Free Fall (Elite Force 4)

Slumping back against a concrete wall, he felt the weight of his own guilt hammer down on him. Even now, the addiction whispered to him, tempting him to win enough money to take his family and hide from everyone forever.

But he owed these bastards too much and they were too well connected to crime syndicates around the world. If he betrayed them, there wasn’t a hole deep enough for him to climb into. They would find him, find his family, and slaughter them all.

He dragged his wrist across his damp eyes. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked.”

“Piddly little tasks to test your competence and your compliance. Dry runs for this mission. We thought you were ready, now we’re questioning that assumption. I hope you can come through for us, Henry. Your wife’s life depends on you.”

His head thudded back against the concrete wall. He had no choice. No way out. Only the hope of buying time. “What do you want me to do?”

“Kill Sutton Harper.”

Chapter 12

Rain hammered the roof of the airplane hangar. Rain, of all things. Rare as hell in this part of the world, but choosing today to make her life more complicated.

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.