Zara

by Jade Kerrion

  The panel slammed in her face and sound rattled behind the door as heavy locks drew back. The gate swung open, and Zara stumbled to her knees, peeking up from beneath the rim of the scarf. Three men stared at her, their faces dismayed, and then exchanged wide-eyed glances. One of them stepped past her to stare at the refugee camp in the distance. “I don’t see any fighting,” his voice rumbled.

  “They came to my house, took my cousin. They took me, too, but I ran.” She clutched at the hand of the closest man. He pulled back but she did not let him go. “Don’t let them take me.”

  “We’re clear.” Grass’s voice rang with gratitude. “Moving in.”

  The man whose hand she held stilled. “Take you where? Who?” The concern in his eyes and an undercurrent of kindness belied his rough tone. Memory pricked her; just like Danyael. His angry gaze darted toward the camp. “Nakob?” he growled under his breath. “Filthy dogs.”

  Alarm prickled along the length of Zara’s spine. If the men weren’t allied with Nakob, then—

  A gunshot rang from the compound. The men’s heads whipped up as they spun in the direction of the sound, their hands automatically reaching for their rifles. Spotlights flared, filling the night with light.

  Some part of her mind screamed at her to stop, but her instincts were too ingrained, her reflexes too perfected to be anything but lethal. From the folds of her black robes, she pulled out her handgun. Her finger squeezed thrice. Three bullets spit of out the bulky barrel of her silenced handgun. Three bodies crumpled to the ground. Blood stained the dirt beneath her feet.

  Only then did she release the man’s hand. It fell lifelessly beside the man who had, for a split second, reminded her of Danyael’s instinctive compassion.

  Grass’s commands rattled through her earpiece. Zara ignored orders she had no intention of obeying. She concealed her weapon in her robes and ran into the compound. Instead of entering the main house, she veered toward the adjacent buildings, running past women who scrambled from the guesthouses in various stages of undress. Her gaze swept across the seemingly identical buildings, and she ran toward the farther of the two houses where a woman had not emerged.

  A low privacy wall surrounded the building, but the wooden gate swung open with a low creak. The small villa was dark, but she raised her hand to the light fixture over the gate. Heat warmed her fingers before she made contact with the recently extinguished lightbulb. Beneath her robes, the fingers of her other hand tightened around the grip of her handgun.

  Her gaze swept over the darkened, landscaped garden surrounding the guesthouse. Water lapped against the side of the tiled pool, and glistened on the stone steps leading from the pool into the guesthouse. Glass doors sealed the entrance to the house, and heavy curtains concealed movement within, but not the slight twitch of the curtains themselves.

  Zara’s eyes narrowed. Overhead, clouds drifted across the sliver of the moon. For several seconds as gray of the night dulled to black, she sidestepped into shadows and adjusted her headscarf to cover her face. The high-tech material woven from lab-grown microfibers shrouded her in darkness but allowed her to see clearly through the cloth that covered her eyes.

  The shadows welcomed her as she crept along the wall. A square table and four chairs cluttered the small patio on the left side of the building. She had interrupted dinner; three half-eaten plates of food were warm to the touch. A higher wall separated the outdoor dining area from whatever lay behind it. A bathroom, perhaps even an outdoor bathroom; it would be highly unusual for the area, but given the little she knew about Alhassan’s penchant for blending eastern and western standards of luxury, she would not be surprised. She secured her weapon and bracing her feet against the sharp right angle of the connecting walls, climbed silently over it.

  She had not been wrong about the external bathroom—a charming space paved with smooth cobblestones and decorated with flowers draped over the edges of hanging pots. Zara pressed her ear against the closed door separating the bathroom from the rest of the building but could not hear anything. A frown furrowed her brow as she reached for her handgun. She crouched low. Assuming all three were armed, and assuming they possessed a solid dose of common sense, they would each watch one of the three entrances into the building—the front glass door, the patio door, and the bathroom door.

  And they would stand farthest from the doors they were watching while still maintaining a clear line of sight.

