Hell or High Water (Deep Six #1)(15)

Yeah, well, in a perfect world, she wouldn’t want to hear it either. But theirs was not a perfect world. Case in point: the missing chemical weapons. “Would it change your minds…er…mindholes about listening to my story if I told you there was half a million dollars waiting for you at the end of the tale?”

*

7:54 a.m.…

Leo didn’t realize he’d unconsciously let his gaze drift down the length of Olivia’s body, noting the soft flare of her hips, the tiny turn of her ankles, and the graceful length of her unpolished toes revealed by her plastic dime-store flip-flops until his eyes returned to her face and he was waylaid by her flinty, tough-as-nails expression.

“Were you paying any attention to what I just said?” she demanded, leaning against one of the kitchen’s old Formica countertops. They’d done as Bran suggested, retiring inside the house to stop Meat’s incessant barking and because Leo hoped more of his uncle’s hot, strong coffee would be enough to make even the most harebrained CIA scheme sound plausible. “Or were you too busy giving me dirty looks?”

Oh, he’d been giving her dirty looks, all right. But he suspected her definition of “dirty” and his definition of “dirty” were light-years apart. Although he reckoned it was better all around to let her go on believing his heated perusal of her body had been derisive rather than desirous.

“I heard you,” he assured her. “I heard you say you began suspectin’ there was a mole or group of moles inside the CIA after that catastrof*ck in Syria. I heard you say you’ve spent almost a year and a half tryin’ to draw them out. I heard you say that somethin’ suggested to you they might have contacts in Cuba.”

“Not might have contacts in Cuba. Do have contacts in Cuba,” she insisted. “As you well know, the photos taken of the prisoners from inside the detention center”—the ones that had been splashed across the news websites showing the prisoners shackled and chained, the ones that had outraged the international community—“were leaked to the press by a group of al-Qaeda extremists living and working in Cuba. But what you don’t know, what nobody knows is that those photos were proprietary to The Company. The only way those guys could’ve gotten their hands on the pictures is if someone inside the CIA gave them the digital files.”

“Okay, fine,” Leo relented. “So, since you and your supervisor were convinced the double agent had connections in Castro-ville, you all decided to cook up this crazy, idiotic plot to plant a too-good-to-be-true bit of Intel in a Company memo with the hopes that said double agent would take the bait.” He glanced around the kitchen at his friends. “Is it just me,” he asked the SEALs, “or does this reek of a case of the Mondays?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Olivia demanded, looking around the room.

“There’s a saying the Teams like to use,” Mason explained, which surprised Leo since Mason lived by the motto, “A quiet man is a thinking man.” It was usually a miracle if they could get two sentences out of the guy. “It goes a little something like: You tell me our intelligence community is f*ckin’ shit up, and I’ll tell you it’s Monday.” His quintessential South Boston accent made “our” sound more like “ah.”

“Lovely.” Olivia’s flattened expression broadcast quite clearly how much she enjoyed that little anecdote. “The point is…” she said, impatiently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Leo remembered the texture. Spun silk that was cool to the touch. “Even though I can’t take credit for the idea—it was Director Morales’s brainchild—I wholeheartedly approved of it. And it may’ve been crazy, but it certainly wasn’t idiotic.

“They did take the bait. They passed along the Intel to their assets just the way we hoped they would. And last night the cameras in the warehouse—which were, in fact, in perfect working order despite us alluding otherwise in the memo—recorded those very same assets breaking in.” When it became clear that no one had anything to say to Olivia’s little monologue, she jutted out her stubborn chin and finished with, “So, how’s that for a case of the Mondays, huh?”

Despite himself, Leo felt one corner of his mouth twitch. Even though she had an exterior that looked no more threatening than a vanilla cupcake, her inner core was made of pure, tempered steel.

“Question,” Uncle John said from one of the wooden, ladder-backed kitchen chairs. Other than the times when his fingers seemed as if they wanted to dance toward the closed zipper of that big, black duffel sitting in the middle of the table—talk about an elephant in the room—he was casually sipping his coffee and looking for all the world to be completely unruffled by the presence of a CIA agent talking about moles, terrorists, and missing chemical weapons. But, like always, Leo wasn’t sure if his uncle’s placid expression had more do to with the fact that the guy was imperturbable by nature, or the fact that he liked to partake fairly regularly of the crop of Mary Jane he had growing out behind the house.

For my glaucoma, his uncle insisted, though Leo was pretty sure the old man didn’t have glaucoma.

“Shoot,” Olivia said, downing the last of her chicory coffee. Leo couldn’t help but admire the smooth, delicate arch of her neck, and wondered what it would be like to kiss that spot just above—