“Where’s Seth?” Harvard asked, returning with the medical kit.
“Dunno.” Jean-Luc sat up and spit out a mouthful of blood. “Before all hell broke loose, we were being followed by the two shooters and a woman. Seth seemed to think the woman was hiding something when we questioned her. She got away from us, he chased her, and that’s when the shooting started. I lost track of him.”
“All right,” Jesse said after giving Jean-Luc a quick examination. “You’re gonna be sore, but nothing appears ruptured or broken. You get dizzy or start to have any pain or swelling in your abdomen or you start pissing blood, you tell me, Cajun. No toughin’ it out. Got it?”
Jean-Luc offered up a weak, bloody smile. “Oui. I’m a wimp when it comes to pain.”
“Good.” He grabbed several antiseptic wipes and started cleaning the superficial wounds when a shadow blocked out his light.
Gabe stood over them and took in Jean-Luc’s condition, grim-faced. “And Seth?”
“MIA,” Jesse answered.
“What about Fahim? Did you meet up with him?”
“No,” Jean-Luc said, hissing at the sting from the antiseptic pads. Guy really was a wimp. “I found him slumped over the steering wheel of his car a block away from the market. Shot through the head at close range. This was in his trunk.” He shoved the duffel bag toward Gabe’s feet.
Gabe bent over to unzip it. Weapons. Radios. “Well, it’s a start.” He held out a hand and between him and Jesse, they managed to pull Jean-Luc off the floor. “Let’s get the guys out here for another briefing. We need a new game plan.”
Chapter Nine
When she refused to take Seth to the shelter, Phoebe thought they’d go someplace else with amenities like water and heat. She certainly hadn’t expected to climb into the skeleton of a building in a deserted, bombed-out portion of Kabul.
“What are we doing?”
“Nobody will look for us here.” Seth held out a hand to help her over a pile of rubble. She hated accepting anything from him, but she was in pain and still shaking from her earlier brush with death and she didn’t trust her footing.
A skinny stray dog with feral eyes lifted its head and growled as they passed. She shivered. “Looks like nobody has lived on this street in years.”
“That’s the point.” He shot her a narrowed-eyed look over his shoulder. “We lost the shooter, but I need to make sure he doesn’t have some sort of tracker on you before I take you back to my team. If he comes looking for you here, I’ll know he’s got you tagged because he has no reason to be here otherwise.”
They climbed another rubble pile and entered a room that appeared to have once been a living area, with tattered tapestries still covering the mostly intact walls. Seth crossed to the street-facing wall, which sported a giant hole. He checked the street, watching for a long time. He didn’t seem inclined to talk, so she kept her mouth shut.
Talking to him was dangerous anyway. She couldn’t let her guard down or he might find out…things…she’d rather he not know. Like that she’d used his personal tragedy to further her career.
Finally, his posture relaxed and he sat on a chunk of concrete. He searched his pockets for something. “Fuck. My phone’s gone.”
Phoebe sank down the wall until her butt hit the dusty floor, suddenly too tired to remain standing. “I don’t have one either.”
“Then what do you have in that bag?”
She pulled the bag around in front of her and lifted the flap. “Just my camera. I don’t even have my wallet or passport with me.”
“Of course you’d have a camera,” he said, censure thick in his voice. “Don’t even think about taking my picture.”
She winced. “You really hate that I’m a journalist, don’t you?”
“I have no love for the media.”
Right. After everything he’d gone through—everything she’d put him through—who could blame him for that? Guilt tightened her throat, all but strangling her, and she opened her mouth to say—what? “I’m sorry” wasn’t going to cut it. “It’s all my fault” would probably be a good place to start, but what if she confessed and he left her here, alone? She really didn’t want to be alone in a strange place when there were men with guns chasing her. So instead, she leaned her head back and shut her eyes. “Zina’s going to worry about me.”
“Zina?”
“A friend. The shelter’s founder, Zina Ojanpura.”
Seth made a sound of disapproval. “That’s going to get you in trouble.”
