She made me wait a good bit before answering. “I’m on medical leave, you know. I’m not supposed to be getting stressed.”
“Well, if the idea of four women being targeted for something they didn’t do stresses you out, good news. You can help fix it,” I replied. I heard the clinking of a spoon and a bowl. “Are you eating?”
“Pho. It’s all this baby wants.” The spoon clinked again. “Alright. Pick one.”
“Pick one what?”
“One question. You can ask about the dossier, the kill order, who has been sent after you. But only one. That’s all I have time for because I’m hanging up in fifteen seconds.”
I thought fast. We had a good idea of who had been sent after us—basically anybody who wanted to collect a bonus. What we needed to know was if there was a way to call the order off.
“Ten seconds,” she said, her voice muffled—from the noodles probably.
“Is there a way to rescind the order?” I asked.
“Nope.” She slurped another spoonful.
“That’s it? Just ‘nope’？ We’re under a death sentence?”
“Pretty much.” She paused. “Can you go into hiding?”
“For the rest of our lives? No, thanks. I’d rather handle this. Why are they so set on terminating us instead of letting us clear our names?”
She paused. “You know what a gibbet is?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A gibbet? Kind of like a cage on a pole? The law set them up at crossroads and used them to hang murderers, pirates, sheep thieves. And they left them there, chained up and rotting, for everybody to see while they went about their business. You know why?”
“To discourage other people from committing similar crimes,” I finished.
“Exactly.”
“So they want to make examples of us?”
“More that they want to make everybody else too afraid to ask questions. They want to be left in peace, and you four are in danger of rocking the boat.”
I gripped the phone. “Left in peace to do what?”
“You’re well past your fifteen seconds,” she said. I didn’t answer and she sighed. “I heard a rumor. Someone is on the take, arranging murders for pay. I don’t know who. But they’re determined to cover it up. If word gets out, the entire organization is in jeopardy.”
“Bullshit. We didn’t know anything about that before they decided to come for us.”
“Billie,” she said patiently. “Think.”
“The only reason to come for us—” I broke off. “Holy shit. They’re going to blame it on us and let whoever is actually responsible walk free.”
“Well, it took you a minute, but you got there in the end,” she said. “You’re expendable to the board. Whoever is arranging the freelance hits isn’t, so the board has decided to protect them.”
“Why?”
“They could be too highly placed to lose. They could be blackmailing the board. They could have cut the board in on the hits. Those are just the first possibilities that come to mind. I could think of about a dozen more.”
“And none of it matters because we’re still under a termination order,” I finished. “Who is it? Who is arranging the freelance hits?”
“I already told you, I don’t know. It could be a member of the board.”
“It could be someone from Provenance,” I said, my voice heavy with insinuation.
I heard the sound of a spoon dropping into an empty bowl. “You want to accuse me of something, go right ahead. I’m done with this conversation. Your time is up.”
I related what she’d told me to the others. Mary Alice sat with her head in her hands while Helen covered her mouth and Natalie swore up a blue streak.
“Those shit-licking bastards,” she finished. “What if some of the work we did was part of this freelance bullshit? Someone could have been using us to carry out their dirty little side jobs like we were common hit men.”
It was all too easy to see how it might have been done—money changing hands, dossiers prepared. The board would be briefed on the prospective targets and the field agent assigned. Once it was passed down to us, we’d have no way of knowing if the job was clean or not. We put our faith in Provenance and the board to identify the appropriate targets. Every piece of information, every decision, every action, was a link in the chain we forged together. Any corruption in that chain was unthinkable.