Maxwell plopped down on a chair near the window, letting out a respectable grunt. Close, if the need arose, but out of earshot.
Since Keener’s visit with the unit commander, Adam had been treated with civility, if not with respect. He was grateful for that, though he hated owing her or anyone anything as much as he hated being wrong and her being right.
He palmed the receiver, dropped the quarter into the pay phone’s slot, and then dialed, resenting his lack of options and praying that calling her wasn’t a lethal mistake.
A woman answered. “Captain Keener.”
Where was Janet Cray? He rolled his gaze to the wall, betting his fluff attorney didn’t care for answering the phone herself. Wait. Keener was a junior Staff JAG. She’d share a secretary, and answer herself when necessary.
“Hello?” She solicited a response, her tone soft and throaty. “This is Captain Keener.”
Adam swallowed hard, wishing her voice didn’t sound like music to his ears. Wishing it grated. He didn’t bother with courtesies, or with identifying himself. She’d know it was him. During her visit, the woman had absorbed everything about him like a sponge.
Don’t do this, Burke. She’s incompetent. In with Moxley. You’re being stupid. -The woman will get you killed.
Adam cleared his throat and shut his eyes, blocking out his thoughts. In a cold sweat, his hand clammy against the phone receiver, he pretended the tremor rattling through him had nothing to do with the thought that he was making a monumental mistake, pretended the knots in his gut were remnants of the beating, knowing damn well they were rooted in fear.
I’m all you’ve got … Staring at a No Smoking sign above the phone on the wall, he took the plunge. “Why does a junior captain get assigned to lead a team of four even more junior-grade operatives to jam communications in a war-readiness exercise when neither the team leader nor any member of the team is communications-trained and, at the time, there are no readiness exercises being conducted in the field?”
Chapter 4.
Burke.
Stunned to hear his voice, Tracy jerked. The phone bumped against her chin, and she rubbed at it, trying to grasp the question he tossed out to her.
Cold fingers of shock bolted up her spine. All of the men on his team had been junior operatives? None of them had been communications-trained? Why had they been assigned? And why had Burke been assigned to lead them?
The dial tone buzzed in her ear a solid minute before Tracy could slow her racing mind enough to hang up the phone. He had surprised her, first by calling-she’d considered the odds of that slim to none-and then by throwing out his intriguing question and hanging up without another word.
She’d have to be an idiot not to recognize the call for what it was: a direct challenge to prove her worth. In the past, she had walked away from similar challenges though if they were still alive, her parents and Matthew would find the notion impossible to believe. Yet she had no intention of walking away from this one.
Cradling the receiver, she gave the Simpson file one last look, closed it, and then retrieved her purse from her lower right desk drawer. The retired Major Simpson would just have to wait to test the strength of the regulations that demanded he forfeit part of his civil service salary because he was already receiving a military retirement pension. His was a valid common complaint of discrimination against regular commissioned officers who retired from active duty and then went back to work for the Department of Defense as civil servants. It had been challenged in the past without success and Tracy feared, it would be again in the future. She’d give it her best, but the battle would have to be put on hold a while longer. Adam Burke didn’t get into talkative moods oftenin fact, this was the first one since his arrest-and Tracy didn’t want him to clam up again before she learned anything from him.
She buried her hostility at what Adam Burke had done-her only hope of finding her legal hook and building a respectable defense-and left a note for Janet, who had gone to lunch with this week’s heartthrob.
Out in the parking lot, Tracy cursed the scalding heat pouring out of the Caprice and climbed in. Even with tissues stuffed under her hands, holding on to the steering wheel proved to be an exercise in discipline.
Half an hour from the time she received Burke’s call, she sat cloistered in the Lysol-scented, attorney/client conference room, suffering symptoms of claustrophobia and looking at a less swollen, if still shackle(!, Adam Burke.
He sat ramrod straight on the metal chair, his expression tense, his distrustful gaze hard and unbending. “Everything I say to you is confidential, correct?”
She nodded, determined that this time he would be the one tawng-and that she would not leave here doubting everything on God’s green earth because of what he said-especially herself.
“You will repeat it to no one?” he persisted. “Not under any circumstances?”
