Chapter 45
Dagan came awake in the most delicious way, with Chelsea kissing the place on his chest directly above his heart. The silly organ was her slave, so it answered by beating rapidly against his ribs in an effort to break through to her lips.
“Mmm.” He rubbed her back encouragingly and slid his hand down until he could get a big handful of ass cheek. “Are we in France yet?” he asked groggily.
“Not quite. Ten more minutes or so.”
“Mmm,” he hummed again. “Want to put that time to good use?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“We could make out.”
“With Gautier three feet away?”
“I hear nothing, rien du tout,” Gautier called, proving he heard everything.
“See?” Dagan grinned.
Chelsea slapped his chest. In return, he slapped her ass, making her squeal. Even with his eyes still closed, he could feel her watching him. “In truth,” she said, “I would love to spend ten minutes making out with you, but…”
“But what?” He continued to knead her butt. The next time he made love to her was going to be from behind. He wanted to watch her delicious derriere bounce while he thrust into her. Maybe he’d even give her bottom a slap or two. Not hard. Just enough to let her know who was boss.
The thought was enough to make him hard.
“But I need to talk to you,” she said. “I have to tell you—”
“Ah, yes.” He blinked open his eyes. Chelsea had her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and her hair was all wild and crazy, making her look so damned cute. Unfortunately, that look was back in her eyes. The one from Rusty’s place. “Your big confession. Okay. Let me have it. Once again, Big Z is all ears.”
She swallowed. “It’s about Afghanistan.”
That word shriveled his burgeoning hard-on. In contrast, the rest of his muscles stiffened. “Chelsea, I—”
“No, please.” She placed a finger over his lips. “Will you let me finish?”
It was the last thing he wanted, but… “Yes. Okay.”
She blew out a deep breath that ruffled the hair over his forehead. “When I heard you were handing over Abdul Waleed to Agent McShane before returning to the States, I went back and vetted him again.”
He frowned. “Why? A whole host of analysts had already vetted him. Ted Edens, your boss and the head of Advanced Analytics, had already vetted him. I’d already vetted him. And Waleed gave us some really good Intel during the two years he was my asset. Why would you investigate him further?”
Chelsea’s lips twisted. “He sort of gave you good Intel.”
A sick feeling swirled low in Dagan’s stomach. “What do you mean?”
“Waleed only revealed soft targets. Things that would convince you he was legit, but nothing that was ever truly actionable.”
“That can’t be right.” Dagan shook his head.
“Think back. Did you ever actually catch a target? Find a hideout? Bust up a conspiracy?”
He searched his memory. “That bomb-making shop outside of Kabul. Waleed was the one to give us the location.”
“And by the time you got there, the bomb makers were long gone.”
“But we confiscated all their equipment, all their unfinished ordinance.”
“Which they could have easily replaced. Which I’m sure they did easily replace.”
That sick feeling swirling in his stomach turned into a tornado. He had known Waleed was a double agent. Of course he had. That had become apparent the day Waleed set off that suicide bomb. But to hear that he might have known beforehand? That the red flags had been there and he’d missed them? No wonder he had been fired the minute he set foot inside the director’s office.
“So, yeah. That made me curious,” Chelsea continued. “And me being me, I dug a little deeper.”
Dagan screwed his eyes closed. He wasn’t going to like what he heard next. That didn’t stop him from asking, “What did you find?”
“I found out he was a second cousin twice removed from Mullah Zahed.”
Dagan blew out a ragged breath. Mullah Zahed had been one of the most powerful and feared Taliban leaders before his capture, and he had been Waleed’s cousin? “How did I miss that?”
“Not just you,” Chelsea assured him. “Everyone missed it. Edens himself missed it. And now I know that was part of the problem. Edens didn’t want it known he’d made a mistake. He didn’t think it’d look good on his résumé. But, heck, I might have missed it too, had I not run across the guest list for Mullah Zahed’s daughter’s wedding. Waleed’s father attended, and that got me curious enough to go looking for the connection between the two men. It was really convoluted, but I eventually untangled all the threads and found the blood ties.”
“Fuckin’ A.” Dagan ran a hand through his hair. He wouldn’t have thought it was possible for the submersible to get any smaller, but the thing seemed to shrink around him. Then a thought occurred. “But, wait. You found this out before the handoff, right? So why—”
“And here’s where my confession comes in,” she said, her voice heavy with undisguised misery.
That sick, swirling feeling in Dagan’s stomach ratcheted up from an F5 tornado to a full-force hurricane.
Chapter 46
“Twenty-six hours before you were supposed to hand off Waleed, I went to Ted Edens and told him what I found,” Chelsea said, her heart racing to beat the band.
“What did Edens say?”
She couldn’t ignore that Dagan had gone as still as a statue carved from polar ice. It was a terrible change from moments before, when he’d been all warm hugs and roving hands. Was this a hint of things to come?
