Page 94 of Stuart Woods' Golden Hour

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

“You owe me, though.”

There was a long pause before she said, “Okay.”

Braun raised his mobile tohis ear as he stepped onto the balcony of his penthouse. “Dieter, my friend, tell me the good news.”

“There’s been a complication.”

Braun’s grin vanished. One of the things he hated most was a complication, and this project had already had several.

“Explain,” Braun said sternly.

Dieter told him what had happened.

“Dieter, I expect you out of all my people to take care of things without any issues.”

“I made the best of the situation as it was presented.”

Braun usually appreciated Dieter’s habit of telling thingslike they were, but this time it got under his skin. “I think the words you were looking for were ‘I’m sorry, it won’t happy again.’ ”

There was a pause before Dieter said, “My apologies, Mr. Braun.”

Braun silently counted to five. It would do no good to get into an argument with Dieter right now. But after this was all done, they would be having a nice, long chat.

“Back to Verde,” Braun said, once he had calmed. “This is actually good news. If she was there, and Turner was there, then Turner must be Fay.”

“I had thought so, too, but it turns out that’s not the case.”

“What do you mean?”

Dieter shared what Jillian had told him, then said, “Verde’s contact has to be someone else. Someone who probably isn’t even Teddy Fay.”

Braun wasn’t ready to let go of that possibility yet. “Any ideas who she was there for?”

“The man at the hospital who stopped me from finishing off Verde, most likely.”

“Did you at least get a picture of him?”

“I wasn’t exactly in a position to do so. But I’ll asked Jillian to check hospital security footage. If she can get in, she should be able to pull an image of him.”

“This is all very disappointing.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Braun cocked his head. “Why not?”

“We were here because we thought Turner was Fay. If we hadn’t come, we wouldn’t have known that Verde showed up.”

“I guess that’s something,” Braun begrudgingly admitted. “Can I assume you’ll make another run at her?”

“Yes, but not right now. She’s well protected, and we don’t want to do something that will jeopardize the rest of the mission. I’ll keep you in the loop on our next move.”

“Damn right you will.”

After the CIA security teamrelieved Teddy at midnight, he went to the hospital’s security department. There, he used security cam footage to retrace the fake doctor’s movements from when he walked into the hospital until he escaped through a stairwell emergency exit.

At first, it appeared the man had arrived alone. But a review of the footage from outside the doctors’ locker room, where the man had changed, showed another man entering the room a few minutes after the assassin left. When the second man exited, he was holding a rolled-up bundle of clothes.

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