Hard to Trust (15 page)

"I was in Istanbul."

Her words thudded inside his chest. "When?" The simple word seemed stuck in his throat.

"About two and a half months ago." She scrunched her nose. "Why?"

He shook his head. To say the connection was tenuous stretched it. "Was Alex there with you?"

"I came in on the tail end of his assignment. He and Nick were leaving, I was coming in. We never saw each other except in passing at the airport."

"Why were they leaving?"

She shrugged and stared at him. "Sometimes those things happened. Sources run dry, and there's a need for new blood."

"But you didn't stay long?"

"Only a month or so, then I got pulled into the Kabul situation. There weren't many of us who spoke Farsi, and Alex had a great lead, so I agreed to take a little trip."

Jake muddled through the situation in his mind. It didn't make sense, but at the same time, it kind of did. "Anything happen in Istanbul?"

"Not really. I was barely starting to make contacts when I got pulled out to go to Kabul. That's when the trouble started, and my life turned into one giant
Die Hard
movie."

He chuckled despite the machinations going on inside his head. In his world, coincidences were never coincidences, but she hadn't mentioned a woman in all this, so maybe he was being paranoid. "That it has. Except I don't want to be the dumb sidekick, okay?"

She giggled. It was the first time she seemed to relax a bit. "It's agreed. We'll both be Bruce Willis. And Bruce always saves the day in the end, so I expect nothing less from either of us."

"How about your trainers when you were at The Farm? Anything remarkable about your training exercises, that kind of stuff? Did all three of you have the same trainers?"

"Of course we had the same trainers. That's how it worked." She seemed miffed, either because he asked the question or because she hadn't thought of it herself.

Maybe she was angry at his probing. Maybe she was annoyed. Maybe she'd try to kill him in his sleep if she was a double agent and thought he was onto her.

"Somehow the three of you are tied together in this. Maybe it's not from The Farm. Maybe you had the same informant working for you at some point. Maybe it had something to do with Istanbul that caught up with you somehow in Kabul. I know most times you flit in and out of assignments, never lasting more than a couple of years. Can you mull that over in your mind without biting my head off?"

She eased out a smile. "Ah, big bad tough guy is all of a sudden Mr. Sensitive."

"For the record, I'm a retrieval specialist. If somebody gets kidnapped, I'm your guy. The SEALs"—he flexed his fingers toward himself and rolled his eyes—"have nothing on me. They're kindergartners compared to my mad skills."

She laughed. "Okay, now you're getting a little too full of yourself."

"Impossible. I'm the man." He laughed. "Just don't tell my sister. It will get ugly between the two of us."

"Your older brother doesn't work for The Alliance?"

"Naw, he's gone Hollywood. He's a financial whiz and puts his talents into Wall Street as a hedge fund manager. I've got to say, he's made me a wealthy man."

"Did you mention helping your sister out a couple of months ago?"

"Yep—even if the FBI took the credit for it, since we're supposed to fly under the radar. We helped her take down a guy who was dealing in sex trafficking, so Max does dabble occasionally in what we were trained to do when family's involved. The difference is that with Petrovich, we were to kill others at his directives. He always insisted they were bad guys and deserved their fate. At first we acted on blind faith, but then we started to question how they got to be on his list. Then something happened on our last assignment. We, err…" Did he really want to go there? "Let's just say Max was nearly killed. That did it for all of us. We escaped to the US the next day."

Why he told her so much, he couldn't be sure. If it got her to trust him a little more, it would be worth it in the end. It was all about getting the job done, no matter the cost.

Tessa couldn't sleep. All the near misses over the last few days had come piling up on her, and she couldn't help but ponder some of the things Jake said. Were Alex, Nick, and she somehow connected in a way she didn't see? In a way that made them into targets? He seemed to be more than a little interested in the Istanbul assignment for some reason. She had to wonder if maybe they had come across the same people, which put them on some kind of weird trajectory together. The idea sounded far-fetched, but in her current world everything was within the realm of possibilities.