Love conquers all…
His words came back to give her hope. She clung to that hope as the memory of that day came pouring out of her head like that beat-to-shit piñata her father had strung up in a tree for her tenth birthday party…
“This is a stretch, Agent Duvall. Even for you,” Edens said, leaning back in his desk chair and folding his arms over his burly chest. His office smelled like breath mints and stale coffee. Neither scent did anything to soothe Chelsea’s frayed nerves. “You can’t judge a man by his family ties. Especially not over there, where everyone is related to everyone if you go back a generation or two.”
“That may be true. Maybe it’s nothing. A coincidence.”
“That’d be my guess.”
She firmed her jaw. “But shouldn’t we at least alert Agent Zoelner to the connection?”
Edens narrowed his eyes, studying her for a full ten-second count. She had been working for the man for a few years, but she’d never gotten to the point where she could give him her unqualified respect. Edens was too much of a politician for her taste. It was no secret he had big aspirations, wanted to be the next director of the CIA. She couldn’t shake the feeling that sometimes he acted for political reasons instead of strategic ones.
“We’ll let Waleed’s handoff go through first,” he finally said. “We don’t want Agent McShane to start his relationship with Waleed acting squirrelly. Assuming Waleed is legit and this flimsy connection to Mullah Zahed is just that, a flimsy connection, the last thing we need is Waleed getting suspicious or feeling unsafe. If he doesn’t trust Agent McShane, he’ll shut off his information pipeline.”
Chelsea took exception to the word “flimsy.” Yes, Abdul Waleed and Mullah Zahed were very distant relations. But in that part of the world, blood ran true no matter how far apart the branches were on the family tree. “Agent McShane is a professional. I hardly think he’ll give Waleed any cause to doubt—”
“And can you say the same for Agents Walker and Moore? They’re going to be there supplying backup for the handoff. Can you assure me they won’t give themselves away if they suspect Waleed might be playing both sides?”
&n
bsp; “I can’t be one hundred percent certain of anything, sir. You know that. But—”
“I’ll make note of your concern, Agent Duvall.” Edens sat forward, placing his forearms on his desk and steepling his fingers. “But I’ve made my decision on this matter, and I expect you to respect it.”
“Sir—”
“Let’s not fall into the Chicken Little trap and proclaim the sky is falling, huh?”
Chelsea gritted her teeth. “Yes, sir.” Turning on her heel, she marched from Edens’s office, back straight, arms stiff, sure that steam poured from her ears.
“As you know,” she told Dagan, coming out of the reverie, “a day later the sky fell.”
The dimness inside the sub didn’t hide Dagan’s sawing jaw or the harsh light in his eyes. “And what did you do then?” he asked.
His hand was no longer on her butt. She was pretty sure he had it fisted against the yoga mat. With reluctance, she pushed off him, settling herself with her back against the cold hull.
Love conquers all…
Did it? She wasn’t so sure.
“I stormed into Edens’s office.” She left out the part about the tears of rage that had burned the back of her throat. When she’d come in to work that day, the first thing she’d heard about was the bombing, and for a moment the whole world, her whole world, had gone dark. Then she’d learned that Dagan was alive, and relief and light had flooded into her. It had quickly been tempered by the fact that while the man she secretly loved had survived, three other valiant agents had not. That fact would haunt her for the rest of her life. “I screamed, ‘I told you!’ at him. Followed that up with ‘I warned you!’”
“What did he do?”
“He just sat there blinking at me, this blank expression on his face. And then he asked me, ‘What do you mean?’”
Once more, the memory of that day nipped at the heels of her mind like a pack of angry dogs.
“Abdul Waleed!” she screamed at her boss.
“Calm yourself, Agent Duvall. You’re being hysterical.”
“Hysterical? Hysterical? Men are dead, sir! Men we might have been able to save, had we warned them!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She was so taken aback that she just stood there blinking at him. And then she suddenly understood. He was covering his own ass. He’d made the call to delay telling the agents about Waleed’s connection to Zahed, and it had come back to bite him.
“I’ll go above your head. I’ll tell the director everything,” she swore.
A terrible look came over Edens’s face then. “And it will be your word against mine, Agent Duvall. I’ll deny everything, and there’s no way for you to prove otherwise. There’s no paper trail, no emails or taped phone conversation. Tell me, do you have mental illness in your family?”
“Wh-what? You can’t do that!” she raged. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“Try me.”
Her mouth hung open for a long moment, a million thoughts racing through her head. “Fine,” she finally ground out, every blood vessel in her body expanding in fury. “It’ll be my word against yours. And maybe you’ll come out the winner in the end. But at least I will have cast doubt on you. With my credentials, I can find a job like that.” She snapped her fingers. “But you’ll never make it up to the big chair.”
She turned to leave, determined to march into the director’s office—or at least make an appointment with his secretary. As a lowly counterterrorism analyst, she didn’t have the clout to just barge in on the man unannounced.
“Will you?” Edens asked before she could open his office door.
She swung back. “Will I what?”
“Find a job?” His smile was vicious. “Even with your credentials, I would think finding a new position would be difficult after I contact any would-be employers and tell them you’re unstable and given to flights of fancy, always looking for ways to run the good names of your superiors through the mud.”
