Delta Force Defender

by Carol Ericson

  “Maybe she has a charger in her room. Did you see something?”

  “I think just her regular smartphone charger.” She pressed the phone to her chest. “This is huge, Cam. This is what Scott was looking for, what he was afraid I’d find.”

  “He must’ve thought Casey would have the phone on her when he lured her to that hotel room to kill her. When he couldn’t find it, he took her keys instead and searched her room for it.”

  “It must have evidence pointing to him, or he wouldn’t have wanted it so badly.” A dog barked and Martha jumped.

  Cam grabbed her arm. “Let’s go inside and find the charger. I cleaned out her desk and dumped a bunch of items in a plastic bag. It could be in there.”

  Once inside, Cam took the stairs two at a time, clutching the phone in his fist. If the FBI could use the evidence on this phone to tie Scott to the murders and implicate him in the faked emails, Martha could completely avoid scrutiny for stealing the messages.

  He pounced on the plastic bag containing the items from Casey’s desk and dumped the contents onto the floor.

  Martha dropped beside him and pawed through the papers, pens and business cards. She grabbed a black cord, pulled it free from the mess and dangled it from her fingers. “This could be it.”

  He grabbed the swinging end and compared it to the outlet on Casey’s phone. “I think it is.”

  He inserted the USB into the phone and it clicked into place. “That’s it.”

  Martha sprang to her feet in one movement. “Let’s charge it downstairs. I take back every bad thing I said about Casey. Would a flake think to hide her cell phone where she knew I’d find it?”

  “Not so fast. She’s still a spy who stole secrets from a US congressman and worse...put her roommate’s life in danger.”

  They traipsed down the stairs, and Martha pointed him to an outlet in the kitchen.

  “Let’s get this going. I can’t wait to see what’s on this phone.”

  Cam plugged the power cord into the outlet. “I suppose we can sit here and stare at it until it juices up.”

  The doorbell echoed through the house, and Martha gripped the edge of the counter. “Scott wouldn’t be ringing my bell, would he?”

  Cam pulled his gun from his jacket pocket and jerked his thumb at the door. “Check it out.”

  Martha crept to the door, crouching below the fan-shaped window at the top so the visitor couldn’t see her coming. Cam stayed to the side, his gun at the ready.

  She ducked her head and peered through the peephole. She whispered. “It’s Sebastian.”

  “That guy you dated from work?” Cam rolled his eyes. “What does he want, a date? You don’t have to answer the door.”

  “Martha? It’s just Sebastian. I know you’re home because I saw your car on the street. No press out here if you’re worried.”

  Martha shrugged and slipped back the dead bolt. She opened the door wide enough so that Sebastian could see Cam hovering behind her.

  He’d pocketed his weapon.

  “This is a surprise.”

  “Is it?” Sebastian’s eyes behind his glasses darted from Martha’s face to Cam’s. “I’ve been worried about you. First the congressman, then Casey and now the suspension from work.”

  “Speaking of work, why aren’t you there?”

  “I’m taking the whole week off for Thanksgiving. Aren’t you going to visit your mother?”

  “With all this going on—” she swept her arm behind her to encompass Cam “—I completely forgot about Thanksgiving.”

  Sebastian smiled and seemed to dig his Oxfords into the mat on Martha’s porch. If Martha thought she was getting rid of this guy, she wasn’t reading his signals.

  “D-do you want to come in for a few minutes? We were just on our way out. I’m not staying here.”

  “At your mom’s?” Sebastian stepped across the threshold, and a muscle ticked in Cam’s jaw. This guy seemed to know a lot about Martha’s family, but she did date him. Probably had a genius IQ.

  Martha nodded toward Cam. “Sebastian, this is Cam. Cam, Sebastian.”

  Cam gave him a handshake that could’ve brought him to his knees if he’d kept it up, but he released his grip just as a grimace started to twist the other man’s lips.

  Sebastian put his hand behind his back. “Nice to meet you. Friend of Martha’s?”

  “Uh-huh.” Cam wandered back to the charging phone and perched on the stool next to it while Martha and Sebastian talked.

  She offered him a soda and he accepted. She couldn’t be rude and kick the guy out?

  As she walked toward the kitchen, her back to Sebastian, she rolled her eyes at Cam and pointed at the phone.

  He shook his head.

  She returned to Sebastian with a can in each hand and joined him on the sofa, where he’d made himself comfortable.

  Cam ground his back teeth. Why was Sebastian here, anyway? Martha had made it clear they were over.

  Cam kept one eye on the phone, and one ear on the conversation between Martha and Sebastian. He couldn’t help it. Since his reading skills had been so poor in school, he’d honed his listening comprehension skills to an art.

  Sebastian knew a lot about Martha’s family, her father’s situation, her mother’s house. Her likes and dislikes. Their conversation had turned to art, and Cam felt a little bit of panic. Did he know enough about art to converse with Martha about it?

  Martha said, “I’m not sure I know that artist.”

  “His work is similar to the print you have in your room.”

  “The Gaspar?”

  Cam snorted softly. What the hell was a Gaspar?

