“I want Simon Cahill. I want you.” Estabrook was smug again, not as winded. “I want your source. I know you have one. Who is it?”

“I have no idea. Whoever it is wanted to remain anonymous.”

“Liar. Lies, lies, lies. You tell so many you don’t know when to stop. You’ll want to hunt me to the ends of the earth by the time I’ve finished.”

“How can we reach you?” March asked.

“I’ll reach you.”

March glanced at Simon, and he nodded, taking his cue, and spoke into the phone. “Hello, Norman. It’s been a while. We should talk. You and me. Face to face.”

Estabrook snorted. “I want March alive and suffering, thinking about me every minute of every day, but you, Simon. Nothing’s changed. I want you dead. Dead, dead, dead.”

He disconnected.

The room was quiet.

March said, “Abigail’s alive. We have the call on tape.”

“The screams were tactical,” Lucas said. “Estabrook hurt her, but she played to it. She wanted him to think he’d gotten to her. Make him back off before he hit her harder, maybe keep his frustration from building to a breaking point.”

Yarborough flipped his knife shut. “I heard a seagull in the background. Anyone else? It’s not much. Damn seagulls are everywhere.”

No one responded.

Simon went out into the hall. March followed. “Lizzie Rush is your source, John,” Simon said. “You knew her mother. What the hell’s going on? Does Lizzie think you covered up her mother’s murder for your own ambition?”

“Did you?” Bob asked, coming out into the hall.

March looked at him. “No.”

Bob shrugged. “Sorry, John. I had to-”

“I know you did.” March’s voice was tortured but controlled. “I don’t know what Lizzie’s personal feelings are toward me, but I believe she trusts me. We need to trust her.”

“And we need to protect her,” Simon added.

March gave a grim nod. “Unfortunately, she doesn’t make that easy.”

“She thinks she’s one of us,” Bob said.

“From what Will tells me,” Simon said, “she has the skills and the instincts of a pro.”

“That doesn’t make her one.” Bob looked from Simon to March before he spoke again. “If Estabrook finds out what she’s done, he’ll kill her.”

There was nothing left to say. Simon remembered he had Lucas Jones’s keys in his pocket. Without a word, he walked down the hall and out of the building.

No one stopped him.

Chapter 25

Near Kennebunkport, Maine

5:51 a.m., EDT

August 27

Abigail could hear seagulls. She sank onto the cracked linoleum floor of the basement room where she was now being held. Her head ached, and she could feel blood trickling down her chin from where Norman had hit her on the mouth. Amateur. He had no idea how to hit a person.

She leaned her head against the wall, listening for more seagulls as she tried to stay focused and alert.

Owen…

Two of Estabrook’s men had come for her in her stateroom on the yacht and taken her at gunpoint to a fast, rigid inflatable dinghy. She was alone with them in the Zodiac as they sped across choppy waves in the cold mist. She wasn’t blindfolded, so she had seen the most beautiful dawn spill across the horizon in shades of pink, purple and red. Fog hovered over the western horizon. She’d sailed the New England coast with Owen and recognized the magnificent summer homes and inns of Kennebunkport, a popular tourist and fishing village in southern Maine. She and Owen had docked there a few weeks ago and wandered its attractive streets hand in hand. They’d had lobster rolls while watching the tide ebb from the mouth of the Kennebec River.

But even as she was allowing herself the comfort of that memory, her captors had shoved her down into the boat, and she’d vomited-flat-out seasickness, she’d told herself. Not fear or pain.

Thinking about Owen strengthened her, even as she felt tears hot in her eyes. Her face was bloody and swollen, and she was dehydrated. She had no energy left. Still, Estabrook’s thugs had threatened to kill just about everyone she knew and cared about if she tried anything. They’d seemed agitated, even nervous, as if they understood they were working for someone whose tolerance for risk might exceed their own and lead them to disaster.

They’d tied the Zodiac to an ancient dock in a cove not easily seen from land or sea. Getting on either side of her, they escorted her at gunpoint up a steep trail to an abandoned house built onto the hillside overlooking the ocean.

They brought her down dusty stairs to a walk-out basement and shoved her into a room furnished with an old sofa and a folding card table and chairs. Tall shelves held board games, paperback novels and comics, and the walls were covered with posters of the Hulk, Batman and various other comic-book superheroes.

Kids had hung out here, Abigail thought now as she stayed still, pain pulsing through her. This had to be the Rush family home in Maine. Lizzie Rush owned it. Where was she now? Abigail resisted the urge to speculate and instead assessed her surroundings. The room had small eyebrow windows-she’d never get out that way. She’d have to get out into the hall somehow, where she’d noticed a door that exited onto the side of the house.

She shut her eyes against a flutter of nausea and a stab of pain. She could hear Bob telling her that one day the constant training they did would come in handy. “You’ll be glad you know how to take a hit.”

Glad wasn’t the word she’d use, but tonight, on the phone with her father, with Norman Estabrook relishing his power over her, she’d acted with reasonable control and deliberation, falling back on her training to help get her through her ordeal. The agony and fear she’d experienced had been real, but she felt no sense of humiliation at having cried for her father. Whatever Estabrook believed about her, she knew what she’d done, and why.

Her father and anyone else listening would understand, as she would have in their place, that she’d been trying both to survive and provide them with as much information as possible about the man they were hunting.

At least now they knew she was alive, and they knew for sure who had her.

Estabrook and Fletcher entered the basement room. Fletcher had stood by while Estabrook hit her. But Abigail didn’t think he’d liked it. If nothing else, the violence and the call to her father were reckless and unnecessary in the eyes of a professional. He slouched against the doorjamb, impassive while Estabrook massaged the hand he’d used to hit her. In the dim light, she saw that his knuckles were swollen.

He didn’t speak to her right away as he paced in front of her, more agitated than she’d seen him in the long hours of her captivity.

“You can stop pacing, Mr. Estabrook,” Fletcher said with a yawn. “Your man Bassette isn’t coming back.”

Estabrook spun around at him. “How do you know?”

“Because I killed him. It was necessary. He was dangerously incompetent.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Sorry, mate. There was no time to ask your permission.”

With a sharp breath, Estabrook splayed the fingers of his bruised hand, then opened and closed them into a fist two times before speaking again. “What about Fiona O’Reilly?” he asked, calmer.

Fletcher shrugged. “She’s not a concern now that Bassette’s gone.”

“The police will know-”

“They’d know, regardless. They had Bassette’s blood. He had a criminal record. He might as well have left a bread-crumb trail for them. Your two remaining men now understand the stakes if they get out of line.” Fletcher never raised his voice or adjusted his position against the doorjamb. “I got you out of Montana, and I’ve kept the police away from you thus far, but I can’t perform miracles. You have highly motivated law-enforcement personnel all over the world looking for you.”