"Fine. I'd like—"
"Uh…Agent Riyad?" Jeffers.
And just like that, the scowl was back.
The spook wasn't kidding. He really did not like Warren Jeffers, much less the man's sycophantic attitude.
She could see the tinge of disgust coating Riyad's latest frown as he turned toward the DCM's downright timid approach across the foyer. "Yes?"
"The ambassador's looking for you."
"Was. I left her side fifteen minutes ago. Unless this request is new?"
"Oh, no. Sorry. I'll just—"
Regan stepped forward, before the man could complete his almost comical tail tuck and instinctive about-face. "Mr. Jeffers?"
The man froze. In honor of her presence, Riyad's nearly perpetual scowl had shifted, now appearing on the DCM's meaty features. "Yes?"
"I need to see Mr. Crier. Now." She hadn't had a chance to discuss the latest with Riyad, so she shot him an open glance instead. One that promised dirt, if he'd but back her up.
To her relief, the spook clipped a nod in return. "Right. As a matter of fact, we both need to see Crier." Riyad nodded to the DCM, tapping into a surprisingly effective store of charm she'd yet to see from the man. "Mr. Jeffers, if you would be so kind as to escort Agent Chase to Crier's office? He told the ambassador he'd be holed up there until further notice." Riyad turned to her and leveled a brief, but stunning smile on her in place of his standard-issue frown. "I'll join you shortly, Regan. Just as soon as I've taken care of that matter we discussed."
Chaudhry.
She returned the spook's smile with more than a touch of pure camaraderie, if only to piss Jeffers off, as she gathered up her laptop and stainless-steel kit. "I'll see you there. Good luck." She allowed her smile to drip away as she headed for the DCM and his thatch of wilted peppery curls and wrinkled suit. "Shall we?"
The DCM's annoyance at having to do her bidding echoed with each peeved step along the silvery marble flooring as they crossed the foyer. It continued to serve as the only communication between them as Jeffers led her past the inner security, as well as darkened office after darkened office, until they'd reached the chancery's political section.
She paused to set her crime kit down on the secretary's outer desk as Jeffers grudgingly continued on toward a closed, inner door, presumably to knock.
A split second before his thick knuckles connected with the slab of wood, a sharp retort reverberated from within.
Gunshot.
Regan dumped her laptop and vaulted toward the DCM, drawing her SIG with her right hand as she knocked the man's entire body down and away from the wooden door with her left. "Call security—and stay down!"
She needn't have whispered—much less slowly cracked the door open so she could case the inner room. Her first, brief glance inside told her all she needed to know.
There was no lingering threat to Jeffers or herself.
Or Tom Crier for that matter.
Not anymore.
The man was seated behind his desk, his navy-blue suited shoulders braced against the back of an executive chair. His green eyes were open, his blond head tipped toward his left shoulder with his jaw split jarringly apart. Half hung freely at a surreal, mutilated angle she'd seen once before. Just after midnight on Christmas Day.
When she was six years old.
All things considered, the man looked remarkably similar to that final image she carried of her mother…but for one notable exception.
Tom Crier was already dead.
23
"Agent Chase? Are you okay?"
Regan was dimly aware of the spook touching her sleeve. She ignored the sensation, and him, fighting the inexplicable fog that had closed in as she stared at the scarlet and gray splattered across the desk she couldn't recall moving in front of.
The fog. It wasn't surrounding the desk.
It was inside her.
It took several torturous moments before she was able to push her way through. To accept where she was—in the present, not the past. At the chancery at Embassy Islamabad, Pakistan, not on the ground floor of a skinny, brick townhouse in desperate need of remodeling on the outskirts of Washington, DC.
How long since she'd heard that retort?
"Agent Chase?"
Damn it, focus.
She drew her breath in deep, gathering up her jangled nerves as she forced her equally jangled hand to slip her SIG back inside the jacket of her suit and into the waiting slot in her shoulder holster. Only then did she risk turning around to face the open door. Jeffers was nowhere to be seen. Three Marines stood in the middle of the outer office, waiting instructions. Corporal Vetter's familiar, uniformed form loomed among them. But that was it.
"Regan?" Riyad again. His voice was sharp this time, determined.
Knowing.
Worse, those dark eyes of his were brimming with genuine compassion as she swung around toward the desk and the spook waiting patiently beside it, and her.
"Can you do this?"
She knew what he was asking. Admitting.
They didn't have time for him to play catch-up cop, and Riyad knew it. Not with that unruly mob still swelling outside the gates.
There might be a slew of diplomatic security agents currently swarming in and around the buildings and grounds of the embassy, but every single one was actively attempting to keep that smoldering powder keg from exploding.
This investigation was up to her. Despite the fact that the physical fallout to the victim in front of her was identical to the horror she'd been attempting to banish from her brain for the past twenty years.
Focus. Work the case in front of you.
Now.
She drew her breath in deep once more, this time purging the lingering remnants of past horrors with it. Mostly. "I'm fine." But her hand definitely wasn't. "My kit. It's in the outer office. Would you—"
"Absolutely." He turned on his boot heels and left, leaving her with that goddamned mess in front of her.