The hairs on her neck lifted. This wasn’t going to be some Sunday-school disclosure. His caution proved it, and her instincts hummed it. “Not without your express permission, no.”
He dropped his deep voice to an unmistakable warning. “I’ve learned the hard way not to trust others, Keener, and if I had any choice, I sure as hell wouldn’t risk trusting you. Not knowing you consider me guilty.”
She could challenge him to find someone who didn’t consider him guilty, and she would have, but there was a bite of accusation in his tone. He resented knowing she believed him guilty, and afraid any reply to what he had just said would shut down communications, she tilted her chin and chose a less confrontational tack. “In the five years I’ve been practicing law, I have never-not once breached attorney/client confidentiality.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” His gray eyes glittered. “Don’t disappoint me by starting now.”
She tossed a hank of unruly hair back over her shoulder and propped her elbow on the table, striking what she hoped would pass for a lazy pose. “Is that a threat?” It felt like a threat, and it had her uneasy. She resented that, though on some level, she understood it.
He didn’t answer.
She gave him a sigh she meant for him to hear, then sat back and folded her arms akimbo. “Look, you’ve obviously made the choice to trust me-at least, insofar as you must-so why don’t you just tell me what happened to cause your arrest?”
Adam couldn’t sit down. Just the idea of trusting Keener had every nerve in his body knotted. Looking at the rank on her slim shoulders, knowing his own was about to be stripped from him, only jerked those knots tighter. “Are there any loopholes we haven’t covered that would allow you to disclose what I’m about to tell you?”
She tilted back her head to meet his gaze, doing her best to bury her impatience. “Give doubt a rest, Burke. Just tell me the truth. I won’t reveal anything you say to anyone without your permission. You have my word.”
Give doubt a rest? Easy for her to say. Unconvinced, he knit his brows. “What’s your word worth?”
“To me?” She looked up at him from under her lashes. “Everything,” Adam did his damnedest to stare straight into her soul. Hell, yes, he was being cautious. This was his life he was putting on the line, and he meant for her to realize it.
She didn’t flinch or look away.
“Okay,” he said, her steadiness giving him the reassurance he wanted. “Okay.”
Settling back on her chair, she crossed her long legs at her ankles. He couldn’t not react; she was beautiful, and that tragic mystical air hovered around her like a cool mist on a hot night. Trying to ignore it, just as he’d. tried ignoring her subtle perfume and everything else attractive about her, he forced his mind back to the incident.
“Orders came down from Command for me to participate in a war-readiness exercise out in Area Thirteen. It was short notice-one day-but that isn’t uncommon when O’Dell-Colonel Hackett’s assistant, Major Gus O’Dell-spearheads raissions.”
Hating that bastard O’Dell for having involved him, Adam’s stomach flipped over and he swallowed down a fist of bitterness from his throat. “I was assigned to lead Alpha team-me and four junior operatives-in the exercise. Our mission was to cross enemy lines, jam Omega’s communications with their factions, and gather intel.”
Adam’s thoughts drifted to the day of the exercise and, low in his gut, anxiety coiled tight. “We hopped into a. truck and headed out to the field. At Thirteen’s drop-off point, O’Dell pulled me aside. There had been a change in orders, he said. He issued me chemical protective gear, a personal chemical alarm, and then ordered me to lead my men to Area Fourteen.”
Keener’s eyes registered shock and confusion. “Butbut that’s a bombing range.”
“Yes, it is,” Adam confirmed, his tone deadpan flat. “My reaction to the order was about the same as yours. I couldn’t figure out why the hell my team was being ordered to infiltrate a bombing range during an active war-readiness exercise, or why I needed chem-gear and they didn’t.”
“What did you decide?”
Tension lumped his muscles, and Adam rubbed at his neck. “Military information is disseminated on a ‘need to know’ basis. Everyone in uniform is aware of it. I figured I had no need to know.”
He walked toward the window and looked out. A cardinal sat on an oak limb, just outside the window. Beyond it, prisoners worked in the garden, weeding. “Intel operatives routinely face unorthodox situations, counselor. It seemed logical to be trained in how to protect yourself in a controlled readiness exercise rather than to be put in that position in the field and to have to figure it out then.”
