She slapped his hand away. “I can’t believe you’re my brother’s best friend. You’re nothing like him. And you, of all people, should be as concerned as I am.”
“Go home,” he repeated. “You’ll accomplish nothing here but to get into trouble. If it hadn’t been for Ali tonight, who knows what might have happened in the street.”
“So that was him.” She frowned. “What was your bodyguard doing following me?”
“I sent him to keep a careful eye on you. You seemed to me somehow destined for trouble.”
She couldn’t bring herself to thank him. “Well, what I do from this moment forward is none of your business. Now leave my room before I call the police.”
Michael inclined his head. “As you wish.”
And as quickly as that, he and his bodyguard were gone. Vanished. The only evidence that they’d ever been there was the broken door.
Jensen walked to the telephone and calmly dialed the front desk. “I need a new room,” she said when a man answered. “Someone’s broken my door down.”
Jensen went downstairs to the restaurant for breakfast the next morning. The sundress was replaced with loose jeans and a white blouse tucked in at the waist. The more skin she covered up, the better. She should have realized that yesterday.
A waiter approached her table with a portable telephone. “Excuse me,” he said, “but you have a phone call.”
“Are you sure it’s for me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jensen took the phone. “Hello?”
“Miss O’Hara?”
“Yes.”
“This is Clayton Turner from the embassy.”
“Oh, hello! I understood from the receptionist that you weren’t coming back until Monday.”
“There was an emergency at the office. Anyway, the good news is that I have some information for you about your brother. I wanted to share it with you as soon as possible.”
Jensen sat up straight. “Thank you so much! I’m listening.”
“It’s my understanding from a reliable source who wishes to remain anonymous that your brother ventured into the desert, headed for a small town called Adjani, last week after a news story.”
“Is he all right?”
“That’s not known at this time. I believe he was in good health the last time our source saw him, but was in the company of some dangerous individuals.”
“Is there some way I can get to my brother? A bus? A train? Any way at all?”
“I took the liberty of arranging for a guide to meet with you in the hotel lobby in exactly one hour. Be packed and ready to leave at that time. Don’t be late.”
“I’ll be ready. Thank you!” said Jensen.
“Not at all.”
“I appreciate your taking me seriously.”
“Good luck with your search. I hope you call me when you return to let me know how things turn out.”
“I will. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Miss O’Hara.”
Jensen set the phone on the table and looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock.
After quickly signing for her breakfast, Jensen went to her room, packed and rolled her suitcase into the lobby. “I’d like to check out,” she told the clerk.
He punched up her information on the computer and readied her bill within minutes.
“May I leave my suitcase with you behind the desk until my guide arrives?”
“Of course.” He signaled a man in uniform to take the suitcase, then handed her a bill and a pen.
Jensen looked it over and signed it. “Thank you.”
“Lady! Lady!”
She would have known that voice anywhere. Turning, she smiled at the young man walking quickly toward her. “Yusef. Are you driving again today?”
“Not today. My uncle is on duty. I come see you. Maybe go to other businesses. Any luckiness finding your brother?”
“Yes. Very good luckiness, as a matter of fact. I just got a call from Mr. Turner who’s with the American embassy. He managed to find out where my brother was last seen and is sending a guide to escort me into the desert.”
“You go into desert?”
“Yes.”
Yusef shook his head. “Not good. Not good. Desert a very dangerous place. No place for woman.”
“I’m beginning to think that no place around here is safe for a woman. Including her own room.”
“This not funny.”
Jensen smiled at him. She couldn’t help it. “Thanks for worrying, but there’s no need. If Mr. Turner is sending a guide, he must be a good one. I’m sure no one from the embassy would knowingly send an American citizen into danger.”
“I still don’t like. Desert very big place. Bigger than all of United States. Easy to get lost. Sheik would not approve.”
Jensen looked at him curiously. “The sheik wouldn’t approve?” she asked. “What difference could what I do make to the sheik?”
“Sheik is your friend.”
“Who told you that? I’ve never met the man.”
“He came to your room last night.”
Jensen suddenly understood. “Oh, no, no. That was my brother’s friend, Michael Hassan.”
Yusef nodded. “Yes.” And he proceeded to rattle off a ten part list of names that ended with Michael Hassan. “His mother, as I told you, was American, so she call him Michael. When you spoke of him yesterday, I didn’t realize they were the same man. Then I see him last night and I know.”
Jensen was having trouble taking this in. “You’re saying that Michael Hassan, the man I met with last night—my brother’s best friend—is the sheik—the king of Sumaru?”
“Yes, yes. Now you are understanding me. He pay you very great honor by visiting you here last night.”
“That depends on your perspective,” she said dryly.
“It not look too good to others, though, so I not say anything.” He made a zipping motion across his mouth with his fingers.
“You mean because he was in my room?”
“Yes, yes. That look very bad. Very, very bad.”
