You Only Love Twice (Masters and Mercenaries #8)(59)

Phoebe stopped her obviously prepared speech. “Who?”

Even Ten and Tag were now paying attention.

“The Caliph. That’s what he called himself. I’ve seen him, heard him. I’m about to go back to the Middle East. One of the things you had to do for the conference was send in the names of all security personnel. We’re required to go through checks, too. Kamdar had to submit our names in order to bring us as his security detail. What date would he have done that on?”

“Grace did it.” Tag was suddenly on his laptop, his hands working the keys in a staccato rhythm. After a few seconds he reached for one of Ten’s notes and groaned. “Shit. She did it the day before the phone calls. She submitted those names and that is what led to the phone calls. He couldn’t be careful anymore. It was too important.”

“He has to have taken or borrowed those phones. I can’t believe I’ve got four traitors.” Ten had gone a little pale.

“Why would this man care if you were at a conference?” Phoebe asked. “Obviously I understand that he wouldn’t want to be recognized, but why would he be there in the first place? Shouldn’t he be running his little army somewhere?”

“He was an educated man. Highly educated. In that part of the world, it means he’s wealthy. He spoke English with a British accent.” He wracked his brain for everything he could think of about the Caliph. It was hard because a lot of the time he’d spent with the man had been in a drug-induced haze. “He talked about Oxford.”

“So he’s very wealthy.” Ten sighed and restacked his papers. “And that means oil in the Middle East.”

“Shit. The last thing he wants is to be outed as a jihadist at this thing. This conference is for moderates only,” Tag explained. “One of the things they’re supposed to discuss is how to deal with resources falling into the hands of radicals and how to protect their companies from it happening. Jesse, I think you’re on to something.”

He shrugged. “It was really Li’s idea. He thought it was about something I knew.”

“Dude, take a compliment. You sound like a girl who doesn’t want to be told she’s pretty more than a thousand times. You were smart. Not going to say it again.” Tag’s words came out of his mouth with the efficiency of a machine gun.

“I didn’t know you said it the first time,” Jesse muttered under his breath. Somehow, in telling him he was smart, Jesse still managed to feel dumb. But Tag was right. He was on to something. And he had another theory. “What if I wasn’t the Caliph’s first? Deke told me you have a couple of people on your team who were captives at one time or another. Who was gone the longest?”

Ten opened his laptop. “Ace and Deke were both gone for a couple of months, Ace slightly longer. Boomer was held for a week before he managed to escape. He made a sling shot, if you can believe it. Fucker took down three men with rocks, escaped, and then almost got his ass caught again because he got lost in the center of Kabul. Some friendlies took him in and hid him until his unit managed to pick him up. I don’t think this is Boomer.”

“No,” Jesse agreed. Boomer was too open, but the other two were candidates. “It makes sense if we run with the idea that the Caliph doesn’t want me to potentially identify him, it would be his man who would make a move to take me out. What if I was a failed experiment? That doesn’t mean others didn’t succeed.”

Ten ran a hand through his hair and his jaw tightened. “I can’t believe it.”

Jesse shouldn’t have expected different. He wasn’t intelligence. He was just a dude with a gun and protective instincts. “All right. What do you think?”

Ten glared his way. “I think you’re right and I don’t want to believe it. Are you always so literal?” He slammed the top of his laptop into place. “I’m sorry. I’m struggling with the fact that I have a traitor in my midst and I haven’t seen it. He could have hurt my men. I take them seriously. That team is my responsibility and I f*cked up because I’m missing something. I didn’t see something.”

“You see the mask he wants you to see.” A chill went through Jesse’s system. How did he make them understand? “I know what he was trying to do with me. He was trying to break me down. To utterly strip me of everything that made me Jesse Murdoch. He would tell me that what I thought was me was really just a mask. The real me was underneath and must be hidden to everyone but my brothers. He was our father, the one who made us see the truth.”

“Who were your brothers?” Tag asked, his voice deep.

“I don’t know. I didn’t meet them. He promised me a family if I just gave over to him. If I could drop the false persona forced on me by the superficial Western devils, I could find my real family. It all sounded more reasonable when there was heroin in my system. Now it sounds like a load of bullshit, but with the heroin it really does make sense.”

“Don’t joke about it,” Phoebe said, sounding emotional for the first time.

“Why not? When you think about it, it’s kind of funny.” They’d tried to train him like a dog. Called him a dog.

“Gallows humor,” Tag said with a faint smile. “Chicks don’t understand it. I could have told the f*cker your skull’s too thick to shove that shit through. He knew how to get to you, though. He knew what buttons to push.”