THIRTY
It was full daylight by the time Hunt Brady headed back to his apartment and Bran started driving back to their suite at the Grant Hotel. It had taken an hour and a half for MPs from the CID Pacific Field Office in Irvine to reach the house in La Jolla. Then the hours of questioning had begun.
Special Agent Brian Kopecki had taken statements from Bran, Jessie, and Hunt, along with the information that Mara had fully cooperated in helping them capture the terrorist, Ahmed Malik, his full name. After lengthy questioning, Malik and Mara had been taken into military police custody and hauled away.
Interrogations were sometimes handled by the FBI, but the classified nature of the missing munitions meant the pair would be taken by army jet back to Fort Carson.
After Malik and Mara were gone, Agent Kopecki had interviewed the three of them separately, asking an endless array of questions, getting mostly the same answers. But no one knew what had happened in the garage except Bran and Malik. Bran had left no physical evidence, and Malik, wisely, wasn’t talking. He didn’t want Bran coming after him, as Bran had convinced him he would. Since the information he’d gleaned was more important than the methods he had used to get it, the subject would be dropped.
Special Agent Kopecki was in touch with his superiors, as well as Special Agent Tripp. Someone higher up the food chain, either Tripp’s superior, Colonel Larkin, head of the CID, or General Holloway, had ordered Bran, Jessie, and Hunt Brady’s release.
So far Bran hadn’t had a chance to fill Jessie in on what Malik had told him in the garage, and she had been strangely silent since they’d left the condo.
“All right, what’s going on in that beautiful head of yours?” he asked, casting her a glance from behind the wheel of the Navigator as the vehicle made its way back to the city. Both of them were exhausted, but this was more than just fatigue.
Those big green eyes swung to his face. “Did you torture that man?”
He should have known.
His jaw clenched as he gripped the wheel and searched for an exit, flipped on the turn signal, cut between two slower vehicles, and pulled off the freeway onto La Jolla Parkway. Following the GPS map to a spot on the beach, he drove into a lot on a cliff overlooking the ocean and turned off the engine.
“We need to talk,” he said, cracking the door and sliding out of the SUV.
As Jessie got out to join him, a brisk wind rolled in off the sea, whipping loose strands of fiery hair around her face. She looked drawn and tired and beautiful. Her black yoga pants outlined the perfect little ass that always turned him on, and he felt a rush of heat he was forced to ignore.
As they walked along the path above the cliffs, waves pounded the rocks below then rushed back out to sea. Gripping Jessie’s hand, he led her over to a fence rail at the top of the cliff.
“I understand why you did it,” she said, looking up at him. “I’m not condemning you, I just need to know.”
But that wasn’t true. Same as during the war, people didn’t really want to know about the enemy soldiers he had interrogated or killed. They wanted to pretend none of the bad stuff actually happened. That was one of the reasons he never got involved in a serious relationship. He’d never known a woman who could handle the truth. Very few people could deal.
Looking at Jessie, it hit him with the force of a blow that this was the reason the two of them would never work. She couldn’t handle knowing the things he’d done and he didn’t want to live a lie.
He steeled himself. Better to get it over with right now.
“I hooked jumper cables to Mara’s car battery. Then I told Ahmed if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, I’d clamp them on his balls and light him up.”
She made a little sound in her throat. Bran kept going. “I gave him a demonstration. You probably heard the charge going off in the kitchen. Then I asked him where the chemical weapons had been taken. When he refused to answer, I zapped him. When he still refused to answer, I hit him with the juice again.”
Her eyes filled.
“He told me the weapons had been driven from Colorado to the port in Houston. They were loaded aboard a ship and transported to Yemen. The name of the ship wasDelfina. It would have arrived weeks ago. A group calling themselvessawt Allah, the Voice of God, has the weapons. But if they’d used them, we’d have heard about it at the time it happened, so I’m guessing they’re still in the planning stages. I asked him what they were going to do with the munitions. He said he didn’t know. At that point I believed him.”
“Because if he lied, you would have shocked him again.”
He just shrugged. He hadn’t really hurt the wormy bastard. Ahmed wasn’t a high-level, highly trained combatant. He’d folded almost immediately. It was the perceived threat that ultimately convinced a guy to talk. Bran had a knack for making someone believe there was no limit to what he was willing to do.
Sometimes there wasn’t. As a soldier, he’d done what he’d had to. He didn’t regret it. Losing Jessie wouldn’t make him regret it now.
He hardened his heart against the slice of pain that told him how hard he had fallen for his best friend’s sister. How could he not have seen the truth before now?
He clenched his jaw against the knot squeezing his stomach. From the start, he had known it would never work. He should have been more careful, should have protected himself.
He took a deep breath. There was nothing he could do about it now. No matter how she felt about him, he would protect her. He owed it to Danny—and to himself.
He forced his thoughts back to the job. “I pressed Ahmed to name the man behind the theft of the weapons. The guy had no idea. I asked him about Weaver and the hit on your dad, but again, no idea. He was assigned a job and he did it. That’s the way it works with terrorists. No one knows what another part of the cell is doing. The CID will go after the group in San Diego. They might bring in the FBI to help. Eventually they’ll probably get the name of the person who bought the weapons through the auction, but that’s not going to give us the answers we need.”
“You mean the name of the man or men at the top, the people who got the twenty-five million dollars.”
