“How did you know I would come here tonight?” Tracy asked eventually, being careful to drink water as well as her wine.
“Because I invited you. Well, as good as invited you. Once I was sure you’d shaken off the CIA and the British, I let you know where I’d be. Made sure I was seen by a few of the right people. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”
Tracy thought, So Cameron was right. He did want me to find him.
Aloud she said, “I could have shot you.”
Hunter looked perplexed. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Oh, I don’t now. Because of Neuilly? All those dead teenagers?”
“I had nothing to do with Neuilly,” Hunter protested.
“British intelligence placed you there. Ours too.”
“Then British intelligence is wrong!” He sounded genuinely horrified. “They’ve been trying to throw you off the scent, Miss Whitney, and it looks like they’ve succeeded.”
Tracy looked at him skeptically.
“You didn’t come here to kill me,” Hunter said. “You came because you want to know the truth. And I let you come because I want to tell it.”
“A confession?”
He grinned. “You still have me down as the bad guy, don’t you?”
Tracy looked away. The truth was, she didn’t know what she had him down as.
“I’m a journalist,” Hunter said. “Telling the truth is my job. My problem has been finding somebody I trust enough to tell it to.”
“And you think you can trust me?”
“What I think”—Hunter sipped his wine—“is that you’re incorruptible. That sets you apart from just about everybody else in this sorry m
ess.”
Tracy knew she was being flattered, but she let it pass. “I’m honored.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Hunter said. “You think I’m a terrorist so I’d be surprised if my good opinion means much to you. But I’m going to talk to you anyway. I assume you’re already recording?” He nodded knowingly at Tracy’s knockoff Chanel purse.
Tracy dutifully pulled out the powder compact containing her tiny digital recording device and placed it on the table, next to her gun.
“Always one step ahead, aren’t you Mr. Drexel?”
“In my line of work, if you’re not one step ahead, you’re dead,” Hunter drawled. “Let’s get started, shall we?”
Tracy sat, frozen, while he spoke, inhaling every word.
“It all began with a story for the New York Times.” His deep, gravelly, smoker’s voice echoed off the villa’s vaulted ceilings. “That is, it was my story. I was writing it freelance. But my plan was to sell it to The Times. I’d been seeing a girl there.”
“Fiona Barron,” said Tracy. Two could play the one-step-ahead game.
Hunter looked impressed. “That’s right. Fi. Anyway, Fi and I had a falling-out. And the editor wasn’t my biggest fan either. To be fair to him, I guess I had been a bit of an ass. ”
Tracy didn’t probe. She could imagine.
“I wanted to build bridges at the paper. And the only way I knew how to do that was by writing something off-the-hook amazing. This was going to be the story that got me back in everyone’s good books.”
“So what was the story?”