The Ultimate Betrayal

by Kat Martin

  “My father wasn’t a fool,” she said. “If he loved you, he must have been seen the person you are inside. I’m sorry for the way this turned out. I’m sorry for both of you.”

  Turning away, she walked back out into the hall. After her mother’s death, her father had been desperately lonely. Perhaps in his final days, he had found some comfort in the arms of the beautiful woman who so clearly loved him.

  She swallowed past the painful tightness in her throat and continued toward the kitchen. When her cell phone rang, the screen showed General Holloway’s contact information.

  She held the phone to her ear. “This is Jessie.”

  “I got a call this morning from Agent Tripp at the CID,” he said. “Wayne Coffman is dead. Found murdered in his cell this morning. I’m sorry this didn’t work out the way you hoped, but I figured you’d want to know.”

  Her hand trembled. The only person who could help them get to the man who had orchestrated her father’s death was dead. Without Tank, there was no way to pressure Edgar Weaver, which meant no way to catch the men who had murdered James Kegan. Her throat ached. “Thank you for calling, General.”

  Holloway hung up and Jessie sank down in one of the kitchen chairs.

  “What is it?” Bran asked as he came in from the garage.

  “Tank’s dead. Found murdered in his cell this morning.” Her eyes filled. “All that work and it’s a complete dead end.”

  Bran caught her shoulders and drew her up out of the chair. He kissed her quick and hard. “We’ll figure it out. Find another way to get the proof we need. Right now we’ve got to focus on what we need to do right here.” He gently shook her. “You gonna be okay?”

  She looked up at him and dragged in a shaky breath. “I’m okay.”

  The men went back to work, getting ready for the confrontation, then arming themselves with multiple weapons. At 7:45 p.m., Bran and Jessie disappeared into the bedroom while Hunt took up a position outside to be sure no uninvited guests tagged along.

  The plan was for Mara to invite Ahmed into the condo, the unknown factor being whether she would keep her word or warn him so he could escape.

  As the minutes ticked past, Jessie stood tensely next to Bran, who held his Glock in a two-handed grip.

  Peering through the crack in the bedroom door, Jessie could feel the perspiration gathering between her breasts. Eight fifteen and still no sign of Ahmed.

  “Maybe he isn’t going to show,” she said.

  “Or maybe he’s checking things out, making sure it’s safe.” They had closed the bedroom curtains, and only a lamp burned in the living room.

  Nerves dried the inside of her mouth while Bran looked totally relaxed. This wasn’t new to him. She wondered how many times he had faced a deadly opponent.

  At exactly eight thirty, a solid knock rattled the front door. Jessie could hear Mara’s footsteps padding across the carpet. The locks turned and the door opened.

  “Hello, Ahmed,” she said, greeting him in English. “Please come in.”

  “I think it is better that you come with me.”

  Bran softly cursed. He was out of the bedroom and down the hall in an instant, his Glock leveled at Ahmed. “Raise your hands and keep them in the air! Do it now!”

  Jessie watched from the hall, her heart beating wildly as Bran crossed the living room, his Glock pointed at Ahmed’s chest. Hunt came in though the sliding glass door, his pistol also aimed at Ahmed.

  Bran’s eyes were a hard ice-blue as he dragged the man inside and hurriedly searched him for weapons. “I think right here is better,” Bran said, closing the door. “That way we can all get to know each other.”

  Ahmed cast a disdainful glance at Mara, who stood pale and shaken a few feet away. “From the start, they said you were not to be trusted. I told them they were wrong. I was a fool.” He was tall and thin with a neatly trimmed heavy black beard. Dressed in black slacks and a white shirt, he was the cliché of a terrorist hiding in plain sight.

  In seconds Ahmed’s hands were zip-tied behind his back and Bran had dragged him into the kitchen and into a chair at the table. Hunt kept his weapon pointed at Ahmed’s chest.

  “I’m sorry,” Mara said to the man. “What you did was wrong. I couldn’t let you hurt anyone else.”

