Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,109

or the fact that the loquacious SEAL hadn’t told Shane about it before now. “How long were you …?”

“It was one very shitty week,” Magic said. “I was back on base before you were. Suliman slipped through our fingers, which was doubly disappointing. But I can tell you with absolute authority that this”—he tapped the imager—“is not her. Beeyotch is missing an eye. And I don’t care what kind of reconstructive surgery is being done these days in Paris, but even if, by some miracle, she went there and had her face rebuilt, it’s still not her. Unless they replaced both eyes with brown ones, made her ten years younger, a half a foot taller, and gave her a new set of teeth, too.”

Shane looked at this man whom he’d trusted, time and again, not just with his life but also the lives of their teammates.

“I suppose the teeth falls under possible,” Magic went on as he scratched his head. “But if they’re going to give her new ones, why make ’em crappy and crooked? And combined with the rest of that shit …?” He shook his head. “Nope.” He popped his P—a habit he’d picked up from years of working with Shane. “Not her.”

Shane shifted painfully, trying to reach for the bag that held Slinger’s equipment. “Let’s run the image through a non-gov-issue face-rec program.”

“Good idea, and I got it,” Magic said, pulling the pack closer. He dug through the nest of wires, looking for the cord that would connect the viewer to Slinger’s doctored mini-tab.

But it was then that Shane’s radio headset clicked on, and Scotty Linden’s rich baritone came over a scrambled channel. He was one of the two SEALs assigned to follow Slinger. “LT, Linden here. Over.”

“Gotcha, Scott,” Shane said, motioning for Magic to click on his radio headset, too, before he hooked the two pieces of equipment together. “What have you got? Over.”

“A six-man team,” Scotty reported. “Three are following Slinger, three took off in your direction. Dex is trailing them, I got the others. They’re all dressed like locals, but they move like Amurricans. If I had to lay money down, I’d bet CSO. Over.”

That didn’t make sense. If the U.S. already had a black op group from the elite and highly secretive Covert Security Organization here on the ground, they wouldn’t have bothered to send in a team of SEALs.

Unless …

“LT,” Magic said, his quiet voice not coming through the radio. He’d clicked off his microphone.

Shane looked over to find that Magic had put down the imager. Whatever he’d seen had made him somber.

“Hold on, Linden,” Shane said. “Over.” He shut off his lip mic, too, and asked Magic, “Who is she?”

“You’re gonna hate this, Shane,” Magic told him.

Shane nodded. Yep. He already hated it. “Just tell me.”

“Slinger’s face-rec software IDs her as Tomasin Montague. Her mother was local to this area, her father was French Canadian,” Magic reported.

“Why is that name familiar?” Shane asked.

“She’s the sole surviving witness,” Magic told him, “of the Karachi Massacre.”

And … there it was.

A year ago, a summit had been scheduled to be held in Karachi, Pakistan, where world leaders were going to discuss the ever-growing, ongoing terrorist threat in the Middle East. But before the talks officially began, a bomb went off, turning the meeting into a bloodbath. Several brutal dictators had been killed—but so had more than a half dozen democratically elected leaders, including the presidents of Germany and Spain.

The U.S. President and his corporate delegation, however, had not yet arrived.

It wasn’t long before ugly rumors surfaced, and soon the international media began making accusations that the corporate branch of the U.S. government had been behind the attack. The CEOs in question had spent the past year stridently insisting they were innocent. If only, they claimed, they could locate the young woman alleged to have seen the man who planted the bomb … She knew the truth, and she would and could clear their names.

But the woman—Tomasin Montague—had vanished.

But now she’d been found. And Shane and his men hadn’t been tasked with putting her and her family into protective custody and delivering her someplace where she’d safely be able to report the truth of what she’d witnessed.

Instead, they’d been told she was a deadly terrorist, and ordered to call in an air strike that would, essentially, wipe out this entire village.

But who had given them this order? Who had altered the face-rec software? Someone very high up the chain of command had to be involved.