Capturing Kate Read Online Free PDF Page B

gazed at her until she got even less comfortable. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
    “What do you know about him apart from the water plant stuff?”
    “What? Nothing!” She sat up straight, leaned forward. “Not a damn thing, but the information I do have was not easily won, okay? Do not dare trivialize what I had to do, what I had to say, to get Ella to talk to me and work with me. And now she’s…” She started crying.
    “I just wonder, Kate, why you’re a threat to him.” His voice was even but something in it was steel.
    “I have no idea.” She wiped at her face with both hands. “Sloan, how the hell should I know? I’m a reporter, okay? A good one, but nothing else. I’m—what the hell are you thinking? Do you think I’m in his dirty gang or something? Is that what you think? For all I know, you’re in his gang.” Anger made her voice loud, harsh, and she started coughing.
    He handed her the water and she drank deeply, until the bottle wheezed and gasped when she let it go, sucking air back into the vacuum.
    “I don’t think anything right now. I just told you I’m curious.”
    “Well, I’m curious, too. I’m curious about—I mean, what’s going to happen to Ella?” She had meant to yell at him, say something sarcastic and bitter, but her worries poured out. “She didn’t look—back there? Is she going to make it?”
    He didn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t know. I’m very sorry, Kate.”
    “Can’t you find where they took her? I don’t think they’re going to help Eli. You can’t reverse what happened to him. They tricked her, and I think they’re going to kill her.” Tears bubbled up in her eyes. “She didn’t mean to hurt me, I know it.”
    “Like I said, we need to give him a sense of comfort that nothing is out of place.”
    “So you know they plan to kill her, and you’re not going to do anything?”
    “There are agents on it. If she’s still alive, they will do their best to extract her safely. But we can’t tip off Mancini.” Anguish flashed on his face before it closed again. “Not until the auction. And you—” He broke off.
    “What will happen to me?” Kate felt fear rise again.
    “You got lucky. You need to stay out of the way, which is why I brought you here.”
    “I mean, after.” She blinked at him.
    He looked away. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. My job is to keep you safe for the duration of the operation, keep you out of harm’s way. If we can get another copy of the data, I’ll let you continue working on it—but I won’t let you go public until the right time.”
    “But you said it was all wiped out.”
    “I think Ella hid a copy somewhere for you.”
    Kate thought about the thing Ella had pushed into her hand and forced herself not to look down at her hip. Was it still even there? God only knew. She bit her lip. “Why would she do that?”
    “She was being forced to betray you, Kate. But she had no love for Mancini. She’s a smart woman, and she knows the value of multiple data sources. My gut tells me that she hid a copy of the data somewhere, and she wants you to find it. That’s why she said that to you. About following your heart to find the truth. Connor told me she said it more than once.”
    “That could mean guilt. Or babbling. She was out of her mind.” In retrospect, Kate could see the terror in Ella’s whole body.
    Sloan pursed his lips. “I need you to think, Kate. Where would Ella hide data for you? She wanted you to have something, either something physical, or some information. We need that.”
    “Why do you care?” Her voice rose high and thin. “You don’t even care about the water plant stuff.”
    “Maybe Ella stumbled across something at the plant that was about more than lead and carcinogens in the water supply. Maybe she didn’t even know what she had, and was just blindly passing along anything even vaguely suspicious. That might be what tipped Mancini over the edge to