Amelia Autin - Liam's Witness Protection

“I know him,” she said. “Your brother-in-law. I met him when I first met your brother. You told him where we are?”

Liam shook his head again. “The first thing you have to learn about security, Ms. Mateja, is a concept called ‘need to know.’ At this point Cody doesn’t have a need to know where we are, so I didn’t tell him. When and if he needs to know, I will.”

Cate waited for one heartbeat, then two, before she said, “Cate. Please just call me Cate. I... I don’t like Caterina.” She couldn’t suppress the little shiver as she said the name. “And I don’t use Mateja anymore.” Not for seven years. “Except in court, of course. I must use it there—it’s my legal name.”

“What last name do you go by, then?”

She laughed a little. “Would you believe... Jones?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.” She darted a look at his face. “I wanted an American name so common no one would be able to trace it...or me. The only names I could think of like that were Smith and Jones.”

“‘Alias Smith and Jones,’” he murmured under his breath.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Just an old TV western Alec and I used to watch on cable.” He looked as if he were going to explain more, but changed his mind.

She waited, but he didn’t say anything, so she continued. “Cate Smith sounded too much like Kate Smith, the singer—I didn’t want anyone to remember me for any reason.” Her smile faded. “The book I read in the library about going underground advised not changing your first name too much, especially the first letter. Too easy to slip up and say your real name—or at least start to say your real name—if you’re taken unaware. Same thing for signing your name. So I became Cate Jones.”

“Cate Jones.” He tilted his head to one side as he considered it. “Not bad. And most people who heard you say it would think K not C , making it even less likely they’d recognize your name.” Then his soft brown eyes hardened. “So why were you going underground in the first place?”

She wanted to look away from that hard, uncompromising stare, but she couldn’t. “Alec knows,” she said finally. Painfully.

“But you don’t want me to know, is that it?”

Cate shook her head. “You don’t have a ‘need to know,’” she reminded him.

“Touché,” Liam said with a little huff of laughter. “Touché.”

* * *

“Escaped?” roared Aleksandrov Vishenko in Russian to the two men who were the bearers of bad tidings to their boss. “What do you mean, she escaped?”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” said one man as he tried to placate his boss. “But there was interference from an unexpected source—Diplomatic Security Service agents who happened to be in the courthouse...armed. Both of our men are dead. At least they cannot talk.”

“They would not have talked anyway,” insisted the other man.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” the first man said, glancing at him. “They are dead, so it no longer matters.” Then he faced his boss again. “The courthouse is swarming with FBI agents and men from the US Marshals Service—both marshals guarding the woman were wounded. One of the federal prosecutors is dead, the other could die any moment. And the woman was spirited away by one of the men who foiled the initial attempt on her life. We do not know where he has taken her. Not yet.”

“Find out,” Vishenko hissed at his men. “Find out where she is and take care of her. Permanently. If she lives to testify, we are all dead.”

* * *

Liam’s cell phone shrilled, interrupting his conversation with Cate, and he grabbed it. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” said Cody Walker, Liam’s brother-in-law. “I spoke with my boss, Nick D’Arcy, in Washington.”

“Was that necessary?”

“Not unless I wanted to have a job tomorrow,” Cody said dryly.

“Sorry,” Liam apologized. “I guess I’m not thinking clearly at the moment.”

“D’Arcy can be trusted. There are only a few absolutely incorruptible people in the world, people I’d trust with my own life, and Nick D’Arcy is one of them. He’s also one of the most brilliant minds in the business, not to mention eerily omniscient. Didn’t I ever tell you his nickname is Baker Street?”

“Yeah, you mentioned it once or twice. Keira, too. Sherlock Holmes, right?”

“Right,” Cody said. “So do you want to hear the plan he came up with, or not?”

“Let’s have it.”

“The agency has a safe house in Fairfax, Virginia. Got a pen and paper?”

“Hold on a sec.” Liam pulled both from an inner jacket pocket, and balanced his cell phone as best he could on his shoulder. “Shoot.”

“Go to this address first.” Liam jotted down the address Cody gave him, then repeated it back. “Right. Someone from the agency will meet you there and exchange vehicles—just in case they know who you are, just in case they’ve got your license plate number and are tracking you that way.”

“Make it an SUV, okay? I’m more comfortable with that kind of versatility and power under the hood.”

“Sure thing. You won’t have any complaints. And he’ll have a new cell phone for you, too. Encrypted. Untraceable. At least I think it’ll be untraceable. Alec had to tell the FBI who you were, so of course they’ve got your cell phone number. They can locate you by triangulating on the cell towers your phone pings off.”

Liam hadn’t thought of that, hadn’t thought he needed to hide from law enforcement as well as from the men out to kill Cate, but apparently Cody had. “For now, make sure your cell phone is off unless you’re using it. Once you’ve got new wheels and a new phone, go to this safe house.” And Cody recited another address.

“Okay,” Liam said, after he’d confirmed he had the second address correct. “So we go to the agency’s safe house. Then what?” He looked at Cate as he said this, but her expression gave away nothing of what she was thinking.

“You stay there with our witness, at least for tonight, while the agency opens an investigation—or rather, reactivates the one we already had going with Trace McKinnon and Alec. You did know the agency had a hand in this case, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t, but I do now.”

“Talk to Alec, once you get to the safe house. He’ll bring you up to speed on everything you need to know. Tell him I said the agency trusts him to use his discretion.”

“Will do.”

“And, Liam? I know technically you’re on vacation, and maybe I shouldn’t even be asking, but...”

“But what?”

“D’Arcy wants to know if you’ll stay on this assignment...at least for the next few days.”

Puzzled, Liam said, “Sure thing. But why?”

“There was a case a few years back—before your time—when D’Arcy was working for the US Marshals Service. They were infiltrated by a domestic terrorist organization, and a witness D’Arcy was responsible for was almost killed. Later, your sister discovered the FBI had been infiltrated at the same time, by the same group. A group with ties to the Russian Mafia.”

“Holy crap.”

“Yeah. Information was leaked, and three people died when the terrorist organization tried to torture the whereabouts of the witness—a former cop who’d gone undercover for the FBI—out of his partner. The partner would have given the witness up if he’d known where he was—one of those killed was the man’s own baby son, and the other was his wife—but he honestly didn’t know where the witness was, so he was killed too, to send a message. That’s why D’Arcy doesn’t want to take any chances. He doesn’t want the FBI or the US Marshals Service to know where our witness is...at least for now.”