She paused for effect, waited until silence became painful, and said, “At some point within the next three days, I will put a bullet between the eyes of a sitting member of Congress, and all your guys out there running themselves ragged trying to find my brother will never see me coming. Even if I turned you loose right now and you went straight back and told your bosses everything, you couldn’t stop me. I am that good. Not bragging. It’s just the way it is. It’ll be a public spectacle, something impossible for TV cameras to miss. Those are my orders. I’ll give you a minute to connect the dots and figure out why.”

Kara said, “I don’t need a minute.”

“To be clear, we don’t want to do this, but your people are making it really hard not to. Whether we do or don’t, your guys still want us dead. You’ve seen my brother work. You know what he’s capable of. So you get how big a deal this is when I tell you he has a way to shut this whole thing down. It’ll require a channel to where the backroom deals are made. We need you to make that call.”

Kara studied the table and then her hands, as if plotting the many directions this could lead. She said, “Even if I manage to get the right person on the phone, there’s nothing I can say that will make them take me seriously.”

“No,” Jill said, “but they’ll take him seriously.”

She opened the tablet, punched in the code, pulled the image up on the screen, and flipped it forward. “Liv Wilson, right?”

Kara didn’t speak, but she didn’t have to.

“We already know how to find her,” Jill said, “but we’d prefer a call. A switchboard number will do. Just a few words . . . proof-of-life type stuff.”

Kara said, “Are you planning to grab her, like you did me?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you planning to kill her?”

“Would it bother you if we were?”

“I don’t like her. You already know that,” Kara said. “I probably wouldn’t care a whole lot if I didn’t know and didn’t play a part in it. But I do know. I don’t want her blood on my hands.”

Jill closed the image.

Conscience mattered to Kara, and that’s why she played to it.

“We don’t know what kind of resistance we’ll face,” she said. “Our goal is to do this with as little violence as possible.”

Kara said, “I guess in the end it’s all the same. The goal is to stop the chaos. If you want the guy who runs the shop, I have his cell phone, too.”

“I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

Kara recited. Jill typed.