As they spoke, a man walked in, fully robed as were most of the men she’d seen, his head covered in the traditional flowing white cloth with the band around the top to hold it in place. He walked straight to her. “Ms. O’Hara?” he asked in a thick accent.
“Yes.” She extended her hand, which he ignored.
He handed her a note. “This is your guide. He speaks almost no English, so communication between you will be all but impossible, but he is very capable and knows the desert well. He knows where your brother was last and will take you there. Your journey should take approximately three days. Yours in service, Clayton Turner.”
Yusef took the note from Jensen when she was finished and read it himself.
“My luggage is over there,” she said, pointing to the front desk.
The man looked blankly at her.
“My luggage. There.”
Another blank look.
Raising her hand to indicate “never mind,” she went to the desk and got the suitcase herself while shouldering her backpack.
The man took the suitcase from her and carried it outside to his waiting very old, very beat-up four-wheel drive and put it into the back along with a lot of other gear already stowed there.
He pointed at the passenger door, which Jensen took as a sign that she was to get into the car.
Yusef ran up to her and placed his body between Jensen and the door. “I still don’t think you should go with this man. You need to talk to sheik first.”
“He has nothing to do with this, Yusef. He refused to help me look for my brother.”
“He not like you going into desert with stranger, embassy or no embassy. I know this.”
Jensen impulsively kissed him on the forehead just as she had last night. “Thank you for caring, Yusef. If it were in my power to choose a little brother, you’d be the one. But I’m going. I have to. If it were your brother who was missing, wouldn’t
you go?”
Yusef, still blushing from the kiss, frowned. “Yes, yes. I suppose. But I not woman.”
“Yusef...”
It was with great and obvious reluctance that he opened the car door for her.
Jensen climbed inside and Yusef closed the door.
The guide turned the key in the ignition. It seemed to take a great deal of effort on the part of the engine to start, but it finally did. Without waiting to make sure that Yusef was clear, he gunned the accelerator and pulled into traffic.
Jensen turned in her seat and waved to Yusef, who looked like a forlorn little boy standing in the middle of the road, then turned back to face forward.
She looked for a seat belt but there wasn’t one.
Then she glanced at the stone-faced man beside her.
With a great internal sigh; Jensen readied herself for a loooong three days.
As they left the city, traffic gradually grew more sparse. Squared off settlements of homes grew fewer and farther between. Where once one could see small blocks of sand here and there, now it began to take over the vista to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
After an hour, they left the main highway and took a two-lane offshoot that looked like a road to nowhere. It went straight into the desert and desert was all Jensen could see. Ripples of sand; waves created by wind; dunes that seemed to go on for miles.
The faded road itself seemed to disappear into the sand.
And the heat. Unbelievable. The relentless sun was directly overhead, pounding the roof of the car. Needless to say, there was no air conditioning. Jensen left her window open just for the wind, but the problem with that was the sand. After a while it clung to her perspiration-sticky skin. She ran her fingers across her forehead and could feel the scratchy residue.
Reaching into her purse, Jensen pulled out her sunglasses and slipped them onto her nose. Normally her eyes weren’t terribly sun sensitive, but this was a completely different kind of light than she was used to. This gave her a headache.
When they’d first started down the road, there had actually been some scattered traffic. When they’d been driving for several hours, that traffic had trickled into practically nothing.
They came to a one-pump service station. A man in robes walked out of a little house and spoke with the guide.
Jensen climbed out of the car and stretched before going to the rear of the car and searching through the gear for some water. She found a bottle and showed it to the guide.
He brusquely nodded his head to affirm that it was okay for her to drink.
She pulled up the stopper and squirted some into her mouth. It was hot, like the air, but at least it was liquid and rinsed the sand from her mouth.
At a signal from the guide, she climbed back into the car, taking the water with her.
Half an hour later, the guide took the car off the road completely and headed directly into the desert. Plumes of choking sand rose behind them.
They drove for another five hours, during which Jensen saw one of the most remarkable sunsets of her life. The guide stopped when it grew dark and motioned to her to sleep in the back seat. He pulled bedding out of the back of the car and handed it to her, then pulled some out for himself and signaled to her that he would be sleeping elsewhere.
The heat had sapped her energy and her appetite. She didn’t even bother to ask him about dinner. Not that he would have understood her anyway.
Even now, it was still hot from the warmth rising from the sand. There was no escaping it.
Jensen spread a sleeping bag onto the back seat and lay on top of it, her arm across her forehead.
What if Henry wasn’t there when she got to wherever she was going? What would she do then?
She was too tired to think about it.
Everything went black. Jensen fell into an absolutely sound sleep that lasted uninterrupted all night long.
It was the heat that awakened her. It began filling the car even before the sun had completely risen.
