Hell for Leather (Black Knights Inc. #6)(47)

“And your supervisor flew you here in the middle of the night—a CIA agent who has no jurisdiction on U.S. soil—just to find one missing old man?”

“Two missing old men,” Chelsea corrected. “Because unless I’m mistaken and you’ve got him tied up down in the basement, Charles Sander is also persona in absentia.”

“Oooh.” Ozzie placed his hand over his heart, stumbling back like he’d just been hit by one of Cupid’s arrows. “A woman who speaks Latin. Marry me, Agent Duvall. Marry me right this minute.”

“Shut up, Ozzie,” Dagan thundered when Chelsea turned to gift Ozzie with another beatific smile. “And before you go getting too flattered, Chels, you should know that he asks everything with breasts and ovaries to marry him.”

“Can I butt in here?” Delilah asked, and Zoelner blinked, having momentarily forgotten about the other people standing in the dingy little living room. “Why doesn’t the CIA have jurisdiction on U.S. soil?”

Dagan opened his mouth to answer, but Mac beat him to the punch. “The Central Intelligence Agency is chartered to work internationally.” The former Fed’s slow Texas drawl made that last word sound about a hundred miles long. “The FBI is the federal agency that deals with domestic issues.”

“Oh.” Delilah frowned. “So, then why is she here?”

“Exactly!” Dagan threw his hands in the air.

“Look, people,” Steady cut in. “I hate to be the one to mention it, but does it really matter why she’s here?”

“Considering the CIA just loves to stovepipe the rest of us?” Dagan replied. “Yeah, I’d say it matters.”

“I’m not stovepiping,” Chelsea insisted.

“Zoelner’s right. It matters if she’s stovepiping,” Ozzie said in an aside to Steady.

“Even if she is stovepiping, her arrival here might be—” Steady began, only to be interrupted by Chelsea yelling, “I’m not stovepiping!”

“What the heck is stovepiping?” Delilah asked, and all heads turned toward her. The room was so filled with tension at that point that Dagan felt like he was defusing a bomb. Defusing a bomb while being chased by a psycho killer and running through a minefield filled with hungry lions…

Yeah, that about covered it.

Mac, still managing composure despite the volatile atmosphere, supplied helpfully, “It’s when one agency doesn’t help the other because they’re stingy when it comes to their Intel.”

“I’m not stovepiping,” Chelsea repeated sullenly.

“I don’t believe you.” Dagan scowled down at her, narrowing his eyes when the slightest wash of pink tinged her cheeks. “Aha!” He pointed at her, but before he could say anything more, Steady stepped in again.

“Whether you believe her or not is inconsequential, hermano, because, the fact remains we were going to call for her help anyway, so—”

“You were?” Chelsea grinned at Dagan, one victorious brow raised.

“Just for access to the infrared on Eyes in the Sky,” he admitted irritably.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” She slung the black carryall around in front of her to dig out an iPad. Punching the button on the Bluetooth device hooked around her ear, she simultaneously sat on the arm of the couch and started issuing commands to whomever was on the other end of the line. “So, what do you need?” she asked as she powered up the iPad.

“We need heat scans of the entire town,” Ozzie told her. “We’re hoping to go door-to-door to ask if anyone has seen Charles or Theo, and that exercise would go much more quickly if we actually knew which houses were occupied.”

Had everyone lost their friggin’ minds? They were just going to ignore the ten-ton elephant—aptly named Chelsea’s Bizarre Appearance—that was tap dancing over there in the corner? Because why in the world would—

“Dagan?” When she used his given name, he realized two things. First, it made his skin prickle. And next, it was the second time she’d tried to get his attention.

“What?” he demanded, feeling as if his head should be spinning around atop his shoulders à la Linda Blair in The Exorcist. See…Ozzie wasn’t the only one quick with the horror movie references…

“I asked if there was a specific grid you’d like me to start with,” she said, frowning up at him. “My technician,” she pointed to her earpiece, “is telling me it’ll take about two minutes to reroute the satellite and begin uploading the scans.”

“Tell him to start with downtown and make his way back toward our current location,” he said, irked that she’d somehow managed to take over the situation without first coming clean about her mysterious arrival. Diversion and avoidance. Yeah, he’d learned that pretty little trick in spy school, too.

Chelsea relayed the information, simultaneously tapping on her iPad. Then she grinned up at him. “Has anyone ever told you when you get pissed, your voice gets all raspy? I can’t imagine how you handled that out in the field. It’s a tell that—”

“And has anyone ever told you that your observations are about as welcome as an itchy *,” he cut her off.

“Yeesh.” She suppressed a grin. “You’d be the first.”