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Chapter 29
Bradford stood motionless while the full meaning of Munroe’s words sunk in. 
She would follow the license plates as far as the information took her, and this was the way of madness, the way of death. 
He sat on the edge of the bed, raked his fingers through his hair, and didn’t move to make the call Munroe expected him to make.
After a moment of silence, she turned the desk chair to face him, sat, and in her typically intuitive way, joined him in the quiet until he’d gathered his thoughts.
“Look,” he said finally, “pulling Hannah out of a sleeping commune, or snatching her off the street, that’s one thing. 
“But going after the Cárcan family? An operation like that is a whole different caliber. 
“I understand you feel an obligation to finish what you started, you made a promise to Logan and you gave him your word. 
“But this changes everything. We’re looking at an entirely new sitrep. 
“We have none of the same targets, none of the same risks, we’d be going in blind against a group of ruthless people who are on their home turf and are well armed and well connected. 
“This isn’t something the two of us can take on with just a day’s notice.”
Whatever reaction Bradford expected after having vented, it wasn’t to find Munroe in his lap.
She’d sat for a moment, still and thoughtful, and then rose from the chair and stepped to the bed. 
She placed a knee on either side of his legs, held his face in her hands, and kissed his forehead. “I won’t argue with you,” she said, “because you’re right.” 
She remained like that for a moment, her cheek to his hair, and he closed his eyes and breathed her in, hurting and happy in the same moment. 
He wanted to hold her, hold on to her, protect her from herself and from the world, but she wasn’t his to protect and never would be.
She let go and backed away, walked to the window, and stared out. “I have to finish this,” she said. “I’ll get it done one way or the other, and if I have to, I’ll go alone.” 
She turned from the window. “I’m not threatening you, Miles, and I’m certainly not trying to manipulate you. I know you. 
“I know that if I say I’m going, then you believe you have to go, if for no other reason than to watch my back. But I don’t want that. 
“This might very well be a suicide mission, but it’s my mission, not yours, and I accept that fully.”
“Why?” he said. “For God’s sake, why, Michael?”
She quoted his words back to him. “I have a gift,” she said, “and I’m letting it serve me.”
Bradford sat silent, the timpani of frustration building into a crescendo. Her decision was about Logan, it had always been about Logan. 
And some misplaced loyalty and her bullheaded stubbornness and refusal to know when enough was enough simply because her life didn’t mean as much to her as it did to other people. 
He paused and measured his words carefully. “Logan would throw you under the bus in a minute to save his daughter if it came down to it.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “But Hannah’s his daughter. Who is there to look after a child if not her parents?”
“Well, sure,” Bradford said, his voice rising slightly. “But if Logan is truly what he means to you, then he should have your back, not use you as some form of human shield. 
“That’s what this is coming down to. You’ve become a human shield. Can you even see it?”
She shrugged, as if the implications of such were not even worthy of consideration. “I can take care of myself,” she said. “I don’t need someone to protect me.”
“And yet you do this willingly, knowing that you’re his tool.”
Munroe paused, and then turned slightly so that she faced him dead-on. She stared. Long. Hard. 
“Yes,” she said. “I do it willingly, knowing that I’m a tool, because my decisions have nothing to do with reciprocation. 
“I choose to do this because it suits me. I choose to help Logan because I want to. I choose to save his daughter because I can. I choose to care. 
“Do you understand the difference? It’s a choice, Miles, not an obligation. Not a burden. Not emotional blackmail. 
“Not something I have to do simply because Logan needs me. I don’t do it for gratitude or for quid pro quo. 
“What Logan does, how Logan feels, how Logan reacts, has no bearing on my decisions. They’re my choices, not his.”
Bradford stopped, said nothing more. He understood, then, her bond to Logan, her continued love for Noah, and so many of her life’s decisions. 
Self-preservation for her was instinctive, feral, and wild, inevitably bringing death to those around her, instinct that controlled her body and kept her alive, and she refused to allow that instinct to encroach upon her heart. 
She acted and loved who she wanted, when she wanted, and how she wanted, and having made those decisions consciously, for reasons that were her own, 
even against self-preservation, she would abide by them, even if it killed her.
“Okay,” he said. “I won’t try to stop you or convince you not to go. I’ll get you all the information that I have, get you whatever you need.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“On one condition.”
She paused. Stared at him sharply.
“I’m going with you,” he said. And then as she’d done to him earlier, he quoted her words back. 
“It’s my choice,” he said. “Not a burden, not an obligation, not emotional blackmail or something that I have to do. I do it because I choose to.”
They gathered at a watering hole off one of the many side streets in San Telmo, near the hostel, 
nothing more than a room fifteen feet wide, no windows, dim, smoke-hazed and crowded all the way to the bar counter on the end wall. 
The place was chosen because it was where Logan and Gideon already were when Bradford called, and for what Munroe needed, here was as good as anywhere.
