Page 5 of Poison Evidence

The man cursed in Arabic.

Dread shot down his spine.Motherfucker. This wasn’t a group of locals with a beef over the Compact of Free Association between Palau and the US. This was bigger.

Why here, why now?

He catalogued the list of party guests. The biggest names in Palauan politics, but hardly players on the world scene.

Shit. The article about Ivy MacLeod and CAM had been published three days ago. Just enough time to send a small terrorist cell, but not enough to get weapons into the country. For that, they’d need a boat.

He’d bet one loaded with weapons was en route from Indonesia or the Philippines now.

Did these men want CAM for the same reason he did, or did they have a different agenda?

Police flooded the ballroom, and he stood and hauled the fake superhero to his feet, then shoved the man in the direction of a young officer.

He needed to get Ivy and set himself up as guard for her equipment. Odds were, CAM was no good without Ivy to operate it—the system probably had biometric security in addition to being too complex for a layman. His line of thought caused him to blanch.

Ivy.

A smart team of terrorists would send one group to disrupt the party while another hunted the woman. Terrorists who operated in foreign lands might be scum, but they were rarely stupid.

And he’d left Ivy alone in the garden.

“You scream, I cut you,” Spiderman said.

She swallowed the sound as if it were bile. Jack knew she was out here. He’d come, even without her scream for help.

She hoped.

The man shoved her forward, toward the swamp. Her feet sank in the muck and her heels caught on the viny root system that defined the mangrove tree. She fell forward, landing on her knees, her palms sinking deep into the murky silt.

“Clumsy whore!”

The flat of the machete blade struck her back, and she couldn’t hold back a yelp of pain.

He yanked at her hair, exposing her throat to the blade. “I said no screaming.”

She sucked in a breath and held back the sob that wanted to accompany the tears that escaped. She dug deep for anger to squelch the fear. “You hit me, asshole. It’s not my fault I screamed.”

He released her hair and lowered the machete. “You fell on purpose.”

What accent did the man have? Was that Arabic she heard in the vowels? Or Farsi?

Definitely Middle Eastern, whatever it was.

She sat back in the muck and worked the clasp of her heels. “I fell because I’m wearing three-inch heels in a fucking mangrove swamp.”

“Watch your language, infidel whore.”

She was no fool. She knew exactly why this man was here.Patrick. “Fuck you. Your version of Islam is bullshit. You insult the Prophet by your actions and are an enemy of Islam. You will burn in Jahannam for your sins.”

He slapped her, but she just smiled, taking the blow with pride. “Hurting me won’t help Patrick. They don’t need my testimony to convict him.”

“He can rot in prison. You are the one we want now. Your husband promised us technology. We paid him well. He didn’t deliver. So you will make good on his debt.”

And now everything made sense. The Avengers were here for CAM. Patrick must have told them about her ongoing project. He’dsoldher baby before it was even born. And they’d come for it in Palau, because there was no way they could steal it from the Washington Navy Yard in DC, where she now worked.

“Only I know how to operate CAM,” she said. “You need me alive.”