The gown was cool against her skin. It was not an unpleasant sensation.
Somehow that and the fact that the sun was up and streaming in through the palace windows made this seem even more surreal, and that much harder to bear.
But terrible things could happen in the sunlight. It had been a sunny morning, too, on that day when—
Sophia opened her eyes to escape the memory of Dimitri’s head rolling across the ornately tiled palace floor—or at least to try to escape the grisly image for a while.
If she survived this coming day, she’d surely see the gruesome sight of Dimitri’s mouth open in a silent scream the moment she fell asleep. It was a nightmare image she would remember forever, even if she lived to be a hundred and ten.
What had the floor, the room, looked like to Dimitri? Had he seen her in those last few seconds of his life as she gasped with horror?
Death by beheading came fast, but did it come fast enough?
Sophia couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And little wonder, since every time she came face-to-face with Bashir, he had that very same deadly sharp sword close at hand.
He placed it on the table near his bed, and, when she was led into the room, he would never fail to demonstrate to her just how sharp it still was.
His message was clear. If she failed to please him—this bastard who’d killed her husband—her head would be next to roll across the floor.
Two of the women moved the mirror closer so Sophia could see herself—as if she cared.
They’d dressed her in white again. With her blond hair and fair skin, in that nearly transparent gown, she looked like some kind of MTV version of a virgin sacrifice.
Virgin, hah. The truth was that Bashir liked women dressed in white because it contrasted with the red of their blood.
Sophia didn’t know if she would still be alive an hour from now. All she knew for sure was that she was going to bleed.
CASA CARMELITA, ENSENADA, MEXICO
Tess Bailey was back in his bed.
Although back wasn’t quite correct, since that one night Jimmy had spent with her had been in her bed, in her cozy little apartment with that kitchen with the cow wallpaper, out in Silver Springs, Maryland.
“Nash.”
But the difference between Tess’s bed and his didn’t matter now, because she was here and she was naked and she was warm and she was willing and God, God, God, he wanted her.
“I’m here,” she said as she kissed him, as she opened herself to him. “It’s okay, Jimmy, I’m here. . . .”
He pushed inside of her, nearly blind with need, and oh, holy sainted mother of—
“Nash.”
Jimmy opened his eyes to see Lawrence Decker standing over him. He sat up and his head nearly exploded, but he still managed to take in the fact that he was quite definitely alone in his hotel room bed, that the sun was streaming in through the window blinds, that the ceiling fan overhead was on high, that his mouth was impossibly dry . . .
And that if Deck had been an assassin, Jimmy would, without a doubt, be exceedingly dead right now.
It was not his finest hour.
“Hey,” Jimmy greeted him, his voice sounding rusty to his own ears. “You changed your mind about that vacation, huh?”
“Not exactly.” Deck glanced at the two empty bottles of tequila sitting on the bedside table. “You stopped answering your cell phone.”
“Ah,” Jimmy said. “My batteries ran out.”
“A week ago?”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “You know how it is on vacation. You stop wearing a watch, stop charging the phone.”
He looked at Decker standing there in his T-shirt and those army green fatigues with all those pockets, looking almost exactly the same as he’d looked that day they’d first been introduced. And this is Chief Lawrence Decker, formerly of SEAL Team One. What was it about former SEALs, former Rangers? They had a look to them, an edge, that they never lost. It had been, what, seven and a half years since Deck left the teams, yet he still walked, talked, moved, stood, even breathed like a Navy SEAL.
“Or maybe you don’t know how it is,” Jimmy added.
When they’d worked together at the Agency, Decker never took vacations.
“Are you all right?” Decker asked. It was the closest he’d get to mentioning those bottles.
With his hair colored hair and his eye colored eyes, his pleasantly featured face, his relatively vertically challenged stature and bantam-weight build, Decker was the poster child for average.
“I’m great.” Jimmy swung his legs out of bed, pushed himself up—Christ, his head—and staggered into the bathroom.
“You don’t look great.” Decker raised his voice slightly to be heard from the other room.
Jimmy flushed the toilet and moved to the sink, splashing his face, drinking from a water bottle he kept nearby, swallowing some painkiller at the same time.
He winced at his reflection in the mirror as he supported himself with both hands on the edge of the sink. He looked—and felt—like walking road-kill.
Decker, always thoughtful, waited until he turned off the water to say, “I got a call from Tom Paoletti.”
And there it was.
The reason Jimmy had stayed here in Mexico for all these weeks.
Lawrence Decker was a man with a future—and he needed to move into that future unencumbered by ghosts from the past.
Jimmy turned away from the mirror, taking his towel with him into the bedroom, drying his dripping face. “I told you he’d call. Congratulations. When do you start?”
