Well, shit.
All kinds of alarm bells sounded in Seth’s head. It was more than a gut feeling now. It was a goddamn fact and a strange sense of calm settled over him, the likes of which he hadn’t felt in years. “Hang on. Something’s going down at your eight. We need to find cover. Now.”
“Roger that.” Jean-Luc didn’t argue and dropped the rings, much to the vendor’s disappointment. He nodded to the indoor portion of the bazaar and, without another word, they made a beeline toward the awnings spread out like colorful fans from the side of the mud building. The man with the cell phone’s curse carried over the ambient noise and he tried to follow them, shoving his way through the crowd.
“You see him?” Seth asked.
“Yeah, good catch. Guess being a paranoid bastard has its uses.” They found cover behind an empty vendor booth just inside the building and waited, backs pressed against the wall.
The man jogged past, now shouting into the cell phone. His voice faded as he disappeared into the crowd.
“Merde.” Jean-Luc reached into his pack for the sat phone he’d gotten from Harvard before leaving the plane. “We don’t have long before they figure out we’re still inside. I’m gonna give Gabe a heads-up. Something about this whole sitch is fucked. Nobody should know who we are or why we’re here. Keep an eye out, grasshopper.”
As Jean-Luc tried to reach their commander, Seth edged out of the booth far enough to see what was going on around them. He kept his eyes moving like he’d been trained, always scanning, watching, assessing. He saw the woman in the blue veil again—at least he thought it was the same woman—but he didn’t see the guy with the cell phone. Still, that didn’t mean they were free and clear. Obviously their number one fan had buddies willing to join the party.
Whatever the party was.
Jean-Luc hung up the phone. “Piece of shit. I got nothing. We’re outta here. The only person who knew we would be here was Fahim, so either someone got to him or he was never on our side to begin with.”
“Damn. We need supplies.” Since it was usually much easier to secure supplies in-country than go through the international hassle of bringing their own, Fahim had been the mission’s lifeline. “Going up into the mountains, we’ll be wading deep into enemy shit. Without weapons, it’s suicide. And I’ve been there, done that, got the fucking bloodstained T-shirt, and I’m not up for a repeat, thanks.”
“We’ll find another supplier,” Jean-Luc said without much concern. “Trust me. Gabe’s backup plans have backup plans and if there’s one thing this team’s good at, it’s improvisation. Are we clear?”
Seth checked the area. There was the woman again. Was she…following him? “Clear.”
“All right.” Jean-Luc dusted his hands together. “So what do you say to some escape and evasion?”
That woman…
Something niggled at the back of his mind. Most likely paranoia again, but he had to be sure. “No, not yet. Wait here a sec.”
Jean-Luc snorted. “Fuck that. You ever see a horror movie? The pretty one always dies first when they split up and I’m too young to bite it. We’re sticking together.”
Seth rolled his eyes and ducked into the crowd.
Jean-Luc was right on his heels. “Whoa. If I didn’t know you any better, I’d think you just smiled. Did it hurt?”
He flipped off the Ragin’ Cajun over his shoulder. But, yeah, he was smiling. It felt really damn good to be part of a team again.
…
It couldn’t be him.
Phoebe shook her head and stared down at the eggplant she was holding. What the hell? She didn’t need eggplant. She set it back on the table and, distracted, she continued past several other vendors offering different kinds of veggies.
Could it be him?
She glanced up at the same moment the man in the hooded sweatshirt looked in her direction and for a breathless heartbeat, she thought their gazes locked. Of course, that was silly. Her face was covered by the chadari and although she could see out, he couldn’t possibly see in. Still, his blue eyes stayed on her for a beat longer than necessary before he continued his scan of the crowd.
Dammit, she just couldn’t tell with that hood up over his head. It looked like him, but why would he be back in Afghanistan? No doubt this was the last place on earth he’d visit.
Her mind had to be playing tricks on her. It wasn’t the first time she thought she’d seen Seth Harlan in a crowd, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Guilt was nasty like that.
The man and his blond friend disappeared indoors, where bread and dried fruit were sold. She didn’t need either, but…
She followed.
Because if it was him, she could finally—do what? Apologize? Yes, that’d go over well. Hi, Seth. You don’t know me, but I wrote some really horrible things about you two years ago and I just wanted to say I’m so sorry for ruining your credibility…
Right.
It most likely wasn’t him anyway, but at least now she had a distraction from the frustration roiling under her skin. She’d taken her photos of Tehani—face blurred to preserve the girl’s identity, of course—and the bomb vest to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and had gotten nowhere. It was like nobody cared that Tehani’s husband, obviously a man of power, was using his young wives as suicide bombers when he tired of them.
She just didn’t get it. What was the point of having a Ministry of Women’s Affairs if she couldn’t even get past the front desk to talk to the minister? She’d just have to try again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. All else failed, she’d take it public herself. If there was one thing she could do well, it was creating a media firestorm.
Which, of course, brought her mind back to Seth Harlan.
Pausing just inside the door, Phoebe searched for the man in the hooded sweatshirt. The two men should be easy enough to spot. Blonds like his friend tended to stick out here in a land full of people with brown skin and dark hair. For that matter, so did men with blue eyes.
