Tough Justice: Countdown, Part 7 by Tyler Anne Snell

Author:Tyler Anne Snell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

They’ll die if you die.

Those words were becoming Lara’s silent mantra.

She was trying to keep as much control of the situation as she could by stripping away her emotions and only showing a cool head while talking to the madman.

Halpert gave her another one of the grins she was starting to hate more than the bomb beneath her chair.

“You’d kill innocent people because of little ole me?” she asked, already knowing he would. “Should I be flattered?”

“No, you’d kill them,” he answered, ignoring her bit of sarcasm. He pointed at her chair. “That’s a pressure-plated bomb. If you so much as move the wrong way it’ll go off. Whether I want it to or not. And since I’ve given you the choice to sit there and talk to me or I’ll detonate the bomb in a very public place, if you decide to blow yourself up then it’ll be your fault when those people go up in flames, too.” He shrugged. “Then you will have died for nothing.”

Lara tried to keep her expression as neutral as possible. More than anything she wanted to wipe the smug look off his face.

Lara wished, for the umpteenth time, that there was a way to communicate with the team, but she’d been coming up blank for ideas on how to do anything that wouldn’t set off the bomb beneath her chair. All she had was the computer in front of her and she had no doubt that Halpert was monitoring every single part of it at all times. Even if she managed to get to the mouse and move it around without him seeing her through the webcam, she’d bet a year’s salary that he’d know the moment she clicked anything or made any keystroke.

“I have to remind you that the deal is that you sit still and talk,” Halpert said. Lara ground her teeth together. She wanted to be snarky—wanted to only answer him with heavy sarcasm—but was she willing to risk the lives of children?

No.

It was one thing to risk her life but another to risk innocent people.

“And what is it that you want to talk about?” Lara asked. Again, biting her tongue against saying something less than civilized was harder than she expected.

Halpert leaned forward in his chair and crossed his hands in front of him, just enough in frame that she could see.

“I want to talk about Bartholomew Grant,” he said, as if it was a topic as mundane as the weather. “Your father.”

“What about?” Lara shot back quickly. She might have decided to hold her sarcasm behind her tongue but her impatience wasn’t something she could easily tamp down.

“Tell me about him. Who was he as a person?”

Lara felt her eyebrow raise. “Why?”

“Because I’m trying to get to know you better, Agent Grant,” he answered simply. “You’ve spent your life obsessing over your mother’s murder, so it’s safe to say you loved her, but what about your dad? Tell me, in your own words, who he was.

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