“Sounds like valid judgment to me,” she said. “So far.
A concession, but Adam had a long way to go to convince her he was innocent. “Considering what’s happened since then, I wouldn’t do it again, but I followed orders. I led my team to Area Fourteen, and then I returned to Area Thirteen to gather intel.”
“Those too were O’Dell’s orders-you alone returning to Area Thirteen?”
“Those, too.” Adam’s voice went tight, and he fought the same sense of confusion he had fought then. Now, betrayal overrode it. “No one was there. No support teams, no Omega team enemy-no one.”
“No one?” Tracy straightened in her chair, her tone incredulous.
“No one.” Adam bent down to inch a finger between his left ankle and the shackle. The damn thing dug into his flesh, making a sore spot. There was only one reason the shackles had to be so tight. Sergeant Maxwell was a masochist. “I considered the absence of support and human resources significant. Something had gone wrong. So I radioed Home Base on a secure channel, reported it, and notified them that my team was in Area Fourteen.”
“Was the transmission acknowledged?”
” Yes, ” Adam said. “I received a “Roger, Alpha One’ response.”
Keener still hadn’t lifted her pen from the table to jot down any notes on the legal pad in front of her. Adam had mixed feelings about that. She did look thoughtful, though, chewing at the inside of her lip. But why didn’t she ask any more questions?
While not elated by her lack of curiosity, in a sense, he admired her restraint. The woman might be an incompetent attorney, but she was a good listener, giving him the opportunity to disclose everything he wanted to disclose before bombarding him with questions. He liked that. He didn’t want to like it, or anything else about her, but considering he had decided to trust her, finding some redeeming quality in her was a good thing.
He continued his disclosure. “A B-1 bomber made a pass over Area Fourteen and then circled back toward the base’s flight line. For a minute, I worried that the bomber hadn’t gotten the change of orders. That, not knowing there were personnel in Fourteen, the pilot would drop his load.”
“Drop his load?”
She didn’t have a clue. Not a clue. “His bomb, or load of bombs,” Adam explained. “Live ordnance.”
“Oh.” Understanding flickered through her eyes.
God help him, she didn’t even know what a load was and his life was in her hands? Adam grunted. He was in major trouble here. Major trouble.
“So the bomber flew by without dropping its ordnance.”
“No, it dropped the ordnance, but not near my men. About five minutes after the run-ten since my radio call-my chemical alarm triggered. I checked and it was working properly so I tried to follow procedure and call it in, but my radio had blitzed out. Nothing I tried worked to repair it.” He returned to the window, too agitated to sit. “I’ll admit I didn’t waste a lot of time on it. I couldn’t. I knew I had to get to my men or they’d be exposed to whatever chemical had triggered the alarm. The wind was blowing southeast, somewhere between ten and fifteen knots-right toward them.”
In his mind, Adam slipped back to that time. Back to running through the dense woodland, fighting prickly underbrush, fallen trees from last year’s Hurricane Ellie, the heat. God, the heat. It had to have been a hundred ten degrees inside that chemical gear. “Before I crossed over into Area Fourteen, I got sick. My vision blurred. I had difficulty breathing, and my chest went tight. I figured it was heat stroke, and I tried to keep going. I did keep going.”
“So you got to Area Fourteen?”
“Yes.” He rubbed at his neck with an impatient hand. “At least, I think it was Area Fourteen. I was so disoriented, I’m just not sure.”
Skepticism clouded Keener’s eyes.
He damned her for it. “I was disoriented, counselor.”
:“I see.” She arched a doubtful brow.
“No, I don’t believe you do.” Anger rippled his tone. “Not yet.” .
She shifted in her chair and swept back her tangled hair with an efficient snap of her wrist. “What made you think you were in Area Fourteen?”
This, Adam had hedged on deciding whether or not to tell her. Now, he knew he had been kidding himself, thinking he would have a choice. “I saw a metal canister on the ground.”
Tracy leaned forward against the table. “What kind of metal canister?”
“A bomb casing,” he explained, his impatience with her ignorance putting a hard edge on his voice. “I disregarded it as toxic because it didn’t have the mandatory chemical warning label.”
“What label is that-exactly?” she asked, still not lifting her pen.