“La Bruja is here, too?”

“There’s another room over the way. She’s being questioned. She’s going to get the justice you want—it might just be a different kind.”

“Why’d you go after her?” Milton asked. “Because of the ambassador?”

She nodded. “FBI jurisdiction extends to crimes committed against US citizens and interests. His murder is squarely within our wheelhouse. We ran the Benghazi investigation on the same grounds. POTUS couldn’t let this stand, so here we are.”

“‘We’?”

“State, DEA and FBI.”

“And the men in the jungle?”

“SEALs.”

“Do the Colombians know?”

She shook her head. “We can’t be sure who to trust. We know that the cartel has bought senior politicians before, and we know they own the police here. We involve them and the whole thing goes south.”

“So this is off the books?”

“Completely. We’re going to take her back to the States. She’ll be tried and she’ll spend the rest of her life in prison.”

Milton stretched out his legs.

“Thirsty?” she said.

“Very.”

Ellie went to a cold box at the back of the room, pulled out a couple of bottles of water and offered one to Milton. He took it and unscrewed the cap, downed half, then set it down on the table. Milton watched her, remembering how attractive he had found her spikiness, her take-no-shit attitude, and her toughness. He had no doubt that she would have had to fight harder than a man to get to the position she was in, and recalled the nonsense that she had dealt with from her senior officer before they had met. But there was more to her than the toughness; she was smart and resourceful and sassy and… Milton tried not to think about what he liked about her for too long for fear that he would do something that he had promised himself he would never do. He didn’t deserve a woman like her, and she didn’t deserve a man like him. That was just how it had to be.

“When are you moving her?”

“Tonight. She’ll be put into the back of a car and driven to the airport. From there, it’s a one-way flight to Uncle Sam.”

He took another slug of water. “What about me?”

Ellie folded her arms and grinned at him. “You stood me up, John. There’ll have to be consequences for that.”

77

Number One left a message on Weaver’s phone. It was mundane—a suggestion that they meet for a drink to catch up—but the precise wording was predetermined and signified both the urgency of the request and the location. The meet was to take place in an hour at the safe house that the logisticians from Group Five had arranged in advance of the operation.