Munroe stepped into the din, Bradford at her heels, and spotted Logan and Gideon in the front corner. 
The boys were nursing the local brew, had been for a while by the looks of it, 
and although Munroe would have preferred they be solid and completely sober, she’d take what she could get.
Logan spotted them, stood, and motioned them over. They made small talk for the few minutes it took for Heidi to arrive, 
and then, with the five of them pulled tightly around the table, Munroe said, “Unless one of you has done something really, really stupid, there are factors in play that you’ve failed to mention.”
There was a shock of silence around the table, and Gideon put his hands up in a defensive position. 
“I gave you my word,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re going on about, it wasn’t me.”
“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Logan said. “Because, for the most part, we haven’t been included in your chain of ‘need to know.’”
Bradford tensed. Logan’s sarcasm was an obvious dig at Bradford and the way Munroe had allowed him to usurp Logan’s position on the assignment. 
Under the table Munroe placed a hand on Bradford’s knee to quiet him.
She was silent for a moment, not because of Logan’s snipe, but to plot her way through several days’ worth of details to the precise moments that would encapsulate where they now stood.
“I’ve been inside The Chosen for three days now,” she said. “Welcomed, and for the most part blending into the scenery— 
“close enough to Hannah to snatch and pull her out the front door, which I didn’t,” she said, “in order to limit damage potential.”
She paused, took a sip of water, and forced silence on the table.
“Tonight was the go night,” she said, “with everything in place for a clean extraction. 
“But since I’m sitting here and I’m not smiling, you can bet things didn’t go as planned. I’ll give you one guess as to what happened.”
Gideon looked at Heidi, who looked at Logan, and among the three there was a form of baffled confusion until Gideon said, “They pulled her out?”
“Yes,” Munroe said. “They pulled her out. Anyone want to tell me why they would do that? 
“I was spending the night one bed over, so I think it’s safe to assume it isn’t me they’re hiding her from. 
“Why’d they pull her out, guys? Why now, all of a sudden, are they spooked?”
There was a subtle exchange of glances between Logan and Heidi, a sort of knowing between them, and Munroe paused. 
“What?” she said. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Heidi ran into a group of The Chosen,” Logan said.
Munroe bit back spite and mulled over this unexpected piece of news, because even out of the blue like this, it still didn’t quite fit. 
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said finally.
“They didn’t see me,” Heidi said.
Munroe nearly stood and pointed her index finger in Heidi’s direction. “I told you to stay away,” she said. 
And to Logan, “You were aware of this?”
Logan nodded. “I saw it happen.”
“When?”
“Yesterday,” he said.
“You can verify, without a doubt, they didn’t see her?”
“I would have called immediately,” he said, and Munroe calmed. 
With Logan so thoroughly vested in finding his daughter, he would be hyperattentive to the details, and so she trusted him completely. 
More so, if The Chosen had spotted Heidi yesterday, Hannah would have been gone that same night.
Munroe leaned forward, elbows on the table. “We’re back to the original issue,” she said. “If they didn’t see Heidi, why are they suddenly spooked?”
She allowed the ambience of the bar to engulf the table, allowed them to mull and stress over the answer to the problem at hand, an answer that so obviously stared them in the face. 
She waited, hoping that at least one of them might fall into it before she had to articulate it, 
because if it had nothing to do with any of them, then in her gut she knew the answer, if not the details, 
and what she needed before she could figure out what to do next were the details.
Logan spoke first. He was staring at the table, the look on his face reflective of the mental obstacle course his mind was running. 
“They are preparing for something,” he said. “They’re bracing for a move on Hannah, and they’re getting her out of the way, they just have no idea that it was you.”
Munroe nodded, wasn’t going to help him out yet, wanted to make sure all three fully grasped the complexities they were dealing with.
“Why now?” she said.
“They knew we were coming,” Logan whispered. 
He said it more to Heidi and Gideon than he did to Munroe, and it came out more as an uncertain question than a statement, 
but the glances exchanged by the three spoke to the realized horror that passed among them.
Munroe said, “So here’s the thing. If the three of you are certain— and I mean certain with not an iota of room for error, 
“certain because you know, and not because you’re afraid I’ll break your legs— that this thing has nothing to do with anything that’s happened in the city, then I can work with it, 
“but if it has something to do with any of you I need to know now or we could all end up dead.”
“It wasn’t anything on my part,” Logan said. Heidi shook her head as the answer, and Gideon put his hands up once more. “Not me,” he said.
“Okay,” Munroe said, and she was silent for a long while, allowing the weight of the situation to spread. 
“If it’s not you, then I can posit two possibilities, neither of which matter much to me at this point, but it might be helpful for you to be aware of them. 
“One: someone you’ve talked to, someone in your close circle who knows what you’re up to, has said something they shouldn’t to someone they shouldn’t.”
