Damn, he wanted a drink.
Agent Lobo pulled out her own phone, which appeared to be vibrating. “I’ll go and check things out on the Ashkani side of things. See if the mother knows where Nadira is.”
Joshua’s attention went back to Reggie’s phone. A voice came over the line.
“Best Western Quantico.”
“Room 519, please,” Joshua almost shouted into the phone.
“Hold, please.” There was a click and a long wait before Joshua could hear it start to ring. After seven rings he hung up. “He’s either there and not picking up…”
“Or?” Reggie prompted.
Joshua didn’t stop to answer. His feet were already moving.
CHAPTER 9
Had punched the DECLINE button that popped up on his phone as soon as it appeared. The last thing he wanted right now was to talk to anyone on his team. Not Reggie, who the call had been from. Not Coop. Definitely not Joshua.
The traffic buzzed past him, large and angry bees that kicked up enough of a breeze as they passed to tug at his shirt. He should probably step back away from the curb, but the sensation was strangely soothing.
It wasn’t that he was angry at the former agent. Well, not much, anyway. Joshua couldn’t help the fact that he hadn’t liked Bilal all that much.
For the longest time, it’d been Had’s opinion that Joshua’s dislike was just his normal crustiness. That underneath it all, he’d really liked the Pakistani driver. After all, Joshua and Had were almost like brothers, and once the former agent had nearly punched him out. From what Had’d been able to observe, the grumpier Joshua was with you, the more he cared.
But then Bilal had passed away in a single, flaming moment suspended in time. A moment etched in the glass surface of Had’s mind with the acid of painful experience.
And Joshua hadn’t shed a single tear over it.
So… not really the guy he wanted to be chatting with right at the moment.
He’d almost killed a BAU agent today. And not just any BAU agent. The newest member of Team Humpty. The most senior member of the group, barring Joshua, and that didn’t really count, since Joshua was no longer a part of the FBI.
Shaking his head, Had grimaced. When he decided to stick his foot in it, he shoved that thing all the way in.
He’d texted Nadira. She was the only one who really understood what he was going through. And even here there was a sense of imbalance. Nadira had lost a father. Bilal had only been Had’s occasional driver.
But at least she got his grief. And maybe his presence could help with hers.
Besides, he just didn’t want to be alone. And there was no one’s company he’d rather have than Nadira’s right now.
When he’d called, she’d picked up right away. Her voice had seemed almost normal, with just a whisper of the grief that he knew was there, tucked away underneath the pleasantries. She’d offered to come pick him up.
And here he was, standing on a corner again, waiting for Nadira. The last time he’d done this, Bilal had been alive, and Nadira and he had enjoyed a fantastic lunch together at a dive in Austin.
What would it look like if they could go back? How would it feel to return to a place and a time before Had’s actions had doomed a man he had called his friend?
His thoughts were interrupted by a taxi pulling up in front of him. He was about to wave the cab away, when he realized that it was Nadira driving. Ducking his head in through the open passenger side window, he goggled at her.
“You… you’re driving cabs here now?”
She shrugged. “I’m moving in with Mom. Figured I needed to have a job of some sort. The company really liked my dad, so…” She motioned to the car.
Had envied the easy way she could talk about her father. It seemed that every time he thought about it, tears sprang to his eyes. But as he looked a little close, he noticed that Nadira wasn’t meeting his gaze, and that she surreptitiously swiped at her face with a forearm.
Everyone dealt with grief in a different way.
“Get in,” she said after a moment’s silence. “I spotted a Mexican restaurant around the corner that looks decently disreputable. We could go and grab something. You could get a beer.” She gave him an assessing look. “Or an horchata, maybe?”
“Sounds good,” he said as he opened the door and clambered inside. “And yes, probably the horchata.” He tried to muster up a grin for her, but it felt like it fell pretty flat as it stretched across his face. Ended up more like a grimace. Maybe smiling was off the menu for a bit.
The cab felt and looked exactly like Bilal’s had, although it did not have the distinctive scent of lingering Middle Eastern spices that had always seemed to linger around the Pakistani driver. It was both comforting and disorienting to be in a taxi that seemed so close to Bilal’s, that even held his daughter in his place, but that was so clearly not his.
“So, do you have any tidbits to tell me about D.C.?” Nadira asked, checking her mirrors. “After he met you, Dad started calling me with new little pieces of information that seemed like they were just random facts he’d picked up. I thought he’d all of the sudden discovered Wikipedia or something. After I probed a bit, he told me about you.”
“Really?” This time his smile felt much more natural. “That’s… I can’t believe…” He trailed off.
In a strange way, knowing how much Bilal had talked about him to his daughter validated his own feelings. The idea that he needed to apologize for the strength of his reaction no longer seemed all that valid when paired with the driver’s clear return of that strong affection.
There was a stretch of silence as Nadira pulled out into traffic and circled around to the nearby El Gran Charro, which, if Had was translating correctly, meant something along the lines of the Great Big Cowboy. Or the Great Big Jackass. One of the two. Of course the sign with the guy on the horse led him toward the former choice.
