Patriots Betrayed Read Online Free

loved ones in subdued tones, their eyes still seeing the horror of people badly wounded, or staring off into space in disbelief of what they had seen over the last hour.
    That he would be suspected of murder and the police would try to look into his past was a certainty. The bodies in and around his shop and his disappearance alone would put him in the center of their radar screen. He smiled at the image he had in his mind of detectives and federal agents coming to a brick wall and wondering where the hell he came from and what his real name was. They might even think he was involved in some way with the explosion — perhaps even suspect him of being a terrorist. He didn’t smile when thinking of that possibility. The CIA might get involved. No, they already were. If the explosion proved to be no accident, the company would be all over it, and they had the means to dig up his real past. They should know. He’d left fingerprints all over the shop, and his blood. Blood and hair meant DNA. The CIA had both his fingerprints and DNA on record. His driver license photo, also on the state’s computer records, would match the company’s photos of him. It didn’t matter whether the CIA sent the killers or if they didn’t; the company would be after him soon enough.
    The only question was how long it would take before the company got involved in a serious way. If it was the CIA that wanted him dead, they would feed information to the local police, and finger him as a murderer, an enemy of the state bent on terror. They would fabricate evidence. At most, he had a few hours to get out of town before they tightened the noose. Damn it. He had hoped the company didn’t see him as important enough to expend a lot of resources on. After all, he just wanted to resign from the company and live in peace. No. Important or not, he knew too much.
    The safest thing was for him to assume the company was behind it all, and local and state law enforcement, as well as the FBI and Homeland Security, would be fed a big steaming bowl of BS, complete with a story of how dangerous he was to the country and had to be stopped dead.
    After walking two miles, he turned and continued towards another section of town that had bars and tourist attractions that leaned to the seedy side, his destination a bar owned by a woman he’d befriended shortly after opening his scuba shop. A long-time diver herself, she’d walked in one day, bought a few items in preparation for an outing with friends in the Gulf and wound up staying three hours, just talking diving. She had a strange attraction to him, always lingering on the edge of trying to seduce him but never crossing some line only she saw. After several months, that all changed. She and he had spent many nights together. She was about seven years older than him but not half bad looking and was always fun to be with, upbeat and seldom down. She was an endless fountain of funny jokes.
    Pearl was from New Orleans. In her forties and looking thirty from any angle at a distance, mainly because of her thin build that she worked hard to maintain. “All women’s bodies are high maintenance,” she always said, “but most don’t get that needed care from their owners.” Up close, she didn’t look thirty; her face made men swear she was twenty-five. She had lost her first husband to divorce (he’d beaten her) and another to death by traffic accident. What puzzled Raylan was the fact she was still heartbroken, not over the death of her second husband, but the fact she was forced to leave her first one because he was so abusive. She once tried in vain to explain. “He was my first love and will always be in my heart for that reason. His anger issues weren’t his fault. He came back from the war that way.” Raylan figured the guy must not have beaten her too much. After all, she didn’t have a scar on her face, and her teeth were perfect. But then, maybe he limited his blows to her body. She did have a face no