Her eyes popped open and she squinted through the darkness at him. “What is?”
“You’re too open. You didn’t have to volunteer all that information. You could have just left it at ‘friend.’ Instead, you told me her name and her occupation. Now if I wanted, I could track down Zina Ojanpura and the shelter. If I was a bad guy, I could do a lot more.”
“You’re not a bad guy.” A bad guy would have saved his own neck at the market. A bad guy would have left her to fend for herself when she fell at that crossroads, and she had a feeling Seth would have stayed with her even if she’d made the decision to run in the opposite direction.
“Just crazy, huh?” he said with a hint of self-deprecation coloring his tone.
She let go a nervous laugh. “Well, no, but—”
“It’s okay. I know what I am.” He pushed to his feet again. “Let me see your arm.”
Phoebe recoiled. “It’s fine.”
A penlight switched on, illuminating his face before he flicked the small beam over her arm. With his brows drawn together and lips flattened in a grim line, he looked…concerned. “You’re still bleeding.”
“Only a little.”
He stood still for a second, then doused the light. She sensed movement in the darkness, heard clothing rustling. Her imagination filled in the blanks. He had a hard body, but not as bulky as it had been in the pictures she’d seen of him when he was a Marine. She pictured lean muscles flexing as he pulled the sweatshirt off over his head.
Good God, she found that mental image far more appealing than she had any right to. Even though it was all in her head, she lowered her gaze to her lap. The fluttery sensation in her belly wasn’t a tingle of sexual awareness. Nope, not at all. It was hunger. For food. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, after all.
The penlight came on again and she found his boots planted directly in front of her. She took in the long lines of his legs, his narrow hips, and the definite outline of his penis at the front of his pants. Not aroused, just…there. And large.
He shifted his weight on his feet.
Shit. She was gaping at his crotch, wasn’t she? Heat rushed into her face as she struggled to find something—anything—else to look at. Problem was, with the penlight offering only a meager beam, he was all she could see. At least he still wore his sweatshirt, thank God. In his hand was a white T-shirt that he must have been wearing underneath.
Either he didn’t notice her blatant perusal of his body or he chose to ignore it. He knelt in front of her and got to work ripping a strip of fabric from the shirt. When he reached for her wounded arm, she again flinched away.
“Phoebe.” Exasperation colored his voice. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Oh, she knew that, but she wasn’t about to let him do something as intimate as bandage her wounds. While he wouldn’t hurt her, she would most definitely end up hurting him.
She snagged the fabric from his hand. “Thanks, but I can do it.”
“Yeah? How do you plan on tying it?”
Without missing a beat, she one-handedly looped the strip around her arm, fashioned a loose knot, then gripped the end with her teeth and tightened it.
His brows lifted in surprise. “Okay. Didn’t expect that.”
“Girl Scout,” she admitted. “I’m not a completely helpless damsel in distress.”
“And I never attacked your abilities to take care of yourself. Your honesty, yes. Abilities, no.” Shutting off the light, he pi
cked his way back to his seat and settled into silence. Minutes ticked by.
“I’m not hiding anything,” she blurted. At least nothing he thought she was hiding.
And there was that guilt again, chewing at the back of her conscience.
“Your eyes say otherwise,” he said after a yawn. “But I do believe you have nothing to do with the men at the market. They were after you, not us. It just appeared they were following us because you were.”
“Why would they follow me? I was grocery shopping.”
“Obviously, you pissed someone off.” Another yawn, and his voice took on a drowsy mumble in the darkness. “Someone with enough power to make you conveniently disappear.”
She started to protest, but her mouth went dry. Tehani’s husband. She’d suspected all along he was a man with power. Could he have found out about her attempts to discover his identity? Her blood clotted with ice. She knew what the man was capable of, and the idea he could be after her made her very glad she wasn’t alone right now.
“Seth?”
No answer.