Jensen watched it through squinted eyes for several minutes before stiffly rising from the back seat and stepping out onto the sand. She reached back inside for her bottle of water and squirted some into her mouth, rinsed it around and spit it out.
Pushing the stopper back in, she set the bottle back inside the car and looked around for the guide.
There was no sign of him.
“Hello!” she called out.
No answer.
“Hello!” she yelled louder.
Nothing.
Jensen walked all the way around the car looking for some sign of the man. It wasn’t as though there was anything for him to hide behind. He was, quite simply, gone without a trace.
Jensen couldn’t believe it! He’d just left her there, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by sand with no landmarks in sight. She had no idea where she was, where they were going or how to get back.
She furiously slammed her foot into the side of the car. “Damn you!” she screamed. “Where are you?”
There wasn’t even an echo. It was as though she hadn’t made a sound.
God, the heat.
Okay. She had to think.
Her mind ran in thirty directions at once.
Calm down.
Focus.
Focus. “Come on, Jensen,” she said aloud. “Come on.”
She looked at the car. The car was the key to her rescue. If she could turn the car around and follow the tracks made the day before, she’d find her way back.
This was good. This was a plan.
She walked around to the back of the car. Yes. There were the tracks. This could work.
Jensen climbed into the car. The keys were in the ignition. She turned them.
Nothing.
She turned them again.
Nothing! Not a chug or a pop or a grind. Absolutely nothing.
Jensen walked around to the hood. It was slightly open. She raised it the rest of the way and looked at what to her was completely foreign territory except for the battery—which wasn’t where it should have been. In fact, it wasn’t there at all.
Great.
And even Jensen knew that the fistful of broken wires hanging out of a black cable shouldn’t have looked that way.
“Don’t panic,” she whispered. “Everything will be fine.”
But she couldn’t help the fear that was rising like bile in her throat. She was terrified.
What next?
Water. She had to have water to survive. She’d never even make it through the day without it.
Walking around to the back of the car, she opened the liftgate, climbed inside and searched through the things, tossing them out onto the sand when she’d finished searching them. There was a red tent and her suitcase, of course. Her backpack. An empty gasoline can.
No water.
Jensen leaned over the back seat and picked up the water bottle she had so carelessly tossed inside earlier, hugging it to her. There were perhaps four swallows left.
The inside of the still car was like an oven. Outside wasn’t much better. It had to be 120 degrees.
She needed shade. The car provided some, but the heat coming off the metal was more than she could bear.
Climbing out of the rear, she emptied the nylon bag containing the tent.
There were no directions, of course, and she’d never set one up before. Her idea of roughing it up to this point was a weekend at the Holiday Inn.
Piece by piece, she set everything out on the sand and tried to figure out what made sense. It took her an hour to get something up, but it was more like a lean-to than a tent.
Fine. It was still shade.
Laying a blanket on the ground beneath it, Jensen took her water and sat down. She allowed herself a – small sip.
Jensen finally had to admit to herself that she didn’t have a clue what to do to get herself out of this mess. It wouldn’t do her any good to follow the car tracks on foot because they’d traveled for hours yesterday with
out seeing a single living creature.
She’d never be able to make it back to the road. It had to be nearly 150 miles away.
She was afraid to go forward because she didn’t know what was there. Yusef’s words about the size of the Sahara rang in her ears: Larger than the United States.
Jensen lifted a handful of sun-bleached grains and let them sift slowly through her fingers. No one knew where she was except the guide, and he certainly wasn’t going to come back for her.
Was this what had happened to Henry? Her dear Henry? Had someone just dumped him in the desert? Was he now part of the sand, the way she was going to be before very long?
With her legs crossed in front of her, Jensen went through her suitcase to see if there was anything useful. She pulled out a few things to use for bedding later.
In her backpack she found some peanuts she’d saved from the plane and an oatmeal cookie she carefully wrapped in tissues.
The peanuts were salty, so she decided against them. They’d only make her thirstier. Though she seemed to remember reading somewhere that one should have salt at times like this.
It didn’t matter.
But she could nibble the cookie when she was hungry. If done carefully, it would last her for two days.
One cookie for two days. And she was already starving from no dinner the night before.
She took a small bite, carefully rewrapped it and put it back in the sack.
Then she took out her journal, which she carried everywhere, and a pen, and began to write. Not particularly because she had anything she wanted to say, but because she needed to pass the time and forget about the heat.
God, the heat.
The unbearable, suffocating heat.
She closed her eyes and thought of Wisconsin with all of its grass and fields, forests and lakes.
Her cool little farm with all the paths through the forest.
Her favorite path, where sunlight poured through the leaves making patterns on the ground.
As night fell, she took another bite of her cookie, a small sip of water and watched her first real desert sunset, her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin on her knees.
Spectacular wasn’t a strong enough word. Extraordinary. Colors more vivid than any she’d ever seen.
The Sheik's Mistress Page 4