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

pursue the remainder of this case to retain the sanity Gil had so recently questioned, she knew what Palisade was withholding. "Durrani's refusing to talk to everyone else. Everyone but me."

The respect was back.

"Yes."

Regan clamped down on her excitement, forced herself to play it cool. Because she also knew full well that the objections and infuriating psychological assessment Gil had voiced on the phone to her commanding officer had been passed on to this man.

She could not afford to appear too eager, much less desperate. "What about Tamir Hachemi?"

The respect in Palisade's gaze deepened.

Excellent. Her tactic was sound. As was her suspicion regarding Durrani's sadistic man Friday.

"Hachemi clammed up."

No shock there. The Afghan translator had turned out to be nearly as cunning and verbally deft as Durrani. How else had she missed a working, state-of-the-art heater in an eighteen-year-old Nissan Urvan so battered and rusted a Sudanese junkyard would refuse it entrance? That pristine, perfectly functioning heater was the vital clue she'd missed. The one that'd led directly to Art Valens' death. The heater that had spewed the Russian-made anesthetic gas that had killed her fellow CID agent.

Gil was wrong; she should've caught that clue.

She wasn't about to miss another.

"What caused Hachemi to renege?" The last she'd heard, there'd been a deal on the table. The deal had been requested by Hachemi himself the moment the translator discovered that, due to the recent granting of his United States citizenship, he'd been officially classified as a traitor and was subsequently eligible for all dubious privileges said label entailed. Including, but by no means limited to, a sentence of hard labor and unusually spartan accommodations at the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth—until his potential, pending execution.

Palisade shrugged. "We have no idea. One minute, Hachemi's claiming he has solid information regarding another terrorist—one we would be very interested in identifying—and the next, nothing."

Holy shit. Suddenly, the general's presence made sickening sense. "He's saying there's another traitor in our midst?"

"Yes. Only the claim is past tense now. Hachemi swears he made it up. Wants to take his chances at Leavenworth."

From the lock on Palisade's jaw, he didn't believe the translator's turnabout any more than she did.

Someone had gotten to the man.

Somewhere. Somehow.

Regan shot to her feet, executing a lightning about-face, stalking across her boss' drab carpet as she worked to contain the shock and growing rage. She spun around again. "Did Hachemi give up anything else before he clammed up? Is the soldier part of a larger terror cell? Has it been activated? Is he—"

Palisade held up his hand as he came to his feet. "We don't know. Any of it. But as you do know, the cave's existence—not to mention its precise location and contents—has yet to become public knowledge. The brass and the president would like to keep it that way, for a number of reasons. The least of which being that those women were Pakistani. The whole damned region is still a powder keg, especially now. That's the only reason the Pentagon agreed to let you back in the game."

Durrani. His demand to meet her.

The deviant doc had his own agenda; that was a given. She had a pretty good idea what that agenda involved, too. Either way, it didn't matter. Not to her.

And clearly, not to Palisade.

No wonder the general was here in the flesh. If there was even a chance this case wasn't yet over, the Army would use every asset at its disposal to ferret out the identity of that remaining traitor before the next catastrophe was scheduled to commence—including her.

"Sir, you think there's a chance they're connected, don't you? The identity of that woman—and the traitor."

The man's faded blue gaze strengthened. Sharpened. "Do you?"

"Yes."

"Agent Castile isn't so sure. He thinks it could just be a case of symmetry; so does the Islamist expert we brought in. Something about the number seven being sacred in the Muslim religion. And since Durrani tracked the pregnancies of six of the women at Malalie—"

Regan nodded. "They think he knew about the twins beforehand and needed another body for some mystical numeric portent."

"But you don't?"

"No." Castile was a solid agent, more than smart enough. But he was wrong on this. So was this Islamist "expert".

By the general's own briefing, no one had gotten Durrani to talk. Except her. She'd also bested the man physically. Granted, the tussle she and Durrani had shared had taken place thirteen days ago in the bathroom of a terror cell safe house in Charikar, Afghanistan, but she'd managed to draw the doc out long enough to take him down.

It hadn't been easy. At the time, every muscle in Durrani's body had been meticulously and methodically honed.

His mind, even more so.

The conversation she and Durrani had shared then confirmed her instincts now. Palisade's too. There was more to that anomalous non-mother's presence in the cave than the need for numerical symmetry, mystically generated or otherwise.

Was she one hundred percent certain?

No.

But if there was a chance, however remote, that such a connection existed, she would be pursuing it. Especially if that chance afforded her another crack at the man responsible for injecting the psycho-toxin into not only herself, but an entire twelve-man SF team. More importantly, Durrani's coming interrogation with her could well lead to the identity of the final victim—and their unknown traitor. Because if Tamir Hachemi knew the traitor's identity, so did Durrani.

And, soon, so would she.

Her determination must have shown, because Palisade scooped up the classified papers. He returned them to the accordion folder, crossed the office and tucked it in her hands. "You'll need this. The latter half contains copies of the reports and forensic paperwork that came in after you were medevacked here. I'll have the remaining information forwarded to your email."

"When do I leave?" There was no way the Army would be packing up Durrani and shipping him to Fort Campbell, even if she was now key to this.

"Your C-141 takes off in less than an hour."

Barely enough time to head home and