by Linda Conrad
She looked a slightly embarrassed. “Yeah. Actually I’ve tried a couple of times with no luck. But I’m sure Ed will turn up pretty soon. At least, I hope Eltsin or the Taj didn’t find him and hurt him. He should be okay, don’t you think?”
“Jass…”
“No, don’t say it. I don’t want to talk about that.” She wouldn’t listen, but quickly turned and headed toward the motel-room door. “Have you heard from your brother? Let’s go get something to eat unless you think Shakir needs us right away. I’m starving.”
She threw open the door and bright sunshine spilled into the room, temporarily blinding him. When Tarik could focus again, he saw his worst nightmare standing at the threshold of the door.
“Ed!” Jass sounded pleased.
Obviously she didn’t see the weapon in her handler’s hand—or the younger of the Taj agents standing right beside him.
“Back in the room, Jass.” Ed lifted the gun’s barrel an inch and pointed it at Tarik. “Don’t try anything, Kadir, or she’ll be the first to go.”
Jass took a step back, far enough that the two men could enter the room and close the door behind them. “What on earth is going on, Ed? Talk to me.”
She still seemed oblivious to the weapon in Ed’s hand. Tarik began to worry she was trying so hard to believe in her handler that she might get herself killed.
Reaching out, Tarik took her by the elbow, dragging her back to his side. “Ed’s here for a reason. Let’s hear him out.”
“Sure,” she said without looking at Tarik. She stood mutely, facing Ed and the weapon in his hand.
“Oh? He asks and now you listen? You wouldn’t listen when I begged you to.” Ed spit out the words with disgust. “I tried and tried to convince you to leave Kadir and abandon the mission. But you thought you knew better.
“Damn it, Jass,” he went on, as a pained look appeared on his face. “Why’d you stop listening to me after all these years? Why with him?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” For the first time since Tarik had known Jass, her voice sounded weak.
“Yes, you do.” Ed scowled. “You understand fine. You don’t want to believe your own instincts. You’ve been playing that same game for years. Looking the other way when the things I did or said didn’t add up. Time to grow up, Jass.”
“Years? But…”
Tarik wanted to reach out to her. His every sense told him she needed him more than ever right now.
“Don’t even think about it, Kadir.” Ed pointed his gun directly at Jass’s chest. “Give me one more chance to talk to her or watch her die before you.”
Tarik would’ve loved to put his hands around Ed’s neck and squeeze the traitorous life right out of him. But he knew Jass would have to hear the man out, as hard as it would be on her. He would give anything to protect the woman he loved from the coming pain, but this was one time when she had to be strong—alone.
The young Taj agent turned to Ed and spoke with a heavy accent. “Why are we waiting? You said you meant to kill them.”
Ed waved the man off. “Give it a few more minutes first. There’s time.”
“Wait.” Jass raised her chin and stared at Ed. “You’re telling me you have always been—what? A traitor to your country? I don’t believe it. You were my father’s best friend. His partner. He died in your arms.”
Ed chuckled. “Don’t tell me you still believe the sappy story I made up? Jass, you have to be smarter than that. I thought you were as intelligent as your old man.”
Jass’s body went ramrod straight. She fisted her hands at her sides.
“Oh please,” Ed said with a sigh. “You’re saying you didn’t know your father was selling secrets to the Russians? Or that he and I were more than covert agent partners? And here all this time I figured you were trying to learn the ropes from me. That you and I would be the same sort of business partners one day.”
Jass took a tiny, nearly unnoticeable, step to the left, covering Tarik’s position with her own body. He wanted to scream at her to stop it. To get behind him and let him be the protector. But he didn’t dare call attention to what she was doing or make any sudden moves.
But he did manage to secretly slide his arm around behind his waist, fingering the weapon in his belt. He was set. All he needed was a small diversion.
“Tell me what really happened when my father died.”
