by Cindy Gerard
Swearing, staggering, and gingerly touching his fingers to his cheekbone, he grabbed his gun from the floor, found his one-eyed jack, and tucked it in his pocket.
“So…” Sucking wind and grinning in the face of her anger and his pain, he dropped into the chair at the foot of the bed. “Welcome to my world.”
6
Of all the stupid moves, Eva couldn’t believe she’d let Brown get the drop on her. She knew what kind of an operative he’d been, knew not to let down her guard around him. But because she had, now her head was on the chopping block instead of his.
The sense of dread that had dogged her all the way to Peru went off the charts. Anger quickly outdistanced it. The bastard was enjoying this. She felt only a small measure of satisfaction as she watched his cheekbone redden and swell where she’d nailed him with her boot.
A good five minutes had passed since he’d cuffed her to the bed. Once he’d caught his breath, he hadn’t wasted time searching the room.
He didn’t find much. She’d been careful. If she was right and she’d been followed to Lima, she didn’t intend to make it easy for her shadow to find her—which wouldn’t make it easy for Brown to find out anything about her, either, and that, too, was by design. She didn’t want him knowing her real identity. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
To make certain, she’d rented the room by the hour. Paid cash and used one of her fake IDs. Multiple passports and extra cash were stashed in a locker at the airport, the combination committed to memory. So he wasn’t going to find anything to identify her here. But he did find the extra doses of Ketamine she’d brought along for insurance. And he’d found her Glock 19 in her purse, which meant he now had all the firepower.
Both handguns lay on a squat table he’d shoved against the wall near the foot of the bed, where he stood now—out of reach of her feet. He held a full syringe in his hand, playing with it, playing with her head.
“Ve have vays of making you talk,” he said with an arched brow and the worst German accent she’d ever heard.
The hard look in his eyes overrode his sick sense of humor. She had to stay strong. “Ooo. That was original.”
“I don’t have to be original.” He considered the needle. Considered her.
Now he was making her nervous. “You’re not going to use that on me.” She hoped to God she was right.
“Give me one good reason not to.”
She tried to get comfortable and felt a brief moment of guilt over how long she’d kept him bound in this very same position. It hurt her shoulders—and she didn’t have the added discomfort of once having had hers dislocated. “You won’t get any answers if you knock me out.”
“Maybe I don’t want answers.” The German accent and the joking were long gone as he slowly raked his gaze over her body. “Maybe, after all the shit you put me through, I want what you promised to deliver back at the cantina.”
A sick feeling slid through her stomach. “You need to drug and rape your bed partners to get a little action these days, do you?”
“Listen to all that judgmental scorn from the woman who didn’t hesitate to use a needle on me.” His smile was ugly. His voice was so soft and chilling it made her shiver—especially when he moved closer… a prowling, pissed-off lion. “Enough playing around. Talk to me, chica. I’ve reached the end of my patience. Who are you, how did you get your hands on that file, and what do you really want from me?”
He looked dangerous now. Unreasonably gorgeous and mean, suddenly, as the anger that flashed in his eyes turned to an arctic cold rage. “Talk or I walk. Right after I tape your mouth shut and give this wad of cash to the desk clerk of this fine establishment and tell him not to disturb you until the money runs out.”
He held up the bills he’d dug out of the front pocket of her jeans—another experience that hadn’t lacked in humiliation. “This ought to buy a good ten days of uninterrupted solitude, don’t ya think?”
She made herself hold his gaze. “You wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t leave me here to die.” Or for whoever wanted her silenced to find her defenseless.
He shoved the cash into his hip pocket. “I’m a cold-blooded murderer, remember? Wasn’t that the gist of the charges you leveled against me?”
When she didn’t say anything, he walked to the door. “Suit yourself.”
“All right.” She was suddenly afraid he would leave her. After what she’d done to him, could she really blame him? “All right,” she repeated when he hesitated with his hand on the door knob and waited.
She swallowed. He didn’t need to know the whole truth. Not until she knew if there was even a prayer of trusting him. “You were right. I did lose someone that day. A friend.”
He got very quiet. Then he leaned heavily against the door and waited for her to tell him.
“Ramon Salinas,” she finally confessed, unable to control the tremor in her voice. She hadn’t spoken Ramon’s name aloud for a very long time, and it hurt every bit as much as she’d thought it would.
For a long moment they were both quiet—both of them assaulted by their own thoughts about Ramon. When she’d recovered enough to look at him, she realized that he hadn’t recovered at all. His somber gaze searched her face.
“How did you know Salinas?”
There had been bad blood between the two men. A part of the reason she so despised Brown was because of the stories Ramon had told her about him. Ramon had told her that Brown had always done everything he could to undermine him—whether it was throwing wrenches in his bids for promotion, questioning his authority, or cutting into his action with women—before Ramon had met her, of course.
She’d had no reason to doubt Ramon. He’d told her that Brown was a hot dog and an egomaniac who took unnecessary risks with other people’s lives—risks that, according to the file that had shown up so mysteriously a month ago, had gotten Ramon and all those others killed.
She had to focus. “He didn’t like you much.”
He grunted. “You’re pulling punches now? The man hated my guts.”
