White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel by Tracy Cooper-Posey Read Free Book Online

with you and your…companion.”
    “Officially?” Olivia asked bluntly,
although she already knew that this was not an official meeting. If
it was going to be official, then the Deputy Chief Of Staff or the
Communications Director would be heading this posse and the demand
to come with them would have been phrased as a very polite
request.
    But they had no political standing here.
Any meeting they could get would most likely be unofficial and
covert. Nick had warned her that it would be this way on the flight
up from Acapulco, but Olivia had already figured out how it would
go.
    An unofficial meeting with her father
was a good first step.
    Nick looked at her and raised his brows
the smallest amount. This request matched what he had
predicted.
    She nodded and looked at Jerry. “We need
to collect our luggage first,” she pointed out.
    “No need, ma’am,” Jerry said. “We’ve
already cleared your luggage. It’s waiting in the car.” He moved
back and to one side and waved toward the exit, while one of the
others in his team spoke into their wrist microphone.
    The carousel clanked and groaned as it
started up and there were scattered cheers from the passengers
waiting around it.
    Olivia sighed and moved in the direction
Jerry was indicating and Nick moved up alongside. “It’ll save on
cab fare,” he said philosophically, making her smile.
    But her thoughts were running ahead to
the meeting with her father and her smile faded quickly.
* * * * *
    Carmen had no idea what prompted her to
do it, but after breakfast she sat back on her sleeping bag and
pulled out the laptop once more. Garrett was nowhere to be seen and
she figured he was sleeping off the mescal. He had been most of the
way through the bottle and she had no doubt he had finished it
after she had left. That was a lot of alcohol, especially Vistarian
mescal. He wouldn’t be up until noon. That left her free and clear
for a few hours yet.
    Remembering the way Garrett had sneaked
up on her the last time she had used the laptop, this time she put
her back against the wall and angled herself so that she could see
both directions of approach just by looking up over the laptop.
    Then she went surfing. The first thing
she did was type Garrett’s full name into Google and hit
‘enter’.
    There were a lot of results for Garrett
Blackburn that led to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and the other
social networks. It was hard to imagine Garrett hanging out on any
of them. He just wasn’t that sort of human being.
    On the next page there were half a dozen
entries linking to Harvard Medical School. They were dated about
the right time Garrett would have completed his medical degree and
if he had gone straight into pre-med out of high school, then he
was slightly older than she had first thought. She clicked on one
of the links, but it was a simple listing of med students for that
year. She shut down the tab and went back to Google.
    On the third page, she came across an
entry that didn’t seem to be related to him at all. It was from the
English Times newspaper. “Bodies of Mother and Daughter
Found Outside Baghdad.”
    Her heart squeezed painfully, as she
moused down to the link and clicked on it.
    The news article was short, but she
didn’t need any more detail. There was enough in the three
paragraphs to tell the whole story. An American doctor working for
the WHO, called Garrett Edward Blackburn, had been pulled from his
home in the middle of the night by Iraqi soldiers, who believed he
was distributing black market drugs and food to locals. They took
his wife and daughter, too, and while attempting to make Garrett
talk, the soldiers had killed his family.
    In front of him.
    Garrett was turned loose three days
later and stumbled into the American Embassy, his feet and body raw
from the caning and clubbing he had suffered. That had been four
weeks before the bodies of his wife and daughter had been found
outside Baghdad.
    The article summarized the horror