Page 14 of Stand Fast

Yum.

“The others will be here in another minute,” he added.

She nodded and put on a polite, professional smile, hoping he couldn’t tell the effect he had on her. While she wasn’t terribly experienced with men, she could tell Khan was interested.

He was subtle about it, though, respectful, and that made it twice as hard to ignore her own attraction to him. She was dying to know whether he was the same Zaid from the dating site. Online Zaid had been thirty-three, and this Zaid was around that age.

Not that she was going to pursue anything with him, because the whole idea was stupid. Getting involved with him would make her look completely unprofessional should anyone find out, not to mention that a potential relationship with him was an automatic dead end because she was based out of Kabul for the foreseeable future and he was only here for another three months.

“You been making any headway with finding your young informant?” he asked, folding his tall body into a chair on the opposite side of the table. The man had an air of authority and a natural magnetism that were impossible to ignore. Calm, self-assured, and she was pretty sure those hazel eyes missed nothing when he looked at her.

It made her feel naked, especially when they were alone like this, catching her off guard and rattling her a little. “Not yet.” She set out the last of the folders and straightened, pulling her professional armor around her like a shield. “But we’re following up a few leads.”

“You think he was lying to us?”

“There’s a good chance, yes.” She’d known that going in, of course, and would weigh his intel carefully.

Agent Hamilton, FAST Bravo’s team leader walked in, and gave her a friendly nod that she returned. “Sorry we had to push this back so late. Commander Taggart had Khan and me in another meeting.”

“No, don’t apologize. I’m glad you were both able to be here for this.”

Agent Khan was here to help with translation during the presentation. And they would all be spending more time together in future because of the ongoing investigation with their informant, Barakat, who had seemed to miraculously vanish after their meeting.

Because the little tosser was most likely playing both sides against the other.

Jaliya still didn’t know whether he’d fed them straight bullshit, or whether The Jackal had somehow been tipped off about the other night’s op. Either way, their high value target hadn’t been in the village when FAST Bravo and the NIU went in. It made her team —and by association,her—look inept. She wouldn’t stand for it.

Commander Taggart and the rest of the taskforce arrived, including members of the NIU and two military officers, Colonel Shah and General Nasar. Four more Afghan military officials took their seats next to the chief of special police in Kabul. With two members of her team beside her fielding questions and Zaid helping translate for the two Afghan officials who didn’t speak English, she felt more at ease delivering the information she had to share.

“By this point we’re all aware that recent operations to seize shipments and find The Jackal have been unsuccessful. The missing shipments we were assured were there, and the empty caches our teams have found are reason enough to suspect a problem within our intel network.”

The whole time she spoke, she was acutely aware of everyone’s eyes on her, but especially Taggart’s and Khan’s. Both secretly made her nervous, although for very different reasons. One seemed to scrutinize her capability as an intel specialist. The other made her feel intensely female. Desirable.

She cleared her throat and continued. “But based on recent information we have received, I’m comfortable in saying that we have a leak somewhere in our chain of informants. Or worse, within our own intelligence community. Whatever the case may be, we’re certain that The Jackal is behind it.” Her team was currently analyzing all the potential players involved, which more than doubled their workload.

With that she motioned for everyone to open their folders, and took them through all the intel she and her team had compiled, a page at a time. Efforts to find likely targets containing caches of drugs and weapons stemming from The Jackal were frustrated by teams coming up blank whenever they went out to search.

She was starting to wonder if the leak stemmed from someone in this very room.

As head of her division on the taskforce, it was her reputation at stake when the search teams came up empty in the field. She was the intelligence specialist assigned to FAST Bravo, and recent events had begun to make her look incompetent. That was totally unacceptable, and she would be damned if she’d let it continue.

No. When she found Barakat she would lean on him until he spilled everything in his devious little heart.

When she was finished with her presentation, Jaliya fielded a few questions from the taskforce representatives before giving her closing remarks. “Rest assured that my team and I are working around the clock to get to the bottom of this and find the source of the leak. I’ll personally update the heads of the departments when I have any pertinent intel to pass on.”

She and her team had already started combing through the movements of the taskforce personnel, just to make sure one of them wasn’t involved in the leak. As far as she and her team could discern, the FAST and NIU members were all innocent. After all, they were the ones sent out to perform the ops. Their leaders appeared clean as well, or they wouldn’t have been included in this meeting.

As soon as her team exposed the leak, they’d be one step closer to bringing The Jackal down once and for all.

“Any further questions?” she finished.

“You’ll let the agency know if you need any more resources or assets to assist with the investigation?” Taggart’s tone made it clear he wasn’t asking. Rather, he’d just given her a politely-phrased command to bring more people on board.

She wasn’t about to argue with him. They had more work than they could handle and her investigation had proven that Taggart was clean. “Of course.”

Relieved the meeting was over, she gathered her files and tucked them into her backpack. When she straightened, her stomach did a little flip to see Khan standing next to the door, waiting for her.

She arched an eyebrow at him. Usually men only singled her out if they were going to hit on her, and she was quick to put them in their place if they tried. She kept waiting for Khan to cross that line, but he hadn’t yet. It made her wary. What did he want from her?

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