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

Regan set the folder she'd brought with her on the table and leaned forward, intent on forcing that smile to falter altogether as she tapped his bump. "Oh, look, I broke your nose. And that cut—" She tsked softly as she shifted her finger to trail the tip along the row of tidy stitches someone had reapplied well after she'd left this man lying face down on the floor of that bathroom with one of her filthy socks crammed into his mouth. "I'll have to talk to the ship's doc about getting these removed. Though really, you're bound to have a nasty scar due to the infection and restitching you suffered anyway." She offered a decidedly unrepentant shrug. "Sorry."

The man's smile managed to cling to his lips—barely. "If this is all the damage I suffer at the infidel's hand, I shall consider myself fortunate. After all, not all who enter your country's custody have fared so well, yes?"

Abu Ghraib?

If so, there was no need to try and shame her with an oblique allusion or even a direct reference to that heinous debacle. She had no illusions. Not all her fellow soldiers were as fair and honorable during the heat of battle as she'd like, much less in the quieter, more subdued moments before and after—especially during those moments that were well out of eye and earshot of the rest of the troops. It was why she had a job. Her own set of Army-honed, mission-oriented skills.

Unfortunately, the impetus of that remark hadn't been distant and sweeping. It was close and intimate.

Personal.

She was certain when that dark stare shifted across the compartment, toward the 1MC speaker hanging in the corner of the overhead.

"And how is my brother in Allah faring this evening?"

For a moment, she wondered if Brandt truly had spoken out of turn, or even Riyad or Corporal Vetter.

But, no, the bastard seated two feet away might be a mass murderer and a terrorist, but he wasn't an idiot.

Not only had Durrani graduated from Harvard medical school, he'd done so with honors, despite a rocky start during his undergrad years while he'd been fine-tuning his English. His later academic success wasn't surprising, since the man had also proven capable and cunning enough to steal a unit of blood donated by Captain McCord during a rare down moment at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan months earlier. If another physician hadn't wondered about the absent plasma proteins in a forensics report, they might never have figured out that Durrani had frozen that stolen unit, only to thaw it out four weeks ago so he could plant McCord's blood inside that Pakistani cave during the murders.

Someone that clever could easily have heard the announcement that ordered Riyad and the ship's doctor to the conference room shortly after her arrival and put the rest together.

"Agent Chase?"

She paused in the middle of retrieving her voice recorder. "Hmm?"

"Do you require my assistance with Tamir? After all, I am a qualified physician."

Now that was debatable, wasn't it? Especially since a physician's leading dictate was do no harm. Something at which this so-called physician had failed.

Profoundly.

"Thank you, but no." She set the recorder on the table beside her folder. "Doctor Mantia and his assistants have everything in hand." She didn't bother adding that the latter had included a master-at-arms petty officer with a body bag. "I am glad that you're in the mood to be helpful, though. You see, I have a lingering mystery regarding that cave. One I'd appreciate your assistance in solving."

One of those sleek, dark brows rose.

She leaned forward to switch the recorder on, offering up the standard who, what, when, why and where as she sat back in her chair.

Initial legalities out of the way, she turned the manila folder around so he could view the contents as she opened it.

"Ah, you've brought pictures. I presume they pertain to this…mystery of yours?"

"They do." Regan tapped the uppermost one, suppressing the bile that churned up each and every time she viewed it and the succession of photos that followed. Namely, the close-ups of the slaughtered victims from that cave. "As you know, although Jameelah Khan was married to a man from Pakistan during the months that she worked at the laundry on Bagram Airbase, she was having an affair with Captain McCord. The child you sliced from her womb was his. As I'm sure you also know, Jameelah died as a result of the horror you inflicted on her. But her baby did not. She survived. The little girl will be heading to the States soon to live with her biological father, Captain McCord."

"Pity."

"That his child survived? Or that we discovered her parentage?"

"Both." Those dark eyes remained as cold and emotionless as they had in that safe house as Durrani stared at the grisly eight-by-ten glossy. But his mouth didn't. His lips curved into a distinct, shit-eating smirk that took every ounce of restraint she possessed to ignore as he leaned back in his metal chair and shrugged—as much as those steel cuffs would allow. "Of course, there was always the risk the latter would come out."

"Her parentage?"

"Yes."

"You're lying." She didn't need that sanctimonious smirk to know it either. It was the paternity itself. "After all, why go to the trouble of kidnapping Jameelah in the first place if you didn't want her daughter's true parentage to come out?"

Another shrug, and another smirk.

Good.

She wanted them. Needed them.

The more this man wallowed in his smug superiority, the greater the odds that she'd reach her goal before he caught onto it—and her. "I think Jameelah was crucial to your plans. It's the other women who weren't. After all, you simply reeled the remaining women in while you were making your rounds in Kabul when you volunteered at the Malalie Maternity Hospital. Once you identified a potential victim, you merely told her that you were worried about her baby. That she needed further tests. Tests her fundamentalist husband was likely to balk at. But not to worry—you