there, with the AR. I have weapons training.”
“Do you remember shooting a gun?”
She blinked several times. “No, but I know I have.”
“I’m trained in firearms, but I know nothing about what the Russians carried during the war,” he admitted.
“But I would bet there are plenty of people in the FBI that do.”
He shifted his position, and she could see his mind working through her suggestions. “Not impossible.”
“I attacked Sasha. Punching, blocking.” Olivia’s thoughts shifted to her walk earlier that day. “And when we were out today, I picked up a stick. Just a stick . . . but after I tossed it on the ground, I kept thinking I could use it to defend myself.”
“That’s a skill set I don’t have,” he said.
She leaned forward, placed a hand on his knee. “I think I might be onto something.” And for the first time, the fog felt as if it were lifting ever so slightly.
“There might be a different explanation.”
She smiled. “But we can’t rule this one out.” She wondered if there was a boss out there wondering what the hell happened to her. That thought stilled inside her. Like a dead end. “Do we ask your people if they’re missing someone?”
“My department has been trying to figure out who you are since this happened. We came up completely empty.”
She patted his knee. “If I was undercover, that would make sense.”
“Yes, but eventually there are breakthroughs,” Leo said. “Very few people go undetected in this world.”
Something about this felt so right. And then she had a sobering thought. “If I’m right about this, then maybe you weren’t the target, and I was all along.”
“I’m not prepared to release that guilt quite yet.”
Olivia couldn’t help but smile. “Let me guess, you’re Catholic.”
He shrugged. “Only on Sunday when my grandmother is looking.”
“Leo, this feels right.”
He covered her hand with his. “I don’t think it’s going to be long before it all comes in clear.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Leo left her alone when she stopped talking to him, retreated into her notebook, and started writing down a long list of weapons and her knowledge about them.
What he saw of that list was downright terrifying.
He wanted to confront Neil, make the man level with him. But as she was ticking off all the ways she mimicked an undercover agent, Leo was ticking off a list of his own.
She was an operative. She worked for Neil. She knew about Navi and the case. Neil did not want Leo to know her true identity because why? Because Olivia wasn’t as innocent as the others? And how innocent were the others?
He’d looked up AJ Hoffman and found out why the man bucked authority as a child. AJ’s father was a politician, an ambassador to Germany. As Leo followed that bouncing ball, he uncovered a family photograph along with names. And an obituary for Amelia Hoffman, who had been found facedown on the bank of a river. As Leo dug, he found that someone had been arrested for the murder in Germany, but the who or why wasn’t on any public database. The fact that Neil’s team didn’t want to discuss it with him suggested it was connected to Olivia somehow.
Did she know something about AJ’s sister’s death?
If Leo could remotely tap into the FBI database, he could get the answers. But that wasn’t possible with the current setup they were using. Not without being detected, which would defeat the purpose of staying off the radar.
But the big question after today was what Olivia had uncovered herself.
Maybe the shooter wasn’t aiming at Leo.
And if that was the case, Neil and his team suspected it all along. In fact, they implied she had been the target, but Leo refused to see it.
So who would want Olivia dead?
Navi?
Did the man even know Olivia was in play?
If not Navi, or someone on Mykonos’s side, then who and why?
And this was where Leo and Neil were in the same position. Neither one of them knew for sure who the shooter was, or who hired them.
But in order for Leo to find that answer, he first needed to know exactly who Olivia was.
The action flicks that had prompted his path to the FBI had started to spin in the back of his head. Reminding him that sometimes the good guys were the bad guys. And the bad guys did good things. And wasn’t that the fine line Neil and his people treaded? And if Olivia was a part of the team, but at arm’s length . .