  Bran moved into his space. “We need to know what happened to the weapons you stole and you’re going to tell us—one way or another. You can make it easy on yourself or hard.”

  Ahmed’s mouth lifted into a smirk. “Do you really believe I will tell you anything? You Americans make me sick. What will you do—waterboard me?”

  The look on Bran’s face sent a shiver down Jessie’s spine. Cold, determined, utterly ruthless. It was unlike anything she had seen before, and it made her doubt everything she thought she knew about Brandon Garrett.

  “You sure this is the way you want it?” Bran asked softly, almost politely. It was more terrifying than his anger.

  Ahmed blinked, no longer so certain. “I will tell you this. The weapons are no longer in your country. They are gone, and there is nothing you can do to stop what is going to happen.”

  “Where are they?”

  Ahmed closed his eyes and started praying. Bran let him finish. Then he grabbed the roll of duct tape out of the bag on the table, tore off a strip, and slapped it over Ahmed’s mouth. The man’s dark eyes widened as Bran jerked him out of the chair and hauled him through the door leading out to the garage.

  “I borrowed your jumper cables, Mara,” Bran said on his way out. “I’ll put them back where they belong when we’re done.” He slammed the garage door shut, the sound vibrating across the kitchen.

  Jessie’s breathing heightened. Mara’s eyes looked wide and fearful. Hunt said nothing, just settled himself in one of the kitchen chairs. There were only three. One was out in the garage where Bran had taken it earlier. She had thought it was odd at the time.

  “What...what is he going to do?” Mara asked.

  Jessie glanced at Hunt.

  “Don’t look at me,” Hunt said, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t have the vaguest idea and I don’t want to know.”

  The kitchen fell silent. On the other side of the door, Jessie could hear grunts and the sounds of a brief struggle. In the kitchen, no one uttered a word.

  Bran said something. Ahmed gave a muffled reply. There was a sharp snapping sound, then a buzzing noise, then silence.

  “What is happening?” Mara asked, a faint Middle Eastern accent now discernible.

  No one answered.

  The snapping, buzzing sound came again, followed by a muffled shriek, then silence.

  “You have to stop him,” Mara pleaded, panic in her eyes.

  Jessie was thinking the same thing. Except that her father was dead, and Ahmed and his friends had killed him and were now trying to kill her.

  More snapping and buzzing, another muffled shriek, then silence. Jessie’s heart was thundering so hard she wondered if the others could hear it.

  “He won’t...he won’t kill him?” Mara asked.

  “I doubt it,” Hunt said. “Too messy. He won’t want trouble with the police.”

  Mara made a sound in her throat.

  Time dragged on. When the snapping, buzzing sound came again, Jessie started moving. Her legs were shaking as she crossed to the garage door. How far was she willing to go to get answers that might save people’s lives? It was the same moral dilemma people had faced since the beginning of time. She thought of her dad and the honorable man he had been, and reached for the knob just as it turned and the door swung open.

  Bran looked at her pale face, reached out and caught her shoulder. “He’s fine. A little the worse for wear, but he’ll be okay. We need to call General Holloway, have him deal with the situation.” Holloway wanted the weapons found. He would know who to contact to deal wit
h a terrorist threat.

  Her heart was still throbbing. She thought of Holloway and the phone call she had received that morning. Something about it had nagged her all day. How many people had known Wayne Coffman was their only link to Edgar Weaver? Who knew that Weaver could be the key to finding a major player in the theft of the weapons? Holloway was one of very few.

  And Holloway could easily have arranged for Mara to be invited to a party her father was attending.

  She cast Bran an uneasy glance. “I don’t know...maybe we should call Agent Tripp at the CID.”

  Bran’s gaze zeroed in on hers and locked in silent communication. “Maybe we’d better call them both.”

  THIRTY

  It was full daylight by the time Hunt Brady headed back to his apartment and Bran started driving back to their suite at the Grant Hotel. It had taken an hour and a half for MPs from the CID Pacific Field Office in Irvine to reach the house in La Jolla. Then the hours of questioning had begun.

