said she was still there. She’d found a way to infiltrate, to make them think she’d switched sides, become one of them, but her ultimate goal was to get back to us, provide us with the kind of intel we’d never been privy to before.”
“With no contact? In three years?”
“When I say she was deeply embedded—”
Tate lifted her hand. “I change my mind. I don’t want to know this. You’re putting me directly in the line of fire by disclosing highly secure information and I don’t—”
“You don’t have a choice. You were right about that. And you need to know. Because she said she needed to be extracted. I asked her how, what exactly she needed.” He rolled his head, pinned her with his dark gaze. “Which is the other reason I came out here, to watch you, to try and put all the puzzle pieces together.”
“I don’t follow.”
He rolled his head again, pinning her with his gaze. She couldn’t look away.
“When I asked her what she needed for extraction, she said to get you. That you’d know.”
Chapter 6
She stared at him for a long moment, then said, “I thought she was dead. I still can’t believe otherwise, frankly. So how in the hell would I know what she needs, apparently alive, working deep undercover, three years later?”
Derek hated putting her through this, but he had no choice. They had no choice. “You were the only other one who was there. You know your captors—”
“How many pictures did I look through? Thousands. And I came up empty.”
“Maybe she thinks they will show up now, if you look again. I don’t know what she thinks, or thinks you know. Our transmission cut out then, and that was our last contact.”
Tate was doing a damn fine job of using anger as a shield against whatever terrors might be lurking from her past, but he didn’t miss the light shudder that went instinctively through her at his comment.
“I won’t look through your database again.”
“You have a computer?”
She arched a brow. “What? You’re going to hack in? Because if you sign in from any location, you must know it would be like waving a huge red flag.”
“I have alternate means.”
She tilted her head, and he thought she’d ask him to explain, but she didn’t. She’d only demanded he answer whatever questions she asked, and he planned to do just that. He also planned to honor her silent request to not provide information she could have requested, and didn’t. When he could. If he felt she had to know something in order to get them both through this, he’d tell her whatever he had to. She already hated him. If it meant keeping them both alive, what did it matter if he pissed her off a little more?
“Is that what you think CJ wants me to do? Waste hours on end looking through what amounts to the who’s who of terrorist mug shots?”
“It’s a place to start. Do you have any other suggestions?”
“Yeah, that we start anywhere but there.” She slumped back in her chair and rubbed a hand over her face.
“Tate—”
She held up a hand, stalling whatever comfort he might have tried to give her. Probably just as well. Nurturing didn’t come naturally to him. Unless it involved how to raise a good agent.
“I can mentally go back over it,” she said quietly. “Our time out there. Not just at the end, when we’d been found out and taken into custody, but before, when we were still undercover. I know CJ, or I did, better than anyone. I can try to figure out how she might have gotten back in with them, and how she might need to get out, but even with all the mental analysis I can apply, given my three-year-old intel, it would, at best, be a stab in the dark if you don’t have any additional information on where she might be, specifically, and with whom.” She looked at him expectantly.
“I don’t have anything else. We only had those two communiqués. She hasn’t been in contact since. And I wasn’t able to verify anything through what proper channels I felt I could access. My only lead was you.”
“Do you know, for certain, that the faction that held us is still in existence, in power? Are they still operating as they were? Three years, as their world turns, is an incredibly long time for them to remain intact.”
“We’ve of course kept them in our sights since extricating you. But we haven’t been assigned to anything on them since then. As you say, their world changes quickly, as does ours, and they ceased to be the dominant threat.”
“Did you look to see if, perhaps, there has been any other activity with them? Other countries working anything having to do with them? Our allies? Or enemies? Or possibly some other faction within our own government?”
He slowly shook his head. “I did look, yes, but no, there have been no operations that I’ve been able to uncover dealing with them or those who surround them. Definitely not with us.” And they both knew his clearance was the highest there was. What he didn’t have personal access to, he usually had an alternate source to tap into. However, this time he’d been limited in who he could reach out to. “I had to be careful how deeply I searched, and who I asked.”
“But you feel confident that you didn’t miss anything.”
“As confident as I can be.”
“And yet your entire department missed the fact that CJ has been alive for the past three years and apparently working with the same group we were sent to infiltrate.”
“You know as well as I do how easy it is to fall off the radar if that’s your goal.”
“Harder today than it used to be.”
“True. But intel is only as good as the direction we’re aimed in. We can’t gather information on what we’re not looking at.”
She dipped her chin, but her attentions seemed turned inward. He didn’t want to know what she was seeing in her mind’s eye. “So, if they’re no longer a threat, no longer the focus of any kind of real scrutiny, then are you saying they abandoned their plans to acquire plutonium? I know it’s been a couple of years, but surely they haven’t given up on their quest to gain global presence by becoming a nuclear power?”
“No, they haven’t. But the world changes, partnerships change, channels of communication become harder to maintain in the face of continued opposition. Hell, the opposition itself changes.”
“But they’re still trying to do exactly what they were trying to do when CJ and I were sent to infiltrate them? So why aren’t we looking at them? Why aren’t they dead center on our radar?”
“The chain of command changed, theirs and ours, and so did our focus. Some of their alliances crumbled, new ones were established, it’s not the same game now. From what I could learn, the division that held you shot and killed their leader in a double cross six months after you were extricated. It was chaos for a short time as a new power grid was established, but the man who
