Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  But never once, during all the hours that they’d spent talking, had Jimmy leaned in close and told her, “Hey, you know what? Decker has a thing for you.”

  There had been a moment, on the flight to Hong Kong, before he’d slept off the last of his hangover, that would have been perfect. But had he used the opportunity to bring up Deck?

  No, he had not.

  And once they’d gotten off the plane here in Ikrimah, a hundred miles from Kazabek, there had been no time to say much of anything at all.

  Ikrimah was a nightmare. The situation had gotten dire since the last time he’d been here. This was the second-largest metropolis in K-stan, and it was filled with people who wore their hopelessness and fear deeply etched into their faces.

  Their very lean faces.

  These people were starving. But they hadn’t been rocked by an earthquake, so all of the aid was going straight to Kazabek.

  Or maybe it wasn’t.

  Only half of the supply crates that Tom Paoletti had procured seemingly out of thin air—the man definitely had some powerful connections—had made it through. According to the airline, the others were “still in transit.” Talk about a royal pain in the balls. Unless they got really lucky and the gaping cracks in the Kazabek Airport runways got patched in the next few days, they were going to have to return to this airfield, way out here in terrorist country, later in the week to pick them up.

  Of course, “still in transit,” was corporate code for “Oops, we screwed the pooch and have absolutely no idea where on this vast planet your missing luggage might be.” A trip back to Ikrimah was probably not going to be necessary.

  Because, ten to one, the crates had already been appropriated by the K-stani warlords who ran the local black market.

  Vinh Murphy, who with Dave Malkoff had met them at this airport, had been in charge of getting the surviving supplies to the bus. But as they passed through the open-air terminal, Jimmy managed to lose yet one more crate. It was marked “Rice,” and he misplaced it in Nida’s vicinity.

  The burka-clad K-stani woman had set up her jewelry stand right there on the sidewalk, where she’d done business every day for the past five years since her husband had died. She had four impossibly small and solemnly obedient children assisting her today, instead of her usual three.

  Jimmy quickly picked out a beautifully crafted bracelet and then a necklace, paying for them both in American money and in rice. He knew things were bad in K-stan when Nida didn’t argue as much as she usually did, insisting that he was paying too much. Instead her eyes filled with tears, and she slipped a matching pair of earrings into his bag.

  He had had to run to catch up to the others. They were in the process of lashing down their supplies on the roof of the ancient rattletrap of a bus that would ferry this latest contingent of relief workers south to the capital city of Kazabek.

  Finally they were on board and ready to go—only three hours behind schedule, which was pretty damned miraculous.

  That was when Will Schroeder, known in some circles as the Antichrist, made the scene.

  Jimmy saw Schroeder’s familiar red hair from where he was sitting with Tess, way in the back, as the prick lugged his duffel bag up the steps and past the driver.

  “Oh, shit,” Jimmy said, and three or four of the God Squad—devoutly religious men and women who bounced from one disaster site to another—turned to give him the profanity stare.

  Yeah, yeah, he was going to hell. Tell him something he didn’t know.

  Deck was across the aisle and up four rows, sitting next to Murphy. He spotted Will Schroeder, too, and turned invisible.

  That was always amazing to watch. Jimmy wasn’t exactly sure how Decker did it, but he definitely became less . . . there. There was no other way to describe it. He took up less space—he actually got smaller. He slumped, hunched, contracted—whatever he did, it was freaking effective. It was possible that he somehow slackened the muscles in his face, too, and that, combined with pulling his hat down over his eyes, was the final touch. His own mother would have looked right past him.

  Jimmy did the only thing he could do—he ducked down and hid behind the nearest woman. Who happened to be Tess.

  Who also appeared to understand the situation without any kind of spoken explanation. She leaned back, effectively hiding him from Will’s view, and pretended to be asleep, draped against him. All he had to do was turn his head a little, and his face was buried in her hair.

  Hair that, despite the endless hours of relentless travel, still managed to smell unbelievably good.

  The bus moved forward with a hiss of releasing brakes, and they were on the road.

  An extremely potholed road, over which they lurched and bumped. Tess braced herself with one hand high on his thigh.

  “Sorry,” she said, pulling back as if she’d been burned.

  It was not the first time she’d put her hand in that particular spot.

  Don’t think about that night. She was sitting much too close for him to start entertaining memories of the way she’d given him back his shirt while they were standing in her overly dairy-cowed kitchen. Now was definitely not the time to recall just how desperate he’d been to lose himself in her, how mind-blowing it had been to do just that.

