Pandora's Box (42 page)

Poor them.

Roxie smiled.
 
“Nice try, but Rico is dead.
 
I watched the news.
 
Either you’re lying to me now or he lied to you.”
 
She shrugged.
 
“Whatever.
 
Enjoy your last hours of life.”

Her annoying laughter followed her out.
 
She slammed the apartment door behind her.
 
The laughter slowly faded as she slithered down the hallway.
 

Madison
began to struggle against the cord.
 

“Stop!” Brett shouted.
 
She froze and he added, “I have a knife in my back pocket.
 
Can you reach it?”

Madison
tried.
 
She forced her fingers to stretch as far as they possibly could.
 
The tips brushed the top of the pocket.
 
She hoped it was the right one.
 
Relaxing the rest of her body as much as possible, she tipped herself back in the chair.
 
Her fingers made their way into the opening.
 
Cold metal met her flesh.
 
She struggled to pull it out.

“You’ve got it,” Brett said.
 
He leaned forward in his chair, pushing his bottom at her.
 
“Reach!
 
Come on!”

She caught the knife between two fingers and slowly worked it out of the pocket.
 
It seemed to take forever.
 
She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed she wouldn’t drop it.
 
If it hit the floor, she’d never get it.
 
Her fingers were sweaty.
 
The knife slipped halfway through her grasping fingers.
 
She closed them tight.

Oh please don’t fall.

One minute it was sliding free and the next it was safe between her palms.
 
She took her time opening it.
 
The blade felt too dull to cut through the cord.
 
Placing it on part of the cord, she sawed back and forth hard.
 
As she was cutting she was also pulling her body forward, placing as much strain on the cord as she could.
 

While she worked on the cord, she told Brett everything Roxie had said.
 
The only thing she left out was the paper in her shoe.
 
That had belonged to her father.
 
Whatever it was, it wasn’t any of his business.

Brett admitted, “
Tyler
introduced us before you got married.”

“I know,” she said with a sigh.
 
“I remember you Brett.”

 
“Well, when I heard about all this chip business and realized you two didn’t remember each other, I took some time off from the Navy and flew straight here.
 
I had a hell of a time catching up with you.”

“Why didn’t you say something?
 
Why didn’t you tell us?
 
You called a million times, and I talked to you that one time when the plane was about to explode.
 
Why the hell didn’t you tell me
Tyler
was my husband?”

“I couldn’t,” he said.
 
“If I’d told you that you and Tyler had been together before, in love, working for the CIA as a team, you would have both thought I was out of my mind.”

“True.
 
But I wish you had tried.”

Finally the cord snapped.
 
Madison
jumped to her feet.
 
She grabbed her pack of tools and fiddled with the cuffs on Brett’s wrists.
 
Picking the lock in seconds, she freed him.
 
She said, “We have to find out where the president is giving his speech.”

“I’m way ahead of you.”
 
Brett had his cell phone out.
 
He quickly dialed a number and stepped into the other room while he talked to the person who’d answered the phone.
 
He identified himself, gave a code number, and then said, “I need the president’s itinerary.
 
Now.”

The door shut softly behind him.

Madison
bent over and removed the folded paper from her shoe.
 
Her eyes briefly touched on the bedroom door to make sure Brett wasn’t coming out.
 
She opened the paper with trembling hands.
 
It was another DNA test.
 
According to this, her father had paid a private institution to run DNA on a hair they’d found on his wife’s body.
 
How he got the hair from the police department it didn’t say.
 
But one thing was clear.
 
Scientists had done wonders with DNA testing since those days.
 
Back when her mother had died, the killer couldn’t be tracked through his hair.

But that was then.

She went over the test results three times in total disbelief.
 
Her mind just couldn’t wrap around the truth.
 
How could it be?
 
The test results, ninety-nine point nine percent affirmative, had concluded the hair belonged to none other than Malcom Law,
Tyler
’s father.
 
The president had killed her mother.

It hadn’t been Boracci.

Madison
’s legs turned to melted butter and she felt like she’d been kicked hard in the abdomen, the breath knocked out of her.
 
She reached for the chair.
 
Her fingers closed on air.
 
She stumbled sideways.
 
Her bottom landed hard on the edge of the wooden chair.
 
The test results slipped through her fingers.
 
It drifted to the floor.

Brett strode into the room.
 
“I’ve got the address, but I didn’t call anyone to warn them.
 
I don’t want the Secret Service to shoot
Tyler
.”
 
He went to the door and opened it.
 
“Let’s go save the president’s life.”

Save the president?

Save her mother’s killer?

She shook her head vehemently.
 
“No.
 
I’m not going anywhere.”

