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

"General?"

"Yes, Chief?"

She turned around at the door and headed back toward the hospital bed bisecting the room. "I have another update. I've ID'd our traitor."

"I thought we already had him."

So had she. "Sir, Tom Crier was set up. He—"

"Wrong."

She spun around, coming face to face with the one man she'd never expected to be paying a supportive sympathy visit. And definitely not to her. Then again, diplomacy was in his blood and, hence, faking it. The latter of which, this man was a master at.

"Sir, Deputy Chief of Mission Warren Jeffers has just arrived." Along with someone else. She nodded to Scott as he, too, entered the room. Either Jeffers had talked her old MP classmate into tagging along to help to perpetuate his faux sympathies, or Scott was here for another reason. Either way, "May I call you back?"

"I'll be waiting."

The moment Palisade severed the call, she tossed her phone onto the foot of the bed and rounded on Jeffers. "I don't appreciate you walking into my room unannounced, let alone interrupting my conversation with my boss."

"I don't give a shit what you appreciate. Especially since the information you were imparting was dead wrong—literally. Crier was guilty. From what Agent Riyad says, you yourself found that false bottom in the man's desk and the packet of classified information he'd secreted within. And there's the note. The bastard asked for forgiveness in own hand."

"Agreed." But was Crier asking for forgiveness because he'd committed treason, or was he sorry that he'd finally realized there was a traitor in the embassy? A traitor from whom Crier had failed to protect his own child?

"And those papers you found—"

"Were planted." She shrugged into the DCM's shock, stalking forward to where he and Scott were standing just inside the door. "And there's the timing of Crier's suicide."

Not to mention the timing of what she was about to do. She had the man she needed within arms' length. With all that had happened in this country, and still could, she couldn't afford to let him out of her sight. Not when he could easily disappear into Pakistan, never to be seen again…until the next terror plot was due to unfold.

But could she pull this off with her arm rattling around at her side?

She could wait for Tulle.

Except that risked this all going south before the side of beef made his appearance in time to balance things out. The hospital was even more massive than the staff sergeant's shoulders. There was no telling how far away Tulle was from this room.

She glanced at Scott as she stepped closer to him and Jeffers, hoping Scott would recognize her old look—and the intent behind it.

From the gleam in Scott's eyes, not to mention that ever-so-slight nod, he did.

She tipped her head toward the coffee table behind her. "Corporal Vetter was kind enough to email me the video surveillance for the corridor outside Crier's office prior to his suicide. I just finished it. Fascinating viewing. Not only does it show you, Mr. Jeffers, heading in to speak with Crier minutes before you came down to the lobby to find Agent Riyad conversing with me in the waiting area, but you were in Crier's office for a solid ten minutes. And when you came out, you were seriously pissed. Granted, that appears to be your natural state around your co-workers. But this time, your tantrum ended with Crier eating his gun. Just what did you two discuss?"

"Whatever it was, is none of your damned business—"

She stepped closer, until she was standing directly in front of Jeffers and Scott. "Oh, but it is. Especially since I also have it on good authority that you used that same desk of Crier's several years earlier when you served as political officer; the first, in fact, to occupy that particular office in the chancery. Hence, you knew about the false bottom in that drawer."

She slipped her right hand behind her back and wrapped her quaking fingers around the cuffs, praying she could pull this off as she tugged them from her pocket. She stepped sharply to the right, reaching out with her left hand to spin Scott's wiry frame around, slamming her old MP buddy's face into the wall to momentarily stun him as she simultaneously clipped one of the cuffs to his right wrist while jerking Scott's left across his back to secure the second.

Jeffers was still gaping at her as she reached around into Scott's suit jacket to remove the man's Glock 19 from his shoulder holster.

She was bending down to remove Scott's backup Glock 26 when Staff Sergeant Tulle pushed the door open and entered the room.

She tossed both 9mms onto the bed, then nodded to Tulle to take over the search for anything else that might be hidden within those gray pinstripes.

"What the fuck did you do that for? You can't disarm one of my DSS agents!" Evidently Jeffers had regained use of his tongue.

Scott, however, hadn't bothered to come to his own defense.

They both knew why.

Old friend or not, and as much as it pained her so profoundly to admit, "I can when that agent is a traitor."

25

"What gave me away, Prez?"

"Don't 'prez' me." That nickname was for friends alone, and damned good ones at that. A category to which Scott Walburn no longer belonged. As for that critical clue, "You reset the tumbler on my kit. Among other things."

"Yeah, so?"

"So I change it—every time I close it. And I'd closed it twice since that old number."

"Christ. I forgot about that idiot-savant skill of yours."

Yeah, well, he was the one in cuffs.

Who was the idiot now?

Though, granted, she still felt like one. She'd fallen for his psst, Jeffers is an abuser and possibly more bait. Despite the fact that offering that lie had been a solid, obscuring tactic, especially given how Scott had to have known that the DCM's filthy reputation would have come to her attention anyway. It had been a smart move,