  Special Agent Brian Kopecki had taken statements from Bran, Jessie, and Hunt, along with the information that Mara had fully cooperated in helping them capture the terrorist, Ahmed Malik, his full name. After lengthy questioning, Malik and Mara had been taken into military police custody and hauled away.

  Interrogations were sometimes handled by the FBI, but the classified nature of the missing munitions meant the pair would be taken by army jet back to Fort Carson.

  After Malik and Mara were gone, Agent Kopecki had interviewed the three of them separately, asking an endless array of questions, getting mostly the same answers. But no one knew what had happened in the garage except Bran and Malik. Bran had left no physical evidence, and Malik, wisely, wasn’t talking. He didn’t want Bran coming after him, as Bran had convinced him he would. Since the information he’d gleaned was more important than the methods he had used to get it, the subject would be dropped.

  Special Agent Kopecki was in touch with his superiors, as well as Special Agent Tripp. Someone higher up the food chain, either Tripp’s superior, Colonel Larkin, head of the CID, or General Holloway, had ordered Bran, Jessie, and Hunt Brady’s release.

  So far Bran hadn’t had a chance to fill Jessie in on what Malik had told him in the garage, and she had been strangely silent since they’d left the condo.

  “All right, what’s going on in that beautiful head of yours?” he asked, casting her a glance from behind the wheel of the Navigator as the vehicle made its way back to the city. Both of them were exhausted, but this was more than just fatigue.

  Those big green eyes swung to his face. “Did you torture that man?”

  He should have known.

  His jaw clenched as he gripped the wheel and searched for an exit, flipped on the turn signal, cut between two slower vehicles, and pulled off the freeway onto La Jolla Parkway. Following the GPS map to a spot on the beach, he drove into a lot on a cliff overlooking the ocean and turned off the engine.

  “We need to talk,” he said, cracking the door and sliding out of the SUV.

  As Jessie got out to join him, a brisk wind rolled in off the sea, whipping loose strands of fiery hair around her face. She looked drawn and tired and beautiful. Her black yoga pants outlined the perfect little ass that always turned him on, and he felt a rush of heat he was forced to ignore.

  As they walked along the path above the cliffs, waves pounded the rocks below then rushed back out to sea. Gripping Jessie’s hand, he led her over to a fence rail at the top of the cliff.

  “I understand why you did it,” she said, looking up at him. “I’m not condemning you, I just need to know.”

  But that wasn’t true. Same as during the war, people didn’t really want to know about the enemy soldiers he had interrogated or killed. They wanted to pretend none of the bad stuff actually happened. That was one of the reasons he never got involved in a serious relationship. He’d never known a woman who could handle the truth. Very few people could deal.

  Looking at Jessie, it hit him with the force of a blow that this was the reason the two of them would never work. She couldn’t handle knowing the things he’d done and he didn’t want to live a lie.

  He steeled himself. Better to get it over with right now.

  “I hooked jumper cables to Mara’s car battery. Then I told Ahmed if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, I’d clamp them on his balls and light him up.”

  She made a little sound in her throat. Bran kept going. “I gave him a demonstration. You probably heard the charge going off in the kitchen. Then I asked him where the chemical weapons had been taken. When he refused to answer, I zapped him. When he still refused to answer, I hit him with the juice again.”

  Her eyes filled.

  “He told me the weapons had been driven from Colorado to the port in Houston. They were loaded aboard a ship and transported to Yemen. The name of the ship was Delfina. It would have arrived weeks ago. A group calling themselves sawt Allah, the Voice of God, has the weapons. But if they’d used them, we’d have heard about it at the time it happened, so I’m guessing they’re still in the planning stages. I asked him what they were going to do with the munitions. He said he didn’t know. At that point I believed him.”

  “Because if he lied, you would have shocked him again.”

