Carol Ericson - Delta Force Defender

When the waitress dived back into the crowd, Cam drummed his fingers on the table. He needed to start at the beginning with Martha. She clearly liked to take things in order.

He took a deep breath and started again. “Can you tell me about those emails? Where they came from? What they said, exactly, or close to it?”

“I should report you.” She flicked her fingers at him. “What are you doing in DC? Why aren’t you on duty?”

Cam narrowed his eyes. She didn’t want to report him. Her voice had quavered, and she’d broken eye contact with him. If she’d turned those emails over so quickly, there shouldn’t be anything stopping her from turning him over—but she didn’t want to go there.

“I’m on leave. I’m not here on any official business, just my own.” He crumpled the cocktail napkin in his fist. “Look, I know Major Rex Denver, and I know he’s innocent of these charges.”

“He went AWOL.” She sniffed. “Running indicates guilt.”

“Not always.” He smoothed out the napkin and traced the creases with the tip of his finger. “Not if you think there’s a conspiracy against you and you’re going to be railroaded.”

“A conspiracy?” Her eyes widened and seemed to sparkle in the low light from the candle on the table.

“Here you go.” The waitress set down their drinks and spun away before Cam could tell her to close out the tab and that he didn’t need a mug.

He watched Martha over the bottle, as he tipped the beer down his throat. Maybe this night would be longer than he expected.

“We think someone is framing Denver, and it started with those emails.”

“We?”

“The Delta Force team that Major Denver commanded. We were all—” he put down the bottle harder than he’d planned “—dragged in for interrogation. Do you know what that’s like? You’re doing your job, doing the right thing, and bam . They’re lookin’ at you like you’re vermin.”

She nodded and took a big gulp from her wineglass. “I do know what that’s like. I turned over those emails and all of a sudden, I’m suspect. They’re checking out my communications, my files.”

Cam’s pulse ticked faster. That’s why Martha was none too anxious to report him. They’d grilled her, too.

“Exactly.” He touched the neck of his bottle to her glass and the pale liquid within shimmered and reflected in Martha’s eyes. Whiskey . Her eyes were the color of whiskey. And right now he was a little drunk just looking into them.

Cam cleared his throat and rubbed his chin. “I don’t trust them, any of them. All I know is Denver is not guilty of those crimes, and I’m gonna prove it.”

Martha took another sip of wine from her half-empty glass, her cheeks flushed like a rose stain on porcelain. “I’ll start at the beginning with the emails.”

“Did the CIA determine where they came from?” He scooted forward in his seat.

“I didn’t get all the details because why would they tell me anything? I’m just the one who discovered them and turned them over.” She cupped her glass in her two hands and rolled it between her palms. “They were looking at Dreadworm though, you know that hacking group?”

He nodded, not wanting to interrupt her flow. This stuff had been bothering her for a while, and he just became her receptacle—a very willing one.

“But I don’t know if they ever determined how my email inbox became the target, or at least they never told me. Dreadworm was just the messenger, anyway. The conduit for the message, if you will—and that message was that Major Rex Denver had been working with a terrorist group plotting against the United States.”

Cam slammed his fist on the table, the tips of his ears burning.

Martha held up her index finger. “But I noticed something strange about those emails.”

“Yeah, they were filled with lies.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but it didn’t seem as if the person who composed the emails was a native English speaker.”

Cam blinked his eyes and took another swig of beer. “Go on.”

“If it were a foreign entity who sent those messages, why? Why would they care to warn US Intelligence about an American serviceman?”

“Our allies would care.”

“Why wouldn’t our allies just use regular channels to communicate with our military or even the CIA? But an unfriendly entity might have every reason to plant those stories about Denver.”

“You’ve been thinking about this.”

“It’s more than just the emails.” Martha waved her hand at the passing waitress. “Another round, please.”

Cam cocked his head and took in Martha’s empty wineglass and flushed cheeks. She’d downed that pretty fast. Although even in low heels she stood taller than most men, she was as slim as a reed, and the booze seemed to have loosened her tongue and her attitude toward him. He’d take it.

“More than emails?” He wrapped both hands around his bottle.

She looked both ways in the crowded bar and hunched forward, wedging her chin in the palm of her hand. “I’m being followed.”

“The guy on the subway platform.”

“I don’t know.” She drew back from him...and her earlier pronouncement, and tucked a lock of silky hair behind her ear. “Nobody has ever made physical contact with me before. That push could’ve killed me.”

The fear in her whiskey eyes plunged a knife in his gut. “Maybe it was just a warning, maybe a coincidence after all.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“How do you know you’re being followed?”

“I can feel it, sense it.”

He rolled his shoulders and thanked the waitress as she brought them their drinks. Maybe Martha was just paranoid. She’d been dwelling on those emails, and he didn’t blame her. They’d started a firestorm.

“And then there’s the skull and crossbones.”

He coughed and his beer fizzed in his nose. “You mentioned that before. Someone put a skull and crossbones on the emails?”

“Not the original messages. Someone sent me an email, just this afternoon, with one of those animated gifs of a skull and crossbones—blinking eyes and chattering teeth.” She took a gulp from her new wineglass, and Cam placed his hand over her icy cold one.

“Why is someone sending you threats? You obviously took the intended and hoped-for action. You turned over the emails and got Denver in a heap of trouble. Why the harassment?”

“I—I do have an idea.”

“I’m all ears.” He curled his fingers around her hand in encouragement. Why would anyone threaten Martha Drake, a by-the-book CIA translator worker bee who’d reacted exactly as the sender thought she would?

“It might be because I copied all of the emails from my work computer to a flash drive, and now I have them at home.”

Chapter Three

Cam Sutton’s warm hand tightened around her fingers for a second. “Whoa. I bet the emailer wasn’t expecting you to do that. Why did you do that?”

How could she explain it? She’d never done anything against the rules in her life. “I don’t know exactly. There was something about those emails that didn’t sit right with me.”

“You said before that they might’ve been written by a foreigner.” Cam tapped his temple. “You’re a smart woman.”

“I think it was the sentence structure and the word choice. Too formal or... I don’t know what.” She squared her shoulders and slipped her hand from Cam’s. “When I first reported the emails, I tried to tell my supervisor about my suspicions, but he brushed me off.”

“I take it nobody at the CIA knows what you did with those emails?”

“N-no.” She pulled her bottom teeth between her lips and traced the stem of her wineglass. Farah didn’t count, did she?