And what the hell took Tom Paoletti so long to call? But he didn’t bother to ask that because he already knew. He was what took Tom Paoletti so long. Pizza and beer. Thunder and lightning. Decker and Nash.
You couldn’t have one without the other.
Or so people thought.
But pizza went down just fine with tequila, too.
Decker, as always, didn’t miss a note. He caught Jimmy’s intentional you.
And gently volleyed back a plural. “He wants us to come to San Diego,” he said. “As soon as possible.”
Us. Jimmy sat on the bed, exhausted and still half drunk. “I don’t know, Deck. I’m a little tied up right now.”
Decker nodded, as if that weren’t the biggest load of bullshit he’d ever encountered. “I could really use you,” he said. “Tom’s looking to send a team of civilians into Kazbekistan.”
Kazbekistan. Yeah, right.
There was no way anyone from the West was crossing over the K-stan border without some seriously expensive equipment. Such as HALO gear—including an extremely high altitude aircraft to jump out of.
Decker was, no doubt, attempting the age-old practice of bait and switch. He knew Jimmy wouldn’t rest easy with the idea of Deck heading into the hotbed of terrorist activity known in the Spec Ops world as “the Pit” without someone to watch his back. But as soon as they got to Tom Paoletti’s office, Jimmy would find out that the job was really in Sandusky. Some dot com geeks with more money than God wanted to feel important and install a high-tech security grid in their corporate headquarters.
“Kazbekistan,” Jimmy repeated.
Deck nodded.
Jimmy laughed—softly, so his head wouldn’t split in two. “You are such a fucking liar. But yeah. Okay. I’ll go to Kazbekistan. You go get the plane tickets from Tom Paoletti. I’ll wait here.”
Decker’s response was to cross to the ancient television that was on and flickering, volume muted. He flipped stations until he found a cable news channel and turned up the sound.
English subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen as the anchor delivered the story in Spanish spoken too quickly for Jimmy to follow. The graphic behind the woman said Terremoto in crumbling letters. “. . . six point eight on the Richter scale, with the epicenter of the devastating earthquake just north of downtown Kazabek.”
Holy Mary, Mother of God. The death toll
was going to be in the tens of thousands. Jimmy leaned closer.
“For the first time in five years,” the anchor—a hot bleached blonde with big lips—announced, “Kazbekistan’s borders are open to Western relief workers.”
“It would save time,” Deck told Jimmy, “if you just came with me to San Diego.”
KAZABEK, KAZBEKISTAN
Sophia had her eyes closed—it was always easier with her eyes closed—when the earthquake hit.
At first she, like Bashir and his men, thought they were under artillery attack.
It certainly felt like some kind of bombardment, the way the building shook and windows rattled.
Everything happened so quickly.
A half-dozen guards burst into the room.
Bashir shoved her roughly aside and she fell onto the tile floor, her head hitting with a jarring crack.
It felt as she’d imagined it would, only unlike Dimitri, she still had her head attached to her neck.
Bashir shouted to the guards as he scrambled for his clothes, ordering them to sound the alarms, and they rushed back out of the room. . . .
Leaving her alone with the warlord, whose back was to the table beside his bed. It was the same table upon which he’d put his sword after demonstrating to her just how razor-sharp it still was.
She’d lived through a massive earthquake before in Turkey, and unlike Bashir, who was convinced he had an enemy to repel, she began to suspect that was what this was. But bombardment or quake, it was the break for which she’d been waiting two long months.
Sophia grabbed the sword.
She didn’t have the upper body strength to behead Bashir with one mighty stroke, as much as she would have liked to do just that unto him. As he had done unto others.
Instead she lunged, throwing all of her weight into it.
Even so, she didn’t manage to run him clean through. Still, it stopped him, his scream of pain lost among all the other cries echoing through his palace.
He fell to his knees, and Sophia grabbed the bedcover and ran to the door. The entrance to Bashir’s chamber was usually guarded, but everyone—guards and servants alike—had fled. She wrapped the folds of fabric around her, turning it into a makeshift burka and hiding the blood on her gown.
She made it to the front door, where a crowd of people were pushing to get outside, where uncovered women were being turned back, despite the fact that a portion of the palace roof had already caved in.
Sophia covered her head and face and slipped out onto the street, into the dust rising up into the blue morning sky, and ran.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER
THREE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
Tom Paoletti slid a photograph across the table in the conference room of his offices at Troubleshooters Incorporated. “Ma’awiya Talal Sayid.”
Decker picked up the photo as Jimmy sat forward to get a look. “When and where was this taken, sir?” Deck asked.
“Kazabek,” Paoletti told them in a voice that revealed his New England roots. “Today. About thirteen hundred local time.”
