the Coast Guard.
They would be docking somewhere. He had to find the strength to make his move when the opportunity came. He stretched and the ropes tightened.
Think!
He couldn’t see anything; the hull was dark. His hands were numb so he started working his fingers back and forth, little stretches, trying to keep his blood circulating. It took several minutes, but he was able to move better. When he regained control of his fingers, he started feeling the knots on the ropes, trying to picture how they were tied by touching each curve. It took him a while—he relied on sight too much, he realized—but he developed a plan to untie them. He didn’t know how long he had, but he worked methodically, carefully, shifting slightly now and again.
Thirty minutes later, the binds fell off. He shook out his arms as full feeling rushed back in. He then untied the ropes around his chest, the ones that tied him to the support beam.
Almost free.
The big problem were the shackles around his feet. Not only did they make noise when he moved, he couldn’t run and if he jumped in the water, they would pull him down or make it extremely difficult—and exhausting—to swim. Not impossible, but it would slow him down and they’d easily shoot or recapture him.
He could pick the locks if he had the right tools, but he had nothing.
Getting out of his binds had given him hope, and now he again felt lost. Dammit!
Think, Rogan!
The yacht reduced speed. It turned to the right, and based on the motion of the water, they were going over choppy waves. For fifteen minutes they maintained moderate speed, then the engines idled. Someone was maneuvering the boat through some sort of obstacle. Or inlet. Where they hell were they? Sean figured they’d been out on the water around three hours. How far could they have gone? Not to Mexico. If they’d gone south, they’d be past Galveston, he figured. But he didn’t know the geography well enough to know the towns along the coast. Certainly Corpus Christi, the next major coastal city Sean could think of, would have taken longer than three hours by speedboat. If they’d gone east, they’d be somewhere along the Louisiana border, but New Orleans would be hours, if not a day or more, away. There were lots of places they could dock, but no major towns. They could pull up at a private dock where there could be a helicopter or plane waiting to take them to Mexico.
Finally, the boat stopped. Sean waited, tense. He wanted to go down fighting, but he didn’t want to die.
Then the door above him opened and light blinded him. He closed his eyes and he heard laughter.
“Well, look at that, he got out of his binds.”
“I told you he would,” a voice said.
A very, very familiar voice he hadn’t heard in two and a half years.
* * *
Sean stood outside Colton Thayer’s hospital room and thought about leaving. Colton didn’t want to see him. He’d refused all of Sean’s calls over the last week.
But he was getting out of the hospital tomorrow. If not now, Sean didn’t know when he’d ever have a chance to apologize. It was one of those awful situations—Sean didn’t regret working with the FBI to take down a corrupt United States senator, but Sean really wished he didn’t have to use his best friend to do it.
It was water under the bridge. What was done was done, and Sean just wanted to explain … or maybe not. What could he say? He had no excuse. Colton had been working for Senator Jonathan Paxton for good reasons—reasons Sean would have joined him in supporting ten years ago. But today? Sean had changed. While he understood the allure of white hat hacking, he was in love with an FBI agent and he wasn’t going to risk his freedom, or Lucy’s career, to go back to his old ways.
And, Sean realized over time, sometimes two wrongs didn’t make a right. Sometimes, there were no winners in the battle between criminals and innocents. Sometimes people like Paxton were so corrupt, so selfish, so driven by their grief and narcissism that they didn’t care who they hurt in the process.
But the last thing Sean wanted to do was hurt Colton. He didn’t know what he was thinking—that maybe Colton would never learn that he had been working with the FBI? That maybe Colton would never figure out why Sean had infiltrated