“Ah, come on, Jass. You don’t want to hash this out right now. Just tell me you don’t give a damn about Kadir and let’s get out of here. There’s a large fortune behind the deal. I’m willing to split it with you.”
The Taj agent looked confused. Tarik imagined the man felt betrayed but couldn’t be totally positive he understood because of the language difficulties.
“Okay, yes. But tell me about my father first.”
The handler sighed. “You don’t want to hear it. Not truthfully.” Then the dirty double agent seemed to come to some private conclusion. “Oh, all right. Your father, my old partner Denny, suddenly decided he’d had enough. After years of our working deals together.”
Ed waved his hand in the air. “Your old man said his change of heart had something to do with you. What a load of bull. But whatever it was that came over him, he wanted out. Pompous ass said he would go to our CIA superiors and rat on our Russian contacts.” He shrugged carelessly. “Well, I couldn’t let him do that, could I?”
Jass drew a breath and whispered, “So you killed him.”
Ed caught her words and scowled. “Of course, I killed him. The bastard was going to turn me in.”
Something in Ed’s manner changed. He tensed as though ready to fire. Tarik palmed his weapon and balanced his stance in preparation.
“I’m sorry to do this, Jass. Really. But you’ve left me no choice.”
“Ed…no…”
Instead of firing at Jass or trying to get Tarik first, Ed swung his body to the left and shot the stunned Taj agent directly through the forehead at point-blank range.
“This is the best plan,” Ed murmured as the body went down. “A big shoot-out will work to my benefit. All of you will have died trying to kill the others.”
Tarik could see the handler’s arm muscles tightening again and realized what came next.
“Duck!” All Tarik could do was react—and pray.
Jass went down like a stone while he pumped three silenced rounds into the surprised double agent, who had turned to fire at Jass but never got off the first shot.
With no loud gun blasts, the sickening sounds of bullets hitting flesh competed for attention with the sight of blood spatter as Ed crumpled to the floor. Tarik waited for any further movement, but none came.
“Tarik!” The smoke hadn’t even cleared when Jass jumped up and spun around. “Oh my god, are you hit?”
Tarik opened his arms and she fell into them, clinging to him as tears sprouted on her cheeks.
“I’m not hit and it’s all over, love,” he murmured soothingly. “I’m fine. And you’re going to be okay.”
He knew her real wounds were hidden and went deep. That it might take years for her to get over what she’d had to face. Her whole life had been a sham. How was anyone supposed to put that aside and go on?
But he would be there for her—however long it took.
Letting her sob into his shoulder, Tarik threw a glance at the handler and the Taj agent laying still in growing pools of blood. They were both gone for good.
It didn’t take too long for Jass’s tears to subside, but she didn’t move out of his embrace. Tarik figured she would be going into shock at any moment and needed professional attention.
“Let me call Shakir,” he whispered. “Get him over here to deal with the bodies so I can take you to the hospital.”
“I don’t need a hospital. I wasn’t hit. But I need to finish this mission.” She reared back and threw a quick look over her shoulder at the two dead men on the floor. “How’re we going to find that delivery device now?�
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Tarik sighed and let loose of his hold on the too-tough covert agent. “You need to stop now, Jass. Let me and my family handle things from here. Go home. I’ll find you and let you know how things turn out. I want you to take enough time to get your head together.”
Jass frowned and stepped away. “My head is okay.” She folded her arms protectively around her middle. “Maybe this revelation was a bit of a shock, but not completely out of the blue. Despite what you and Ed must’ve thought of me, I’m not totally stupid. I wouldn’t discuss it because I wanted to talk things over with Ed first.
“The sight of his weapon changed everything,” she admitted. “I decided to play along for info.”
Tarik didn’t know what to say to her, or what to do for her. She needed help, but while she was in covert-agent mode, he would never get her to accept it.
When he didn’t say anything for a long time, she said, “I was serious. Time is short. A maid could stumble in here at any moment. Do you have any thoughts on how to find the delivery system now?”
