Read Online Duplicity by Vicki Hinze - Free Book Online

not to tell her. Now, he knew he had been kidding himself, thinking he would have a choice. “I saw a metal canister on the ground.”
    Tracy leaned forward against the table. “What kind of metal canister?”
    “A bomb casing,” he explained, his impatience with her ignorance putting a hard edge on his voice. “I disregarded it as toxic because it didn’t have the mandatory chemical warning label.”
    “What label is that-exactly?” she asked, still not lifting her pen.
    Her blank legal pad mocked him. “Chemical canisters require a label. Either a yellow or a blue band around them. It’s a visual warning that they’re live ordnance, not training dummies.”
    Absorbing his every nuance, she worried her lower lip with her teeth. “So you disregarded this canister because it lacked the label.”
    “Right.” Adam stuffed a hand into his prison grays’ hip pocket and stared out the window. “I made it to my men.” A mountain of regret and cold rage tore loose inside him. He fisted his hand in his pocket to bury it. “They were all dead.”
    Tracy paused. A thousand questions burned in her brain, but she refrained from asking even one of them. Burke needed a few minutes to regain control of his emotions. A blind man would realize he had been reliving the events as he described them.
    He wouldn’t like her noticing the slight shake in his hand, or the tremble in his voice. But he would hate to realize that she’d seen beyond his anger at finding his men dead and into his pain. Could he be that good an actor? Could anyone be so utterly convincing at faking that kind of pain?
    As a survivor, she couldn’t imagine it. But this wasn’t about her, or her emotional response to loss. It was about Burke. And only God knew what he was and wasn’t capable of faking.
    She crossed her arms over her chest, not wanting to visualize the scene he had walked into out there. Not wanting to feel the shock she would have felt, the regret for the team, and for their families. For her, that would have been devastating. As devastating as learning Matthew had been legally drunk at the time of the accident, injuring her, killing himself, and Abby-a fact Paul, protecting her, hadn’t disclosed. She’d been torn apart by it, mortified, and nearly destroyed. And from the vibes radiating from Burke, this incident hadn’t been much easier on him.
    When he appeared calmer, she urged him on. “Then what happened?”
    “My men were dead, but they hadn’t been hit by the bomb. There wasn’t a mark on them. I figured whatever ‘killed them had to be biological or chemical, and I remembered the canister,” Adam said, clearly back in control. “I knew something way out of line had happened so I went back and buried the canister in a safe place.”
    A safe place? Obviously he didn’t trust her enough to disclose the location. “Did being near the canister set off the chemical alarm?”
    “Once it triggered, it stayed on. I reset it, but it kept triggering, so I can’t say if proximity to the canister had an effect.”
    A shiver trickled through Tracy’s chest. If what Burke said proved accurate, then the canister had to be live. What else would trigger the alarm? And if the canister was live and Burke had received a radio response, then Home Base had known the operatives were in Area Fourteen. If true, then Burke wasn’t to blame, but the operatives’ deaths had been deliberate. That made this incident no accident. It made it murder. But not murder by Burke.
    But that was impossible. She shuddered. Impossible!
    Burke’s husky voice snagged her attention. “I passed out,” he said from between his teeth, as if disgusted that he had succumbed to human weakness. “O’Dell-someone-must have laced my oxygen with something.”
    Convenient. And creative. “Why did you bury the canister?”
    “I considered it prudent.”
    Standing at the window, he angled a look back at her that betrayed him, speaking volumes more than his words.