“I’ve been digging,” he shares, talking even faster now, his words nearly tripping over each other. “And you know how everything wasn’t adding up at our last meeting with the ambassador?”
I sit forward a little. “Yeah.”
“It gets worse.”
I lift two fingers toward Gunnar as he passes the command center door. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Don’t know yet.” I motion toward the phone. “Shut the door.”
Gunnar closes it behind him, and I hit the speaker button on my phone.
“You’re on with Gunnar, too,” I tell Mattis.
“Perfect,” Mattis chirps. “Now I only have to explain this once.”
Gunnar drops into the chair across from me, brows pulling together. “Should I be concern?—”
“Yes,” Mattis interrupts.
Gunnar sighs. “That answer worries me more.”
I wave him off and lean back. “Start from the beginning, conspiracy boy.”
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist if the conspiracies keep turning out to be real.”
“Debatable.”
“No, listen. After the last meeting, I kept waiting for the ambassador or the DEA to send over the intel they promised us, right?”
“They’re government agencies,” Gunnar says dryly. “Slow incompetence is kind of their brand.”
“Yeah, except this wasn’t normal slow. It wasdeliberateslow.” I exchange a look with Gunnar, but Mattis continues before either of us can interrupt, “They stalled every request. Dodged every follow-up. What documents they did send looked scrubbed before they ever reached us.”
“That still sounds like government work,” I grumble.
Mattis ignores me. “And it wasn’t sitting right with me, because the numbers didn’t match. The seizures, the manifests, the financial trails—none of it aligned with what we were being told.”
He pauses.
“So, I started digging outside official channels.”
Gunnar groans quietly. “Jesus Christ.”
“What?” Mattis snaps. “That’s literally why you keep me around.”
“Fair point.”
I rub a hand over my beard. “What did you find?”
“The ambassador’s wife died ten years ago.”
“I know,” I reply. “Car accident.”
“That’s what they called it.”
Something in his tone sends a cold ripple down my spine.
“She was driving home from a charity gala in Bogotá. It was a brand-new, top-of-the-line armored SUV. Less than two months old.”