She squinted toward him, making out his slack features in the pale moonlight streaming in from a hole in the ceiling. His chin rested on his chest and his hand hung limply off the edge of his concrete seat. He breathed slow, steady.
Out cold.
Shivering, Phoebe hugged herself, careful not to jar her injured arm, and settled in to wait the night out.
…
Jahangir Siddiqui hated the necessity for this trip, hated returning to the mountains that had bred him. It was a desolate place, full of memories of the dead, and coming back to it after all these years still settled a weight in his stomach.
In the driver’s seat, Askar, his soldier, ended a call on a satellite phone and glanced in the rearview mirror. “Sir, the men have checked in from the market.”
Finally, some good news.
Since leaving the comfort of his city home, he’d been so wrapped up in a sick sense of nostalgia, he’d almost forgotten about the American journalist, Phoebe Leighton, who had been asking far too many of the wrong questions of the wrong people. When one of his loyal soldiers in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs contacted him this morning to say she claimed to have photographic evidence linking a public official to the rash of suicide bombs, he’d decided it was time to dispose of her. The men he’d sent to follow her had orders to kill or capture—he didn’t particularly care one way or another.
“Is she alive?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The news shot a thrill of power through him and he hardened in response. So maybe he did care, after all. “Good. Have them take her to my home in Kabul. I’ll deal with her myself.”
Askar remained silent. Too silent.
The sexual buzz faded and his blood pressure inched skyward. He sat forward in his seat. “They did capture her.”
A statement, but Askar answered as if he’d asked a question. “No, sir. Two American men intervened.”
Siddiqui leaned back again and rubbed a hand over his beard. A hard bump in the road made him glance out the window at the sheer drop into the valley below, mere inches from the vehicle’s tire. The height didn’t bother him. He’d grown up in these mountains, had cut his teeth on this rugged terrain. What bothered him was that beyond the valley, the mountains pointed toward the sky like giant white breasts. He thought he could see the scar of dead land on the far side that used to be a village. His village. His hands began to tremble and he closed his fingers into a fist.
Fucking Americans.
Askar glanced in the mirror again, his features still completely impassive. “The men did, however, find Fahim.”
“Ah.” Siddiqui shook out his hands and made himself turn from the window, some of his anger dissolving. “The traitor’s friend. I assume he’s been dispatched for his lies.”
“He’s dead,” Askar confirmed without a flicker of any kind of emotion in his black eyes.
“I wonder how Zakir will feel about that. I want to speak to him first thing.”
“Yes, sir.”
Up ahead, the road dead-ended in a mud wall and dented metal gate. The compound. He sighed as the gate swung open. It did his heart good to know he now had possession of the same American outpost that had ordered the attack on his village ten years ago.
Once inside the courtyard, Askar shut off the vehicle’s ignition, but didn’t move from his seat.
Siddiqui paused before opening his door. “Is there something else?”
“Niazi Village. Do you still want them punished?”
He paused and took several seconds to consider it, since decisions made in haste rarely turned out well. Niazi Village sat on a spit of rocky land that wasn’t even good for poppy farming. Its only value lay in the stopover it provided for his drug runners en route to and from Pakistan, which was the only reason he bothered to claim it under his protection. However, the villagers negated that protection when they hid his wife from him.
“Yes,” he finally answered. “And it must look like the Americans did it.” He needed a sufficient reason to initiate a war when he was elected in a few months, and there was none better than the deaths of peaceful, innocent mountain people. “You can make that happen, yes?”
“Yes, sir.” Askar pushed open the door and grabbed his rifle from the passenger seat. He circled the car and opened Siddiqui’s door.
The sounds of struggle caught Siddiqui’s attention from the other side of the main building. And then came the screams of pain. He strode through the courtyard toward the noise, Askar following in his shadow, and found Zakir Rossoul stripped bare, hands and feet tied spread-eagle to a set of posts. The men took turns slapping a cane across their prisoner’s backside and each lash brought about another anguished cry from his parched lips.
“Has he talked yet?” Siddiqui asked as he watched the spectacle.