  Which would place them right about—

  She threw her weight against the door. It flung open and she rolled forward, beneath the rapid rush of bullets flying over her head. As she slid across the smooth tiles, she brought her gun up and fired once.

  A scream of pain tore through the air.

  —there.

  Only then did her eyes confirm what her instincts had known for a fact. Her bullet had found its mark.

  That hail of bullets stopped, but another picked up from the far corner of the room, from the person who would have been monitoring the glass door.

  Where was the third?

  Zara slid alongside the bed and fired under it.

  Her unseen attacker gasped and hit the floor. Zara rolled over the bed and came up in battle crouch. Point blank, she aimed her gun at the person who had fired at her and squeezed the trigger. A bullet spit out. Her attacker’s body shuddered once and stilled.

  “Please, please, don’t shoot,” a scarcely coherent voice sobbed in English. The muffled cry emerged from the corner five feet behind Zara’s attacker.

  Zara backed away so that she could simultaneously watch the front gate through the glass door and the shape cowering in the darkness. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Lila Forrester. My-my father…”

  Zara flicked on the light mounted on her handgun and trained the beam on the girl’s tear-streaked face.

  “Package acquired,” Zara murmured.

  “Where are you?” Klah demanded.

  “The fourth guesthouse from the main building. I’m coming out. I’ll need cover.”

  “Got it. God, you’re on her.”

  Zara looked at Lila. “Come on.”

  The girl swallowed, her throat moving visibly. “You killed them. Who-who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am.” Zara knelt beside the dead body and flipped it over. The unseeing eyes of a Caucasian woman stared back at her. Zara reached around the woman’s neck and yanked off a thin chain with dog tags. “Stand up,” she told Lila.

  The girl pushed slowly to her feet. Her lips quivered, and she sagged against the wall.

  “Move.” Zara shoved the girl in front of her, stopping long enough to pull a matching set of dog tags from around her first victim’s neck—also a woman. She glanced at the tags, and her jaw tensed. Marine security guards.

  Embassy guards.

  What the hell?

  Lila’s eyes darted nervously, and she swallowed, the sound audible.

  Zara gripped Lila’s thin wrist. “Don’t run. I’d have to shoot you to stop you, and it’d be a waste of a bullet.”

  Klah’s voice snorted in Zara’s ear. “Not big into assuring victims, are you?”

  “I would, but I’m not sure who the victims are anymore.”

  “What?” Klah sounded as perplexed as Zara felt.

  She did not have any answers for Klah as she slid open the glass door and pushed the sobbing Lila out ahead of her.

  God’s calm voice spoke through the earpiece. “I’ve got eyes on you.”

  “We’re extracting,” Grass ordered. “Fall back on Zara.”

  “No,” Zara snapped. “Stay the hell away. I need space to move.” The partial truth concealed her rapidly eroding faith in the situation.

  “Copy that.”

  Zara tugged Lila along the outer wall. The young woman recoiled from the flare of lights and the sounds of gunfire from the main house, but Zara dragged her toward the main gate.

  A bullet pierced the wooden post, spraying splinters. Zara droppe
d to the ground, pulling Lila down beside her. A spray of bullets from an upper-story window pierced the wall above her head. “God!”

  “On it.”

  Another bullet hit the wall so close to her that concrete shards cut into her cheek. She bit back a snarl. That was what came from expecting a man to save her ass. Where the hell was he? She yanked Lila to her feet and stepped behind the girl. “Don’t move.”

  Lila froze although her chest heaved with each breath. Her eyes were large and panic-stricken.

  The shots fell abruptly silent.

  “Zara!” Klah shouted. “What are you doing? You can’t use the ambassador’s daughter as hostage!”

  Watch me. Zara swung her handgun up and fired several shots into the upper story window. Someone screamed and cursed aloud, not Lebanese or Arabic, but in English.

  In American-accented English.

  What the hell was going on?

