Page 11 of Hidden Ascent

“And I got the short straw? Good thing they didn’t come for me first.”

“I did the best I could.”

“How come you’re not dead? I mean, I’m glad, but how’d you get away?”

“They thought they’d killed me, but they missed.”

“They shot everyone else on your team but missed you? How could that be?”

“That’s the question you’re asking me right now? How’d they miss? I don’t know. All I know is I had the opportunity to kill them, and I did.”

“You were under a lot of stress, so we’ll overlook your mistake, but—”

“My mistake?”

“Yes.”

“I made a mistake making it out of there alive?”

“You are a highly skilled agent. You should have taken them into custody so we could question them. I can understand why you would let your emotions take over when you watched your whole team get killed, but you’ve been trained not to let emotions rule you. If we had them for questioning, we could have found out how they knew you were coming. Now, Ian’s dead, and we have no answers.”

“I had no choice but to kill them or be killed. Those were the only two options available to me. As soon as I escaped, I came here.”

“As soon as you escaped? Your operation took place over an hour ago. How long did it take you to get here, exactly?”

“Are you accusing me of something? Because if you are, you’d be better off to come out and say it. I got here as soon as I could and found my boss had been shot. Not only that, but Ian said he was a part of it. And now I’m supposed to listen to this garbage?”

“Whoa, hang on. Ian told you he was involved?”

“He said it came to him from above. He said he knew about the ambush, but he had no choice but to set us up.”

“How high above?”

“I don’t know. He died before I could question him further, okay? Then, whoever it was who killed him tried to kill me and make it look like murder-suicide.”

Baker ran his hand through his hair, then opened the passenger door of his car. “Get in. If this is true, we’ve gotta get you out of here. I know somewhere safe you can stay while I look into this.”

“You’re the only other person on the team for this operation. Your life could be in danger too.”

“They killed Ian because he knew who he was taking orders from. I’m not a part of this.”

“But you know about the Red Wolves. I think that was why we were killed.”

“I’ll be careful. But you need time to recover.”

“I should be out there helping you.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll bring you back in once I get an idea of the scope of this thing. Do you want to have that cut on your head looked at while we’re here?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Give me a second to call in a team, then we’ll go.”

Chapter4

It tookthem close to an hour to reach the dirt road where Baker said Homeland had a safehouse.

He stopped the car and reached his left hand across to turn on the dome light. Isla glanced down at his right hand resting in his lap.

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