“He told me you were a hotshot and a wild card. He even told me that you were probably going to get him killed one day.”
That had been right before he’d returned to Afghanistan for a second deployment and hooked up with the One-Eyed Jacks again. It was on that deployment that Operation Slam Dunk disintegrated and Ramon had died.
“So you figure that’s exactly what I did,” he surmised correctly.
Still slumped against the door, he looked exhausted with the weight of Ramon’s memory. “How did you know him?” he asked again with a closed expression.
“I did a story on him,” she lied. She refused to give Brown the advantage of knowing how she and Ramon were really connected. “When he was home recovering from—”
“Shrapnel from an IED,” he interrupted with a war-worn look in his eyes. “Took a hit in his leg in a skirmish outside Kabul. It sent him back stateside for a couple months.”
“That’s when I met him. While he was recuperating.” That part was true. “He gave me an interview.” That part wasn’t. What he’d given her was a ring. They’d been married three months when he redeployed to Afghanistan.
She flinched when Brown pushed away from the door and walked back to the chair. Eyes on hers, he stood behind it, gripped the back with both hands, and leaned on it heavily. “Try again. Active duty Spec Ops soldiers don’t give interviews.”
He was right. She had to pull it together if she wanted to convince him to believe her. “It was strictly anonymous. I never referred to him by name. It was more of an overview… the perspective of a soldier on the ground.”
“Did you drug him, too, to get him to talk?”
She expelled a deep breath. “I’m sorry about that.” It was a lie and she’d do it again in a heartbeat. She didn’t have time to be nice. Nor was she particularly inclined.
She seldom was. Nice wasn’t her thing.
He considered her with a hard look. “Now you�
��re sorry? I don’t think so. You wanted your pound of flesh. You’re happy as hell you made me suffer. That’s why you came looking for me, right? To make me pay?”
She wanted him to suffer, all right, the way she’d suffered after losing Ramon eight years ago.
It had taken a long time to work through the grief. But she’d finally moved on. Then a month ago the file on Operation Slam Dunk with all of its conflicting information had dropped into her hands… and somebody spooky had landed on her ass. From that moment to this one, her entire world had shifted.
Eight years ago, she’d been told that Ramon had died on a routine training mission. That he’d made a careless mistake that had cost him his life. So all this time, she’d believed a lie that had told her Ramon had not died a hero’s death, but one caused by his own carelessness.
The OSD file blew the lie to smithereens. The “official after-action report” on Operation Slam Dunk, signed off on by the Spec Ops commander, said that Ramon had died on a reconnaissance mission in Helmand Province. A mission that had turned into a bloodbath when Mike Brown had defied orders.
And yet, while the official after-action report laid all the blame squarely on Mike Brown’s shoulders, he’d vehemently denied any wrongdoing in his pretrial statements. That denial had compelled her to look deeper.
Nothing she’d found out said Brown wasn’t guilty. But every new piece of information she’d uncovered raised more questions. Then the shadow had appeared, and her sources had dried up. Someone had been following her ever since, and Eva didn’t have a doubt in her mind that her own life was in danger.
Just like she had no doubt that her shadow had followed her to Lima. She’d never seen the spook, but so help her God, she could almost smell the guy.
She jerked her head front and center when Brown snapped his fingers, commanding her attention. “You’re drifting, chica. We were talking about Ramon.”
She cleared her mind, tried to pick up the thread of their conversation. “Ramon talked to me because he was a friend of my brother’s.” Another lie, but she was determined to stay this course and somehow regain her advantage.
“How were they friends?” he asked, grilling her the way she’d grilled him. “Your brother in the military?”
“What does it matter?” she snapped. She didn’t want to go down this path. It left her open to more scrutiny. “He was a friend, okay?”
He spun the chair around and straddled it. “Seems like maybe a lesson in hostage etiquette is in order. You shouldn’t get testy with me, Pamela. Remember, I’m the one holding the needle this go-round.”
7
Eva breathed deep, regained her composure, and stared him down.
He dragged a hand through his too-long hair, brushing it off his face. Between the hair and his much more than a five o’clock shadow, he looked ragged and worn and still ridiculously gorgeous. His eyes were bright and clear now. The Ketamine had worn off.
“Fine,” he said when her silence made it obvious she planned to stick with her story. “Ramon was a friend. You hate me because he died. Got it. So, what? You plot for eight years to find me and tell me what a horrible person I am? Sorry. I’m not buying that.”
When she said nothing, he studied her face intently, and when he finally spoke he sounded thoughtful, even a little sad. “Did you come here to kill me, chica?”
“If I’d wanted you dead, I’d have put something with a little more kick in that syringe. I told you. I’m doing a story. A tribute to Ramon. A retrospective,” she said, restating her original lie, then adding a little extra, working him. “And I waited eight years because I’ve been on assignment in the Middle East. You might have heard? There are wars on terror, uprisings, military coups breaking out everywhere?”
“You know how it is. Us bottom-feeders tend to live under rocks. We miss things.” He gave her a considering look as he gingerly touched his fingers to the swelling under his eye. “Okay. Because you’re so entertaining, I’ll play along. You’ve been a busy little war correspondent. But now you’re back on Ramon’s story. Please, do enlighten me more.”