  Then something clicked in his brain, and his head twisted slowly to the side. Her room? The print in Martha’s bedroom? Unless she’d been lying, Martha had told him she’d never slept with Sebastian, that he’d been to her place just twice and had never made it past the entryway.

  How could he know what was in her bedroom—unless he’d seen it from her laptop camera, which he’d hacked into as the patriot?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Martha swallowed. “The Gaspar? In my bedroom?”

  Sebastian licked his lips, his tongue flicking out of his mouth like a snake’s. “The one you told me about.”

  Martha’s eye twitched. Two seconds later, Cam barreled across the room and grabbed Sebastian by the neck.

  Martha shouted, “What are you doing?”

  “He’s the patriot, Martha. He’s the one who hacked your computer. He’s the one who IDed you as the CIA employee to set up. He sent Scott to your mother’s house, and Scott probably sent him here to watch your place while he’s with Farah.”

  Martha’s mouth dropped open, but every word Cam said she knew to be true. Sebastian had set her up, and he’d probably set up Farah, too.

  Sebastian gagged and choked as his face turned blue above Cam’s powerful hand clutching his throat.

  “Let him go, Cam. You’re choking him.”

  He uncurled his fingers, and Sebastian slumped to the sofa, coughing.

  Cam got in his face. “Start spilling.”

  Sebastian rubbed his throat. “You’re crazy. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You can choose that route if you want.” Cam pushed away from the sofa and held up the charging phone. “But we have Casey’s burner phone. Is that what Scott sent you here to find?”

  Sebastian dropped his head in his hands. “I—I didn’t know it would go this far. It started with information. I was approached on an overseas trip. It was the money. They offered me so much money. You wouldn’t know what it’s like, Martha. You, with your privileged background. I had so much student loan debt, it was suffocating me.”

  “Oh, I thought you were doing it because you were such a patriot.” Martha jumped up an
d took a turn around the room.

  “How did this email plan start and why?” Cam slammed his fist in his palm. “Why Major Denver?”

  Sebastian held up his hands as if deflecting physical blows. “I don’t know anything about any of that. I was just asked to identify someone at Langley who would turn over a set of emails, no questions asked. I knew Martha would do it. I knew how she felt about her father’s crimes.”

  “Oh my God. You used our conversations against me.”

  “It was nothing, Martha. You didn’t have to be involved any more than turning over those emails—and then you broke bad.”

  “Ha!” She tossed her head. “That’s quite a charge coming from someone involved in espionage against the government.”

  “It was more than just the emails. You helped Scott set up the liaison between Casey and Congressmen Wentworth, putting Martha in further danger.”

  “Martha was never supposed to be in danger.”

  “But she was.” Cam smacked his hand against the wall, and Sebastian’s eyes widened as his Adam’s apple bobbed in his skinny neck.

  How had she ever been remotely interested in him?

  “I wanna know why Scott is still here. Why didn’t he murder those people and get out of town?”

  “I-I’m not sure.”

  Cam stalked toward him, and Sebastian shrank against the sofa cushion. “I swear. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the phone. He wants to make sure we secure Casey’s phone first.”

  His fist clenched, Cam loomed over Sebastian. “Who’s he with? Who is Scott working with?”

  “I swear. I don’t know any of that.”

  All three heads swiveled toward a buzzing noise from the phone.

  “It’s operational.” Cam stepped away from Sebastian, flexing his fingers as if he’d gone through with the hit.

  As Cam strode toward the counter, Sebastian half rose from the sofa, and Martha said, “Cam!”

  He swung around and leveled a finger at Sebastian, who’d stopped in midrise. “Sit.”

  Cam grabbed the phone and tapped it awake. “No password.”

  “Check the texts.” Martha cast a nervous glance at Sebastian, who looked ready to bolt at any minute.

  Cam’s eyebrows collided over his nose, and he thrust the phone out to Martha. “You look through it, while I watch our spy here.”

  She took the phone from him.

  Martha saw just two sets of texts, and one was the single text to her phone. The other was to a number, no name attached to it. It had to be the man Casey knew as Ben and they knew as Scott, but Martha would bet her town house that both names were false.

  “The most recent text is the one directing Casey to the hotel for a meeting. She must’ve received that text, scheduled her text to me and then hid the phone in the hiding place for our key.” Martha held up the phone. “This is enough to cast suspicion on Ben, even if this is a temp phone for him.”

  “Ben? Who the hell is Ben?” Sebastian shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  Cam growled. “Ben is your buddy Scott. You know, the guy you set up with your coworker Farah. The guy who murdered three people.”

  “Ben?” Sebastian emitted a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. “He got that from when I told him I felt like a regular Benedict Arnold, and I had to explain who he was.”

  “He didn’t know Benedict Arnold?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You were right about those emails, Martha. They came from a foreign entity, a non-native speaker.” Cam twirled his finger in the air. “What else? What other texts are between the two of them.”

  Martha backtracked through the conversation between Casey and Ben. “There’s not a lot of substance here. It’s mostly Ben setting up meetings. He must’ve been very careful about committing anything to text or probably even telephone conversations. I don’t know why he was so worried about our finding this phone.”

  “Those texts are going to cast suspicion on Casey’s death and Wentworth’s. Maybe that’s all we need.”

