Mara shook her head. “I don’t know. I only saw Ahmed once. After that, he called me on a disposable phone whenever he wanted to give me instructions.”
“Do you still have the phone?” Bran asked.
“No. He told me to throw it away.”
“So you have no proof that anything you’ve just told us is true,” Jessie said.
Tears rolled down Mara’s cheeks. “No.”
Bran glanced over at Hunter Brady. “You get all that?”
Hunt turned off the recorder on his cell phone. “I got it.”
Bran turned back to Mara. “You understand where this is going, right? You’ll be arrested. There’s nothing I can do about that. You’re involved in what appears to be a terrorist plot. Someone you worked with is now in possession of enough chemical weapons to kill or injure thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people.”
A sound of distress slipped from her throat.
“If you know something—anything that could help stop a possible attack—now is the time to tell us.”
She shook her head. “I wish I did. I’m so very sorry.”
“I wonder what my father would say if he were standing here now?” Jessie asked, her eyes on the woman’s exotically beautiful face.
Mara looked stricken, her dark eyes liquid with tears. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred times.”
Jessie stared at her hard. “Unfortunately, because of you, we’ll never know the answer.”
Bran pulled out his cell to call General Holloway’s direct number. It was the middle of the night. The call would not be welcome.
“Wait!” Mara rose from her chair at the kitchen table. “I don’t want people dying because of me. Maybe there’s a way I can help.”
Bran cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “And in exchange you want...what? Your freedom? You got a man killed, Mara. You have to pay for that.”
“I got the man I loved killed. I will pay for that the rest of my life.”
He kept the cell phone in hand, the threat clear. “What are you offering?”
“I have a way to contact Ahmed. He said I should only use it in an emergency.”
He flicked a glance at Jessie, who had gone from angry to alert. “Go on.”
“I could set up a meeting, tell him that the colonel’s daughter came to see me, that she believes I had something to do with stealing the chemical weapons. I could ask him to meet me. I believe he would come.”
Bran’s gaze returned to Jessie. Mara Ramos had been at least partly responsible for her father’s death. The army would lock the woman up and throw away the key. The call was hers. Even more important, once the terrorists knew Jessie was alive and in San Diego, her life would again be at risk.
“It’s dangerous,” Bran said, spelling out the threat. “They’ll know where we are.”
Jessie’s shoulders firmed. “We have to stop these people. This is the best chance we have.”
She was right. He didn’t like it, but the longer this continued, the better chance one or both of them would wind up dead—or there would be a terror attack.
He fixed his attention on Mara. “All right, you set up a meet with Ahmed. He doesn’t show, we call in the army. You try to run, we call in the army. In the meantime, we stay right here. You do anything we don’t like, none of us will hesitate to put a terrorist in her grave.”
Her lips trembled. “I won’t run.”
“If you do this and we find these people, there’s a chance you might end up with a lighter sentence, maybe avoid spending the rest of your life in prison.”
She swallowed, wiped fresh tears from her cheeks. “I once had a naive belief that terrorism was a way to make things better for my country. I outgrew that belief many years ago. I don’t want people to die.”
