She straightened her shoulders, balled up her fists, said, “No.”

He shot her in the foot.

She screamed and crumpled.

Jack grabbed her hair and pulled her up.

Her hands and feet and bathrobe were muddy.

“Make the call,” he said.

She gritted her teeth, her nostrils flared, her breathing picked up tempo, and she refused to look at him or the phone, so he shot her other foot, too.

She screamed again, crumpled again.

“We’ve still got hands, knees, and elbows to go,” Jack said. He shoved the phone in her face. “You’ll be doing your country a favor by making the call.”

She grabbed the phone, scrolled through the contacts, dialed.

Jack tugged the device from her hand, put the call on speaker, gave the phone back. Steven Hayes answered. Wilson told him she’d been kidnapped by the people he’d been trying to find, driven off in her own car, and shot twice, and now they wanted to talk to him. Jack told Hayes what he’d already told Wilson.

He was trying to stop this assassination.

He had information to offer. Hayes was welcome to look at it first, before deciding if he valued it enough to barter for a life. They should meet.

“Where and when?” Hayes said.

Jack hung up, pulled Liv off the ground, and shoved her onto the backseat. “I already had that number,” he said. “You could have spared yourself two crippled feet by not being such an asshole.”

She spit at him.

He smiled, pulled the SIM from the phone, pocketed it, powered the device back on, and left it lying in the field. He climbed in beside her and slammed the door. “Don’t need you anymore,” he said, “but gotta keep you until it’s over. Let’s hope your boss is better at playing this game than you are.”

Jill pulled back on the road and hit the gas.

The Range Rover, like most modern vehicles, was hackable and trackable and probably had had a target slapped on it before he’d gotten off the phone. The big guns were coming, and he was going to outrun them with a naked woman who couldn’t walk.

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 35

Brush Creek Township
Pennsylvania, USA

KARA

THE ROOM HAD ONE WINDOW, HIGH AND NARROW, AND IF SHE ANGLED off as far as the chain would reach and then stretched, she could catch just a glimpse of the porch and the spot where the car had been. The rest was sky and trees. Nearest neighbors, best as she could tell, were a few miles down the road, and she’d been left alone, ankle shackled to a chain that ran through a boarded-up hole in the floor to some kind of concrete anchor beneath the house. Ten hours by car from Chicago for this, an old pier-and-beam on the edge of nowhere Pennsylvania, where she could scream for days and never be heard.