But as he did it, he revealed a switchblade knife that he’d managed to take out of his pocket when he’d been writhing on the ground the moment before.
Kendra inhaled sharply, quickly slipping the knife into her sleeve as she tucked the jacket more closely on the wound.
Then she turned to face Dietrich. He had just kicked their guns into the brush, and he held his own firearm leveled at her chest. He was too far away from her for her to use that knife, she realized immediately. The minute she made a movement toward him, he’d pull that trigger. He wanted to pull it. She could see the anticipation in his expression. But he hadn’t pulled it. Why? The beam of her flashlight picked up the highlights in his hair and eyebrows, giving him an almost ethereal appearance. His nose had been recently broken, and his cheeks were still bruised from his encounter with Jessie. But now she could also see that besides the anticipation, there was excitement. He was enjoying this.
“What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “This is scheduled to be a very busy night and I was afraid I’d have to make a special trip back to take care of you.” His lips curled. “You were going somewhere in a hurry. Should I guess where?”
“Nowhere special. Just up the hill to meet half of the local FBI field office. And about twenty of San Diego’s finest. Care to join me?”
“You may be remarkable at many things, Kendra, but lying isn’t one of them. I know there are only a few FBI personnel left here. I have more than enough support to take them out.”
“For your scheme to smuggle Delgado out of Mexico and into Russia? This was just going to be the way station, wasn’t it?”
Dietrich was trying to be cool but she could see her knowledge rattled him. A slight intake of breath, shifting in place, darting of his eyes…
Push him a little more. “We all know what you’re doing here,” she continued. “And we found out about the old tunnel. You think you’re the only one who knows about that?”
He was silent. “Not now evidently. But it must be a fairly recent discovery or this place would be crawling with FBI. I believe I’m safe. It doesn’t matter what you know now.”
“But you relied on no one knowing before. Or at least you hoped. That needed to stay a secret for any of this to work. Something made you murder Mr. Kim and Elaine.” She added bitterly, “You didn’t expect that you’d run across two people who cared so much about this place and the children here that they wouldn’t give up until they knew it was safe. They were onto you, weren’t they? It’s logical that you’d have to have a drill or some special equipment to break the seal on the tunnel. What Elaine must have seen was you moving it from the shore to take it to Big Rock. When you found out that they knew, you couldn’t afford to let them live.”
He shrugged. “Collateral damage. Believe me, it’s nothing I planned or even wanted to do. Everything was going wrong. I was trying to keep from killing that bitch to avoid attracting attention. Even her damn dog was a problem. Once he heard me in the trees on the cliff and went crazy after me, I just barely got away. Then I had to worry about whether shooting him would cause more of a problem than just trying to avoid him and had to do even more research.” He shrugged. “But by then it was too late to matter. I knew she’d have to be taken out anyway. But I was cursing her, because her death made my job much more difficult.”
“Your job,” she repeated. “Raul Delgado. A man like that with a ten-million-dollar bounty on his head. He must be willing to pay several times that for a fail-safe path into a new life.”
“Not just for him. His family, his money, and his product. Quite a large undertaking,” he said smugly. “One only I could succeed in providing him.”
Kendra stared at him. The asshole was bragging. He was proud of himself. Disgusting, but not unusual for this brand of scumbag. He was getting off on letting her see what a big man he was.
Use it. Keep him talking. It might be the only way to keep Roberts and her alive until Lynch had a chance to find