Under Fire

“For Rachel. I know you’re really here for her.”

“Because you put her life in danger,” Liam snapped before he could call the words back. Hell, he didn’t even want to.

Wind picked up speed in the storm, the eaves creaking at the force, rain misting in through the open windows.

“I did. And I’m sorry for that.” Brandon’s eyes shuffled to Rachel’s with unmistakable contrition. “Honest to God, Rachel, I wish I could go back and do things differently.”

“How?” She reached out to him. “Believe me, I’ve thought about this a hundred different ways and I think we both acted in all the logical, legal ways to report suspicious activity.”

Liam looked back and forth between them, searching for signs that they were more than just connected by the situation. And what do ya know? Catriona Whittier was watching their interaction with the same interest. The woman wasn’t at all what he would have expected from a pet-sitter. She was so thin, damn near frail, she looked like the wind could carry her away. Even her red hair looked fragile, scraped back from her face. She appeared passive.

Except when she looked at Brandon Harris. Then her eyes went fierce.

All right then. Time to figure out exactly what Harris knew. “I guess that makes us your last hope, lieutenant. Convince us.”

Harris’s hand fell to rest on top of his shepherd mutt’s head. “Back in the day before we were at war with everybody all the time, security cops were divided into two categories: law enforcement and base defense. Now we’re all mostly focused on base defense here and overseas, and undermanned for the task.”

Liam nodded. “That’s a heavy load to carry, especially in a war zone.”

Harris wouldn’t be the first to crack from combat burnout. Who wasn’t pulling double and triple duty these days?

“I asked for the deployment.” Harris thumped himself on the chest. “I embraced it. I wanted to go over from the minute I finished training, to have my chance at defending my country.”

Catriona gasped, her attention on Harris even as her hand gravitated into her hobo bag to pull out a chew toy and toss it to Fang. “Brandon, you wanted to go to the Middle East?”

Harris winced, looking down at the planked floor. “I thought I was a badass, that I could go over there and make a difference all by myself.”

“Lieutenant,” Liam said, to pull Harris back into the conversation, into the moment, rather than wherever he’d drifted off to. “What exactly was your tasking?”

The silence stretched out, filled only by the increasing storm outside. A crack of thunder vibrated through the cabin.

Harris looked up sharply, blinking. “I was a military bodyguard for a high-profile civilian contractor in southern Afghanistan. I went everywhere with him… meetings, dinner, trips from base to base. Even his shopping trips to pick up touristy crap for his wife and kids back home.”

“A regular family guy,” Liam said, more to keep him talking than anything else.

“No,” Harris’s eyes hardened. “He wasn’t. Those trips to different marketplaces were a cover. He was meeting with contractors from other countries.”

“Not unheard of.”

“That’s what I thought at first.” He swiped the perspiration off his forehead, taking his time, as if gathering his thoughts. Or preparing his story? As a military cop, he would have training in interrogation. Enough to fool the room? To fool a shrink?

“I’m just a lieutenant,” Harris continued, “a lowly nobody, as far as they were concerned. Window dressing. So they talked more openly in front of me than they would around you, Major, or some other higher-ranking official. I know this sounds far-fetched, but as I pieced together those different meetings, I realized they were setting up the exchange of military information.”

“Whoa.” Jose held up a hand. “Contractors from different countries? That’s treason.”

“If I could prove it.” Harris rolled his shoulders. “Which I couldn’t. I spoke to my commanding officer, and he said they already had an eighteen-hour workday chasing down tangible threats with hard evidence. So I kept my mouth shut and ears open, waiting for something concrete I could take to the authorities, get some sense of who was pulling the strings. They talked a lot about their ‘bosses’ and reporting back to contacts in the military community, but I never got a name.”

Liam smiled darkly. “That would be too easy.”

“They were reckless, but not that reckless. It’s obvious they worked with someone high up the military chain of command. At first I thought it was a money thing, but the more I listened, the more I got the feeling it was about affecting the balance of power.”

“Whoa,” Cuervo interrupted. “Balance of power?”

“Right,” Harris continued. “It was about reshaping the face of the command structure, personal agendas for military armament programs that should excel versus which ones they would make sure failed.”

Damn. It would have been so much easier to go after a greedy bastard. Money trails were simple. But power-hungry types with an ideological ax to grind? Liam focused back in on Harris.

“Maybe a month into the assignment, things shifted. It was about more than talk. They planned an actual exchange, something to do with the coordinates for when U.S. satellites would be conducting intelligence gathering. If another country knows when you’re watching them…”

Shit. The implications were hellacious. U.S. intelligence operatives, military members on maneuvers… They would all be sitting ducks.

“Uh, yeah.” Liam scratched the back of his head. “That would constitute treason.”

Harris didn’t smile. “I could hardly believe what I was seeing. An exchange. A simple little chip that they passed over by exchanging cell phones.” He paused. “The data chip was in the phone. All I had to do was report them to officials on base and…”

“And?” Rachel touched his arm softly.

