the incident, she was already familiar with all the army systems. It was mind-numbing drudgery. But she would get to travel with the unit. They were going to Pakistan for a month, and she’d been asked to set up a safe house close to the Afghan border and organize all their travel and meals.
“It’ll be different once we get out of here.”
He’d snuck up on her. She stood at attention. Unlike yesterday, when he’d been dressed in fatigues just like her, Luke was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt.
“Sir?”
“Call me Luke. I’m sure the guys gave you the lowdown. We keep the formalities around Colonel McBride, but inside the unit, there’s no rank.”
“Except for you.”
“Someone has to be in charge. But the guys are involved in all major decisions.”
“Except the one to hire me. Or use me as a spy.”
He pressed his mouth into a thin line but then his lips turned upward and he grinned broadly. “Parrino, you’re going to keep me in line, and I like it.”
Better watch this one. He was one of those guys who flirted without even thinking about it. Fabio. Except his transgressions hadn’t halted his career as they had hers.
“Are you going to fill me in?”
He motioned toward his office and closed the door behind them. After she was seated, he pushed a file across the desk. “The safe house the team was using blew up. Ethan walked right into it. The rest of the team was out on surveillance and he returned to check something out. Dimples and Rodgers came to the house when Ethan stopped responding and found it burnt to the ground. They pulled out Ethan’s charred body. Forensics identified him from DNA and dental records.”
“So why do you think he’s still alive?”
“I’ll get to that. First, I want you to consider how the safe house was compromised.”
“Surely someone has already looked into that.” There was no way the guys in the unit would have accepted that it was Ethan’s body otherwise.
“This unit doesn’t really exist. We’re technically paper pushers tasked with archiving old army records. The official story is that Ethan died in a training accident. So only the unit members have been studying the details, and we’ve found nothing. The guys only believed it after the DNA results came back. But the safe house could only have been compromised by someone on the inside. We suspect someone in the army set him up.”
She flipped through the file. There were pictures of the burnt house and Ethan’s body. It wasn’t recognizable. Reading through the operational details, it was obvious the unit had been set up. But how? The only people who knew of the operation were the unit members. Even Colonel Black Tag didn’t have all the details.
“So I just set up the safe house in Pakistan. I’m the only one who knows where we’re going, but I used army assets to find it. If someone on the inside knows we’re going there, it wouldn’t take them long to use the same resources I did and by process of elimination, identify our safe house.”
Before he opened his mouth, she held up her hand. “I need to find a new one, not using army assets.”
“Good, you’re a quick study. As hard as it is, don’t do things the army way.”
Easier said than done. The army way was all she knew.
“Okay, so someone on the inside knew you were going there. Possibly a member of the unit.” Even as she said the words, she couldn’t see any of those guys betraying them. They were a team. They’d been together for six months, and while they hadn’t fully accepted Luke as their commander, they believed in the unit. She’d seen that in the way they handled themselves during the exercise. Each member was top notch.
“I’d be surprised if it’s one of my guys, but I’m not eliminating that possibility. You weren’t a part of the unit when they lost Ethan, which is why you’re the only one I’m reading in on the next part.”
“Why you think your brother is still alive.”
He slid another folder toward her. It was the autopsy report. She scanned it, not knowing what he wanted her to find. The DNA test seemed pretty conclusive.
“Page 7, the skeletal scan.”
She flipped to that page, then looked at him questioningly.
“It shows his ribs are intact. He fractured his ribs when we were kids.”
So that was why he’d picked up on her broken bones.
“Maybe the coroner missed it.”
“He didn’t. I showed the original X-rays to another doctor. No broken ribs.”
“Maybe you’re mistaken about the break.”
He shook his head. “We were thirteen and spending the summer with a cousin overseas. Ethan got trampled by a sheep. When we stopped laughing, we figured out Ethan was in real pain and took him to the hospital. The fractures were obvious on the X-rays, even to me. He was in bed and I had to take care of him for the better part of the summer.”
She sat back in her chair. There had to be a more reasonable explanation.
“I’ve spent two months thinking about this and the only possibility is the dead body wasn’t Ethan.”
“The DNA tests.”
“Were based on matches in our database. Someone could have switched the records. Same with the dental scans.”
Realization dawned on her. “The broken ribs—you weren’t on post. You went to a private hospital so it wouldn’t be in the army records.”
He clicked his fingers and pointed them at her. “Even my father didn’t know about the broken ribs. I need to get to the bottom of what happened with Ethan. Call it the twin intuition thing, but I feel it in my bones—he’s not dead.”
Alessa’s sister, Julia, was three years younger than her but while they were growing up, Alessa could always sense when Julia was in danger. She couldn’t even imagine what it was like to have an identical twin. If Luke believed Ethan was alive, then chances were good that he was.
“How can I help?”
“Right now, learn your job. Rodgers has been doing logistics, so he’ll talk you through the mistakes you made on today’s assignment. Get friendly with the guys, be a member of the unit. If you hear something that seems suspicious, let me know.”
A cold dread seeped into her bones. That’s how it had started with Aidan. Personal favors that seemed innocuous, part of the job even. But the mistake she’d made with Aidan was that she’d let him get too close. Forgotten the fact that she was an enlisted soldier and he was a commissioned officer, which meant they couldn’t even be friends. She wouldn’t do that with Luke.
Luke stood and she followed suit, getting ready to salute him, the way she would any other superior officer, but he extended his hand and she automatically took it.
“We wear civilian clothes to shed the army way. No saluting. From now on, we’re colleagues, perhaps even friends.”
She looked into his ocean blue eyes. I can’t be friends with you. That would be dangerous. Her career couldn’t withstand one more rumor of an improper relationship with a superior officer.
THREE DAYS INTO the unit and Alessa didn’t know whether she’d made the best or worst decision of her army career. Now that she had to do things the un-army way, the logistics job was much harder than she’d expected. It was easy to click through some databases and fill out paperwork, but a whole other task to rely on general internet searches and online contacts to set up the