The Doll Read Online Free

Walker leaned in closer.
    At their crowding, Jahan put his palms against the desk and rolled the chair backward. “Please,” he said.
    They both straightened, then took a step back. Jahan waved them on farther. “Go do what you do and let me do what I do.” When neither of them budged, he slid lower in the chair, stretched his legs, and tilted his head upward. “I’ve got all day.”
    Walker glanced at Bradford, and when he offered no reassurance, she took another step in retreat, headed for the hall, and paused in the door frame just long enough to lean back in. Said, “You’d better call me if there’s news, Jack—you leave me out of this and I swear I’ll find a way to make the rest of your life fucking miserable.”
    The click of the wall segment followed a half-minute later.
    Jahan muttered under his breath, his right hand making a talking motion, “As if she doesn’t trust me!” When, after a long silence, Bradford didn’t move, Jahan glared up at him.
    “I need to watch,” Bradford said.
    “No, you don’t. I know you think it’ll help you feel better, keeping busy, being up-to-the-second on what’s going on, and all that. But standing there breathing in my ear while I pull this apart is only going to give you anxiety—is going to give
me
anxiety. There are new notes on the board and you have a business to run.” Jahan motioned across the room toward the whiteboards. “Go that way.”
    Bradford sighed, shifted away from the computer and everything he hoped, and fought against hoping, to find.
    Hope
. The activity of the impotent. His was a world of action, of relying on his own wits and ability to create the luck that kept him alive, and yet here in a moment of weakness he was a mendicant
hoping
for alms.
    He turned away, a concession to a friendship with Jahan that went back far enough that privately they still called each other names earned during rougher and cruder times.
    Jahan’s career path had taken him from army intelligence into Bradford’s mercenary fold. At thirty-seven, he was a second-generation American, semi-attached to an extended family in Mumbai, and having spent the predominance of the last eight years working private security in the Middle East, he could now, at least on the surface, as easily pass for Pakistani, Saudi, Persian, or Syrian as he could Indian—sometimes Mexican or Colombian, depending on a person’s prejudice, and there always seemed to be plenty of prejudice to go around.
    Jahan had a snarky way of bringing bigotry to the fore, and as it wasn’t easy to argue with a smartass who had a penchant for mockery and an IQ of 152, his words often provoked blows. Dodging, mocking, he would laugh and taunt, claiming that jacking withintolerance was the best free entertainment around. It didn’t take long for the Capstone term of endearment to follow.
    B RADFORD FACED THE whiteboards and the diagram he’d put up this morning when the image of Munroe toppling off the motorcycle was still fresh and raw and hadn’t felt like two weeks of decay smothering his airway.
    He rubbed out his previous words and replaced them simply with
Michael
. Then, as if on autopilot, filled in the blanks with what little he knew: They, whoever “they” were, knew Michael was in the country, knew where to find her, knew she was a woman, knew who Logan was to her, and knew how to find him and that his place was wired. In the heaviness of the unanswerable, Bradford’s eyes wandered along the boards to Jahan’s latest updates on the team in Peshawar. The satellite phone bill on that job alone was going to bankrupt him.
    Seven of his core team were currently out on assignment—the two in Pakistan, plus four in Afghanistan and one in Sri Lanka. With the exception of himself, who as boss and owner got to cherry-pick for his own schedule, the overseas assignments were rotated with homebase operations and factored by time and expertise.
    Home was nice, but the big money was in the hazard