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

Mostly.

She and the spook continued to maintain their dual silence as the ME began to close the initial Y incision with a neat looping baseball stitch via that enviably steady hand. Still. Despite nearly two hours of constant, fine-motor work.

As the colonel finished tying off the thick thread, Riyad's jaw loosened and began to open.

She did the man a favor and pinched the thick, sinewy biceps beneath his polo sleeve hard enough to leave a bruise. Odd. For an intel guy, he was seriously buff.

He took the warning in stride—but obeyed.

She clamped down on her own impatience and swallowed it firmly as Tarrington finally retrieved the black rugged case that had been stashed on the deck at the starboard side of the OR since before they'd entered. The moment he hefted the case atop a waiting cart and cracked it open, the connection between that seizure, the rictus, those pinpoint lung hemorrhages, as well as the colonel's unusual fascination with the liver, locked in.

Hope outright exploded within.

Riyad stiffened. "Is that a—"

"Shhh." But she nodded, even as she mentally crossed every single one of her un-contracted fingers and toes. Hell, her soul.

If she was right—if Tarrington was right—what she now knew he suspected wasn't mitigating at all. It was outright exculpatory.

She also understood the fresh round of confusion burrowing in between her fellow agent's brows as he watched the ME fire up the specialized equipment within the case. After all, Riyad was a counterintelligence specialist. He was used to thinking in terms of terrorists. Bomb-making materials and explosive residue.

The microTLC that Tarrington had brought with him to the aircraft carrier was definitely used in the course of those types of investigations. The Thin Layer Chromatography system was often crucial to solving them. But it was capable of so much more. The portable gem had been designed to analyze forensic and environmental samples in the field, and even on the battlefield, in a variety of ways. The microTLC could detect explosives, illicit drugs, insecticides and pesticides from samples taken from a surface, liquid or solid.

In this case, liquid.

She watched as Tarrington switched on the microTLC's screen, retrieved one of the small plastic developing chambers and placed it in the waiting slot, then added the mobile phase. Next, he swabbed a sample from the blood he'd drawn from the translator's heart, added in the acetonitrile and began the agitation.

From there, the agonizing wait commenced as he nudged the sample through the remaining steps until, finally, it disappeared into the machine.

She tried to keep her hope in check as the minutes continued to tick out…and failed. Unlike Riyad, she knew the colonel wasn't looking for evidence of tetanus any more, or even epilepsy. He was looking for something else.

Something that could turn this entire case on its head.

Based on the sudden release of tension in the colonel's shoulders, he'd found it.

Unfortunately, she was too far away to read the confirmation on the microTLC's screen.

"What—"

She glared at Riyad, cutting him off once again. "I said, shhh." Tarrington wasn't ready to share, and she'd be damned if she'd allow the spook to jinx this.

Somehow, she found the patience to stand there beside Riyad, silent, as the colonel repeated the entire procedure with yet another sample. This one taken from the collection he'd removed from the translator's liver.

"Agents?"

That was their cue.

Relief flooded in as the ME turned to wave them over. The colonel's face and body were still set in impartial stone. But he was smiling inside.

It was in the gleam in his eyes.

She followed the spook around the gurney and stepped up to the microTLC's screen beside the men. And there it was. That lovely, exculpatory word.

Strychnine.

With it came the second tectonic shift in her day—as well as her current mission. Someone aboard the Griffith was guilty of murder, but it wasn't John.

Because Tamir Hachemi had been poisoned.

11

Regan dug her fingernails into her palms to keep from swaying as the relief blistered through her body, burning through the tension and the terror of the day.

She still couldn't quite believe it.

Strychnine.

She freely admitted that deep down, she'd been praying for a reprieve for John. The proverbial stay of execution. But what he'd received was so much more. That single word had granted John an honest-to-God Get Out of Jail Free card.

Of course, the container designed to preserve Tamir Hachemi's brain, along with the blood and tissue samples Colonel Tarrington had culled, still needed to be shipped to the Joint Pathology Center at Fort Detrick for a more detailed workup. But those ten tiny letters on the microTLC's screen were definitive.

Unless—

She turned to the ME. "Did you find anything else?"

The welcomed burn intensified as the colonel shook his head. "Nothing to contraindicate poisoning as cause of death. And much to support it. Mr. Hachemi's pupils are still dilated; his mucus membranes are cyanotic."

"The pinpoint hemorrhages in the lungs?"

"Those, too." Tarrington nodded. "I also found star-shaped scarring in the tissue of the heart consistent with previous arrhythmia. Whether or not Mr. Hachemi or the US Army were aware of it, the man's heart was not healthy."

"So that seizure Corporal Vetter and Staff Sergeant Brandt reported to me—"

"Was not a seizure at all. It was the beginning of Mr. Hachemi's first convulsion, which unfortunately also led to the heart attack, that killed him. If Mr. Hachemi's heart had been healthy, he would have most likely suffered several more convulsions. With this particular compound, there tend to be two to four, on average. Unfortunately, given that no one would've been looking for the strychnine, I'm almost certain he would've died anyway. And those additional convulsions would have been excruciating."

"Strychnine?"

Riyad was still staring at the microTLC's screen, seemingly stuck on that beautiful, exonerating word. And his scowl had returned.

What the hell was wrong with the guy?

Give the dicey geopolitics of the case—not to mention that the White House, Islamabad and Kabul were bound to be read in on the autopsy report—he should've been as relieved