“In the process of doing research about Ramon and his deployments, I was given access to several military documents.” Another bold-faced lie. She’d never been given access to anything. If it hadn’t been for that top-secret file showing up out of the blue on that flash drive—no explanation, no return address, no postmark, because it had been delivered by a courier service that had conveniently lost all information about the sender—she would have never opened up this particular can of worms.
His eyes sharpened on hers. He clearly suspected that she was lying about how she’d gotten the files, yet for some reason, he played along. “And they handed over the OSD file. Just like that.”
Relieved that his skepticism seemed to have transitioned to interest, she pressed on with her lie. “No. Not just like that. My guess is they intended to supply me with a press-ready overview of the operations run since the war started. Your basic homogenized and carefully culled material. Declassified, redacted, and already made public in some form. They weren’t supposed to give me the Operation Slam Dunk file.”
His face paled again at the mention of the file. “Then how did you get it? That file isn’t supposed to exist anymore.”
“It exists. I read it.”
His expression grew grimmer. She’d already proven how much she knew about him with information that could only have come from the file.
“Okay.” He conceded the point. “Let’s back up. Who are they? Who gave you the information?”
“I don’t reveal my sources.” She couldn’t if she wanted to. She didn’t know who her benefactor was or what his or her motive was for dropping the bomb in her lap that had led her here to Lima and Brown.
“It’s so reassuring to know that you have some professional code of ethics—drugs and flex cuffs notwithstanding.” He lifted a shoulder. “But that could just be me, splitting hairs.”
“Those were carefully calculated tactics. You’re a big boy. I’m sure you’ve done the same.” She wrapped her fingers around the bars on the headboard and pulled herself up to get a little more comfortable. “Anyway, I’d scanned close to thirty generic, sterilized documents when I spotted the last one on the list. Somebody goofed and hadn’t erased the data.”
He let out a low groan. “No shit. All right. Let’s ride this horse and agree that you ‘stumbled’ onto the ‘official’ military report of what happened that night. The gospel according to the five-star gods of war. Still doesn’t tell me what you need me for.”
“In the pretrial transcripts you repeatedly denied any wrongdoing on your part, adamantly maintained that someone had sabotaged the mission then set you up to be the fall guy—”
He cut her off with a lift of his hand. “They did set me up.”
“Then why the plea bargain?” It was that abrupt about-face that had compelled her to dig deeper. And that digging had ticked someone off enough to have her followed. “Why would an innocent man cop a plea? Why would you sell out your remaining two teammates, Taggart and Cooper, and take them down with you?”
He considered her for a long time. “You ask that as though you think I might have had a reason other than being guilty. Having a change of heart, Pamela?”
She hadn’t realized she was so transparent. “Okay. Here’s the truth. When I came here, I wanted you to be guilty. I wanted you to admit it. I wanted it to end there.”
He arched a brow. “And yet—now something is making you wonder if maybe I’m not the scourge of the free world. Goodness gracious, my heart’s all aflutter.”
She squirmed and rolled her burning shoulders, as weary with this game as he was. “Just because I’m starting to believe you got a bum rap doesn’t change the fact that I think you’re a coward.”
“Give it a rest, chica. This is not the path to the truth. You ever hear the expression ‘You can catch more flies with honey than Ketamine’?”
“Damn it, Br
own. Just give it to me straight. What really happened on the mission?”
He slumped back in the chair, slowly shook his head. “Oh, no. I still haven’t gotten my answers. You’ve been lying to me since you opened your mouth. Why is this really so important to you? And seriously, if this is about a story, why not put the screws to the powers that be and leave me the hell out of it?”
The intensity in his blue eyes reminded her that while this was about her wanting answers, it was also about his life. His career. Both things he’d walked away from.
“Because the moment I said the words Operation Slam Dunk out loud to someone at the Department of Defense, I lost total access. They quit answering my e-mails, refused my phone calls. I get real suspicious—red-flag suspicious—when doors start slamming in my face.” Just like she got scared when she started noticing the same black sedan following within a few car lengths on the freeway each night. The same panel van parked a block away from her house.
He made a tired, cynical sound. “There are no stone walls like the U.S. military’s walls.”
She strained futilely against the cuffs again, then laid back against the pillows. “Listen, I have my own sources, my own methods. I can get to the bottom of this. But I need you to help me flesh things out, sift through the garbage and get to the real leads.”
He jerked his chin back. “Leads? Leads on what? An eight-year-old story that—at the risk of total redundancy—the military is going to stonewall like it’s Fort Knox?”
“Leads that might go beyond what happened in that valley that night.”
There. She’d said it.
“What are you talking about?”
“I wish I knew. But something… something’s way off.”
He looked completely baffled. “Is that not what I’ve been trying to tell you?”
“I had to find out for myself, okay? That’s why I’m here. That’s why I used extreme measures.”
He had nothing to say to that, but his expression said plenty. Somewhere, mixed in with the staged indifference and very real anger, was relief that she might actually believe him now. Which meant he wasn’t as apathetic about the hand he’d been dealt as he let on.