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Yes, she blinked. Agent Brown.
“Agent Brown. We know. We’ve got him. You got him, wounded but not dead. You kept him alive for interrogation.” A siren wailed in the distance. “You did great, Stella. Help’s coming.”
She squeezed his arm again. Love. You.
“Love you too.” And he meant it, with every cell in his body that screamed for her to hold on. Not to give up.
Come hell or high water, if she lived, he would do anything to make sure he didn’t lose her again. He’d thought he was protecting her by staying away, but she was right. He’d only been shielding his heart from the possibility of losing another family. Yes, he carried a genetic flaw and he couldn’t forget that, but he’d made different choices for his life than his sister and mother. He sure as hell refused to be like his dad, enabling, avoiding.
Jose monitored her thready heartbeat and willed her to stay with him. He and Stella deserved a life together.
Without her, he had no future. “God, Stella, you can’t die, damn it. I want to spend my life with you.”
But he’d waited a second too long to tell her. Her eyes stayed closed, no more blinking messages.
She’d passed out cold.
***
Pain hovered just below the surface under a blanket of drugs.
Part of Stella wanted to stay under the numbing fog, and another part of her insisted she needed to wake up, even if that meant facing the agony of… gunshot wounds.
The hellish scenario flashed through her mind in fragments. Brown’s betrayal. Shooting him. Him shooting her.
Jose’s shout of horror piercing her headset.
Her memory filled with the sight of him leaning over her, treating her, pleading with her to hang on. The fear in his eyes had let her know just how bad her injuries were. By that time, she’d been floating in a cottony cloud of shock.
Was she alive now? Or hovering in a limbo state?
She drew in air and could swear she was actually breathing, except there was no antiseptic scent of a hospital. Her body felt so heavy, anchored by the crisp weight of a thin blanket.
A sheet? She forced her hand to grip the sheet, then move to her face where tubes pumped oxygen to her nose. No wonder she hadn’t detected the standard hospital smell.
At least she was alive. Knowing that, she fought through the hazy pain, fought her way back so she could see Jose and tell him how much she loved him. She wasn’t missing out on that chance again.
Her eyes opened and a chair screeched back against the floor. She turned her head on the pillow and found… her mother.>Smith came on the line, barking out orders shifting his security around. Stella angled sideways through the crowd, arching up on her toes for a better view. Damn it, she needed a clearer vantage point. Period.
No one questioned how Brown could remember faces from thousands in a registry of suspicious persons. The man had a photographic memory and a careful attention to detail. And the timing lined up for some kind of move to be made. The vice president’s wife was giving her statement about women’s rights in the region. Gifts were being exchanged, including a doll passed from a local official’s daughter. Beads on the doll’s dress gleamed in the morning sun.
Stella grabbed a light pole and stepped up onto the ridged edge, searching the crowd—until, yes, there were two men walking side by side, both wearing hats that matched agent Brown’s description. But where was he? She searched for his dark suit in the splash of color, careful not to linger on the PJs still creating a wall of strength in front of the dais. She found Smith an instant later, just past the stage.
Jones would have been easy to find with his outback hat, but he was at the airport taking Ajaya into protective custody so he could be moved to the States. So why wasn’t there a dark suit on the west side of the park? Only military uniforms converging for protection as ordered.
Hanging onto the lamppost, she angled around, looking off to the east, which didn’t make sense. Mr. Brown was in the back, watching the west. Except he wasn’t. She saw his dark suit and short ginger hair, spiky on top. Okay, so he wasn’t in his assigned position and he’d called in a report that shifted the bulk of security to the other side of the park. Could be explained away by something as simple as him finding a better vantage point as she had.
No big deal. She was just looking for trouble because of hints of a mole. And there were always rumors and fears of a leak in intelligence.
She glanced back at the rear entrance to see who’d taken Brown’s place…
No one. She slid off the lamppost and back to the ground. Her feet carried her toward the east side of the park, where she’d seen Mr. Brown on the edges of the party.
Brown didn’t make mistakes. He was Mr. Logical, like her. Except right now she wasn’t thinking logically. She was thinking that her every instinct screamed something was wrong about Mr. Brown. That he was the kind who could have cracked codes to get his hands on the list of agents. That he was the kind who would have the aptitude to encrypt the information.
Him and hundreds of other people.
Except he was here and she had questions with very little time to waste waiting for answers. She pushed through the crush of bodies, applause and cheers reverberating over something in the speech. Damn it, she needed to move faster. If she voiced her suspicions over the headset to Mr. Smith, she could divert security in the wrong direction—and Mr. Brown would hear her.