  “Go!” Zara shoved Lila out the gate and dashed after her. “Toward the camp. Run!” Bullets ripped up the grass behind Zara.

  Lila screamed. She covered her head with her hands and ran in a zigzag down the hill.

  “Zara, damn it!” Klah cursed. “We’re over here! Where are you taking her?”

  “Where the people shooting at me aren’t Americans.” She pressed a code into her watch to sever the secure network connections between her bionic devices and the SEAL team before grabbing Lila’s wrist and jerking her to a halt. The young girl stared up at her, lips trembling.

  “You’ll need this.” Zara unwrapped her headscarf and placed it over Lila’s hair, before drawing the edge low over the girl’s face to cover her eyes. She wrapped the edges of the scarf loosely over the lower half of Lila’s face. “Keep your head down.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Into Shatila.”

  “The refugee camp?” Lila recoiled. “I can’t go in there. It’s…” She glanced at the flickers of light at the base of the hill. “It’s dangerous.”

  Dangerous? And all the near-death experiences before weren’t? Zara rolled her eyes as she plucked the tiny beauty mark off her face. She had to get rid of the microphone or the SEALs would use it to track her down. “Stick close to me.”

  “Why? Who are you?”

  “I thought I was part of the team sent to free you, but I’m not sure anymore.”

  Lila pulled sharply away. “I’m not going with you. I—”

  A deafening whoosh silenced the rest of Lila’s words. The familiar sound dropped Zara instinctively into a prone position. She looked up at the missile’s light trail through the night sky. No, God, no—

  The explosive-laden tip pierced the villa wall. The initial dust cloud of crumbling mortar vanished in the red-orange fireball that punched out. Shockwaves and heat raced ahead of the collapsing debris.

  Lila’s shocked whimper was scarcely audible.

  Zara’s internal curse didn’t have time to make it past her lips. She tightened her grip on Lila’s wrist, dragged the girl to her feet, and ran for the safety of Shatila. Sobbing, Lila stumbled along, her will to resist squashed into submission by a missile blast. Their pace slowed only when they blended into the swell of people rushing out of Shatila to stare goggle-eyed at the burning compound on the now-distant hilltop. Even so, Zara did not relax until the wide expanse of Lebanon’s fields shrank into narrow paths between dirt-streaked buildings. The streets were little more than packed mud, and the air clogged with the stench of humanity crowded into impossibly small spaces.

  Zara snapped her fingers around a grubby little hand brushing against her robes. The child passing by her flinched. “There’s nothing there for you,” she said in Arabic, her tone harsher than usual.

  The aspiring pickpocket nodded slowly. His throat worked as he swallowed hard, no doubt against the fear she smelled on him—the instinctive terror of prey trapped before a predator.

  The normality steadied her. “Here.” She pulled a coin from her pocket and patted him on the back before depositing the coin into his hand. “Off you go.” She released him, and he dashed away, vanishing into the maze of darkened streets.

  Zara led Lila through Shatila. People bustled past them, but no one stared at them for any longer than warranted by idle interest. Recalling her way through Shatila was more difficult than Zara had anticipated. The last time she had visited was nearly a year earlier, and the transient nature of life at Shatila made navigating through landmarks challenging. The bakery that sold falafel balls and fresh-baked pita bread was gone, but the barbershop—little more than rusty swivel chairs beneath a battered awning—was still there. Behind it, tucked in an alcove, a wooden door opened into a steep, poorly lit stairway.

  At the top of the stairs, an old woman, her leathery skin pleated with age, sat behind a table. Her eyes were round and black as little beads. Without a nod or a word, she slid a key across the splintered surface to Zara.

  Zara glanced at the tag attached to the key and led Lila down the hallway to the fourth door. The lock appeared rusty but the key turned easily. She flicked the light switch on the interior wall, and a sickly orange glow from the naked lightbulb washed over the only piece of furniture in the room, a double bed.

  She pulled Lila into the room and locked the door before striding across the room to close the windows, shutting out the cool night air. No need to tell Lila that they had found shelter in a whorehouse, or that Zara had a standing arrangement with the aged proprietor to use it as a safe house.