Except she couldn’t find them. A lot of people wandered up and down the aisle, but none were the blue-eyed man or his companion.
She frowned. Now hold on a second. They couldn’t have vanished.
Unless her mind really was playing tricks.
She wandered back outside and looked around. Nope. Whoever he was, he’d given her the slip. Sighing at herself, she decided she was too tired and frustrated to continue shopping and cut through the market with the intention of returning to the shelter.
Crossing streets in Kabul was a bit like a real-life version of Frogger. One wrong move and splat! Game over. Getting to the other side in one piece always took patience and no small amount of skill. Unlike natives who darted out no matter what was barreling their way, Phoebe preferred to play it safe and wait for a break in the traffic. Sometimes it took a while, but waiting was better than ending up a road pancake.
As she stood on the curb, she sensed a presence looming too close behind her. Alarm crawled up her spine and she toyed nervously with the strap of the bag on her shoulder. She usually didn’t have problems going out alone in Kabul—as long as she wore the chadari, men saw her as a modest Muslim woman and left her alone. It was when she wore only a head scarf that she ran into trouble. Her light-copper hair and pale skin stuck out in a crowd, so as much as she hated the chadari as a symbol of oppression, it also provided a modicum of safety. She understood why many women feared to give it up even after the Taliban regime fell.
Finally, there was a lull in traffic and she nipped between a lumbering bus and a taxi. Whoever was behind her stayed on her butt and his shadow fell over hers as the sun sank to their backs.
Probably just someone going in the same direction as her. Nothing to get worked up about. And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes locked on the back of her head. Her heart kicked into a panicked gallop and sweat trickled into her eyes under her veil.
Oh crap. If she was being followed, she could
n’t lead this person to the shelter.
Making a split-second decision, she darted back across the road, barely avoiding a motorbike that jumped onto the sidewalk to get around the stalled traffic. With a squeak of surprise, she dropped her basket and stumbled backward.
An arm clamped around her waist from behind and jerked her against a lean, hard body as a big hand clamped over her mouth.
Chapter Seven
That eerie calm returned, almost as though a sheet of ice had dropped between Seth and the world. He hauled the struggling woman into an alcove. He heard Jean-Luc call his name and order him to stop, but fuck that. This woman knew something and he was damn well going to find out what.
“Who’s after us?” he demanded, turning her around and shoving her against the wall. He hadn’t spoken Pashto since his rescue twenty-one months ago and the words felt at once foreign and familiar on his tongue. This was one language he doubted time would ever erase from his memory. “Who are you? Why were you following us?”
Behind him, Jean-Luc swore in a long string of Cajun French. A hand gripped his shoulder. “Jesus Christ, Seth. Let her go. You keep this up, you’re goin’ to have some pissed-off husband or brother or father comin’ after your head.”
“Nah. They’ll just punish her.” And he would not feel guilty about that. He would not. She was the enemy.
The woman stilled. He hated not being able to gauge her expressions and yanked up the veil. A pair of pale eyes stared at him, rounded in shock. Interesting color, somewhere on the border of green and blue. He bet in better lighting, the blue of her chadari brought out the blue in her irises.
He gave his head a quick shake to dislodge the utterly unimportant thought. Christ, his mind was all kinds of fucked up.
“Oh my God. It is you,” she said. In English. With a slight accent hinting at…upper-class New England.
Wait. What?
He let her go and backed up a step as she shrugged out of the chadari, folded it, and tucked it into the bag on her shoulder. She was a petite thing with curly hair that, like her eyes, wasn’t quite one color but balanced between a light brown and red. She wore it pulled back in a low ponytail, the end of which brushed the middle of her back.
Okay. Not exactly what he’d expected.
She watched him like she’d come face-to-face with a ghost. “I can’t believe you’re here. I thought maybe you were you—I mean, of course you’re you. But when I saw you, I—” She broke off, shook her head. “I’m not making sense.”
“No, you’re not and you need to start. Who are you?”
She drew a breath and threw back her shoulders. “My name is Phoebe Leighton. I’m a freelance photojournalist working on a story about the women’s shelter here in Kabul.” She motioned vaguely toward the street, but he didn’t take his eyes off her.
“Jesus. Should have figured you for a fucking journalist.”
“Excuse me?”
“You act like you know me,” he said, ignoring her outrage. “But I’ve never met you.”
“Of course I know you.”
“How?”
And there was that look, the concerned one that came across people’s faces when they were wondering if he was crazy. He gritted his teeth against it. “How?”
“Because,” she said slowly, “everyone in the States knows who you are. Or at least every journalist in the States worth her salt does. You’re Seth Harlan, the Hero Sniper. The only POW ever rescued from Afghanistan. Which brings up the question, why are you here?”
Hero Sniper. Christ, how he hated that ridiculous media-issued nickname. “I’m vacationing.”
Phoebe snorted and raised an eyebrow toward Jean-Luc, who had surprisingly kept his mouth shut all this time. “Now you, handsome, I don’t know.”
Jean-Luc grinned. “I’m more than willing to help ya out with that, cher.”
