Free Secret Identity by Paula Graves Page A

look of surprise, she added, “I don’t watch a lot of news. I knew MacLear had folded, but I never heard exactly why.”
“Barton Reid sent a group of the SSU to kidnap the two-year-old son of a linguist named Abby Chandler.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “A linguist?”
“They wanted something her late husband had stolen from MacLear.”
When Rick flashed the light on her arm, she winced at the ragged, oozing sight. She should have checked before they settled down for the night—her arm had been aching a little then. She just hadn’t wanted to admit any weakness in front of Rick. “What time is it?”
“A little after 4:00 a.m.”
So the wound had been dirty for several hours now. “Better give it a good scrubbing,” she said grimly. “Infection’s had some time to set in.”
With a look of sympathy, Rick nodded and went to work on the wound with methodical thoroughness. He was trying to be gentle, Amanda could tell, but there was no painless way to scrub dirt and debris out of an open wound, especially one that had been allowed to fester all night.
He spoke while he worked, his voice soft but somehow bracing. “Abby—the linguist—didn’t know what her husband had taken or where to find it, so she went to her husband’s best friend, a fellow Marine named Luke Cooper.”
She looked up at the name. “Cooper?” she asked in a similarly hushed tone.
He nodded. “My cousin.”
“Ah.”
“Abby figured if anyone would know what her husband had taken, it would be Luke.”
“And did he know?”
“Not at first.” To her great relief, Rick stopped cleaning the wound and reached into the first-aid kit for the same tube of ointment she’d used to protect his earlier gunshot wound. His mind seemed to follow a similar path, for he smiled slightly as he started applying the ointment. “Look—matching wounds.”
“I take it, since MacLear went down in a blaze of infamy, that your cousin found what the linguist was looking for?”
“Yeah. And a lot more.” Rick put a piece of gauze bandaging over her bullet graze. “Found out her little boy was actually his son. It’s a long story, but one with a happy ending. He and Abby are married now.”
“And they put Barton Reid behind bars?” She’d had some dealings with Reid during her time in the CIA. Not good dealings—the man had been the worst kind of diplomat, one who thought his position in the State Department gave him a sort of droit du seigneur —not sexually, as far as she knew, but Reid had expected everyone else, fellow American and host-country citizen alike, to march to his tune. He’d been the kind of foreign-service agent who gave the rest of them a bad name, and she wasn’t sorry to hear that he’d been hoist with his own petard. “What did he do?”
“Profited from a drugs-for-arms deal down in Sanselmo.”
“And whatever Abby’s husband stole proved it?”
“Well, we thought so, at the time.” He sounded grim. “There were copies of emails, saved on a flash drive, that showed Reid had direct knowledge of the deals.”
“But?”
“But Reid claims the mails were sent fraudulently by one of his aides. A man who conveniently committed suicide a week before Reid came out with this claim.”
Amanda shook her head. “Surely nobody’s fooled by that.”
He shot her an odd look. “You haven’t heard any of this before? Thurlow Gap didn’t have a newspaper?”
“I didn’t take the paper,” she answered.
“It’s been all over the news for the past few months.”
“I told you, I don’t watch the news,” she replied, her tone louder than she had intended. She lowered her voice back to a whisper. “I was trying to leave all of that behind me.”
She could tell he wanted to ask more questions, but to her relief, he simply finished taping down her bandage and sat back on his heels. “It’ll be getting light out soon,” he said. “Maybe this would be a good time to see if our intruders have finally left.”
Amanda felt sluggish