  Because although Tess was willingly letting him hide behind her, she was trying to do it by touching as little of him as possible.

  Jimmy risked a look toward the front of the bus.

  Sitting beside some unrecognizable, bland little relief worker who was wearing Decker’s shirt, Murphy was a human monolith at rest. He was about as nonplussed as Stonehenge.

  Jimmy would bet his entire stock portfolio that Murph and Will Schroeder had never been introduced. Because Murphy—who could have been the love child of Tiger Woods and Andre the Giant—wasn’t the kind of guy you could meet and then forget.

  Dave was up toward the front of the bus, a few seats behind the driver, no doubt because he’d gotten food poisoning during his stopover in Turkey—what a typical Dave Malkoff thing to do. He probably thought the bus wouldn’t lurch so much if he sat near the front.

  Dream on, Dave. This was K-stan, where fixing the shock absorbers was the dead last thing on the local bus company’s maintenance priority list, just beneath fixing the bullet holes in the windows.

  Will Schroeder was sitting several seats behind Dave—whom he apparently didn’t know, or didn’t recognize.

  Which wasn’t really that absurd a possibility. Jimmy himself hadn’t recognized Dave when they’d come face-to-face at the baggage claim area just a few hours ago.

  Dave had, apparently, taken his departure from the CIA as an opportunity to embrace his inner grunge rocker.

  His hair was shaggy and long enough in the back to be pulled into a ponytail. He hadn’t shaved in at least a week. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that said “Bite Me,” neither of which fit his wiry frame particularly well, but both of which were a radical change from the Joe Friday designer line of cheap-as-shit black suits that he’d worn as his uniform in the past.

  If Jimmy hadn’t known about the food poisoning, he would have guessed that Dave was completely stoned. He was sitting with his head lolled back and his body boneless—totally relaxed. In fact, he’d even smelled a little like the local weed. It was freaky.

  Who are you and what have you done to Dave “Puckerfactor Five Thousand” Malkoff?

  It was either Twilight Zone time, or weird Dave had created one damn good cover.

  “Who is he?” Tess asked, her breath warm against his neck. She was talking about Will, of course. “Red hair, right?”

  From his hiding place behind Tess, Jimmy could see only the back of the evil one’s head, but it sure seemed as if he were planted in his seat. He’d taken out a book and was reading.

  He maneuvered his mouth closer to her ear. “He’s a Boston Globe reporter. His name’s Schroeder.”

  She nodded. “Does he know you?”

  “Yeah. He knows I�
�m no relief worker—Deck, too,” Jimmy told her. “But then again, neither is Schroeder.”

  It was entirely possible that half of the people on this bus were reporters. K-stan had a no media, no cameras rule that was strictly enforced, and everybody and their CNN reporter brother were using this admittance of Western relief workers as a way into the country.

  Of course, the fact that they were letting in relief workers from the West at all was a sign of just how terrible the situation was in Kazabek.

  Tess shifted so that she could speak to Jimmy even more quietly. In fact, her lips brushed his ear as she spoke.

  “Even if he sees you, he won’t blow your cover, because if he does, you’ll blow his,” she concluded, quite correctly.

  His turn to put his mouth near her ear. He resisted the overwhelming urge to lick her. “Yeah, but once he sees we’re here, he’ll be on us like a dog in heat. He’s probably come for the disaster story, but it won’t take much for him to realize there’s something bigger going down.”

  “So he not only knows you’re not a relief worker . . .” Tess said.

  “Deck and I were sent to Bali shortly after the nightclub bombing,” Nash told her. “We, uh, interacted with Schroeder there. He’d have to be an idiot not to know that we were working for the government. And he’s no idiot.”

  Tess was silent for a moment. He could feel her breathing, feel her thinking. Finally she turned her head, her mouth again touching his ear. Christ, was she doing that on purpose?

  Maybe she was. And maybe tonight . . .

  But, “Sorry. The bus keeps . . .” She pulled back a little. “Do you really think we’ll be able to get off this bus without him seeing you?” she asked. “Once we disembark, I won’t be able to hang all over you like this. Public displays of affection are a big no in the streets—or so I read in my information packet on Kazabek. You know, the one you didn’t really expect me to read?”

  “You’re so funny,” he murmured.

  She laughed softly, and he was rocketed back in time to her bedroom. She was beneath him, out of breath, her legs still wrapped around him, her eyes dancing. . . .

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked now.

  They would get to Kazabek, hire a truck to take them to Rivka’s house, unload their equipment, have a little dinner, and then go into their bedroom and . . .

