Something tugged at him, but he couldn’t pinpoint what. From her position, her back to the enemy’s camera, she clearly meant to hide something from her captors watching. She stared up into the bug, her blinking strange, erratic. Was she drugged? He watched closer, searching, slowly realizing…
Holy crap, there was a pattern.
Jose held up a hand, snapping his fingers for attention. “Agent Smith, get a close-up on her face there. Do you see? She’s blinking.”
“Yeah, and your point, Sergeant?”
“She’s blinking Morse code.” The longer he looked, the more certain he became. “Like the Navy pilot captured during the Vietnam War. He blinked ‘torture’ in a televised interview.”
“And you think she’s doing that now.”
“Stella’s a code breaker. You know that from her file. But you wouldn’t know she talked about stuff like that all the time.”
They had talked about it. And that had to be why she’d hedged her bets in trying to get him here to watch the footage. A long shot? Maybe. But her situation called for extreme measures.
Jose sat up straighter. “And there. She’s tapping her fingers, but always away from the bad guy cameras.”
“Tap code? Like the language the Vietnam prisoners used to talk to each other from cell to cell?”
“Right. She’s trying to communicate, to give us as much information as possible.” Damn it. If they’d seen this earlier, the information would already be decoded. Now… “Who knows what else she may have uncovered?”
Mr. Smith scratched his bristly chin. “Weighing the risk of waiting against missing some info she may be sharing, we can’t afford to delay. You’ll go in and we’ll feed her messages to you as we unlock them,” he said with surety, but his forehead creased with concern. “Is your personal baggage with Agent Carson going to present a problem?”
How much did Smith know? The breakup last month had been bad. It had hurt like hell—still did. But it had been quiet as well as permanent. He’d come to grips with the fact he would spend his life without her.
But he could not, would not, accept a world without Stella Carson in it. “I’m as focused as I’ve ever been. I know my job and I’ve been tasked to get all the hostages out alive.”
“That’s what I needed to hear.” Smith turned from the image of Stella on the main screen. “Gentlemen, time to roll.”
Jose stole one last look at the only woman he’d ever loved, soaking in what could be his final glimpse of her alive. The door behind her opened again. She pressed her back to the wall. Fast. Her eyes alert.
A captor with hard muscles and harder eyes walked inside, tossing another unconscious student in a heap in the corner. He paused in front of Stella, one lip lifting in a sneer.
“Once we finish with the last of your friends, you are next.”
Jose’s fist closed around the coin. Bloody hell.
***
She was next.
Next to be tortured.
Next to be killed?
Time was running out for a Hail Mary rescue. That didn’t mean she intended to go down without kicking in some teeth on her way out of this world. Sure, the local government had asked for international help in dealing with the warlords, but that wouldn’t guarantee her presence would be actively acknowledged. Field operatives disappeared sometimes. It was a hazard of the job. Would these stone walls become her funeral crypt, entombing her here with other dead bodies and priceless artifacts?
The door closed, giving her a temporary reprieve to search the room, to prepare herself and hopefully launch more warnings. When she’d identified the nanotechnology surveillance equipment, she’d allowed herself to hope her messages would get through in time. And if not? She’d relayed as much information as possible. Some might not have noticed her blinking and tap codes, but she’d bargained on Jose remembering their conversations. She’d scrambled for every idea possible to leave clues that she needed him brought in to watch the surveillance feed.
Had he seen her?
Regret chewed her gut over the way she’d ended things, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he felt the same. Even if they weren’t meant to be together, she’d hurled horrible words at him and those could be the last she spoke to him. Was there a chance to tell him if he was on the other end of that video feed? Would he recall the good times between them, their exotic dates over to Queen Elizabeth National Park and up into Egypt? Heaven knew she would never forget the sound of his laugh. His easygoing approach to life, the way he cared for the people around him had drawn her to him from the start.
She pressed her hands to her eyes, dizzy from lack of sleep and minimal food. What if she was hallucinating about the whole mini spy drone? Charlotte’s Web up there could be wondering what the hell was going on. And damn, she really was crazy if she focused on anything other than doing everything possible to get out of here. It wasn’t just her life on the line.
She blinked a final Morse code in the direction of “Charlotte.” Details about the guards and discussions she’d overheard, everything possible to protect the rescue team coming in. Would it be enough to help an extraction team before her turn at the inquisition?
She’d taken her fair share of knocks from her three big brothers while playing basketball, football, and pretty much any other sport, because if she didn’t join them, she got left behind. She’d always punched right back. She’d held her own with her fists, fingernails, and whatever else she could lay her hands on. She would do the same here.>Screens flickered and shifted with feeds of everything from jungle perimeter to the rusted chain-link fence. Jose imprinted every detail in his brain. Nothing could be tossed aside as inconsequential.