Backblast by Candace Irving (miss read books TXT) 📕

"Okay. Durrani was terrified he'd talk under torture, and he was willing to die to ensure he didn't. That's explains why he killed himself. But I'm not sure how knowing that helps us get the information we need." John brought his right hand up to her neck to rub the affected side for a few moments, then shifted his left arm to support her head better. Both helped more than her stretching had. "You mentioned three lines of investigation. If this is one of them, as near as I can tell, that bastard succeeded in killing it, along with himself."

That he had. But Durrani had left another clue on the table. Though this one was more than a bit humiliating. "Mata Hari."

John stilled, then blanched. He shook his head.

But she nodded. "Once I got him spun up, the doc lobbed a lot of crap in my face, including that name. He was also a bit…gleeful…as he accurately relayed why that name and the implication behind it were significant to me."

Whore.

Just over two weeks ago, when John had been on the psyche ward at Fort Campbell along with his remaining, chimeral-infected men, she'd assured him that she'd gotten over the tawdry insinuation he'd smeared her with that night in Hohenfels' CID parking lot. She'd lied.

She truly didn't care if the entire world spewed that word directly in her face.

But John? With him, even the implication managed to burn a hole through her confidence and her heart…every single time she thought about it.

She'd worked to mask the pain that had come with the memory when they'd been back at Campbell on that psych ward. But here, now? Even before she caught the hurt reflecting back at her from John, she knew she'd already failed.

She was too raw to even try.

His fingers came up to smooth a damp strand of hair from her cheek. By the time he'd tucked it behind her ear, his fingers were trembling more than hers. "Hon—"

"Don't. Please. I don't want to talk about that right now. I just…can't."

It didn't matter that her voice had quavered at the end. His nod wasn't all that steady either.

"Okay, we'll table it. But we will come back to this. Soon."

Not if she could help it.

The heaviness in their sighs merged, underscored by the subdued creaking of the ship, the combined humming of all that machinery.

Somehow, the Griffith had become white noise on steroids.

"John…you know what this means, don't you?"

This sigh was sharper and curt enough to cut through any noise. "This plot's been in the works a helluva lot longer than we thought."

"Yup."

And for some reason, John was at the center of it.

As near as she could tell, the only person left who had an inkling as to why was the spook—and Riyad's mouth was locked up even more tightly than those of their two recently deceased prisoners had been, combined.

"Did Durrani give a clue as to who might've overheard that conversation?"

She shook her head. At the time, she and John had assumed they were alone. After all, it had been three in the morning. But the CID lot had also had police vehicles and half a dozen massive Humvees slotted in that night, offering plenty of cover. And the section they'd been in had been dark. "I don't even know if he or she was Army." Hell, they ran Marines through the Joint Multination Readiness Center at Hohenfels, too. And there was the whole "multinational" aspect to consider.

Not to mention that during the week in question, the JMRC had been training roughly twenty-two hundred soldiers a day.

According to John's terse frown, all of the former had been tallied up by him, too. "Talk about a needle in a haystack."

And not only was the haystack camouflaged, so was the needle.

Fortunately, Durrani had slipped up more than once tonight. And this "culling clue" was a seriously revealing one.

"We have a leak."

John's frown deepened. "Who?"

"I don't know. But he or she knows me. Or, at least, my background. I'm guessing I attracted attention that night by extension when they saw me with you, because whoever was watching decided to go snooping. In the classified arena. A lot of the crap Durrani lobbed could only have come from my background investigation. How else would he have known about my mom's suicide—in front of the damned tree—and my dad's desire to walk on the dark side of the law while he was still employed by it?"

"Jesus." John's frown had mutated into a dangerously filthy scowl that put every one of Riyad's to shame. "Even I didn't know some of that until you told me."

She nodded. Even with his Special Forces connections, John hadn't known the truth about her bastard of a father until he'd spotted her dad's old police badge on her coffee table and run the number through the internet the following day during a down moment at Bagram. John hadn't known the tawdry details of her mother's death at all, until she'd told him. How could he? Her mom had reverted the two of them to her maiden name shortly before she'd checked out in front of that Christmas tree.

The tree that John also hadn't known about.

Nor should anyone else in the Army—or any other branch of the military. Because she'd never shared that particular tidbit. "That's not all. Because of Durrani's arrest and then my coma, I didn't have a chance to follow up on something. But the night before we arrested Durrani, I interrogated Captain McCord."

"I know."

"But what you don't know is that McCord threw those three orange hairs in my face during the interview." Hairs that had been found in that cave. Hairs that belonged to one of McCord's men. Except, the soldier who'd grown those hairs had died two weeks before those women had been massacred. Like her, McCord believed the presence of those hairs in the cave proved that he and his men had been set up. While that was true…she'd never mentioned those hairs