Page 41 of I'll Be There
“Justin,” she added.
“I knew who...but I didn’t know that we—”
“Your smile—it’s his. And he was always making sure I didn’t get left behind. And...when he held my hand, he rubbed it in just the same way.”
Conner looked down at their clasped hands, then let hers go and set it gently on the bed. “I didn’t get the thumb drive.”
She blew out a breath. “That’s not good. It’s all the evidence we had.”
“You didn’t back it up anywhere?”
“Sure, my computer. Which blew up two days ago.”
Right. “Any guesses on what it had on it?”
Behind him, he heard a shuffle of noise, and he looked up to see Jim Micah close in on them.
“Hey,” he said quietly and touched her foot. “You’re alive.”
She grinned then, warmth in her eyes. “Thanks for not leaving me.” She looked at Conner. “But please tell me you got him.”
He made a face. “Actually, he’s...he’s dead.”
Her eyes widened.
Conner held up his hand. “I didn’t kill him.” Directly. “We were chasing him and shot out his tires. His truck flipped, and he went through the windshield.”
Her gaze flickered to Micah, as if confirming Conner’s words. He nodded.
“Shoot. I would have liked to know who he was.”
“How did he find you—us?” Conner asked. “Did you call anyone?”
“Besides you? No. And after we talked, I turned the phone off. So there couldn’t be a GPS signal.”
Actually... “You didn’t throw it away?”
She sighed. “It’s the last piece I have of Justin. Silly, I know, but I still have his voicemail on it. The one he left the day he sent me away. I sometimes turned it on just to listen to it.”
“You...you still have a voicemail?”
“The phone is in my stuff, wherever that is.”
Micah was already rummaging through a clear plastic bag hanging on the end of her bed. He unearthed the flip phone. “It’s off.”
“It’s an old phone,” she said. “But turn it on—it might still have juice.”
He pressed the power button.
“Tell me about the day you left,” Conner said as the phone powered up. “Did he say anything about who might want to hurt him?”
She tried to adjust herself, moving up in the bed, but winced. “Can you move my pillow?”
Conner moved to adjust it, and that’s when she leaned close. “Your friend—is he FBI?”
He met her eyes, shook his head.
She glanced at Micah and nodded. “Okay. So...Justin was, you know, working undercover. I think his job was to alert the FBI or NSA or whoever he worked for, to possible terror attacks. One of them was a pipeline attack in Alaska. The FBI stopped that one. But then he alerted them to a bomb in Times Square, near a recruiting center. They did nothing—and the bomb went off. Thankfully, no one was injured, but Justin was furious. It wasn’t the first bombing that didn’t get stopped either—apparently both the British and Mexican consulates were bombed in the early days of Justin’s joining the Sons of Freedom. He started to suspect that maybe the SOF might be working for, instead of against, the government.”
