“Yes?”

“Hello, darling. Having a bad day?”

Damian.

I don’t even ask how he got the number.

“Sounds like you’re taking a bath,” he says.

“What do you want?” I steal a glance through the open bathroom door, afraid he might be sitting on the bed.

“It’s not what I want. Other than to make you happy.”

I crane my neck to look in the hallway closet mirror. The room is empty. “Then stay away.”

“I am. But that’s not why I’m calling. I understand you had a difficult time today with a rather difficult individual with bad hygiene.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He’s not in my hotel room, but has he been following me? I took an FBI jet. There’s no way he could have known or even made it here in time. I didn’t even know I’d be here four hours ago.

“Of course you don’t. We all have our secrets. You might want to call on him again, though. He might be a little more cooperative.”

I’ve seen what Damian has done to men who get in my way. I stand up in the bathtub and almost slip. “What did you do?!”

If he threatened Reynolds, that could be very, very bad. I feel like I’m about to throw up. Images of the jack of spades in the dead pimp’s pocket fill my mind. It’s hard to breathe.

“What did you do?” I ask again forcefully.

“I appealed to his sensibilities and higher logic. I think he’s going to be very helpful.”

“Damian! What did you do?” I shout it out loud. I’m frantically trying to towel off and nearly fall over. I don’t know how I’m going to explain things if he threatened Reynolds, or worse.

“Relax, sweetheart. He’s fine. Trust me. He wants to help you.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because I bought his company.”

32

DAMIAN WAS THE CALL Liam Reynolds had to take when he left the restaurant, and he couldn’t refuse. Damian made him an attractive offer, then wired the money into his bank account.

Mark Ross, the Texas field agent, picks me up from the hotel and takes me over to Reynolds’s condominium. On the way I call up Ailes and try to explain to him what Damian did.

“Where did he get the money?” asks Ailes, surprised.

“I’m afraid to ask. He wanted to put the company in my name, but thankfully he didn’t. It’s probably registered to some offshore shell company.”

“I kind of wish he had. I’d love to see the accountant’s reaction when you put it on the expense report. What did he pay?”

“He didn’t say. I’m sure Reynolds will tell us if we ask.”

Reynolds was now expecting me and would turn over all the passwords and provide us with any help we need. The next step is getting Ailes’s team access so they can download all the data and put whatever they need on the server to trap the Warlock.

Even if the Warlock is covering his tracks, there are ways to work around that if you know someone is going to be visiting a specific site. Instead of tracking the source of a connection, you can make his computer send out a burst of requests, kind of like a fingerprint. With the cooperation of local ISPs, you can look at their traffic and trace the pulses.