Edge Of Truth

“Humor me. I’ve had no one to talk to for six days—and days last a mighty long time down here.”

“Fine. You want to talk, let’s talk about you. Where are you from?” He didn’t even pretend a genuine interest. Though if his French accent was faked, too, why did his words roll over her skin like velvet?

“The States,” she said, with a sly smile.

“Well, yeah. I meant...” He met her eye, then looked away. She detected a faint curse—called out on his own caginess. He crouched beside a wall and began examining it. “You know what I meant.”

Ah, what the heck. It was all on the internet. “I’m based in New York when I’m in the States, which isn’t often.”

“Where are you mostly?”

“I live in Addis Ababa, not that I’m there often, either. I cover Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, South Sudan... So I’m mostly on the road.”

He was silent a few seconds, regarding her with raised eyebrows. “Wow, you didn’t land the cushy job. Did you piss off your bosses?”

She laughed. “I begged to be posted here.”

“What are you running away from?”

“Nothing. I like it here.”

He returned focus to the wall. “Where did you grow up?”

“Fort Bragg, mostly, though we moved around.”

“The army base?”

“That’s the one. My mom and brothers are still headquartered there.” She swallowed. And her mom had just become an al-Thawra target, too. Your other whistle-blower will soon meet the same fate as the first. Nice and tidy. Was Hamid bluffing? Tess could only hope Lieutenant Colonel Newell was one step ahead of Hamid—it was her job to know what people were thinking before they thought it, to outmaneuver them before they took a step. Which had sucked when Tess was a teenager, but now...

“You’re an army brat.” He ran his hands down the padded straps of her bag, frowning. “That ain’t gonna work,” he muttered.

“What isn’t?”

He fished around in the bag, emerging with a small rolled bandage. “Fort Bragg. That’s in the South, oui?”

“North Carolina, yeah.”

“You don’t sound Southern.”

“My accent comes and goes, a little like yours.”

“We did a joint exercise off Hawaii with some guys from there,” he said, his voice tight, evidently ignoring her dig. “Stevens, Porter, Luiz... Know them?”

Common enough surnames and it was a big base. Lucky guess?

“Mauricio Luiz?” she said.

He unwrapped the bandage and snapped it taut. It ripped. He swore. “Sounds right.”

“Blond guy?”

He looked at her sideways. “With a name like that? Nah, Colombian or something. Short guy, burn scar across his neck, tattoo of a...snake, or something. Arrogant piece of shit.”

“Oh yeah, that’s him.” So Flynn probably wasn’t faking the military thing. “He’s a good buddy of one of my brothers. God knows why. Last I saw him, he’d bleached his hair.”

“That’d be right.”

“Have you trained elsewhere in the States? Maybe that’s where I’ve seen—”

He held up his hand, listening, as a car engine surged and fell away. “We’re near a road?”

“Yeah. Not a lot of traffic but it seems to be a public road. I’ve heard children’s voices, buses, donkeys...”

He scanned the room for the twentieth time. “So what stopped you signing up, like your brothers?”

Wow, he was as seasoned at changing the subject as a politician. “Hard to be a lefto, greenie conspiracy theorist and shoot people.”

“You forgot the tinfoil hat.” His lips pulled up into a lopsided grin. It made him look boyish. Cute, even. Green—his eyes were green.

She pulled focus. Like it mattered. “I was more interested in keeping the higher ranks honest than doing their bidding. I saw the crap my mom and brothers had to put up with.” She left her Bronze Star–winning father out of it—he’d been the type to serve up the crap, while cheating on her mother on every tour. “Mom was only too happy to send me to college to keep me out of uniform.”

“Bet she didn’t imagine you’d be the one winding up here.”

“Guess not.” Or the child who’d bring killers to her door. What was her mom doing now? No one in the family would sit back and wait for the authorities to act, despite their respect for the chain of command, but she’d know Tess’s abduction had put her at risk. It was only after she’d put Tess in touch with Latif six months ago, while he was still working as an IT security analyst at Denniston, that the conspiracy had started to become clear. And now Latif was dead—“collateral damage” in a drone strike against al-Thawra, as if that could be believed—despite Tess’s promise to protect him, and the evidence he’d left behind was her only hope. Too many deaths already.

Flynn pushed a finger through the gap he’d widened in the floorboards, then retracted it, his forehead wrinkling. Was he planning to yank the whole floor down?

“What do they do—your family?” he said.

Warning bells jangled—was he fishing for information? Something to hold over her? But, hey, her family was no secret—Rolling Stone had profiled the entire clan last year on the third anniversary of her “American hero” father’s death.

“My brothers are Special Forces—all three of them. Mom’s in Intel.”

“Is that why you’re obsessed with this Somalia story—you’re afraid your family will be deployed there?”

“I don’t like to see any soldier go to war without a very good reason.”

He ran a hand over the boards. “Neither do I. Hell, I could end up deployed there... So this dossier—can you do your story without it?”

A chill tiptoed up her spine. “My bosses would never run it without hard evidence—it’s too damning, too dangerous.”

“So you need to get it back.”

“I don’t imagine that’s an option.”

She picked up her MRE. Maybe force-feeding her stomach would stop it churning. This guy might be radiating mixed messages but at least he brought hope.

“How long have you been in the legion?” she said. If he was hiding something, she’d catch him out. If in doubt, ask the same question ten different ways until they got flustered. The Human Lie Detector, Quan called her.