Deck passed the photo over, and Jimmy took a closer look at the man who was known to be a top al-Qaeda operative. “Is he . . . ?”
“Dead,” Paoletti finished for him. “Yeah. Courtesy of the quake.” He pushed more photos toward them.
Jimmy leaned forward again. None of the news stations had footage or even photos of the devastation in Kazbekistan—reporters from the West hadn’t been allowed into the country for years.
In these photos, the skyline of the city—an architectural blend of ancient and new—had been radically changed. The Kazabek Grande Hotel still stood, a testament to the Westernization of the tiny country in the late 1970s. But the office building next to it had partially crumbled. In the foreground of the photo, many of the older structures—homes similar to that of Jimmy’s longtime contact Rivka and his wife, Guldana—had been reduced to rubble. It looked like parts of Baghdad and Basra after the war in Iraq.
“I’m sorry—I know both of you have friends in Kazabek.”
Jimmy looked up into Paoletti’s eyes. The compassion and understanding he saw there was not feigned.
“The situation’s bad. Sewer pipes broke—water’s contaminated in most of the southern sectors. WHO’s trying to get involved—southern Kazabek’s an epidemic waiting to happen. Power’s out, cell towers—the few that were left—are down. And the local warlords are still killing each other and anyone who looks at them cross-eyed.” Paoletti smiled. “I’d make one hell of a travel agent, huh? Bottom line, this job is going to suck.”
“We’ve both been to K-stan before, sir,” Decker told him. “Conditions there have never been good.”
“Yeah. I served a short sentence there myself,” Paoletti said. “And you don’t have to sir me. We’re not in the Navy anymore, Deck.”
When Jimmy had walked into this office, nothing about this place had impressed him. The building itself was low-rent, the furniture ugly, and the receptionist’s desk empty. Tom Paoletti’s new company specialized in personal security, but at first glance it looked as if Troubleshooters Incorporated needed a little rescuing itself.
But then Paoletti—the former commanding officer of SEAL Team Sixteen—had come out of the back office and shook his and Deck’s hands, and Jimmy knew instantly why the man was a Spec Ops legend.
He had that same je ne sais quoi that Decker did—the same golden aura. It danced and glowed about him and proclaimed him a true leader of men. Of women, too, although Jimmy would bet big money that most women followed Tom Paoletti around for a different reason entirely. And this was despite the fact that, in another couple of years, he was going to be billiard-ball bald.
Deck’s still-thick head of hair wasn’t the only difference between the two men. In fact, besides that rare leadership quality they shared, they really weren’t that much alike.
Paoletti’s quietness was easygoing. There was a contentment to him, a sense of peace, a comfortable-inside-his-skin quality that could be found only in someone who—at least most of the time—liked the man he saw in his bathroom mirror each morning.
Decker’s watchful quiet, on the other hand, seemed to hold an undercurrent of danger. He was like a gunslinger from one of those old Westerns Jimmy had watched as a kid. Quiet and even polite, but with something in the way he sat or stood that let the world know this was not a man to mess with.
And if he was messed with, look out.
And yet, at the same time, Deck could, with very little effort, make himself completely invisible.
That was something Jimmy particularly admired, since invisibility in a crowd wasn’t high on his personal list of easy tricks.
He suspected it wasn’t on Paoletti’s either. But right now the man was silent, just letting Decker take a longer look at the photographs he’d given them.
Deck knew Paoletti from his years with the SEAL teams. In the rental car on the way to this meeting, when Jimmy had been speculating on the nature of this assignment, Deck had turned to him and said, “I’d sign on just to shine Commander Paoletti’s shoes.”
It was one hell of an endorsement.
“Where did these pictures come from?” Decker asked Paoletti now. “Who’s the photographer?”
“The client sent them to me,” he replied. “I can’t be more specific than that.”
“Understood.” Deck finally put the photos down on the table. “They’re looking for Sayid’s laptop.”
It wasn’t a question, but Paoletti nodded. He glanced at Jimmy, checking to see if he was up to speed.
He was, indeed. Al-Qaeda leader Ma’awiya Talal Sayid carried a laptop that was believed to contain a gushing fountain of information—maybe enough to clue in the West to the next terrorist target. Of course the key word there was believed.
“Does your client—let’s call them the Agency for short—have any proof that th
is mystical laptop isn’t just a rumor?” Jimmy asked. “Or that it contains more than the latest versions of Pac-Man and Solitaire?”
“Nope,” Paoletti told him, with a coolness in his eyes that let Jimmy know his easygoing friendliness was for Decker and Decker alone. Paoletti still hadn’t decided whether he and Nash would be buddies. Which was different from most people’s prejudgment. Most people filed Jimmy in their troublemakers folder before even meeting him.
Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint Page 4