“What?
 
Are you high?
 
Tyler
is going to get himself killed trying to take the president down.
 
We need to stop him.
 
What’s the problem?
 
I thought you cared about
Tyler
.”

She loved
Tyler
.

Did she love him more than she hated the president?

The room seemed to tilt sideways and logic became an alien concept.
 
She could save the president’s life and save
Tyler
in the process.
 
Or she could do nothing.
 
The president would pay for his crime, but
Tyler
would die.
 
She thought about him, the way he’d always been on her side.
 
He’d saved her life twice.
 
Once from the microchip and once from the bomb.

“I need to stop at my apartment first,” she said.

Brett scratched his head, clearly exasperated.
 
“For what?”

“I have a remote like the broken one Roxie just ran out of here with.
 
We can use it to snap
Tyler
out of it.
 
Without it, he can’t be stopped.”

“We don’t have time for both of us to go after it.
 
Why don’t you go alone?
 
I’ll try to find
Tyler
and stop him.”

That didn’t sound like a good idea to her.
 
Mistrust reared its ugly head again.
  
What if Brett was working against them?
 
Even if he was a good guy, he could get
Tyler
killed.
 
He’d been a Navy SEAL, but she had been CIA, not to mention Secret Service.
 
She’d been trained to handle situations like this and she had a few years on the younger man.

“Better idea,” she said.
 
“You go to my apartment.
 
Here are the keys.
 
Get the remote from the kitchen table and I’ll stop
Tyler
.”

He shrugged.
 
“Whatever.”

Brett handed her a piece of paper with a too familiar address on it.
 
The president was giving a speech in the same ballroom where her father had tried to assassinate him three weeks earlier.
 
She felt the blood drain from her face.
 
The evil blonde bitch had planned this perfectly, designing
Tyler
’s assassination of the president to follow her father’s attempt.
 
She’d lost her father.
 
There was no way in hell she was going to lose
Tyler
.

“Give me your gun,” she said.

“What?
 
Why?”

“You won’t need it at my apartment.”
 
He handed it to her, reluctantly.
 
She carried it to the bedroom, still dressed in
Tyler
’s shirt.
 
As she stalked away, she said, “I don’t know where mine is.
 
Either Roxie took it or she hid it.”

The feel of cold metal pressing against her palm filled her with purpose.
 
She’d save
Tyler
.
 
The only reason he was involved in this mess was because of her, because Roxie had a burning hatred for her.
 
In her black mood,
Madison
vowed to rid the world of two evil maniacs.

She’d kill Roxie.

And the president.

If she went to prison, it would be worth it.

******

Chapter Nineteen

Déjà vu struck her hard as she entered the ballroom for the second time in a month.
 
The decorations had changed, gold and white this time, replacing the true blue of the night her father died.
 
She walked beneath a stunning chandelier, one of eight.
 
Madison
purposely steered clear of the spot where her father had been gunned down.
 
In her dark trousers and blouse, she stood out among the elegant people wearing their finest designer originals, and she received more than one haughty look.

She ignored them.
 
They didn’t matter.
 
Their money didn’t impress or intimidate her in the slightest.
 
She was there for one reason: to save
Tyler
.
 
She’d failed to save her father’s life before, but she would not let history repeat itself with the man she loved.

And she did love him.

Her fear of being in love had ebbed out like the tide, replaced with glowing memories.
 
She and Tyler had met five years ago.
 
They’d fallen in love on sight, eloped after three years during an especially cool mission.
 
They had just bought a new house when Roxie and Boracci’s men had swooped in to steal their future.
 

Madison
remembered her father being at the chapel with them, tears in his eyes when he gave her hand to
Tyler
and told him to take care of his baby.
 
Unbelievable!
 
Her father had known she and Tyler were married, that they were kidnapped and programmed to not only forget each other, but also to kill the president of the
United States
, and he hadn’t done a thing about it.
 
He hadn’t tried to help her.

Why had he allowed it to happen?
 
He could have told her, could have saved her an enormous amount of trouble.
 
Not to mention, he might still be alive.

He had been quite an actor.
 

Hail to the Chief
began to play.
 
The double doors at the top of the stairs parted to reveal President Law and his wife, tailed by three service men.
 
For a moment
Madison
lost herself in the past.
 
She almost expected her father to race by her, gun raised.
 
The sound of thunderous applause rocked her back to the present.

She turned her head in time to see platinum blonde hair moving through the crowd.
 
Roxie.
 
Madison
was torn between chasing after her and searching for
Tyler
on the opposite side of the room.
 
Surely Roxie wouldn’t glue herself to his side.
 
She’d want to be as far away from him as possible when he pulled the trigger.