Once again, her mouth hung open. Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears.
“Go back to your desk, Chelsea.” He no longer afforded her the courtesy of calling her “Agent Duvall.”
“And I went,” Chelsea told Dagan. “To my utter shame, I went. I knew he would make good on his promise. And I needed a job. I still need my job. Mom and I are still in so much debt, and the house…” The words had poured out of her. When the dam had finally burst, there had been no holding back. But now, self-loathing made her hesitate. “I didn’t think Edens would get you fired. I don’t know what I thought he would do, but it wasn’t that. And then that day you came back…”
Dagan spoke, and the timbre of his voice was horrible. “The day the director of the CIA accused me of becoming complacent, the day he told me that no other agent would ever trust me or work with me again. The day he said he was left with no choice but to terminate my contract.”
“Edens must have poisoned the well for you. I think he was scared that if you hung around, I would tell you the truth. And I wanted to tell you then and there,” she swore. She never knew that anguish could tie one’s stomach in knots. “I tried to tell you. But I-I was terrified of losing my job. Terrified of what it would mean for my mother and her happiness and her dreams and memories if I did. And there was no undoing what had been done. I just thought—”
“Edens died six months ago, Chels.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“Why didn’t you tell me then? When your job was finally safe?”
“Because you were working for BKI. You’d moved on. You’d gotten over it. You seemed happy. Avan was happy. I didn’t think bringing up all that pain from the past was worth it. And I was so ashamed of having kept quiet for so long, Dagan.”
“So then why the fuck are you telling me now?”
The submarine popped and groaned around them. They were changing depth. A sense of desperation grabbed hold of her. “Because…” She shook her head, searching his face, hoping to find some flicker of understanding. But there was nothing. “Because I can’t start a relationship with you if there is this big, bad secret between us.”
For long moments, he remained quiet, unmoving. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she demanded, “Say something, Dagan. Please.”
Only his lips moved when he asked, “What do you want me to say?”
“Say you forgive me for choosing my mother’s home and memories and life’s love all those years ago. Say you’re not going to let this come between us. Say that love conquers all.” Her tone was pleading, begging. She didn’t care. When it came to this, when it came to him, she had no pride left.
He said none of that. What he said was, “I’m sorry.”
Those two words might as well have been a death knell.
Chapter 47
Calais, France
Dagan felt like he had been punched in the chest by Tyson Fury.
He’d thought he knew heartbreak. His mother’s cancer, his father’s aneurysm, seeing Avan in the hospital looking like he was knocking on death’s door. All of it had hurt him in ways he wouldn’t have thought it possible to hurt. But this…this was worse. Because this…she was not the woman he thought he knew.
“We arrive,” Gautier announced from the front of the sub. “I regret I cannot get closer, but the shore, she is not so far. Twenty meters, peut-être? No more.”
“Dagan.” Chelsea reached for him. “Please, I promise I’ll—”
“Don’t,” he told her, a muscle twitching in his jaw. Another one was going to town in his right eye. “I can’t right now. Just…” He shook his head. “Just leave it alone.”
Her eyes were huge as she blinked up at him. He thought he saw her perfect mouth quiver, but he couldn’t be sure because he quickly looked away.
When Gautier popped the top on the sub, Dagan inchworm
ed his way toward the front until he could see through the hatch to the stars shining overhead.
Huh. The world is still spinning.
He thought that odd considering his world, everything he thought he knew about Chelsea, everything he thought he knew about himself, had been blown to shit.
A series of vibrations buzzed in his pocket, alerting him to a waiting voice mail. He extracted his iPhone, thankful for the waterproof case, and glanced at the screen. It read Unknown Number* But the little asterisk beside the text told him it was someone from Black Knights Inc.
Without looking at Chelsea—he couldn’t look at her; he was too confused, too dismayed—he held the phone to his ear and listened, his jaw sawing faster as each harried word entered his ear.
Thumbing off the device, he grabbed his backpack. “Change of plans,” he told her.
“What do you mean?”
“That was Emily. She called to say they ran into some trouble. Looks like someone was waiting for them at the Eurotunnel terminal.”
“How could anyone possibly know—”
“Same way they found out about you and me, maybe? Surveillance cameras? But the how doesn’t matter. What matters is they’re safe. They’re headed to Christian’s uncle’s cottage in Port Isaac.”
“Christian has an uncle?”
“Apparently so. Their plan is to lie low and wait until the heat dies down or until we can figure out what’s going on. You and I are on our own for now. Get your pack ready. We have another swim in front of us.”
“Dagan, we—”
“Chelsea, now’s not the time.”
“I know. I wasn’t going to say anything about…” When she swallowed, he could actually hear the lump in her throat. “We need to call the others and fill them in on what’s happened,” she finished. “They need to know about Morrison and Spider.”
Right. Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Oh yeah. Because she’d dropped a bomb, and he was still reeling from the explosion. “Do it,” he told her. “But be quick. I don’t like sitting out here in the open. Makes me twitchy.”
Fuel for Fire Page 25
