Free Seducing the Accomplice by Jennifer Morey Page B

stayed with my friend. I wanted to see his sister again. I spent every day with her while I was there. When I returned home, we had a long-distance relationship for a while, and then I helped her come to the States. A year later we were married.”
    He married her.
    “Dharr didn’t know about us at first,” he said. “But somehow he learned she wasn’t in Istanbul anymore. That’s when he went to her brother and found out she was with me in the States.”
    He stopped.
    “What happened?”
    Calan leaned forward and turned off the television. “Three months after he discovered I married her, he found a way into the U.S. and killed her.”
    Sadie drew in a breath. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She really was. “That must have been terrible.”
    “That was more than seven years ago.”
    It had taken him that long to catch Dharr? “Have you been looking for him all that time?”
    “Yes, every spare moment I had. But he was good at hiding. Moving around. Like a regular Bin Laden. I was on assignment most of the time. Sometimes that put me where I needed to be to track him and other times it didn’t. I came close to killing him once when I tracked him to Yemen. I wasn’t on assignment then, but I caught him in the middle of intercepting another special forces team. They didn’t know he was there. It was a setup. I could tell the moment I saw him, hiding in a vehicle while his men swarmed a building where soldiers were waiting for rebels. The team was supposed to help the Yemen government, but someone betrayed them and told Dharr where they’d be. I tried to save them, but I was too late and I was only one man. I took down a few of Dharr’s men but not in time. Dharr got away.”
    “Why did Dharr want American soldiers dead? Was it just because they were American? Who would tell him the location of U.S. soldiers?”
    His hesitation and the way he averted his eyes revealed a lot. There was more.
    “Years after my wife died, I met a woman who worked intelligence for the CIA. She helped me uncover an arms deal a U.S. broker was arranging for Dharr. The broker arranged for a U.S. senator to bribe an executive he knew at an Albanian military export company to do business with Dharr. Kate must have been close to uncovering that because she was murdered shortly after I told her what I knew about Dharr. It gave her the lead she needed to expose the senator.”
    One that led to her death. Her heart ached for him. “He killed two women you were involved with?”
    His face became a mask of indifference.
    “Is that why the soldiers were killed? They knew about the arms dealing?”
    “Yes. One man on the team did.”
    One man had known something and all of them had been killed. A bonus package for a group of terrorists.
    Dharr had killed all those people. His wife, the soldiers and then a woman who’d tried to help him. It was overwhelming. She couldn’t imagine how difficult that must have been for him. And probably still was. “What happened with the senator? Did you know he and an arms broker were doing business with Dharr?”
    “No, I didn’t know. No one did, not in time anyway. Anyone who got too close to putting it together was killed. The senator didn’t murder anyone, but he alerted Dharr, which in my mind is the same as committing the crime right along with him.”
    Except not in his wife’s case. “Did you go to Kate because you knew she could help you?”
    “No. I met her because we knew the same people within the military. The senator was her stepfather.”
    Sadie gasped. What an awful thing. Quite a coincidence, too, but Sadie didn’t believe in coincidences. The senator was working with the terrorist Calan was after and neither he nor Kate had known. But their joining together had exposed the senator and led to Calan finding Dharr. Talk about divine intervention. Or just plain rotten luck. His probing had gotten another woman killed.
    “Was the senator caught?” she asked.
    “Yes, but he killed himself