As they moved into a parking space that Had would’ve sworn was too small for their vehicle, Nadira looked over at Had and gestured for him to exit the cab. She pulled out her cell phone.
“You go on ahead. I’ll catch up in a sec. Need to make sure my mom’s okay.”
Had nodded and stepped out onto the curb. Moving toward the restaurant, he decided he might as well step inside and see if he could snag a table for them.
Glancing around to take another look at Nadira, he glimpsed her leaning over something in her lap, studying it with intensity. It was impossible at this angle to see what it was, but it looked like maybe she was having some trouble with her phone.
He turned around just in time for the explosion to catch him full in the face. It flung him backwards with such violence that he ended up striking the side of Nadira’s cab. It had to be his imagination, but Had could have sworn that he could hear her gasp of horror as he slid toward the ground and the light from the sun dimmed.
Sinking into unconsciousness, Had couldn’t help but think that this was not the ideal second date.
* * *
Reggie had seen Joshua angry before, but up to this point she had never seen him panic. They looked much the same, although the panic had a sense of urgency to it that his anger many times lacked.
Bella had seemed to pick up on the sentiment. There had now been three moments in which she’d growled at perfect strangers, one of them being the cab driver they’d managed to snag. The poor man looked terrified the whole way over to the hotel.
So far Joshua, taking a cue from Bella, had barked at Coop, at Reggie, at the absent Lobo and Salazar and at the manager of the Best Western, who had looked like he was about to burst into tears. They’d rushed over to the hotel, hoping to find Had there, only to discover that his room was empty.
They had questioned everyone in the lobby to see if they’d seen the young cop, and after a frustrating conversation with an old man who was mostly deaf and appeared to be at least a little senile, were told that he’d been seen getting into a cab about ten minutes ago.
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That’s when they felt the tremor.
Reggie watched as the blood drained from Joshua’s face. As for her, she felt that she was moving through some surrealistic nightmare where she couldn’t move fast enough, couldn’t think clearly. Where a loved one was in danger and she couldn’t figure out how to arrive in time to save them.
It had always been her mother, falling from some great height. Standing in the outer doorway of a barn’s hayloft, about to fall to her death. Perching on the edge of a cliff, sharp rocks below. And Reggie, far too distant to do anything but watch as her mother tumbled, limbs lifeless like a dummy’s, down to the ground.
But this time there was no waking. Only an exiting to the street, where the acrid scent of smoke filled her nose and her lungs, making her eyes water and itch. Bella was barking, and Reggie moved out into the street to try to get a better view of where the smoke was coming from. She almost stepped in front of a moving car and had to leap back out of the way to keep from getting herself flattened.
There, about a block away, was a pillar of black smoke. The wind that had brought the haze to them had shifted, and the column was rising straight up into the air.
They were moving, running toward the blaze, when Reggie’s cell rang. She snatched it out of her pocket midstride, thrusting the phone up to her ear. Reggie heard Salazar’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Is Joshua close to you?”
Reggie handed the phone over to Joshua, irritated. What, did she not count because she’d never been FBI? Or was it a female thing? Seeing as how the man had huge problems with Coop, Reggie was guessing the latter.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Joshua responded to whatever the agent had said on the other line. “We’re seeing it now. Where are you?” His face turned even grimmer, if that were possible. “Fine.” He disconnected the line and kept running.
By the time they arrived at the site of the explosion, a Mexican restaurant that had boasted, up until the explosion, white siding with orange accents, the front of the place was in shambles. Those once pristine colors were now bleeding into the black char from the blast.
The outline of the bomb’s destruction was narrow, centering right around the entryway to the eatery. As far as Reggie could tell, those inside were shaken, but no one appeared to have been hurt. The blast must have been aimed outward.
And there, in front of the restaurant, was a familiar form leaning over a figure on the ground. Nadira, the leaning woman. Had, the man prostrate at her feet.
To Reggie’s surprise, it was Coop who got there first, pushing Nadira to one side. The BAU agent bent down to examine the young cop, her face more animated than Reggie had seen it in some time.
“Is he okay?” she blurted, rushing to Coop’s side. Nadira answered off to the side, her tone choked.
“He was knocked out for a minute, but it looks like he’s coming around.” The woman’s face was streaked with tears. She glanced over at Coop. “Well, it looked. Can’t tell for sure now that I’ve been pushed out of the way.”
A dawning realization came over Reggie.
“You,” she said, pointing at Nadira. “It was you.”
Everyone turned in her direction. Coop, Joshua, a blinking Had who was trying to sit up. Several bystanders. Even Bella, who seemed to sense that there was something serious happening.
“What are you talking about, Reggie?” Joshua asked.
“Think about it. Bilal’s fingerprint. Her DNA. She was the only one who knew they were coming here. It was Nadira.”
Moving over to the attractive Middle-Eastern woman, whose face was a mask of confusion, Reggie pulled out her handcuffs. She turned Nadira around, slapping one of the cuffs on the woman’s wrists as she did so. The familiar words, oft heard but never spoken by her, spilled out of her mouth.