Jake was sound asleep on the other bed, so she opened up her laptop. Culling information had always been a specialty of hers, and she figured browsing through the account she kept in cyberspace would be a good use of her time. She decided to start with her notes from her Istanbul assignment to see if any pictures or names sounded familiar.

The grainy photo she'd taken of the market was unclear. A man and a woman met at one of the kiosks, but their physical characteristics were unrecognizable. Why she'd chosen to take that picture, she couldn't quite remember. Something must have pricked her senses at the time.

She was sent there to discover if rebels were plotting to destroy an American ship in the Gulf. But she'd only made brief contact with one of the informants and taken the bad photo and a host of notes, before she'd been pulled to go to Afghanistan. Wishing she had a magnifying glass, she once again looked over the photo with the same result.

Time to move on. Jake's discussion had gotten her thinking about the past. She drew in a deep breath and thought about Alex. He'd been there for her when no one else was. They'd grown up in similar circumstances. Both were only children and had been recruited right out of college. He wasn't close to his mom, but never really explained why. Feeling a sense of empathy around him had gone a long way in soothing her ailing heart. He'd always said they were kindred spirits. Somehow his simple phrase made her feel more normal.

In the end, he'd turned into her closest friend. So did she miss him? Hell yes. But he'd become more distant over the past year or so. It wasn't all that unusual for agents to crack under the strain. On more than one occasion, she'd encouraged him to take a breather from fieldwork. He didn't want to hear that.

Alex was driven. He seemed convinced the information they'd gain in Afghanistan would be the key to getting him the promotion he so desperately wanted. As soon as she'd joined camp she'd felt an edgy vibe around him. He'd kept it in check when they hit the town to set the meet date with their informant. It was only afterward that things began to unravel.

She replayed the film of his execution yet another time. Why had they taken him? They hadn't demanded a ransom. They had no real reason to take him.

That vague memory she had of Alex commanding the men not to kill her…was that real or a figment of her imagination? Why would they obey his orders? It would seem rebels would do whatever the hell they pleased. Thinking Alex had some control over them had to be a hallucination brought about by the blood loss. They executed him. She'd seen it with her own eyes on the video they'd put up on the Internet. It had been validated by the CIA.

Nothing made sense. Once again she went through the video frame by frame examining each for a speck of information. The location was unrecognizable with absolutely no clues as to where or why he'd been held. The men surrounding him were covered completely, giving her no ability to recognize them.

Next she pulled up the note she'd pieced together. She couldn't help but wonder what it meant. Why were they talking about him when he'd been dead for over six weeks? Of course there was always the possibility they were examining the video or the debriefing of the incident to learn any telling moments or to prevent it from happening again.

Backgammon back in play. Loose ends taken care of…soon. Weaknesses…

Knowing she wouldn't be able to figure this whole thing out now, she closed the laptop. It had been a hellacious couple of days, and a gal needed her beauty sleep. She couldn't help but smile at the memory of Alex saying that to her whenever they'd been up talking. The funny part about his comment was that he'd always been referring to himself rather than her. He'd always been much higher maintenance than she would ever be.

*  *  *

Once he heard the sound of even breathing, Jake slid out of bed and opened his laptop. She'd sent him the file of Alex's execution. At that point he'd probably seen the tape a few times, and each time he seemed to see something new and different. Not that it was anything big, but little things had a tendency to gnaw at him. It was almost as if the scene seemed practiced or rehearsed, but that could mean they'd done it many times before to different men under various circumstances.

First they placed a drugged-out-looking Alex in a chair and, without warning, shot him. The impact of the bullet sent the chair bounding to the floor. But it looked different to Jake. Not that he was an expert in that sort of thing, but the timing was off. The sound of the bullet didn't seem to match up with the trajectory of Alex's chair falling backwards. He wasn't the best with physics and mass and velocity, so it might be a simple matter of him not getting it.

