Betrayal by Tim Tigner Page B

last thing Odi had expected.  
    “Do you know how your teammates died?” Ayden asked.
    “I only saw two of them. Both were shot in the head.”
    “I’m no expert in forensics, Odi, but I had a look at the bodies and then consulted with a friend. Your teammates were not shot. All seven were assassinated by tiny bombs. Check out the headsets.” Ayden held up the remnants of an earpiece. “I found bits of this same plastic lodged in all seven head-wounds.”
    Odi felt his skepticism kicking in. “How did you end up with the headsets?”
    “I got them from the boy who scavenged them. He was playing with one while I examined him. I had already examined the bodies by then and found the strange shrapnel. When I saw the bloody headsets, I put two and two together.”
    Odi did not want to think about the implications of that revelation. Instead he began to examine the pieces one after the other. They had not been tampered with, that much was clear. They were still covered with streaks of blood and bits of gore. It did not require his expert eyes to see that Ayden’s conclusion was correct—although he had missed it on the battlefield. Each headset had exploded from within. A tiny charge had been cleverly directed by the speaker dish into the wearer’s ear.
    Odi put a residual piece to his nose and recognized the distinct scent of RDX. He knew that a drop of RDX the size of an eraser head would take a human head clean off. Given the location of the explosive, just millimeters from the ear, the charge would not have had to be any larger than a match head to be lethal.
    Odi set the evidence back down on the table as his head began to spin.
    His teammates were not the victims of war.  
    They had died from assassination.
    He felt the walls closing in.
    Ayden bobbed nervously in his chair as Odi took a long moment of contemplative silence. Then Odi brushed the broken bits off the table with a single sweep of his good arm. He looked up at his new friend. “Why would someone rig our headsets to explode? Why would someone back at Quantico want to kill my team?”
    “If yours had been the only incident,” Ayden said, “I would say that someone on your team posed a serious threat to the person behind this—as in knowing something that would send him to jail—so he killed everyone to cover his tracks. But—”
    “Hold on a minute,” Odi interrupted. “There were other incidents? Other attacks?”
    “Oh yeah. There were two. The AmCham office was bombed in Belgium, and an American School was bombed in Paris.”
    “When?”
    “Both attacks took place the night your team was assassinated.”
    Odi leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. His life was getting more complicated by the minute. Now he understood why Ayden had discouraged his making a call, but that was about all he understood.
    He needed more information.
    “I interrupted you,” Odi said. “You were going to tell me why you thought someone had done this.”
    “Yes, well, I think the core reason is obvious. Why do people do anything?”  
    “Money?”
    Ayden nodded.
    “How does killing my team make anybody money?” Odi asked.
    Ayden answered him with a question. A surprising question. “Do you know what the biggest industry in the world is?”
    “Oil?”
    Ayden shook his head.
    Odi raised his brows.
    “Fear,” Ayden said.
    “Fear?”
    “Yes, fear. At the individual level, fear is sold in many forms, the most common of which is insurance: health, life, accident, theft. People are afraid that something big will go wrong, so they put their money down. At the collective level, fear is sold in the form of defense—against fire, flood, famine, and crime. Of course the granddaddy of these is national defense. Mention the word terrorism and people trip over themselves to hand you blank checks.”
    “You’re losing me. What does—” Odi cut himself off. “I’m beginning to see where you’re going with this, but I’m not there yet. Keep