  Cam dragged a chair from the dining area, placed it in front of Sebastian and straddled it. “Here’s what you’re gonna do. We’re gonna contact the FBI, and you’re gonna confess to your crimes. You’re gonna tell them about those faked emails and give them everything you know about Ben or Scott or whatever he calls himself. I have his fingerprints on a glass, and maybe we can get his real identity from his prints—even if it has to come from Interpol.”

  “We have to wait the rest of the day, Cam. He still has Farah, and if he finds out Sebastian went to the FBI, he could harm her.”

  “I—I can’t stay here the rest of the day.” Sebastian looked wildly from Martha to Cam. “I have plans for Thanksgiving.”

  Martha tapped Casey’s phone against her chin. “What are we going to do with him? If we let him leave, he might disappear. If we call the FBI now, we put Farah in danger.”

  “If we let him leave, he just might go back to the office and try to destroy the evidence that points to him as the one who got those emails to your computer.”

  “Wait. You can’t keep me a prisoner.” Sebastian shook his finger at Martha. “You’re in a lot of trouble, Martha Brockridge.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “We’ll keep him here until Farah is safe. Maybe—” Cam drummed his fingers on the chair back “—we’ll have him contact Ben and let him know he got Casey’s phone.”

  “What? No!” Sebastian had turned even whiter. “He’d expect me to bring it to him right away.”

  “I still don’t understand why tomorrow is some magic date for Ben. He releases Farah tomorrow, and we go through with our plans to report him once she’s safe.”

  “He obviously plans to leave tomorrow.”

  “But why not leave today?”

  Sebastian’s eyebrows jumped to his hairline. “Why are you two looking at me? I told you. I don’t know any of his plans. I’m paid for my contacts within the Agency and my access to and knowledge of its computers. That’s it. When Wentworth died and then Casey, I knew everything had exploded.”

  Martha smoothed her thumb along the curve of Casey’s phone. “If he’s willing to give up Farah tomorrow and take off, let him. I suppose he figures once he’s out of the country, the FBI won’t be able to track him down. But at least he’ll be out of my life, and Sebastian can testify to the falsity of the emails.”

  “I won’t know the why or who behind the setup of Major Denver though.”

  “Maybe once the FBI and CIA get a handle on Ben, it’ll give them a good idea.” She came up behind Cam and rubbed his shoulders. She couldn’t help that Sebastian’s bug eyes at the gesture gave her a thrill of satisfaction.

  Casey’s phone slipped from her hand and landed at Cam’s foot. He bent forward to pick it up. “I’m not looking forward to spending the night with this guy, but... What’s this?”

  “What?” She leaned over his shoulder and looked at the phone cupped in his hand.

  “Pictures. You didn’t check the phone’s photos, did you?”

  “No.” She knelt beside him, and even Sebastian hunched forward.

  Cam’s finger brushed across the display. “They’re documents. Security plans and diagrams.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Casey must’ve gotten these from Wentworth. Tony told us she would get info from the congressman and pass it along to Ben. This must be part of that.”

  “Why would Ben want this type of information?”

  “To gain knowledge of the security plans for a building or place...and bypass it.”

  Sebastian exhaled a noisy breath. “A terrorist attack. You’d want intel like that to plan a terrorist attack.”

  “He’s right.” Cam’s lips formed a thin line. “And this is what Ben doesn’t want us to see. He
knows these pictures are on this phone.”

  When Cam swiped to the next picture, his body jolted. “It’s the Mall, the monuments on the National Mall.”

  Martha crossed her arms over her chest. “And it’s going down tomorrow.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Answer it.” Cam handed Sebastian his ringing phone, pressing the button on the side to activate the speaker.

  They’d forced Sebastian to text Ben from Casey’s phone to let him know he’d found it at Martha’s town house. The response from Ben had been instantaneous.

  Sebastian cleared his throat. “Scott.”

  “So you found it. How?”

  “I—I remembered when I was dating Martha she told me Casey was always losing or forgetting her key, so they had a hiding place. I found the phone there.”

  “Did you look at anything on the phone?”

  “Just the texts.” Sebastian licked his lips. “Did you want me to look for something?”

  “No, just bring it to me in two hours.”

  “Where are you?”

  Cam dug his fingers into his biceps as they waited a beat for Ben’s response.

  “I took Farah to the St. Regis to get her out of the way while all this was happening. I didn’t want her questioning Martha too closely about anything.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I don’t need your approval, geek. Just bring me the phone.”

  Sebastian turned bright red. “Sure, sure. Am I supposed to see Farah while I’m there?”

  “No need for that. We’re ordering dinner up to our room tonight. I’ll make an excuse to get ice or something, and you can meet me at the vending machines down the hall. Text me from the phone when you get here, so I know you still have it.”

  “Is this going to get me a bonus?” Sebastian wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  “Bonus?” Ben chuckled. “Sure, I’ll give you a bonus.”

  When Sebastian ended the call, he gagged. “He’s going to kill me.”

  Cam snatched the phone from his hand. “I’ll try to save you...after I take care of Ben.”

  “And after I get Farah out of that room.”