“Okay. I’m listening.”
The look of relief in his eyes was immediate, as was his tight smile. Trevor really was one of the good guys.
Even though she was still furious with Jake for what he’d done, Olivia couldn’t help but be thankful he had a friend like Trevor watching his back.
Trevor filled his lungs before starting. “What went down between you and Jake is absolutely none of my business. I know that, but I was just hoping that maybe I could help you to understand why he did what he did.”
“I already know why.” Olivia tried not to sound too bitter. “He was protecting my brother.”
Trevor nodded in agreement. “Yes, he was. But most importantly, Jake kept his knowledge about your brother a secret to protect you.”
Jake and Mikey had both given her the same song and dance, but that didn’t make her feel any better. Olivia gave Jake everything she had to offer, and he’d lied to her about Mikey. She didn’t know how to get past that.
Shaking her head, Olivia said, “You don’t understand, Trevor. This wasn’t a little white lie that somebody tells someone they love like, ‘No, honey, those pants don’t make you look fat’.”
Her obvious sarcasm had the corner of Trevor’s mouth curving up slightly as he tried to contain his smile. Olivia wasn’t smiling.
“This was my brother, Trevor. I thought he was dead.” Her voice broke, but she kept on. “Jake knew how much pain that caused me, yet he still kept this from me for ten years. How do I even start to forgive something like that?”
She blinked quickly, determined not to cry. She’d shed enough tears over the past few months to last a lifetime.
All traces of his smile faded from his face, and Olivia got the feeling that whatever he was about to say wasn’t going to be pleasant.
“One of the last ops I went on with Delta ended very badly.”
Olivia wondered where he was going with his little trip down memory lane, but from his pained expression, she thought it best to just let the man talk.
“It was a joint operation between the CIA and the military. There was an agent assigned to our team. A woman named Lisa. She went on missions with us. Debriefed with us. As the Agency received vital intel, Lisa was the one who would relay it to our team. She also gave us access to two of her most important assets. She wasn’t officially Delta, but by the end of the op, she was considered one of us.”
He smiled sadly. “Lisa and I hit it off from damn near day one. We grew close, and I...I cared about her.”
Olivia saw a strange sense of sadness mixed with regret when he spoke more about the woman. Clearly, this story had anything but a happy ending.
“What happened to her, Trevor?”
“Intel from one of the assets led us to the man we’d been after for almost a year. He was a member of a major terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. The asset somehow managed to find out where he and some other key players were hiding. It was an abandoned shack built against the side of a mountain in Syria. The night before the op, Jake came down with the flu, putting me in charge. I was the one who made the call to go in.”
Trevor stood and walked over to her living room window. Looking out over her front yard, he went on.
“It was all a set-up. The asset was actually working for the man we were trying to take down. He led us into a trap.”
“Like a double-agent?” Olivia asked quietly.
Jake nodded. “Lisa trusted him, and we got screwed.” He took a deep breath and turned to face her. “Two of our men went in first. They said the place was clear and called for Lisa and her asset to come inside. Said they needed her to decipher something they’d found.”
Over his shoulder, Trevor explained, “Lisa could speak and read several languages. It wasn’t uncommon for her to translate documents for us during an op.” Looking back to her window, he continued, “Per protocol for this mission, I stayed back with our other teammates, keeping an eye out for any incoming threats. I watched Lisa and her asset walk inside. Two minutes later, the building exploded.”
“Oh, God, Trevor. I’m so sorry.”
He turned back to her. “That wasn’t even the worst of it. When we went through the rubble, we only found the two men from our team who’d entered the building first. They’d both been shot in the head.”
“What about Lisa and her asset?”
“There was a tunnel built into the mountain behind the shack that led to a bunker. Our people didn’t know it existed.”
“Lisa?”
“She was taken into the bunker and through a second tunnel. There was a hidden exit at the end of that one. By the time our guys discovered it, she was long gone.”
Trevor paused, his face hardening. “A video was sent to the CIA two days later. It was of Lisa. She was tied to a chair, and had been beaten. They received a new video every day for the next five days. I’ll spare you the details, but by the fifth day, when we received confirmation she was dead, we were relieved. For her sake.”
Olivia didn’t even want to imagine what had been done to the poor woman. “I’m so sorry. You and your team must have been devastated.”
Trevor nodded. “We were. And for a long time, I blamed myself.”
“Why? You were only going off of the information Lisa’s asset gave you, right?”
“Right. Except I didn’t trust the asset. There was just something...off about the guy. I voiced my concerns multiple times to our commander and to Lisa. She always defended the man. Said he’d never steered her wrong. And the powers that be wouldn’t listen to me because they were too focused on