“The marketplace was bombed.” His voice went flat, his eyes hollow. “Bodies flew part. The two contractors died on impact. I heard sirens and screams. None of it fully registered. I just closed my hand around one of the cell phones and passed out. The next thing I remember, I woke up in a battlefield hospital ward.”

Liam leaned back in his chair, churning over Harris’s story in his mind. “That’s it?”

“When I got out of the hospital, I was pretty rattled. Go ahead and laugh if you want. Lieutenant gung ho was totally freaked out after a few months of combat and one especially close call. They tell me I was catatonic.” He shrugged. “When I came out of it enough to be moved to a rehab center, they gave me my stuff back. And there was that cell phone.”

“From the marketplace?”

“Exactly. I tried to alert the authorities to what happened. They informed me I was suffering from battle stress and that my memories were faulty.”

“Why didn’t they at least check the chip in your phone? That wouldn’t have taken long, to verify information.”

“The first time I started to explain things, I wasn’t as coherent or… calm. They gave me some kind of knock-out drug halfway through before I even got to the part about the cell phone. Next time I tried to tell, I was more cautious in holding back information, and before long I didn’t know what to believe. Maybe I was a mix of rational and delusional. But I didn’t know who to trust with that chip. I was afraid to let even my psychiatrist know. The paranoia paralyzed me. Until Rachel paired me up with the therapy dog, Harley.”

Harley nudged his hand.

Harris stroked the dog’s head in a way that appeared to soothe him. “Rachel said she would go with me to the authorities…” He shrugged. “It didn’t pan out as we’d hoped.”

“What about the chip in the cell phone?”

“I turned it over during my second interview with the OSI.”

“And now there’s no way to verify what you’ve told us.” Damn it, this guy had been stringing them along for nothing. The threats could have all been set up by him, especially if he’d had a psychotic break.

Liam looked from Rocha to James and could see they feared the same thing. That they were stuck in the boonies with a seriously unhinged and dangerous individual.

Harris stuffed his hand behind his back.

“Gun!” Rocha shouted.

Liam and his PJ teammates piled on top of Harris, knocking him from the chair. Harley growled, and from the corner of his eye, Liam saw Rachel grab the dog’s collar. Harris thrashed underneath them. Hard. Damned hard. With punches and kicks of a trained security force specialist. It took all three of them to pin his raging body.

Dimly, Liam heard Catriona scream, felt Rachel’s hand on his arm. The red faded from his eyes and he calmed enough to assess the restrained lieutenant. Harris’s chest heaved, his skin paling. His eyes darted from side to side. He appeared scared—but rational.

Liam leaned to catch Harris’s attention. “Talk to me.”

“No gun,” he said through gritted teeth. “A cell phone. I made a copy of the chip and stored it in another phone.”

Liam nodded to Cuervo to check it out. Cuervo reached into the guy’s back pocket and pulled out…

An iPhone.

Liam rocked back on his heels. “My apologies, Lieutenant.”

Harris sat up slowly, his muscles visibly twitching. “It’s okay. I’d have done the same in your position.”

Rachel knelt beside him with Harley. Harris hooked an arm around the dog’s neck, but he wasn’t meeting Catriona’s gaze across the room. That sure answered a couple more of Liam’s questions. Harris had a thing for the dog-sitter. Made sense that he would be embarrassed around someone he wanted to accept him as manly. Harris didn’t appear to care what Rachel thought of his masculinity.

Harris rubbed the back of his neck. “Any chance you guys can decipher the information on the chip?”

“Good news, bad news. We’re a team for a reason. We all have different skills. And our computer geek, Data—Marcus Dupre—is back home.”

Rachel shoved to her feet. “Now would be a great time for the good news part.”

“We have a generator and top-notch computers here. And thanks to the storm that’s keeping us from leaving, it’s also impossible for anyone to find us. So we have time.”

Time to figure out if the cell phone contained world-shaking information—or if that phone was Brandon Harris’s version of a crazy tinfoil hat.

Either way, he was keeping Harris the hell away from Rachel.

***

Rachel was going seriously stir-crazy.

The cabin that had seemed like such a safe haven initially had now become more of an overcrowded jail cell because of the storm. She sat cross-legged and pretty much useless on a bed with a sunburst quilt.

After Brandon’s meltdown, they’d cranked the generator. Liam hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said it kicked ass. Air conditioners pumped cool air through the shack. Three computers had been set up on the dining table. The Internet was spotty, going in and out as they worked to reach Marcus Dupre. But Liam and the two members of his team were poring over the computer chip, with Brandon trying to break the code.

Catriona and Sunny were in the kitchenette and had quickly evicted Rachel, insisting she’d been on the road longer than they had, so she should rest.

Even the dogs had abandoned her. All four canines had piled pack-style on the porch, not a bad place, since they would serve as a first alert to anyone approaching. Their ears would be better tuned to nuances in the symphony of storm and marsh noises. She hugged her knees, resting her chin on them, drifting off…

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