Page 26 of Silent Threat
“I can drive back to Shit Hill,” Cole offered as they walked out to her car.
She glanced at his bad arm.
He saved her the trouble of having to ask. “I’m getting pretty good at driving with my left. We’re not on a racecourse. Small town, past midnight. The roads are empty.”
She nodded, handed him the keys, got in on the passenger side, and promptly fell asleep.
Who slept like that? At the drop of a hat?
Probably people with a clear conscience.
Although, he too had been like that while in the service. Soldiers slept when the opportunity presented itself. Once upon a time, he’d been able to nod off without a problem.
He drove her through town, stealing glances at her. She didn’t wake until he parked the car. She looked even softer and warmer, all sleep-mussed. She blinked at him and then looked around, processing that they were at Hope Hill. “Thanks.”
He opened his mouth to sayNo big deal, but from the corner of his eye he caught a dark shadow moving between buildings. He turned to catch more, but the shadow disappeared.
“What is it?” Annie yawned.
“Someone’s out there.”
She blinked out the window. “Maybe deer. It’s pretty late. They come out of the woods at night.”
“Could be.” But Cole didn’t think so. He knew a man’s shape when he saw it. “You don’t think it could be your ex?”
After a second of consideration, she shook her head. “Joey works the night shift at the gas station on Tuesdays. Even if he was here earlier, he’d be at work by now.”
Just another patient, then. Maybe even Trevor. Maybe the kid couldn’t sleep.
Cole could certainly relate.
He got out and tossed the keys to Annie, and then they headed to their rooms. They were in the same building: Annie on the first floor, Cole on the second.
He made sure she got to her door safely before he went up the stairs. But he didn’t go to bed.
At three o’clock, he eased out into the dark hallway. Everyone knew he was an insomniac. If he got caught, he had a ready-made cover.
He headed toward the main office.
When he’d told Annie his mother had been concerned about how he was handling his injuries, he hadn’t been lying. But his mother’s concern wasn’t the reason that Cole was at Shit Hill. He’d come because his former commanding officer had asked him to do some undercover work.
Two weeks ago, a brief, coded message had been texted from the rehab center to a known enemy agent in Yemen. According to his CO, a dozen more messages had been sent since, one nearly every day. Each contained military information at various levels of confidentiality—mostly troop movements and troop locations. Cole’s job was to find out who was sending the messages. He was tasked with quietly catching the end of a loose thread so that intelligence services could unravel the organization the traitor was feeding.
Thirty-six vets were currently being treated at the facility—all men. A coincidence, the others had told him. Sometimes they had female vets here too.
The staff numbered nineteen.
Step one was to narrow down the field of suspects. Cole had been working on that for the past two days.
The patients—some of them still active-duty—were the ones with military information, and Cole suspected the traitor had to be one of them. His CO was running detailed background checks, working the case from that end.
So far Cole had crossed off Trevor and Alejandro, then Dale, a grumbling marine. Trevor was too emotionally brittle to pull off being a spy. Alejandro and Dale had never been stationed in some of the regions the clandestine messages had mentioned.
Cole had talked to as many guys as he could. He’d had plenty of opportunity: in the cafeteria, in group therapy, in the gym. But he wasn’t going to overlook the staff either.
From the staff list, he’d crossed off Annie Murray. That left him with fifty-one more names on the combined list. He needed to cross off fifty names to find the traitor.
He stopped in front of the main door that led to the admin offices.