And it was a mess.
Like her mother, the embassy's senior political officer had pressed the working end of a pistol beneath the base of his chin, only to shift his hand at the last moment, sending the round exploding up at a slight angle, through his jawbone, nasal cavity and forehead, blowing the top of his skull into the ceiling of the room. Bits of brain, blood and bone had then rudely rained down around him. In her mother's case, her shoulders and lap…and, of course, the recently decorated Christmas tree behind her.
Tom Crier's flesh and fluid, and bits of brain and bone, had ended up on the shoulders of his dark blue suit and in his lap as well…along with a sheet of previously plain, white paper with two words scrawled amid the center.
Forgive me.
"Agent Chase?"
She drew in her breath and turned to find Riyad behind her, brandishing her crime kit. She thought about ordering him to remove the polite kid gloves he'd inexplicably brought into the room with him, but what the hell. His eggshells attitude might be grating, but overall it was a welcome change from his disdain when they'd performed a similar activity in the Griffith's conference room two days earlier.
Not trusting the fingers of her rattling hand, she reached out with her left and spun the barrels on her crime kit's waiting combination lock. Once inside the stainless-steel case, she withdrew a pair of latex gloves and booties, then motioned for Riyad to do the same. Protective gear donned, she retrieved her camera and automatically began her photographic sweep of the scene while the spook moved across the office to set her opened kit down on the modest, wood-grained conference table.
Other than that body and what definitely appeared to be a suicide note, nothing appeared amiss.
She tipped her head toward Embassy Islamabad's now former political officer. "He was having an affair with Inaya Sadat—with her husband's knowledge and permission. Crier fathered her baby."
"You're sure?"
As sure as she could be without paternity test results in hand. "Brandt an
d Aamer Sadat were lovers. Major Garrison and I got verbal confessions from both Sadats at the Shifa this evening." Something neither would ever have invented with their religion and Pakistani citizenship, since both risked death with the admissions. "Also, their son, Danyal, does have diabetes, but that's not why he's in the ICU. Someone infected the boy with the chimera. I could smell it on his breath. Dr. Fourche is already consulting and arranging to have the cure flown in later today."
"Holy fuck. A baby?"
"Yep."
The spook extended a gloved finger toward the desk. "Hence, the bastard's note."
She nodded. "It would seem so." Then again, appearances could be deceiving. She'd learned that lesson the hard way…several times.
Forgive me.
For fathering a child outside of his marriage? Or for infecting that child with a deadly virus to cover it up? Or had Thomas Crier been alluding to the investigation he'd come to suspect she was really here in Islamabad to pursue? The one involving their nation's latest, and perhaps deadliest-to-date, traitor?
Regan pondered the questions as she wrapped up her close-up photos of the victim and his immediate surroundings. She'd taken no photos of the weapon Crier had used, though, because she'd yet to spot it.
Had it bounced beneath the desk?
She reached out to grasp the left arm of the executive chair. The leather monstrosity did possess wheels, but with her recalcitrant hand, there was no way she was going to risk losing control of the chair and accidentally spinning their victim out onto the floor. "I'm done photographing the body. Can you help—"
"Let go. I've got it."
The spook's filthy frown returned when she failed to obey, though this one resembled John's when she'd tried to take her kit from him as they were leaving the Serena hotel earlier tonight, rather than the others Riyad had been bestowing upon her since her arrival aboard the Griffith.
She released the arm of the chair and let Riyad roll Crier's body several feet back.
And there was the gun.
Crier's right hand had hit his thigh following the 9mm's retort, sending the Glock he'd used to blow his brains out skittering underneath the desk.
She crouched down and took the requisite photos, then reached down to retrieve the Glock. "Can you grab an evidence—"
"Right here."
"Thanks." She slipped the 9mm into the paper bag already open in Riyad's hands.
He filled out the evidence label, but left the bag unsealed as she'd yet to dust the Glock for prints. The label finished, he walked the bag across the office to lay it on the conference table beside her stainless-steel case.
"I've got a gunshot residue test kit in the second drawer—"
"Got it."
Damn. The man might make a decent investigative colleague after all. He'd even spent his time while she was photographing the scene splaying her kit wide on the table so he could root thought its contents and set out items he thought she might need. She turned back to Crier's body as the spook reached her side. Ignoring that glassy, vacant stare as best she could, she accepted the GSR swab for the lab's sample. She used her steady hand to dab the swab down the victim's right index finger and along the inner webbing, then up to the tip of his thumb.
Fortunately, that vacant gaze was green, not blue. And while the rest of those misshapen features were baby-faced, they were definitely male.
It helped.
She finished dabbing Crier's right hand and moved onto his left as Riyad took care of packaging up the initial samples. Once both hands had been dabbed for the lab's definitive test, she retrieved the small square of white cotton, swiping the entire inner webbing of Crier's right hand once more with the material.
This second round of swabbing was for herself.
She set the square of cotton into the plexiglass developing chamber, then accepted the dropper from Riyad and popped the ampule within. Once the square was soaked with the testing solution, she sealed the plexiglass box and handed it to Riyad so he could set it on the conference table along with the rest of the materials she'd expended.