“Nadira Ashkani, you’re under arrest for the attempted murder of Officer Kyle Hadderly. You have the right to remain silent…”
* * *
“Okay, ignore the fact that she has no legal jurisdiction to make an arrest here. It was still premature.”
Joshua pursed his lips as he listened to Coop. Something about the explosion seemed to have energized the agent. She was nearly her old self, at least for the moment.
Which meant that she was back to being opinionated, stubborn, and… most importantly, right now… wrong. All right, possibly not about the jurisdiction part, but Reggie was green enough that the lapse could be understood.
They were back at Quantico, and Nadira was in an interrogation room, after having it explained to her that she was there voluntarily and that the handcuffs would be removed. She seemed to be suffering from shock, which was the only thing that was giving Joshua pause right now.
“Look, Reggie’s right,” he shot back. “It couldn’t have been anyone else. Nadira was the only one who knew where they were going to be.”
Reggie, for her part, was sitting in a chair nearby with her head in her hands. At first, Joshua had worried that she might be embarrassed for her Miranda faux pas. He needn’t have been concerned.
The young cop was pissed off. Royally.
Lifting her head, she pierced Coop with a glare that would have backed off a grizzly. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that it has to be her.”
Bella was at Reggie’s feet, as usual finding the most upset person to try to comfort. She licked at Reggie’s hand that had dropped away from her head.
Joshua wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing right at the moment, but Agent Cooper seemed to have more fortitude than the typical bear. The look she leveled back at Reggie wasn’t antagonistic, but it wasn’t backing down either.
“There are too many unanswered questions,” she said, her tone calm but forceful. “Like the mole.”
“It could have been Bilal all along. And then Nadira after him.” Reggie’s baleful look had backed off a hair, but she was still filled with righteous rage. Joshua knew that feeling, a heady mix of power and anger that would wipe away any rational thought that might try to rear its ugly head. It wasn’t a good place for an investigator.
As much as he agreed with her assessment, Coop was right. They had to take a step back before they leapt to a premature conclusion.
“Hear her out, Reggie,” he urged. “We can at least listen to what she has to say.”
Coop turned a grateful look on him, and he had the sudden urge to lash out at her. Perhaps he wasn’t as dispassionate about this as he might have thought.
“Bilal was just our driver on occasion,” the agent said, aiming most of her energy at Reggie. “There was no way for him to be able to track our location so readily when we were in Texas.”
Bella tried to give Reggie another lick, but the cop pushed her head away. That wasn’t typical for Reggie. Her attitude toward Bella had always been loving and gentle. The anger in her seemed to be building.
So was her defensiveness.
“That could have been Nadira helping him out,” Reggie shot back. She’d apparently given this some thought. “She drove us the entire time we were there.”
“There wasn’t enough time to plant the explosives.”
“How long does it take to drop a bomb in a hole?” Reggie said, her hands clenched into fists. For as angry as she was, her thought process seemed razor sharp.
There was only one issue that Joshua could see. She was looking to refute Agent Cooper, not take in what she was saying. The responses, while accurate, were superficial.
“Okay, fine, but what’s the motive?” Coop continued with her argument. “They were political refugees. Bilal came over from Pakistan because he was in danger.”
That was one Joshua felt he could field. “Kind of a brilliant cover for a terrorist, don’t you think?”
“And a terrorist just happened to join forces with a serial killer? I don’t buy it.”
“Stretch, maybe, but it’s where the evidence seems to point.”
It seemed for a moment that Coop had run out of fuel, when h
er eyes sparked with what appeared to be another idea. She shook her head.
“What about the fraud case? The first bomb that caught Joshua?”
Reggie paused, her mouth open. “What about it?”
“There was no connection to either Bilal or Nadira.”
The young cop shrugged. “Bilal took us to the airport.”
“But we didn’t tell him where we were going.” Coop’s reasoning was getting difficult to ignore, while Reggie’s seemed to be deteriorating. “There was no way for him to know.”
“Come on. Had was constantly in contact with the guy. He could’ve said something to him without even realizing it.”
The terrorist-serial killer tie was tenuous enough. This was now even more of a stretch, even for Joshua, who had thought Reggie was in the right. And how much of that support was his desire to protect her? He wasn’t sure of his own neutrality when it came to the raven-haired cop.
But truth was truth, no matter its source.
“Reggie, Coop’s got some good points,” he ventured. “I think we need to listen to her.”
The look she darted at him was filled with venom. As much as it pained him to have her turn that kind of expression in his direction, it also affirmed his stance. She wasn’t fully rational right now. And it was important that they win her back.
And now that Joshua was coming around to Coop’s way of thinking, it was clear there were things he himself hadn’t wanted to look at too closely. Starting with their own team. He cleared his throat, turning away from the glare Reggie was leveling at him.
“Okay, here’s a question for starters—where were Salazar and Lobo the whole time this was going down?”
Coop perked up at that. “Salazar I have no idea. Lobo I think was checking in with Amal to see if she could track down Nadira from that side.”
That was right. Joshua remembered her jetting off, cell phone in her hand. She had been busy, and it was easy enough to check with Mrs. Ashkani to see if Agent Lobo had indeed reached out to her.
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