Backblast by Candace Irving (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

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 and 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