Free The Housewife Assassin's Ghost Protocol by Josie Brown

presence, jog some memory of the incident?”
    “From what we heard when you were still mic’ed, he admitted that he thought you looked familiar,” Arnie points out.
    I shake my head. “That was when I was wearing the platinum blonde wig that was cut similarly to Nicolette’s.”
    “You say he chose the exact same pair of shoes for you as last time? My guess is that he was playing a head game with you,” Dominic reasons. “Or, maybe it was purely coincidence. To be honest, dearie, you’re not really all that memorable.”
    I clench my fist under his nose as a reminder that I too can throw a few knuckle sandwiches.  
    He raises a hand in order to cover his glorious cheekbones. “Truly, old girl, I meant it as a compliment! Your lack of any exquisite features allows you to be nonexistent. You are as anonymous as a charwoman in the East End. As invisible as a wallflower at a cotillion—”
    I’ll admit it: I don’t take compliments well. This time when I raise my fist, Jack grabs my wrist so that I may work on this tiny fault somewhere other than a federal prison.
    As an insight hits him, Abu snaps his fingers. “Or, maybe Salem did it because, slowly and surely, the memory of you was coming back to him.”
    “I…I don’t know.” I shrug helplessly. “Maybe. I mean—well, he did say something intriguing at the very moment I put the high heels on my feet. How did he put it? Oh, yes! He said it reminded him of something, but that it didn’t go well.”
    “Maybe he was having a déjà vu moment,” Abu replies.
    “Now that he’s really dead, we’ll never know what he meant by it.” Ryan’s clipped tone indicates his disappointment that Salem isn’t here with us right now, under interrogation.
    “What about the pills we brought back with us? Why did Salem have so many in the hull of the ship?” Jack’s question gets me off the hook—for now, anyway.
    “Pills—and all those sex slaves!” Emma shivers. “They would have drowned if Donna hadn’t released them.”
    “Salem was using both as bartering chips with some of the other power players, some of whom were on the yacht with us last night,” I declare. “Like Salem and the rest of the men, Pinky Ring was hopped up on the stuff. It’s why he killed Suzette. Salem was going to throw him off the yacht until Pinky Ring promised to vote with him on some issue, against someone they called ‘the Other.’”
    “We downloaded the security footage from the ship’s computer,” Ryan replies. “Emma and Arnie’s teams will run facial recognition on everyone at the party. We’ll use it to ID the men who may be Quorum clients. As for the women, many may show up on Interpol’s missing persons database.” He tosses a packet of pills at each of us. “And by the way, turns out that it’s Captagon.”
    “What exactly does it do?” Emma asks.
    “It’s composed of two drugs: amphetamine and theophylline,” Abu explains. “An American pharmaceutical firm produced it up until the nineteen-eighties, as a legal controlled substance for attention deficit disorders. For over a decade now, the Lebanese have captured the Captagon black market. Unfortunately, ISIS has taken over the production of it. Since the conflict in Syria, Captagon production has skyrocketed. ISIS keeps their young recruits hopped up on it. The jihadists are like zombies. They don’t feel the need for sleep, and they’ll fight on for days at a time.” He shrugs. “They also consider it an aphrodisiac. So not only are they numbed to all the carnage, they rape with abandon. To keep their zombie fighters happy, ISIS has farms of women who are used as sex slaves. Sex is a great recruitment tool.”
      “Perhaps Salem was bringing more of it into Saudi Arabia so that it could be distributed into the Middle Eastern war zones,” I reason.
    Abu shakes his head. “More than likely he’s exporting it out of the Middle East. Similarly sized shipments have been discovered on other