“Go back to where you first got to the hideout.” He shifted a bit against the plush ivory cushions. “What happened next?”
“Hold and observe.” She rattled off the agency’s textbook procedure. “Confirm location and the presence of hostages, and initiate rescue. That’s what we were supposed to do, and that’s exactly what I did. Only the place was like a ghost town. There was no movement. None of al-Asiri’s men could be seen. We hadno sign of the hostages, and no way to know from where we were holed up whether they were ever even there.”
“So you went inside.”
Natalia nodded once again. “If there was even a chance the hostages were inside that building…” Her voice trailed.
She could still hear the words she’d said to Keith minutes before tragedy struck…
I can’t greenlight a breach if I think there’s a chance we’re being set up.
“You had to give the green light to go in.”
Jagger’s uncanny choice of words left her blinking. “But I knew, in my gut, that something wasn’t right.”
“Sometimes we have no choice but to follow the intel, instead.”
“I didn’t want to,” Natalia admitted softly. “I wanted to pull back until I had the chance to reconnect with Rahim. But Keith was hounding me to make the call to go in so we could see for ourselves.” She shrugged a shoulder. “So we did.”
“What happened once you got inside?”
“We found the hostages.” Tears pricked the corners of her blinking eyes. “They’d been dead for a while. Tossed into a pile like a bunch of old leaves or discarded trash.”
“Ah, hell.”
“The support team there with us took the perimeter and the upstairs. Keith, Julian, and I covered the main floor. Julian thought he heard something, and from the initial count, we were missing one of the hostages. So, Keith and I stayed with the bodies while Julian went to check it out.” She frowned. “If there was a chance for us to save even one…” Jagger’s image became blurred. “Turns out, it was a hostage. There was a bomb strapped to the body. The assumption is when Julian tried moving them in his effort to render aid, it triggered a timer.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Next thing we knew”—she continued—“he was racing out of that room, screaming at Keith and I to run.”
The next blink set a tear loose, but she hurriedly swiped it away. Jagger remained silent as she sat up a bit straighter, willing herself to breathe.
“Keith and I were the only ones who made it out of the building alive. The other team members who’d rappelled out the second-story windows, sustained minor to moderate injuries. But Julian …” Her voice cracked despite the effort she’d put forth to prevent it.
“That’s not on you, sweetheart.”
The unexpected endearment caught the breath from her lungs.
“I was the lead on the op, Jagger.”
“Doesn’t make you a mind reader or someone who can predict the future.” He slowly pushed himself to his feet. “Did you have any reason to believe there was a guy with a bomb waiting for you inside that room?”
Natalia brushed another tear away. “We didn’t even know the room existed until we were inside. It wasn’t on the plans we were given, which was one more reason the higher ups blamed Rahim’s intel. Or rather, the trust I’d put in him.”
Jagger walked toward her with unhurried steps, the soft soles of his boots silent as they moved across the shiny, hardwood floor.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight.” He took a seat on the cushion right beside her. “Using intel from a known, reliable, government-approved asset, you followed protocol and implemented the search of a suspected terrorist hideout in an attempt to save a bunch of innocent lives?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Actually, it is.” Jagger’s handsome head tilted slightly to the side. “You had no way to know those hostages were already dead.And you sure as hell couldn’t have predicted there’d be some asshole waiting inside for you with a bomb.”
“It was a total mission failure.”
“Because of al-Asiri,” he countered. “Not you.”
Natalia scoffed. “Yeah, well, tell that to the CIA.”