“No,” Askar said.
“I suppose that means we’re not trying hard enough.” He watched the torture for a moment longer. “Who do you think he is, Askar? Who do you think sent him? The Americans?”
“If so, he’s very good. He hasn’t said a word of English.”
“Maybe he belongs to one of my competitors then. We need him to start talking.” He stepped forward. “Enough.”
His men backed away, heads bowed. One offered him the cane. He took hold of it and strolled over to Zakir Rossoul. The traitor. The liar. The thief. The infidel who posed as a righteous man.
Using the tip of the cane, he lifted the prisoner’s chin. “Are you ready to tell me who sent you to spy on me?”
Zakir’s head rolled toward his shoulder as if his neck was too weak to hold it up. His bloodshot brown eyes were bleary but still defiant, and he spit in Siddiqui’s direction. Or he tried to, but his mouth was too dry and he only made a pathetic pfft sound. Still, that kind of behavior would not be tolerated. Siddiqui jabbed the cane into his stomach and his knees gave out. His body swung forward, catching on his bound arms.
Siddiqui gripped his chin and forced his head up. “Your friend Fahim spoke so highly of you when we first met. He assured me you were a righteous man, a soldier ready to die to see Afghanistan rise from the ashes and take back the power the West has stolen from us. Fahim has paid for his lies.”
Zakir winced, but said nothing.
Stepping back, Siddiqui wiped his hand on his tunic and fixed a contemplative expression on his face. “Askar, didn’t Fahim have a family?”
“Yes, sir. A wife and two young daughters.”
“We should send them our condolences.”
Zakir jerked against his bonds. “No!”
Patience frayed, Siddiqui jabbed his prisoner with the cane again. “Then tell me who sent you!”
Zakir stayed silent.
With a shake of his head, he turned away from the pathetic excuse of a man. “I’ve seen enough here.” His helicopter was waiting to take him back to civilization and he planned to be on it in the next fifteen minutes.
“Askar, I want you to stay and manage this interrogation. And send some men to kill Fahim’s family.”
Askar trailed him back to the car like the loyal dog he was. “Would you like me to kill Zakir as well? We could record his execution, stir up the masses.”
Siddiqui grinned, pride filling his chest. Askar was stone-cold and unapologetic about it. The perfect soldier. “No. Not yet. Sooner or later, he will talk.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“If he doesn’t…” Siddiqui stopped before climbing into the driver’s seat and looked to the south, where Niazi Village sat, quiet and unassuming. He smiled. “Then he’ll die with the villagers who helped him steal my wife.”
Chapter Ten
Phoebe jerked awake to screams, the bloodcurdling sound of a man suffering the most horrible atrocities imaginable. She didn’t remember falling asleep and at first her unfamiliar surroundings sent panic skittering over her skin. She sat up, cold to the center of her being, her injured arm stiff and protesting any kind of movement. Soft early-morning light filtered through the hole in the wall, burnishing dusty motes as Seth thrashed so hard he fell off the concrete block he’d been sitting on. But instead of waking him, the jarring impact only increased his struggles.
Phoebe leaped to her feet and started toward him, but thought better of it when her shadow fell over his face and he started screaming again. She jumped away from his swinging arm, heart lodged in her throat. She’d once heard it wasn’t good to wake someone up in the middle of a night terror, and honestly, the idea of getting close enough to touch him right now tightened her chest until she had trouble drawing in a breath. But dear God, he was suffering. His handsome face contorted in very real pain as he relived something nobody should ever have to live through once.
How could she stand back and do nothing?
She eased forward. “Seth?”
He screamed.
Forget caution. Sucking in a fortifying breath, she knelt beside him, wrapped her arms tight around his bucking torso, and just held him. His heart sounded like it was about to explode underneath her ear and each jerk of his body sent pain through her wounded arm. Tears blurred her vision, but she held on, whispering a litany of comforts. Meaningless, but all she could think to do. “Shh. It’s okay, Seth. You’re safe now.”
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