  He just shrugged. He hadn’t really hurt the wormy bastard. Ahmed wasn’t a high-level, highly trained combatant. He’d folded almost immediately. It was the perceived threat that ultimately convinced a guy to talk. Bran had a knack for making someone believe there was no limit to what he was willing to do.

  Sometimes there wasn’t. As a soldier, he’d done what he’d had to. He didn’t regret it. Losing Jessie wouldn’t make him regret it now.

  He hardened his heart against the slice of pain that told him how hard he had fallen for his best friend’s sister. How could he not have seen the truth before now?

  He clenched his jaw against the knot squeezing his stomach. From the start, he had known it would never work. He should have been more careful, should have protected himself.

  He took a deep breath. There was nothing he could do about it now. No matter how she felt about him, he would protect her. He owed it to Danny—and to himself.

  He forced his thoughts back to the job. “I pressed Ahmed to name the man behind the theft of the weapons. The guy had no idea. I asked him about Weaver and the hit on your dad, but again, no idea. He was assigned a job and he did it. That’s the way it works with terrorists. No one knows what another part of the cell is doing. The CID will go after the group in San Diego. They might bring in the FBI to help. Eventually they’ll probably get the name of the person who bought the weapons through the auction, but that’s not going to give us the answers we need.”

  “You mean the name of the man or men at the top, the people who got the twenty-five million dollars.”

  “Exactly. But we’re getting closer every day. Whoever it was has got to be very nervous. Which is why we can’t afford to stay at the Grant much longer.”

  “So even after everything that’s happened, our lives are still in danger.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  * * *

  Jessie sat quietly on the ride back to San Diego that morning. The ache of loss in her chest felt like a heart attack. In a way it was. She was more than half in love with Bran. All the way back from La Jolla, her mind went over the information he had gotten from Ahmed and what he had done to get it.

  Torturing someone was a crime. She’d been terrified the MPs would haul Bran off to jail. She had no idea what Ahmed had said to Special Agent Kopecki. Maybe Bran would still be arrested.

  On a physical level, she was wildly attracted to him. Every time his amazing biceps flexed, she felt hot all over. But how did she feel about the code of justice he lived by? He’d been a Delta soldier, one of the most highly trained men in the world. Danny had been in the same unit
. They operated in secret, did whatever was necessary to protect America.

  Still, it was the first time she had ever really had to face what the job required.

  Almost from the start, she had warned herself not to get involved with a soldier. She didn’t want that life, didn’t want to risk that kind of pain. And though he was no longer in the army, Bran was a warrior and always would be.

  On the other hand, maybe what she felt for him didn’t matter. From the start, she had known it was only a friends with benefits kind of relationship. When all of this was over, Bran would be gone.

  Her heart squeezed hard, telling her how deeply involved she had gotten.

  Her desolate mood turned even darker. Neither of them talked on the way back to the city, Bran’s mood apparently mirroring her own. She hadn’t meant to hurt him by the censure in her tone, but she knew that she had. Something had shifted between them. They had lost something important, and she didn’t think they would ever get it back. Her heart ached so hard she felt sick.

  On the way back to the Grant, Bran drove them through a Carl’s Jr. for something to eat. With everything that had happened, she had very little appetite, but the future was uncertain. She needed to keep up her strength.

  She sighed as they walked back into their extravagant suite. It was probably a good thing they would be checking out soon. She was getting spoiled by the Grant’s luxurious Egyptian cotton sheets, twenty-four-hour room service, and opulent marble tub.

  As soon as she had showered and dressed, she went to work on the article she was writing, entering the latest information they had gleaned. As long as she didn’t go on the internet and just used the word processor, no one should be able to track her.

  She worked for a while, but it was hard to concentrate. Bran was typing on his laptop at the opposite end of the table, following leads that Ahmed had given him. Just watching him made her eyes burn. He was pulling away, just as she was, asking the same hard questions. She ached to go to him, have him hold her. But it wouldn’t be fair to either of them.