to escape from the middle of the Atlantic, if she has thoughts of getting away. I’ll see what’s leaving Boston Harbor tomorrow or the next day. I don’t care if it’s a luxury liner or a raft with a paddle.”
“I’ll cover the tickets,” Jordan said. “Whatever it costs to make it happen fast. I have Dad’s insurance; if we can’t use it for this—”
“It’ll help.”
“You’ll have to watch her every minute,” Jordan warned. “We have her tied now because she consented to it if it meant Nina would keep her distance, but she can’t walk onto that ship tied up. Not when legally you don’t have a warrant until you get to Austria. You’ll have to be vigilant every second, until she’s under arrest.” If an arrest order could be procured . . . but Jordan refused to go down that rabbit hole. It was out of her hands; all she could do was trust Ian and his colleagues overseas. “I don’t think Anna will try to run, not with Nina watching. But still . . .” Jordan thought of the woman on the dock with the pistol in her hand, a cornered animal ready to lash out at anyone, and shivered.
But then there was the woman who had encouraged Jordan to want the world, who had comforted her when she cried for her father . . . who had murdered her father. And none of those images seemed to have anything to do with the woman huddled in the cabin doorway now, clutching a towel to her bandaged arm and shivering.
“I pity her,” Jordan said. “I hate that. I hate her, yet I still care for her. Why can’t I turn it off, what I felt for her?”
Tony reached out, tugging Jordan against his shoulder. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t tell Ian that I . . . For him it’s so simple.” Something had unwound in the tall Englishman the moment Anneliese had surrendered. “Do you want to go in with me?” Jordan had asked after leading the tied and shaking Anneliese to the cabin. “Ask her why she did it?”
“I know why she did it,” he’d answered. “She did it because she wanted to, because she could. No matter what her other justifications might be. And I don’t care to hear those.”
I care, Jordan thought, staring at the cabin. She wished she didn’t, but she did. Tony’s hand rubbed the back of her neck under her hair, as if he were trying to massage the pain away. She brushed at her eyes. “Thank you, Tony.”
“You don’t need to thank me. I owe you.”
“For what?” Jordan gave a half smile. “Using my weeping fit after Dad’s funeral to infiltrate the shop, or sleeping with me?”
Tony was silent.
“You were tracking down a murderer.” The anger she’d felt toward him initially had sunk and died under the tidal wave of today’s shocks. It seemed like pretty small change now, his initial deception. “Getting the job out of me when we first met, that was a manipulation for the sake of your chase. But I have eyes, Tony. You weren’t squiring me around ballet classes and airfields afterward just to get information out of me. You weren’t getting anything out of me for the chase by then. As for what else you were getting, well, if all you wanted was an easy girl, I’m fairly certain you could have found one who didn’t put you to work as a photographer’s assistant first.”
“I started tagging after you because I wanted to. No other reason.” His black eyes were steady. “I’m still sorry for the lies. More sorry than I can say.”
“And I still want to hit you, a little bit,” Jordan tried to joke. “But I’ll get over it.”
“Hit me if you want, J. Bryde.” Tony lifted her hand, kissed the pad of her index finger that pressed the Leica’s button. “You were magnificent on that dock. Like you’d been striding through war zones with a Leica all your life.”
“The eye took over.” What a strange feeling it had been. Not the right feeling, maybe—surely it couldn’t be right, for the eye with its obsession to capture the perfect shot, to take charge of that moment on the dock and overshadow the more natural things, the more important things: fear, love, worry for Ruth. Maybe it wasn’t right, but Jordan had still felt it. And I want to feel it again.
Ian and Nina were striding back along the lakeshore, the Russian woman fully dressed and