She waited a beat. Held up two fingers. “Possibility two,” she said. “The information on where to find Hannah was fed to you deliberately to bring you— something— to their doorstep.”
The first possibility brought with it a round of sighs that spoke to the high potential for such a calamity; 
the second resulted in a round of simultaneous response, all three of them answering at once, all three expressing pure incredulity. 
So Munroe probed at the disbelief. “You said your source was Maggie, Charity’s sister,” she said to Logan. “That she’s the one who contacted Charity with the news?”
Logan nodded.
“Does Maggie live in Buenos Aires?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I mean, we’ve been working a lot of contacts for a long time, and Maggie was just one of many— 
“we don’t always know where to find people, just how to get in contact. E-mail. Networking. Friends of friends. That sort of stuff.”
“It came unexpectedly, though, right? I’ve seen the way siblings react to news of their estranged sisters.” 
Munroe gave a subtle nod in Heidi’s direction. “I’m guessing Charity’s sister wasn’t exactly at the top of the list of people you’d expect to cough it up, was she?”
“Correct,” he said.
“What’s she look like? Does she strongly resemble Charity?”
Logan paused, as if he wasn’t completely sure, and Gideon answered for him. “No,” he said. “They have different dads.”
“It would be too much to hope for a photo, huh?”
Gideon paused and said, “Maggie has dark hair, she’s shorter, and she’s more Asian-looking— I think her dad is half-Japanese.”
Hannah’s adopted mother. Munroe swore silently and said, “But she has really light hazel-green eyes like Charity.”
The three hesitated, at first as if they were puzzled as to how she could possibly know and then because they realized why.
“You guys have been the perfect tools,” she said. “And the only reason you’re even close to getting Hannah is because you did the unexpected. You found a way to the inside.”
Logan was the first to protest. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “Even if Maggie is here, isn’t it possible that she was sincere in wanting to help? 
“It doesn’t have to be a setup. She could have wanted to help her sister, wanted to make things right.”
“If Hannah were still in the Haven tonight, you might have a valid point.”
“What could they possibly hope to gain from this?” Heidi asked. “Why would they deliberately invite trouble? 
“It’s completely counterintuitive, and it can’t be a setup without a motive.”
Munroe turned to Bradford. “She’s very good, Miles. If I had a company like yours, I’d offer the lady a job.” 
And then to Heidi, “You’ve got to ask yourself, in cases like this in the past, what typically happened when an abducted child was located?”
“There’s been government intervention, usually police raids on the Havens.”
“And eventually the dust settles, charges are dropped, and the kids go back home, right?”
Heidi nodded.
“Has someone ever infiltrated a Haven to kidnap the kid back?”
“No.”
“Is it fair to assume that looking to the past as a guide to the future, they’ve moved Hannah out because they’re bracing for a raid? One that they themselves are trying to provoke?”
Gideon said, “Are you crazy?” and both Logan and Heidi simply stared at her as if she’d sprouted a horn in the middle of her head.
Munroe shifted back, the preliminary movement to leaving the table. “Look,” she said. “The biggest mistake you can make is to underestimate your opponent. 
“At this point, it makes no difference to me one way or the other, but it might to you— or to your friends. 
“From a purely analytical, disinterested point of view, The Chosen have expended considerable resources to keep Hannah hidden, and now out of the blue have tipped you off, 
“as if they’re setting the kid up as perfect bait, expecting someone to come looking for her and being able to show a clean bill of health when all hands turn up empty. 
“Is there anything going on in your community? Custody battles? Upcoming TV shows? Something that might make them look bad if it were to come to light?”
“Maybe,” Heidi said. “I mean nothing specifically, but last I heard from my own connections inside, The Prophet is making a push toward mainstream acceptability and image improvement. 
“As a whole, they’re trying to bury unpleasant issues and show themselves as merely a different sort of church. 
“But people like Charity, they don’t go away, and as long as they’re in the media, the negative spotlight continues to return. 
“It’s possible that The Prophet— The Chosen— the local leadership— would want something flashy, a raid perhaps, something that media outlets couldn’t ignore,
“as a way to prove that their ex-children are a bunch of crazies, that we’re liars who exaggerate and whose word couldn’t be trusted. 
“It would be a dramatic way to prove that they are being persecuted and vilified.”
“Well, there you go,” Munroe said. “There’s a motive.”
“But in that case, why not tell us she’s in Jakarta or Mumbai or even Asunción and send us on a wild-goose chase? Why take us to where she actually is?”
Munroe shrugged. “Maybe they think you know more than you do and didn’t want to risk you calling their bluff. 
“I mean, from everything I’ve read, The Prophet is a narcissistic nut job. Do his reasons even have to make sense?”
Munroe stood and Bradford did as well, and she dropped a wad of pesos on the table.
Heidi said, “But wait, you just leave it at that?”
“It’s not my fight,” Munroe said. “I’m going after Hannah.”