Flashpoint by Suzanne Brockmann Read Free Book Online Page A

was at the time of the quake, or if his laptop is still there in the rubble. Even if it is, it could be destroyed or damaged.”
    “Which hospital?” Deck asked.
    Paoletti shook his head. “We don’t even know that.”
    Deck glanced at Jimmy, who sat forward to look more closely at the two pictures of Sayid. They were both the same photograph, but one had been cropped and enlarged so that the terrorist leader was in close-up. The original shot showed a long line of injured people in makeshift beds, really no more than pallets on the floor, in an ornately tiled room being used as a temporary hospital ward.
    “This is the lobby of the Hôpital Cantara,” Jimmy told Decker. “Near Kazabek’s City Center.” He glanced at Paoletti, resisting the urge to bat his eyelashes.
So do you love me yet?
    “You’re that certain?” the former SEAL CO asked.
    “I went there a few years back to get some stitches,” Jimmy told him.
    Paoletti lifted an eyebrow. “I thought you Agency types were like the SEALs and stitched yourselves up.”
    “In my large intestine,” Jimmy added. He often got dinged up out in the field, a result of playing hard and rough, but that time he’d been stabbed.
    I can’t believe you call getting stabbed “dinged up.”
Tess Bailey’s voice echoed in his head from that night, two months ago. He’d answered,
There’s a big difference between getting dinged and stabbed.
She hadn’t believed him, but it was true.
    The barely noticeable ding Jimmy had gotten on the night Tess had helped him keep Decker from being gunned down in the parking lot of the Gentlemen’s Den was very different from the injury that had brought him to the Cantara hospital.
    He’d been jumped. Three to one—odds he normally wouldn’t have blinked at, but one of ’em had a knife that Jimmy hadn’t seen until it was almost too late. He’d stopped the blade from going into his chest, instead catching it lower, in his gut.
    That had hurt. But it hadn’t killed him. It
had
warranted that trip to the hospital, though. Which was serendipitous, since he could now give a positive ID to the location of Sayid’s body.
    “I sat in that lobby for ten hours,” Jimmy told Paoletti. There had been that many people there who were more seriously wounded than he was. It was just another night in Kazbekistan. He tapped the picture. “This is L’Hôpital Cantara. No question in my mind.”
    Paoletti nodded. “I’m putting together a team,” he said, “to enter Kazbekistan as earthquake relief workers, and to find and extract Sayid’s laptop.”
    Decker nodded, too. “Who’s your team leader, sir? Starrett?”
    A Texan by the name of Sam Starrett, also formerly of Navy SEAL Team Sixteen, was a major player in Paoletti’s new company, as was Starrett’s wife, former FBI agent Alyssa Locke, whose beauty was as legendary as her sharpshooting skills. Jimmy had hoped to meet the two of them today.
    “Sam and Alyssa are both out of town,” Paoletti told them. Of course, “out of town” meant something a little different for his employees than it did for most people. “I was hoping you’d lead this team, Deck.”
    Whoa. This wasn’t just a job offer—this was an open door. Paoletti was offering Decker a new career.
    But Deck, being Deck, didn’t leap up and start doing cartwheels. He just nodded as if he were thinking about it, as if he might actually say no. He finally glanced at Jimmy before asking Paoletti, “What size team are you hoping to send over?”
    “I’d like to send a battalion, but I just don’t have the manpower,” Paoletti said. Rumor had it he was recruiting as fast as he could. But recruiting took time. Background checks could be a real bitch.
    Jimmy knew what his own background check had revealed. Nothing of substance. A name, a social security number, a date and city of birth. A two-word message:
Access denied.
    And just enough rumors to warrant that coolness in Tom Paoletti’s eyes.
    He was actually