Page 109 of Fatal Mistake
“Now walk straight ahead until you reach the office.”
She moved slowly, hoping, begging God to send Cal to her aid before Oren trapped her in a confined space. But all too soon, they reached the office holding a desk and three chairs. She stopped in the doorway to run her gaze over the walls displaying rainbow-colored tapestries, wooden flutes, drums, and exotic apparel like she’d seen in Bollywood movies.
He shoved her forward. “Sit.”
She settled into a wheeled chair, and the gun never left her head.
With his free hand, he opened a cardboard box on the table and withdrew a zip tie. “I only have one hand, so you’ll have to help me fasten your wrist to the chair.”
“And if I don’t?” She tried to put bravado into her tone.
“I detonate June’s bomb.” He chuckled.
His laughter held a hint of the boy she’d once played with. “What happened, Oren? To us, I mean. We were such good friends. I once thought nothing could ever come between us.”
“Until you discovered the one thing most boys wanted from you.”
She swiveled to look up at him, and the gun briefly left her head until he jabbed it back into place. “You think I was sleeping around in high school?”
“Tommy Simmons said you were.”
“Tommy Simmons? I would never have gone out with him. Besides, no one believed a word Tommy said.”
“But he shared the intimate details with me. Told me about the birthmark on your lower back.”
“That wasn’t a secret. Anyone who’d seen me in a swimming suit could have described that.”
“He was very convincing, all right.”
“And so you shunned me.”
“What else was I to do?”
“Gee.” She filled her tone with sarcasm. “I don’t know. Ask me about it.”
“I couldn’t talk to you about that. It’s forbidden in my religion.”
“Please don’t tell me that a lie Tommy Simmons told our freshman year is the reason all these poor women had to die.”
“They had to die because of their promiscuity. You, on the other hand—”
“I what? Have to die because Tommy lied to you?”
He glared at her, his anger burning through the air. “Help me with the zip tie, or I will detonate June’s bomb.”
She believed he meant it, so she took the hard plastic strip from his hand and laid it over her wrist. Together they slipped the tab into the hole, and he jerked it tight. He placed the gun on a shelf out of her reach and fastened her other wrist.
He stepped around her, smoothed his beard, and pressed his hand down the front of his tunic as if she’d ruffled him. He opened another box, and from it, he withdrew a terrifying white PVC contraption she’d come to know as a necklace bomb.
Chapter 30
Washington, D.C.
Cal paced through the room as his teammates worked their assignments. He’d been leaning over the device for an hour now, and the muscles in his neck had stiffened, so he’d taken a break. He paused by the pictures he’d snapped of June’s device and mounted on the wall next to the dummy x-rays.
He was missing something, but what?
He noticed again the small hole on the right side of her bomb. After seeing Keeler’s perfectionism in aligning the seam of the dummy device, Cal doubted the hole was made in error. Which meant it had a purpose.