She laughed. “I just bet you are. So. Seth.” She refocused those amazing blue-green eyes on him. “Are we done assaulting innocent women now? Because thanks to you, the shelter’s groceries are sitting in the middle of the road and I need to go back and buy more.”
“I don’t think so.” He caught her arm as she tried to make an escape. She was fast and almost got away from him. He pushed her against the wall again, this time keeping his hand clamped to her thin shoulder. “What do you have to do with the men following us?”
“What men?” she asked in exasperation, trying to shake him off.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Jean-Luc said. Must be he decided to play the good cop in this interrogation, which suited Seth just fine. He didn’t like the way his stomach jolted every time she turned those eyes on him, and treating her like a bad guy somewhat dampened the sensation. He again caught her as she tried a duck-and-run maneuver.
She made a small distressed noise in her throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Those men were following us and so were you. Are you telling me there’s no connection between you at all? Because I’m a paranoid bastard—”
“He is,” Jean-Luc said.
Seth ignored the interruption. “—and I have a hard time with coincidences.”
She fisted her free hand on her hip, obviously changing tactics and going on the defensive. Again, fine by him. In his football days, he’d been known for his ability to break through defensive lines.
She scowled at him. “Well, that’s just too damn bad because I don’t know the men you’re talking about. I already told you why I was following you. I thought I recognized you.”
“And you often follow the people you recognize?”
“I didn’t know for sure until just now and—what can I say? Curiosity killed the Phoebe. It’s a curse.”
Jean-Luc gave a choked snort that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Seth glared back at him.
Jean-Luc merely shrugged. “What? She’s feisty. I have a thing for feisty women.”
“You have a thing for all women.” He looked at Phoebe again, found himself staring at her pursed lips. Which was wrong. He made himself meet her eyes, noticed a flicker of…
Panic.
The little fucking liar.
He couldn’t begin to guess why that pissed him off so much. Maybe because the shriveled nub of humanity left in him had wanted her to be telling the truth.
He tightened his grasp on her arm until she sucked in a sharp breath. “We should take her back with us. She’s hiding something.”
She tried to jerk her arm free. “I’m not!”
They both ignored her.
“How do you know?” Jean-Luc asked.
“It’s in her eyes.” If one good thing came out of his captivity, it was his ability to read people and judge motivations. There were some days his ability had been the only thing keeping him sane. He could always tell when his captors were in the mood to hurt him and was able to separate himself from his body to a certain extent, lock himself deep inside his own head. He could also tell when they’d leave him alone and even estimate how long he’d have before they came back. He’d cherished the days they’d left him shackled in a dark room and held on to—
Memories.
Jesus, the memories.
His grip loosened and Phoebe took the opportunity to break free, using her petite stature to her advantage and ducking underneath his outstretched arm.
“Shit! Grab her!”
Jean-Luc tried, but she was already forging a path into the crowd.
Cursing, Seth gave chase, except his bigger size hindered him. She was able to duck, squeeze, and dodge around people while he could only shove them aside or plow over them. But at least she was easy to keep track of with that tail of copper hair streaming behind her, glinting in the last pink rays of the setting sun. And another plus—the men in the market noticed her immodest clothing and were now trying to stop her as well, finally detaining her next to the frantic jewelry vendor’s blanket.
The commotion created a void in the crowd and Seth put on a
burst of speed for the last twenty yards. Which, shit, was a big mistake. By the time he reached her, he was moving too fast, didn’t have enough room to stop, and the laws of physics kicked in. His forward momentum sent them both skidding across the blanket of trinkets as gunfire cracked the air over their heads. Her bag flew up and smacked into his side like a brick as he threw his weight sideways. Even though he took the brunt of the fall, she still gave a muffled whimper of pain when they landed. Hot wetness spilled over his hand from her arm. Her face, inches above his, had gone white, her pupils wide in shock. Her pulse fluttered wildly at the base of her throat.
She was bleeding.
Some fucker had taken a shot at her.
All around them, chaos erupted. The crowd screamed and scattered as the gunshots continued in the tat-tat-tat-boom of an automatic weapon.
Seth’s heart lodged in his throat, which was a damn good thing because it kept his stomach from revolting at each shot.
His men screaming.
Dying.
“You shot me,” Phoebe whispered in disbelief and the tremble in her voice brought him slamming back to the present just as fire peppered the ground feet away from them.
Phoebe screamed. He hauled her to her feet and pointed her in the direction of the nearest buildings. “Move!”
Bullets danced at his heels as he followed. When she turned in a blind panic to run in the opposite direction, he grabbed the back of her shirt and hauled her out of the fleeing crowd toward a narrow opening between two buildings. There was barely room enough for the both of them to stand side by side and the alley reeked of piss, but cover was cover. He’d take it over standing out in the kill zone.
Seth pinned her against the wall with his body and pressed his face into her hair, hoping the hood of his sweatshirt would hide the copper glint from passersby. With any luck, the deepening shadows of evening and his dark sweatshirt would completely conceal them.
If the bad guys didn’t have night vision. Or thermal capabilities.
Honor Reclaimed Page 5