And now, the wait.
Within five minutes, they'd have the results.
Though really, given that she and Jeffers had been outside the office when the Glock had gone off and that no one but Crier had been inside when she'd entered, the pending results of their GSR field test were significantly less of a mystery than the contents of the man's imposing executive desk.
Riyad returned to her side. "Now what?"
She pointed toward the column of drawers on either side. "We search." Unfortunately, the drawers were locked. Had her hand been cooperating, it would have been easy enough to pick the main lock. But they didn't have time. Not with that mob outside the gates, swelling even now, as her watch closed in on 0230. "There's a small crowbar at the bottom of my kit."
Moments later, the spook returned with the iron bar and performed the destructive honors.
She pointed toward the far column of drawers as he turned to lay the crowbar on the windowsill behind them. "You take the right side; I'll take the left."
"Will do."
They searched in silence for several minutes, sifting through a mind-numbing amount of bureaucratic paperwork until she hit the bottom of the lowest drawer in her assigned column—literally.
Odd. Her trembling hand continued to smack into the base of the drawer with a steady rhythm—but both the sound and the feel were off.
Riyad shifted his suit-clad bulk to her side. "What's wrong?"
"I think we've got a false bottom." Was this why Crier had created one in that pack of Pakistani smokes? Because he'd used one to conceal something else?
The spook turned to the window, then back, crowbar in hand. "Step aside."
The bar went into the drawer. A solid pop filled the air around the desk. Regan reached in with her steadier hand and lifted the damage piece of wood.
Definitely a false bottom.
A tantalizing, smooth brown envelope lay in the space beneath.
She pulled the envelope out with her right hand. Riyad waited patiently as she worked the stiff brass brad on the reverse so she could lift the crisp flap and tip the significantly less crisp contents out into her waiting palm.
She sucked in her breath as she skimmed the header of the upper sheet.
Her colleague wasn't nearly as polite. "Holy fuck."
The spook appeared fond of that phrase. But in this case—as Regan continued to flip through the papers beneath the upper sheet—she couldn't argue with it.
"Ah, shit." John.
She glanced across her latest crime scene to find the man's dark gray suit filling the doorway of the office. John hadn't been kidding.
He had found her.
Though clearly not where and how he'd hoped.
John's glower strengthened as he strode into the room, pausing at her side to take in the corpse still seated in the executive chair several feet away. His glower turned downright caustic as it moved on to the visible rattling of her arm.
He was about to say something about one or the other, when his gaze fell to the papers in her hand. "Is that—"
"The security review for Embassy Islamabad?" She reached into her pocket and retrieved the purple nitrile gloves she'd taken from the Shifa's ICU earlier that evening, passing them over. "You tell me. Is this as bad as Riyad and I think it is?"
John donned the gloves and accepted the sheaf of papers.
The curse that escaped as he flipped through the stack was filthier than Riyad's had been. "Yeah. These are the plans Webber and I worked on. And these—" John held up the smaller, stapled sheaf that had been tucked beneath. "—are copies of my personal notes concerning our contingency plans for securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal."
Oh, Jesus.
Both Chaudhry and his son were definitely targets. Even if they weren't, she couldn't take the chance that Webber didn't have Colonel Chaudhry in his sights as well as the chief justice's. But was Webber simply tr
ying to foment hate and discontent for the US within the colonel's mind and heart? Or was there something else going on? Something truly horrific, as suggested by the presence of John's notes?
If so, how the hell did they stop it?
John caught her glance. "Rae, you've got a visitor."
At the embassy?
Other than Palisade, Kettering and select members of the embassy staff, no one outside their team even knew she was in the city.
She glanced at her watch. It had taken her and Riyad longer than she'd thought to process the scene. All she had left was to test the Glock, and the envelope and papers for prints—and arrange for the disposition of Crier's body pending autopsy. "Who wants to see me at 0258 in the morning?"
"Chief Justice Harun Chaudhry and his wife are waiting in a conference room one floor down. I was near the back gate when their car pulled up. I called the ambassador, then escorted them inside and got them comfortable. Justice Chaudhry seems to think you're expecting them. He also said that he and his wife have seen the news, and now they want to hear what really happened to their daughter—from you."
She turned to Riyad.
He shrugged. "You told me to call Kettering. I called."
Yes, but she'd fully expected to go to Chaudhry. The man was here—at this hour? And with what was going on outside? And he'd brought his wife along? Then again, it wasn't as if the woman—or her husband—would be able to sleep. Nor was the unruly mob outside the gates a danger to the Chaudhrys.
At least, not yet.
Regan shoved Crier's hidden envelope at John so he could tuck the incendiary evidence back inside. If that was even possible—even with steady hands.
She headed for the wood-grained conference table and the plexiglass box containing the GSR field test results to give herself something to do while her brain continued to work through the latest developments.
As for the chemical one inside the plexiglass, that development was downright anticlimactic. The brown specks now staining the square of white cotton proved that Thomas Crier had indeed taken his own life in this very room, leaving the rest of them to clean up his personal and professionally traitorous shit.
Backblast Page 34