  Her arms wrapped across her stomach, Lila retreated into a corner of the room. “What was that?” Her voice quivered.

  “Surface-to-air missile, likely American made.”

  Her voice shrank until it was scarcely a whisper. “Did anyone…survive?”

  Zara’s chest tightened. From the way the house crumbled like moldy cheese, no. She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Was it because of…me?”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Lila blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Start at the field trip.”

  “But what does—?”

  “Just tell me.”

  Lila brought her knees up to her chest and clasped her trembling hands in front of them. “Ms. El-Amin brought my class to the Gibran Museum.”

  “How long ago had the trip been planned?”

  “Oh, about two months. We have a field trip every two or three months to one of the local museums.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  Lila shook her head, swallowing hard. “There’s nothing to say, really. We had just arrived in the school bus. Ms. El-Amin was sorting through our tickets at the entrance when men in trucks pulled up. They surrounded us, hustled us back on the bus, and drove us out of there.”

  “Did they identify themselves?”

  “No, but they were local. I mean…” Lila gestured at her skin with a waving motion of her arm. “They took us to a camp. I don’t know where exactly…among ruins of some sort. Two days later, they put me in a car and drove for about an hour to the middle of nowhere. Another car, a luxury car, met us there with different people, like high-end security guards. They brought me here, to that villa—” Her eyes swelled with tears again. “—where the guards were waiting. Marines, from the embassy.”

  “Why didn’t the Marines take you home or to the embassy?”

  Lila’s lips trembled. “They said I couldn’t return home yet. The other girls were still missing, and it would be bad for America’s image if word got out that they’d traded for the ambassador’s daughter, but not the others.”

  “They traded? Who told you that?”

  “Dad.”

  Zara masked the flare of her rising anger. The ambassador’s daughter had been saved and the other girls abandoned to sexual assault and slavery. “So you’ve spoken to your father?”

  “Every day. And to Mom, too,” Lila said, apparently blessed—or cursed—with sweet ignorance.

  “Did they tell you the name of your hos
t, the owner of the house?”

  “No, no one did. I mean, the embassy guards let me walk around the big compound sometimes, but never unescorted. I never went into the big house, or any of the surrounding guesthouses. I thought that perhaps I was in some kind of exclusive hotel.”

  “Besides your guards, did you see anyone else? Other guests? Security guards?”

  “Just the maids who came to clean the house and pool every day, and deliver meals. I knew others were around—I could hear activity outside of the guest villa walls—but I didn’t see a thing.”

  “And you didn’t think to ask, to challenge anything?”

  The girl scowled. “Dad said it was fine, that everything was under control.” She glared at Zara. “Who are you?”

  “Tell me about your teacher, Yasmin El-Amin.”

  “She teaches history and art. She’s sort of new; she only started last fall.”

  “Did she ever say anything about family? Parents? Siblings?”

  Lila’s chin lifted. “Who are you anyway? Why are you asking me all these questions? Why do you care about who my teacher is?”

  Zara shrugged. “Because she’s behind the kidnapping—”

  Lila’s jaw dropped.

  “—and I’d like to know who else I need to hunt down.” Zara sat at the edge of the bed. “She seduced my idiot cousin into aligning Hezbollah with Nakob. If she had succeeded, the SEAL team sent in to rescue the girls would have been completely outnumbered.”

  The young woman’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish gulping air. “You’re with the SEALs? But you’re…not a SEAL.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But you were with them.” Her eyes widened. “The people who attacked the villas, those were SEALs?”

  Zara nodded.

  “But why?”

  “They were looking for you. You weren’t with the other girls at the first place we looked, and Yasmin, after some persuasion, told us where to find you.”

  “But why would the SEALs attack the villa where I was safe?”

  Zara closed her fist around the two dog tags deep in the pocket of her robes before meeting Lila’s blue eyes. “That is exactly what I’m trying to find out.”