Free Fall (Elite Force #4)(51)
Author: Catherine Mann

Stella assessed Sutton Harper as he glared at her from across the interrogation table. She rolled a mango between her hands while Smith and Brown observed the interview from off to the side. She’d been given the lead on this for now since she’d spent the past month with the traitor.

Apparently they’d both been pretending to be a student.

Harper was posturing and he was tough, tough enough to make her wonder how long he’d been involved. He looked so benign in surgical scrubs and wet hair from his decontamination shower—for a toxic bomb he’d brought into a crowded reception. She’d been questioning the treacherous bastard for well over two hours with only minimal success. She could only hope when analysts reviewed his statement that they could detect some thread, some inconsistency that could be traced back further until his story unraveled.

What had she missed before, when she’d been undercover with the students? After weeks cultivating a friendship with him, she should have picked up on something. She was a trained professional, for God’s sake, and she’d totally missed she was brushing elbows with a monster who’d joined forces with separatists bent on killing thousands of innocent civilians just to make a statement. At the moment, she didn’t feel all that confident in her professional skills.

But she had backup. Smith sat silently like a human lie detector watching every move while Brown took notes on his tablet, doing his standard gig calculating odds—the consummate professionals.

As much as she wanted to be a calm expert here, her stomach was still in knots just thinking of Jose standing in a decontamination booth, how things could have been so much worse. She could have been grieving over his body.

The thought of him dying…

She fought back the urge to scream and focused on her next tack for finagling a misstep from Harper.

“You and that teenager Ajaya really played us when the kid raced out of the woods.” She rolled the mango back and forth, steady pace, not giving anything away by pitching faster. “You two must have been laughing the whole time you were pretending to be held hostage. Did you two stage the meet up ahead of time? Or was it just dumb luck?”

“The boy didn’t know anything.” His hands cuffed, Harper forked his fingers through his blond curly hair, exhaustion straining the corners of his eyes. “Ajaya was too low level to be a part of the plans.”

“Plans?” She whipped the fruit from palm to palm. “That’s a mighty benign word for killing thousands of people with a bio toxin guaranteeing them a slow torturous death.”

“But it would make for great television, press… all those contorted bodies would create such dramatic images. People perk up for drama. They pay attention to drama.” His brown beady eyes followed the mango with an almost hypnotic regularity.

Good.

“What message did you want people to hear with your drama?”

He looked up sharply. “Like it would make any difference if I told you. You work for the government.”

“So that’s it? You’re… what? Antigovernment?”

“I’m protesting.”

“Easy to protest when you have chemical suits stored in the truck so you don’t have to suffer the fallout.” She raised an eyebrow. “Yes, our people found them.”

“Hey, Stella, don’t look at me that way. I’m not a total bad guy. I tried to help you get to that helicopter. I told you to go without me.”

And a piece of the puzzle slid into place. “When we were escaping, you fell and freaked out, tripping the land mines. You did that on purpose to slow us down, to make us miss the helicopter.”

Shrugging, he worked his wrists inside the cuffs. “I improvised. It all worked out in the end.”

He stared back without the least hint of guilt or shame. Damn sociopath.

She leaned closer, damn grateful there was a table between them or it might be impossible to resist the temptation to take him apart herself, piece by piece.

“Harper, you didn’t help me get to the helicopter when you tripped those mines. You cost us our flight out, risking a night in the jungle. And you turned in innocent students to be taken hostage.” To be tortured. To be murdered.

She pushed images of their faces, people she’d spent weeks with, getting to know them, sharing food and tents. She couldn’t let memories of them terrified and in pain distract her, not now. The best way to give them justice and honor the two who’d died? Do her job. Bring this traitor down.

He sneered at her. “Not so innocent after all since you were a plant, a spy. I knew there was a snitch in the group.”

No use debating with a mass murderer on the difference between international law enforcement agencies with rules of engagement and warlords slaughtering for profit. She just let him talk, knowing he would eventually dig himself a deep, deep hole.

“I have to give you credit, Stella…” He grinned. “You don’t mind if I still call you Stella, do you? Anyhow, I never thought it was you. I actually suspected that anthropology student from Maine. They thought he was just trained well at resistance. Sad to think the poor bastard died for nothing since he didn’t really know anything.”

She forced herself to keep rolling the mango without so much as a wince. Because that “archeology student from Maine” had been undercover from the CIA and they’d killed him during the interrogation.

Her chest went tight with… She capped the emotions.

Later, she would deal with that information, maybe climb up on a roof and scream out her rage at the top of her lungs. For now, she had to do her job, to put together the rest of the puzzle, pull in the other players responsible for today’s attempted attack, because no way did those three men in the truck plan this alone.

Mr. Brown stood, setting aside his tablet. “Agent Carson, I believe it’s time for you to turn the interrogation back over to us.”

The ominous tone in the agent’s voice had Harper fidgeting in his seat. The bastard was fine with seeing people suffer and die for his big stance against “the man.” Torture was strictly forbidden, but she knew there’d been breaks in protocol. She wasn’t sure she trusted Smith and Brown. They’d brought her in here for a reason and now they were just dismissing her?

“Carson…” Smith nodded toward the door. “I hear you should check your computer. Mr. Jones is waiting to direct you to a place we set aside for you.”

Mr. Brown tapped his iPad. Realization kicked in. She set aside her mango. Her computer—images of the second cloth. She had a different role to play, one she felt a helluva lot more confident in: breaking codes.