The snapping, buzzing sound came again, followed by a muffled shriek, then silence.
“You have to stop him,” Mara pleaded, panic in her eyes.
Jessie was thinking the same thing. Except that her father was dead, and Ahmed and his friends had killed him and were now trying to kill her.
More snapping and buzzing, another muffled shriek, then silence. Jessie’s heart was thundering so hard she wondered if the others could hear it.
“He won’t...he won’t kill him?” Mara asked.
“I doubt it,” Hunt said. “Too messy. He won’t want trouble with the police.”
Mara made a sound in her throat.
Time dragged on. When the snapping, buzzing sound came again, Jessie started moving. Her legs were shaking as she crossed to the garage door. How far was she willing to go to get answers that might save people’s lives? It was the same moral dilemma people had faced since the beginning of time. She thought of her dad and the honorable man he had been, and reached for the knob just as it turned and the door swung open.
Bran looked at her pale face, reached out and caught her shoulder. “He’s fine. A little the worse for wear, but he’ll be okay. We need to call General Holloway, have him deal with the situation.” Holloway wanted the weapons found. He would know who to contact to deal with a terrorist threat.
Her heart was still throbbing. She thought of Holloway and the phone call she had received that morning. Something about it had nagged her all day. How many people had known Wayne Coffman was their only link to Edgar Weaver? Who knew that Weaver could be the key to finding a major player in the theft of the weapons? Holloway was one of very few.
And Holloway could easily have arranged for Mara to be invited to a party her father was attending.
She cast Bran an uneasy glance. “I don’t know...maybe we should call Agent Tripp at the CID.”
Bran’s gaze zeroed in on hers and locked in silent communication. “Maybe we’d better call them both.”
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.