Did that mean anything? Probably not. More than likely it was one of those physics lessons Jake had ignored leading to yet another chastisement from Petrovich about how much better a student Max was than he.

He ran through the video enough to know there wasn't anything remarkable about it. Instead, he concentrated on doing searches on both Alex Cromier and Nick Stamos. He went to a search engine within the database he utilized with The Alliance and scanned through the information.

Alex Cromier. The youngest of six children born to two career Army officers. He'd been to seven different schools before he graduated and attended New York University. Fluent in several languages, he graduated summa cum laude in three and a half years. He traveled in Europe and Asia for two years before joining the CIA the following September, the same time as Tessa. So far nothing remarkable, which kind of bothered Jake. It was almost as if the information was sanitized.

Nicholas Stamos. One of two children born to the marriage of two professors at Stanford University. Lived in California his entire life, attending Stanford. He joined the CIA the same time as Alex and Tessa, as she'd reported. Why was he living in a ramshackle apartment in New York? There was no mention of him leaving the CIA. Was he in New York on some kind of assignment? Or had he been addicted to drugs, like Tessa had heard?

What was Jake missing?

He tapped on the edge of the computer, hoping something profound might come to him. But he was lost even as he glanced over the notes on Tessa. Was there any chance Istanbul played into this whole thing somehow? He had to consider the off chance that Cleo was somehow involved as well.

Everything Tessa had said to him was validated in what he had in his file. He closed up his laptop as she stirred and sat up in bed. She looked over at him and yawned, then muttered, "Can't sleep?"

"One of the hazards of the business. I get an idea in the middle of the night and can't fall back asleep until whatever's nagging me is solved."

"You're still awake, so I guess that means you haven't figured out what was bothering you yet."

"Nope." He shook his head. "I watched the video on my laptop again and then accessed new info The Alliance dug up about Alex and Nick. They gave us very little information about you in the first place, and this stuff is equally unremarkable."

"I thought that information was classified." She straightened in bed and rested along the headboard.

"The good stuff is harder than hell to access."

She got up from the bed to stand over him, and looked over his shoulder. "This is bullshit." Her voice sounded shaky as she pointed at the screen. "Alex was an only child to a single mother. He didn't know his father, just like me."

He looked at her. "That's not what it says."

"Then it's pure fabrication. Alex would have no reason to lie to me about his family."

"The CIA is tricky. Maybe he was supposed to get close to you for some reason."

But why would Alex lie to her about his family? He'd have no reason to, unless she'd been set up from the very beginning. Why would they do that to a new recruit on a lark?

A germ of an idea began to filter through his brain. But would she even listen to his potential theory when she was steeped in denial about his info?

"No way. He was my friend." Her voice shook with emotion.

"Didn't you say Alex was a chameleon? That he was friends with everyone, everyone liked him, the life-of-the-party kind of guy, always had a story to get a laugh?" The possibility settled stronger inside him, even if he couldn't make sense of why right now.

Be a chameleon. Blend into your surroundings as much as possible. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend. Until you believe what you say yourself.

Petrovich's words trailed through his mind. But why would the CIA do something like that to one of their own? Was there a reason she was targeted? That was the million-dollar question he'd yet to figure out.

"What does it say about Nick in that bogus report of yours?"

"Has a younger sister, went to Stanford, where his parents worked as professors. Does that jibe with what you know?"

She blew out a breath. "Yep. But why would there be misinformation about Alex, then?" The vehemence in her reaction had diminished. Maybe she was considering the possibility.

"For whatever reason, it's what he wanted you to believe. Straight up, he lied to you. Did he mention anything about why he waited two years after college to join the CIA?"

"No, he went right from college, like me. Like Nick." Her voice got quieter.

"That's true for Nick, but not Alex. He graduated college in three years and then spent time visiting Europe and Asia."