Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13), Matt Lincoln [ebooks children's books free TXT] 📗

There were whispers, and snickers, and the pedantic explaining of things everyone at MBLIS had known since the early days of our law enforcement training. All while Diane wasn’t looking, of course, though I doubted that much escaped her notice even when she was tucked away in her office.

It was annoying, to say the least. But until now, they hadn’t expressed their hatred for the very idea of working with us in the first place, at least not in front of our faces.

“Oi! If you have something to say, why don’t you come over here and say it?” Holm called over to them, and his eyes narrowed in a blistering glare that was altogether rare coming from him.

“Shut up!” I hissed to him. As much as I hated this, I didn’t exactly want to get into it with the FBI agents. Well, really, I didn’t want to get into it with Diane, who would get into it with us if we caused a scene.

“You think we should just let them sit there and blame us for this?” Holm asked, throwing his arms up in the air in exasperation.

“Do you want Diane breathing down our necks for the next God knows how long?” I shot back.

My partner seemed to consider this briefly, dropping his arms and shooting a wary look in the direction of Diane’s closed office door.

He didn’t have time to make a decision, though.

“Come on, what are you, Robbie, scared?” Smith sneered, notably using Holm’s first name even though the two of them weren’t anywhere close to being on a first-name basis. “Scared of your girl boss just like you are a little coffee?”

“Holden!” Corey cried, giving his partner an astonished look. “This isn’t like you. A little healthy competition between agencies, sure, but this is too much. If you’re not careful, I’ll get you pulled off this case.”

I glanced back at Birn and Muñoz, who both looked just as surprised by this response as Holm and I were. For Smith’s own partner to threaten him like that, he must’ve been really out of line. Indeed, he’d gone much further than he had any other time since the other agents arrived in Miami.

“What did you just say?” Smith asked, turning his ire on Corey now.

“He’s right, man, you went too far,” Forrester said begrudgingly. “We all know Diane’s better at this job than a lot of people in the FBI.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Smith asked him, open-mouthed. “If we’d kept this in-house, we would’ve caught them by now. And Interpol wouldn’t be acting like they could walk all over us, now, would they? We all know that hardly anyone over there probably even knows what MBLIS is.”

“They damn well know that the Hollands are on our Most Wanted List, though,” Forrester argued. “And Interpol plays by its own rules. You should know that.”

“Yeah, they took that human trafficking case from us a while back,” Dobbs pointed out helpfully. “At least they haven’t completely stolen it yet. They’re just seeing what they can do without us while they gather information.”

“Us?” Hunt asked with emphasis. “What us? She made it clear enough that if she were to send someone, it would be them.” He gestured vaguely in Holm’s and my direction with a glower at Diane’s office door.

“Exactly,” Smith agreed, clearly glad to have some backup from amongst his own ranks. “And you can’t say that wouldn’t be a mistake, can you, Doug?” He narrowed his eyes at Forrester as if challenging him to dare to disagree.

“Well, they are the ones most well-acquainted with the case,” the other man pointed out, practically wincing as he said it because he knew what Smith’s reaction was going to be.

“Please, they stumbled onto this case,” he scoffed, true to form. “You can’t seriously think that this agency has the training and resources necessary to take on something this big effectively?”

“No, which is why we’re working together,” Forrester said, his tone more measured than I would’ve been able to manage. Judging by Holm’s nondescript grumbles across from me, he had a few choice words of his own that he was avoiding voicing, to his credit.

“Then why do we have to work together at all?” Smith asked as if explaining something very simple to a small child. “It’s just pageantry. We don’t want to be seen as taking a smaller agency’s case, so we’re throwing them a bone. But then we all get shafted since they’re slowing us down.”

At this point, I thought it was high time that I stood up for myself and my agency, though I was sure I wouldn’t be quite as vulgar about it as Holm. At least I hoped I wouldn’t be.

“Come on, you can’t be serious,” I shot back, piercing my gaze on the lot of them. “Most of us are former naval intelligence officers. Muñoz was a pilot. Holm and I were SEALS. And we may not have the big shiny cases or the public reputation that you do, but we do good, solid work here at MBLIS. And we found the Hollands where you failed to God knows how many times.”

“Hey, you all dropped the ball, too,” Dobbs pointed out. “They were in your territory just as much as they were in ours. But your point’s taken.”

“You really think there’s anything you guys can do that we can’t?” Smith said, scowling right at me. “Not a chance. We’d run circles around you in this case if Interpol let us work it.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Birn chuckled. “We both need each other here. That’s why we’re working together. Besides, why would MBLIS exist if some other agency could do our jobs? It wouldn’t make any sense.”

“If you’re expecting the government to make sense, I’ve got some bad news for you, buddy,” Smith pointed out, and most times, I would say it was hard to argue with that point.

“Look, what makes you think you can do our jobs?” I asked, sidestepping his point and going