Marc wasn’t done yet. “If Jewel’s in this, will you be okay?”
It was a fair question. Gabe and Jewel had been a thing. They’d burned hot in their time together. Damned bad idea. Most times, mercs could indulge and go their separate ways, no hard feelings. Not him and Jewel. She’d ended them by leaving the Centurions in the worst way possible. Having her back in the game wasn’t welcome news.
In all fairness, Gabe should cede this mission to another fire team. Bias. Conflict of interest. All sorts of ways things could go wrong if his judgment was compromised. But he had a handle on this and a clear head when it came to Jewel. He was sure of it.
“For now, yeah.” Gabe paused, then added, “We’ll play it by ear for now and I’ll step back if things get complicated.”
“Roger that.” No questioning. They’d all learned to trust each other that way. And if there was any indication Gabe wasn’t acting in the best interest of the mission and the team, Marc would let him know. The team was tight. “Porter van Lumanee was admitted to the Centinela Hospital Medical Center on arrival at LAX with a serious case of food poisoning. He was unconscious on arrival and in critical condition under the care of a Doctor Becker. He’s been on intravenous fluids but hasn’t come to yet. Apparently it hit him in flight and there wasn’t a lot they could do for him until they landed.”
Marc was fast.
“Vic and I will head out to see if we can get access to him. If he wakes up.” Marc sounded dubious. “If you read between the lines, the prognosis isn’t good. Doctor mentions it’s the most serious case of straight up food poisoning he’s encountered. They’re looking for some sort of allergen or other slow-acting contributor to the issue.”
Gabe scowled. “If the guy had a peanut allergy, wouldn’t it hit right away?”
“Anaphylactic shock is the most dramatic, but according to Google, there’s slower ways for allergies to present themselves. If it hit on digestion, it could explain why it took longer to show up.” And Marc’s Google-fu was near Jedi level.
If it was food poisoning due to something he actually ate. None of his team specialized in poisoning and neither did Jewel—they all preferred more directs means of confronting a person—but they’d worked with others who had. Jewel knew those names as well as Gabe did. Easy to induce the food reaction, and it looked completely natural. Travelers suffered from food poisoning all the time.
Course, if it had been a natural reaction to something the guy ate, it was very interesting timing.
No way for his team to know for sure right now.
“All right. Keep me posted. We want to know what this guy has to do with things.”
“Roger that.” Ending the call, Gabe decided to address next steps.
He’d dropped Maylin off at the front of the embassy, waiting for her to enter safely. Not likely to be much danger for her there, with all of the surveillance on property. Plus Gabe assumed whoever was tracking her had their attention on her phone, back at Centurion Corporation outside Seattle. Especially with Marc simulating normal activity on the phone, logging into email and apps as well as running predictable web searches.
But his ex was particularly good at remembering faces and recognizing family resemblance. If she was in the middle of all this, the embassy didn’t seem so safe anymore.
Chapter Ten
“I haven’t technically left the embassy.” And Gabe wasn’t there to hear her mumbled defense anyway. Nope. A good thing too. Maylin stood just in front of the entranceway, still on the embassy grounds, with the late afternoon breeze clearing away some of the embarrassment and frustration she’d built up over the course of the afternoon.
Hours of wasted time.
Oh, it wasn’t the cool reception when she’d first entered that bothered her. She’d been an entrepreneur for too many years to be intimidated by the formalities and the initial insistence that she make an appointment with some unspecified official who likely would be out of office anyway. She could and did handle those obstacles. The consultant badge associating her with the Centurion Corporation private military organization helped get her past the more difficult barriers when she might not otherwise have been able to as a random visitor. Subject Matter Expert had a much more valid ring to it than Desperate Client Who Almost Became Road Pizza.