Lifting up his shirt, he displayed a painful crisscross of scars, welts, knife wounds and burns cutting a swath across his chest, ribs and back.
“I experienced Group 99’s methods firsthand. Believe me when I tell you, nobody hates them more than I do. These people kidnapped me. They beat me. They robbed me of a year of my life. Alexis Argyros, undoubtedly the most sadistic, straightforwardly evil human being I have ever met, is somewhere out there right now, tracking me down, still trying to kill me. And you honestly think I’m on his side?”
“I think you’re on Kate’s side,” Tracy said quietly.
“That’s different.” Hunter’s voice grew more urgent. For the first time this evening, Tracy heard anger there. “Kate is ill. The CIA made her ill.”
“That’s no excuse . . .”
“I think it is. The CIA broke her mentally.
If they hadn’t, Argyros would never have been able to manipulate her the way he did.”
Tracy stopped walking. “What do you mean?”
“Argyros convinced Kate that Bob Daley was working for the CIA. That he was part of a joint British American task force in Iraq who deceived Daniel and left him there to die. Kate did order Bob’s execution. But only because she believed he’d murdered her husband.
“The way I see it, the CIA and Argyros and his bully boys both have Daley’s blood on their hands. Argyros is the one who turned Group 99 into violent terrorists, not Kate. He led his little group of angry boys exactly where they always wanted to go.”
Angry little boys . . . who else had said that?
Tracy’s mind rushed back to Geneva, to her first dinner with Cameron Crewe. She heard his voice now as if he were standing next to her: Group 99 are just a bunch of angry young men . . . They aren’t fighting for a cause. Fighting is their cause. They turn to violence because it makes them feel good. Simple as that. I call them the Lost Boys.
They walked back inside. Hunter closed the French doors behind them and drew the drapes. Then he went over to the bar and returned with two cut glass tumblers of whisky.
“Here.”
He handed one to Tracy. She looked at it for a moment but the time for caution seemed to have passed. She downed it in two swift gulps then asked him the question that had been forming in her mind all the time they were outside.
“Why were you kidnapped? You’re working on your fracking story. The industry don’t like it. The U.S. government don’t like it. But Group 99 are kind of on your side, presumably? Anti-corruption, anti-wealth. Why did they abduct you?”
Hunter looked at her with renewed respect.
“Now that, Miss Whitney, is a good question. That is the question, don’t you agree? Why did Group 99 abduct me?”
“And the answer is . . . ?”
“Simple. Although I’d really like you to get there yourself. I was kidnapped because somebody commanded it. Somebody very rich and very powerful. Somebody who knew I was on to them and had a lot to lose.”
“Not President Havers?”
“No, no. Kidnap’s far too messy. He’d have had me killed.”
“Kate?”
Hunter shook his head.
Tracy frowned. “Then who?”
“Me.”
Tracy and Hunter both spun around.
Cameron Crewe lounged in the doorway, smiling broadly. He had a drink in one hand and a Colt Python Elite in the other.
It was pointed directly at Tracy’s head.
CHAPTER 31