“There’s still that chip you planted on the elder Taj agent. Shakir is working on getting the CIA software that we need.”
Jass stepped out of his immediate space, leaving him feeling more alone than ever.
“Ed may have killed the other Taj agent, too.” She pointed down at the dead body closest to her feet. “Judging by the expression on this young Taj’s face, it wouldn’t surprise me if the kid thought he and Ed were a team, double-crossing his boss. But he trusted the wrong man, poor kid. Triple crosses didn’t seem to be out of the question for good old Ed.”
Tarik looked down at the Taj agent, too and noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Bending on one knee, he pushed the kid’s loose long-sleeved shirt up past his elbow, allowing him to study what appeared to be a new tattoo on the boy’s forearm.
“What are you looking at?” Jass bent to study the image, too. “The tattoo? What about it?”
The picture was of a dagger. Not an unusual decoration for the Taj Zabbar—when it came to pictures or images. But body decorating was not something the Taj accepted.
“It’s new.” Tarik touched the outline. “Done within the last twelve hours.”
“You mean this kid must’ve stopped here in Miami long enough to get a tattoo? That is odd.” She peered closer, studying the decoration. “Do you see this? Look, along the knife blade. Is that some kind of writing or hieroglyphics?”
Tarik bent his head lower. “They’re numbers, written in the Taj Zabbar language.”
“What does it mean?”
He sat back on his heels and thought about why a young Taj agent would take the time to do something like getting a tattoo when that was so abhorrent to his culture. There was only one reason Tarik could think of—money.
“What if this set of numbers corresponds to the marking on the container holding the delivery device?” he muttered almost to himself.
“Now that’s a clever thought.” Jass straightened up and folded her arms over her chest. “Shipping containers all look alike with the only difference being their number designation. I like it. Can we find someone to translate those numbers into something we can understand?”
“No problem.” Tarik stood, went to the desk and retrieved paper and a pen.
“Oh? Who do you have in mind?”
He came back and starting copying down the numbers. “You’re looking at him.”
Adrenaline overload let-down. Jass was familiar with the symptoms, but the shock-like feeling was still a pain in the butt. She brushed past the shakes as they threatened to send her to the floor and produce serious quantities of tears. Going through the motions on autopilot, she grabbed her backpack and left the room with Tarik on their way to the port and one of the shipping container storage areas.
After the motel-room door closed behind them and the sight of all that blood and gore disappeared, she gulped down another breath and fought the onslaught of nausea. Damn it. She refused to be this weak.
Just because a few moments ago she’d learned that her father had been a double agent—and her beloved friend Ed had killed him—was no reason to collapse when there was still a job to be done. Jass prided herself on being calm in the midst of chaos. No allowances for personal dramas.
She took a stab at being flip. “I’m sure glad your shooting arm was tended by that medic on the plane. You can thank me later for nagging you about it. Good shot, by the way.”
“Good ducking,” Tarik answered as he opened the car door and let the buildup of hot air escape before climbing in to turn on the A/C.
Their partnership was almost at an end. He would soon go off to fight more of his family’s battles. And she would be stuck in endless rounds of post-shooting debriefs.
Just as well. She wasn’t sure she could handle dealing with her newfound feelings for Tarik at the same time as she was dealing with life-changing knowledge about the people whom she’d thought loved her.
Greed. It had all been about greed. Her own father had sold out his country for money.
Heartbreak and pain. Too much of both were threatening to consume her. She wasn’t ready to face either one.
For now she shoveled all her baggage, questions and misery into a corner of her mind to deal with another time.
Tarik set the GPS and drove the car out of the motel’s parking lot.
“Do we know where we’re going?”
He shot her a quelling glance and pulled his SAT phone out of his pocket. “I’m calling Shakir to send someone to take care of everything here. And to give him a head’s up on this container number. Maybe he can narrow down the possibilities.”
