Page 25 of Poison Evidence

“No. I’m just going to look over your shoulder as you do your job. You aren’t doing anything wrong.”

She tapped the screen, pointing to a key line from Mara’s email as she read the words aloud:“Right now, I’m hearing from the brass that they want you to stay and complete the project.”

Those words had sent a prickle up her spine and were part of the reason she could produce that distracting tear.

“Mara has been requesting funding for this mapping project for years with zero results. Then all of a sudden, four months ago, the Pentagon made it a big priority and said they wanted me to field-test CAM—in Palau—ASAP. I told them I was at least six months out from being able to field-test, but they insisted. I worked night and day to get CAM ready right up until I boarded my flight. Now the Pentagon wants me to stay, even after I was assaulted and threatened by terrorists associated with my ex? That doesn’t add up. Even if they don’t give a crap about my safety, they care about CAM. Why do you think my government wants me to stay?”

He shrugged.

“Whoare you working for?” she asked.

“I can’t answer that.”

A tiny bubble of hope popped. Of course, if he’d been working for the US government, he’d have told her in an attempt to gain her trust. But still.

“Thor had a Russian accent. Is he with you?”

“No. I told you that already. I had nothing to do with the men who attacked the party.”

“Forgive me for not believing you. You have a history of lying.”

He shrugged again. “Lying is in my job description.”

She cleared her throat. “My job description includes mapping wreckage from the Battle of Peleliu for Naval History and Heritage Command—but ultimately, my boss on this is the Pentagon. What are the odds the Pentagon funded this project in such a hurry because they’realsohoping I’ll locate something specific in the Rock Islands?”

He let out a reluctant sigh. “I’d say the odds are high. You see Ivy, you’re the perfect spy. Because you didn’t even know you were one.”

Chapter Nine

Mara Garrett stared at the computer screen. Ivy’s emails didn’t sound like Ivy. Everything about this was off. Of course, she’d been assaulted and had taken off in the middle of the night without seeing a doctor or talking to the police beyond a phone call. The trauma of it all was likely catching up to her.

But still, it had taken her hours to get in touch, and Mara found it hard to believe Ivy had that much trouble with the uplink. Ivy could make a toaster talk to a coffeemaker, networking them through the microwave. Hard to imagine anything less than a catastrophic crash could take her hours to fix, and when she did run into glitches, she was the type to go into detail over what the problem was, not realizing that Mara’s brain blanked out the moment the explanation got technical.

It just wasn’tIvy. Which meant there was something wrong.

She reread the last email for the third time. Formal to the point of being stiff. They’d passed that stage of their email communications when CAM had crashed and Ivy worked sixty-eight hours straight to fix it. Or ratherhim. Ivy had made it clear in her hilarious, ranty emails sent during the coding marathon that CAM was male in her mind. He was a bad, obnoxious, boastful boy who made all sorts of promises but failed to deliver. And then, when her bad boy started working again, even exceeding her expectations, he was all muscles and abs and bytes and bits.

Ivy on a rant was one of Mara’s new favorite things.

She’d wonder if the emails really came from Ivy, except the biometric coding would make it hard for anyone to pretend to be her, and there was just enough Ivy in the word choices.

She scrolled down the last message, and her eye landed on the attachment list. Ivy had sent a jpg file?

She opened the attachment and studied the photo. There went her doubts about the email coming from Ivy. Her brown eyes looked haunted, and a tear ran down one cheek. The photo wasn’t posed. It was a quick snapshot of Ivy with a man by her side, neither one of them looking at the camera. It was almost as if neither of them knew the computer camera was even activated. Yet clearly Ivy had known. She’d attached the photo.

Mara had never seen the man by Ivy’s side before. The photo backdrop was nothing but blue sky. She opened the photo’s metadata file, and it had been taken just minutes before and included the UTM location where CAM showed up as a red dot on the digital map.

Why had Ivy sent the photo? To prove she was the person at the keyboard?

That there was no mention of the photo could mean Ivy was under duress.

It was just after nine in the morning in Palau, but it was after eight p.m. in DC. An hour ago, Mara had sent Cressida and Trina home. It could be a long night waiting for Ivy to report in, and Mara’s husband had insisted on being the person to keep her company in her anxious vigil.

After all, as the US attorney general, Curt could get answers from the Pentagon as to why the Navy hadn’t demanded that Ivy be brought home. Nothing added up, but if anyone could get answers, it was Curt.

Sometimes it was incredibly convenient being married to the head of the Justice Department. She’d miss that aspect of his job when he stepped down in a few months, but she was eager to have more of his attention, eager to start their family.

But right now, she was damn grateful he was a cabinet member and even the highest brass at the Pentagon had no choice but to take his calls.

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