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Autumn shook her head. “Telling you the truth. You should have seen the way he was looking at you earlier.”
All of a sudden, she was finding it hard to breathe. All the air seemed to be sucked out of her. She couldn’t gain any air. Her head started to spin. She needed to get out of the tent, away from Autumn, away from the ideas she was putting in her head. Without a word, she stepped out of the tent, but of course, her friend followed her.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded, but she wasn’t. They had too much on their plates to be worrying about things like that. Life outside of their case and its possible connections to this bombing were all that mattered.
“Tamilya?” Autumn asked.
Just then she saw Marcus throw back his head and laugh at something one of the HPD officers said. The sound of it, the way she wanted to capture it and replay it over and over, was almost too much. She couldn’t lose herself again. Not with Marcus. Not ever.
She turned away from him and drew in a deep breath.
“Are you okay?” Autumn asked. She glanced at her friend, her best friend for all intents and purposes, and smiled.
“Yeah, just need to keep focused. This is going to be one long day,” she said, then she walked back to the tent.
Nothing else mattered at the moment. Not Marcus or her feelings for him. Her career would always need to come first.
ChapterThirteen
Hours later, Tamilya grabbed a bottle of water as she made her way from the TFH station to meet up with TJ. At the moment, they were convinced that only two bombs had detonated and three more had been found. While the building was structurally sound, everyone, with the exception of EOD, were being kept out. In the meantime, they made calls, and talked about possible motives. It wasn’t that bad for the first hour. As the day had dragged on, however, it had gotten almost unbearable.
There hadn’t been a claim of responsibility in the five hours since the incident had taken place. Thankfully, no other explosions had happened on the island, which pointed to an isolated incident, but the quantity of explosives told them that it was more than just an incident. It appeared they had plans for a bigger hit and that’s what worried her. While everyone else thought it wasn’t part of a larger attack, Tamilya did. She couldn’t explain it, but something in her gut told her that whoever planned the attack wasn’t the guy in the pickup.
“Hey,” TJ said. “What’s up with TFH?”
“Nothing. Any other information on this Solokov guy?”
He shook his head. “Not really. Just the initial info you gave us.”
Alexander Solokov was a foot soldier for one of the Russian oligarchs. He’d been instrumental in the killing of a Chechen politician. Those were all the details they had on him. He hadn’t been heard from in three years. Addie had been the one who’d given her the background on him.
“I called my old boss,” she said.
“Addie March?”
Tamilya nodded, thinking back to the conversation. She hadn’t told Addie a great deal. Just the preliminaries. Tamilya knew she had to be careful how much she held back, because she had been picking her old boss’s brain. Still, she didn’t trust the woman. Addie wouldn’t leak to the press; plus, her reputation was stellar. After what happened last time, however, Tamilya wasn’t comfortable sharing.
“Yeah. She’s the one who gave me the background on Solokov. She also gave me a list of three women he knew were tight with Li, two Chinese and one American. I sent along their names to Charity.”
He glanced at her, his brows furrowing. “She had it right there in front of her to talk about?”
Tamilya shook her head. “No. She called me back after about an hour. She had a file on Solokov, but it was pathetic. Just that one little tidbit.”
TJ grunted and looked back at the activity around Blaisdell. “I still don’t get the reasoning behind a campaign here.”
“Strategic.” She knew that without a doubt.
“But is Hawaiithatstrategic? These days, to an extent they are. But what is the bigger picture?”
She chewed on her bottom lip trying to figure that out. It was what had been bothering her from the beginning. Yes, Hawaii was strategic in many ways. Pearl Harbor was a big port, of course.
“It is, in a lot of ways, just like in the days leading up to our involvement in WW II.”
“People don’t learn, do they? Countries just keep making the same mistakes.”
She knew what he was talking about. Attacking on US soil always garnered attention and a massive build up. The public didn’t believe in attacking first, but they did believe in protecting what they saw as theirs. This could start another war. Maybe that was the reason behind the attack.