“Good idea. There’s probably hundreds of containers in the storage yard.”
It turned out there were more like thousands of containers in ten different yards. Every minute of the day containers were being off loaded from ships and sent to storage. Then those containers were eventually loaded onto semi-tractor-trailers for shipment by truck throughout the U.S.
Shakir met them at one of the yards. “We’re most fortunate to have a genius in our family.”
“Cousin Karim? What’d he find out?”
“He was able to hack into the shipyard computers and track the container by its number. It should be somewhere in this yard.”
Jass scanned a glance over the many containers. Then she noticed a nearly quarter-mile-long line of trucks waiting to be checked out of the yard with their shipping containers now securely attached to their tractors like any other load.
She turned to Tarik and Shakir. “Are we sure that container hasn’t already been loaded onto one of those trucks?”
Tarik looked over her head at the line of semis. “You take left. I’ll take right.”
“I’ll stop the trucks at the gate,” his brother called out as all of them scattered in different directions.
Jass pulled her weapon from her backpack and took off down the line, checking numbers as she ran. About ten containers later, she was huffing and stopped to take a breath.
When she looked up into the cab of the next truck, she spotted a driver with his ball cap pulled low on his forehead. But Jass couldn’t miss those black, beady eyes. The elder Taj agent!
He looked up then too and their eyes met, held. Then he disappeared. Jass dashed around the front of the truck and found him climbing down out of the cab.
“Hold it.” She held her weapon with both hands, training it on his substantial gut. “It’s over.”
Instead of raising his arms in surrender, the elder Taj turned and ran.
Jass roared, all the frustration and anger rising to the surface, and leaped on his back, slamming him to the hot asphalt. Air escaped his lungs as she rammed her knee into his back and pressed the barrel of her gun to the back of his neck.
“Don’t give me a reason to pull the trigger.” Shaking badly by the time he groaned out his acceptance, she tried to release her finger, but her hand was frozen on the gun.
&nb
sp; “You’re done, my love.” Tarik appeared, standing over her and easing the weapon from her hand. “Let go, Jass. The mission is finished. Let me take over from here.”
Her hand opened for him, only for him, and sudden uncontrollable tears blinded her to everything else.
Chapter 16
“I want to see her.” Tarik scowled at his brother. “I don’t understand why the powers-that-be insisted on separating us.” It had been nearly six hours since they’d captured the Taj elder and recovered the nuclear delivery device, and he hadn’t caught sight of Jass in the last five.
Nearly sunset by now, tourists on the beaches would be ordering cocktails or having beers with their friends. But the Kadirs, the Task Force and the local CIA were more or less imprisoned at the Broward County Sheriff’s office, waiting for General Wainwright to arrive and take charge of the situation.
The CIA had spent the whole day taking Jass’s statement in one of the interrogation rooms. Tarik hadn’t liked it. Hadn’t liked the chalky look of her skin or the sunken appearance of her eyes when they’d ridden in the back of the sheriff’s cruiser over here. He’d wanted her to see a doctor. Maybe even a whole staff of psychologists.
Instead, Jass had agreed to be sequestered to tell her old superiors at the CIA what little she knew of her handler’s secret activities. Without Ed alive to grill, the CIA and the Department of Defense would have to piece together the real story of treason from old files and Jass’s memories.
“I understand they’re moving her to D.C. in a little while.” Shakir stood quietly with his hands folded behind his back. “Our job’s done here, brother. We located the delivery device and now the DOD, the State Department and the entire Executive Branch will have to accept that the Taj Zabbar are dealing in international terror.”
“They should’ve listened a year ago when we tried to warn them.” Tarik’s patience was wearing thin, but he didn’t want to tick off his own brother. “Do we know whether the Taj elder has told them anything yet?”
“Are you serious? Someone from the Pentagon showed up this morning at the container yard near Port Everglades and whisked that elder Taj agent away as an enemy combatant. He’s long gone.