.S. I went along with it, because at the time, we didn’t yet know if the Omnis were being organized by foreign interests.”