for the first time looking him straight in the eye. “I wish I wasn’t, but it’s true. Somehow, for some fucking reason, you’ve caught their eye, and that’s who was behind the attack on the compound.”
“The Sparrows?” he repeated. “What kind of fucking name is that?”
She shrugged. “Their full name is the New World Sparrows. It’s a play on words. Back in the days of the Illuminati, members were called the ‘passers’…from the word passeridae, which is the genus for the Old World Sparrows…”
“Everyone’s a fucking genius,” I sniped, rolling my eyes. “What do they think they’re on? An episode of Jeopardy?”
“If they weren’t as dangerous as they are, then sure, maybe Alex Trebek would have been able to solve the world’s woes right now, but as it stands, real life bites.” She shrugged. “I mean, that’s what they say. Maybe they just worship at Aphrodite’s feet.”
Rex shot her a blank look, so I explained, “Sparrows represented Aphrodite in classical lore.”
The Prez shook his head. “Where do you two come up with this shit?”
Lodestar muttered impatiently, “The fucking past? It’s called history, Rex.”
“I’m not a walking fucking Google.”
Reaching up to rub the bridge of my nose, I muttered, “If they’re as massive as you say, then how the hell can we stop them?”
She shrugged. “You can’t. But you can tear them down brick by brick. Why do you think I’ve been trying to destroy the Famiglia? They’re a major part of the game. They’re the Sparrows’ front. By taking them down, you’re going a long way to solving things.”
Rex raised a hand, and she stunned the hell out of me by actually refraining from speaking, as he questioned, “How did you get tangled up in their web?”
“It was by accident. I was supposed to be helping guard a museum in Iraq. It was going to be ransacked, so we were deployed there to protect the antiquities. I came across something I shouldn’t have. They caught me—”
“Cut the BS, Lodestar,” I retorted. “Tell him the truth.”
Her mouth tightened, and she turned her face away from me. “That is the truth.”
“You and I both know you were working for Langley.”
“You were in the CIA?” Rex rasped, his surprise clear.
“For a few years.”
“Long enough to piss off some powerful people,” I remarked. “Enough to get your ass sold into the white slavers market.”
She hissed at me, “Shut the fuck up, Maverick.”
I just hitched a shoulder. “I told you already, no more lies. No more crap. We need to be on the same page. It was different before. I just thought you were fucking nuts, and I was okay with that because I was okay with being a ghost, until our house was blown up, until people were hurt and we lost loved ones. Things have changed. We need to change with them too.”
Because I knew that appealing to her sense of decency wouldn’t work, instead, I appealed to her need to belong. She’d always had that issue.
If I was a shrink, I’d have said it was because her father had died when she was young, but who the hell knew why the brain worked the way it did?
Glumly, she muttered, “The premise of the story wasn’t bullshit. I was assigned to a museum, but it stopped showing antiquities a long time ago. It became a kind of unofficial traders market for information.
“I went there, trying to find a name for an agent who we believed was selling out his people, but when I got there…” She shrugged. “It ended up with me being sold as a fucking slave.”
“And what? You believe these Sparrows are the ones who sold you?”
“I’m pretty sure they were running the traders market, Rex. More than that, I’m sure the fucker who I was looking for was a Sparrow too.” She pulled a face. “I’ve spent every moment since I killed my fucking owner trying to figure out ways to destabilize their operations. Targeting the human trafficking side of things was, as I’m sure you can understand after yesterday, a way of fulfilling a personal grudge.”
Rex pursed his lips, but his fingers started to tap the armrest in a rhythmic manner that told me he was processing what he’d learned. “How do you know yesterday was about a personal grudge?”
She snorted. “Because I’m not an idiot.”
“You been keeping her in the loop with our secrets, Mav?” Rex queried, his tone still as soft as silk.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet? You don’t have to tell Lodestar anything. She has