  And not jump each other.

  How could he be thinking about sex after that conversation he’d had with Decker outside the airport bookstore? Forget the threat of a beating—that was inconsequential. What mattered was that Decker had a thing for Tess. And despite his claims that it was too late for any kind of relationship between them, Jimmy was determined to make things right.

  He wouldn’t be jumping Tess tonight or any other night. Even if she begged him to. Which was about as likely as Elvis parachuting out of an alien spacecraft, onto the fifty-yard line of the Super Bowl and breaking into “Burning Love.” No, if Elvis came back, he’d definitely start the gig with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

  “We’ll wait for him to get off the bus first,” Jimmy told Tess. “Most people are always in a hurry.”

  “And we’re not?”

  He knew she was thinking about that laptop computer, potentially filled with all that information about impending terrorist attacks, sitting somewhere in the rubble.

  “Sometimes you get farther by watching and waiting.” Jimmy laughed. It was funny—that was usually what Decker said to him. But really, the last thing they wanted was a reporter—this reporter—figuring out why they were here. And it wasn’t as if they could just make Will Schroeder disappear.

  Well, actually, they could. He could. Quite easily, in fact. Too easily.

  Tess once again was quiet, as if she’d picked up on his sudden change in mood, and the bus bounced its way toward Kazabek. It seemed impossible that anyone could sleep on this thing, but her silence stretched on and on for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen.

  But then Jimmy realized she wasn’t asleep. She was looking out the window. The sun hung in the brilliant blue sky, making the desolate, rocky hillside strikingly beautiful. Of course, not everyone saw it that way.

  “You love it here, don’t you?” Tess said softly, and he looked down to see that she was watching him now instead of the scenery.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. He was only answering a simple question. He wasn’t sure why it felt as if he were giving her a piece of his soul.

  The bus swayed hard to the right as the driver swerved to avoid a deep hole in the dirt road.

  “Hold on,” Jimmy said as his arms tightened around Tess, as he held her even closer to keep her from hitting her head on the hard back of the seat.

  She braced herself, too, her hand briefly on his thigh again, before she grabbed the seat in front of them.

  “Careful,” he said, the warning as much for himself as it was for her.

  KAZABEK, KAZBEKISTAN

  Jesus.

  Jesus. As Decker stared out the bus window, he could feel Murphy leaning closer to look over his shoulder.

  Up toward the front of the bus, Will Schroeder from the Boston Globe had put his book down.

  After interminable hours on the road, even the five relief workers from Hamburg had stopped their relentless singing of German folk songs as they, too, gazed out at the devastation.

  Kazabek—at least this northernmost part of the city—had become piles of rocks and crumbling mortar.

  The streets were barely passable, and the bus had to slow almost to a crawl.

  Grimy children stared at them from perches atop the ruined buildings, while their parents dug through the rubble that had once been their homes.

  In a former marketplace, bodies were laid out, lined up row after row after row.

  Another open square had been turned into a temporary hospital, with tents set up to protect the wounded from the hot sun. But there were nowhere near enough tents or medical personnel, and people sat or even lay right on the hard ground, dazed and disoriented, some still covered with blood.

  And then there was nothing but block after endless block of devastation.

  Murphy saw it at the exact second Deck did—four men running from a side street, shouting and gesturing toward the bus.

  Murph got to his feet, already opening the bag that held the arsenal of weapons he’d somehow acquired in Ikrimah, readying to repel an attack.

  Dave Malkoff, too, was up and over by the bus driver, prepared to launch out the door, if necessary. Decker hadn’t even seen the man move.

  “Don’t slow down,” he heard Dave instruct the driver, who kicked it into a higher gear.

  But then Nash stood up from his seat in the back. “Stop the bus!” he called out both in English and the local K-stani dialect. “They’re saying they’ve uncovered a school!” He was by an open window and had no doubt been able to make out the words that the men had been shouting as they drove past. “It was buried under debris. Another building fell and . . . They’ve finally dug through and part of the school’s intact. There are children inside—still alive! They need this bus!”

  Decker stood then, too. “Dave!” he shouted.

  Everyone was talking at once, so he didn’t hear what the former CIA agent said to the driver. All he knew was that the bus skidded to a stop and was put into reverse. With a whining of gears, they began backing up.

  When he glanced again toward the front of the bus, he saw that Dave Malkoff had commandeered the driver’s seat.

  “Gather up all your gear and take it with you,” Nash was shouting over the babbling. “God willing, they’re going to need every seat.”

  Murphy was already pulling duffels and backpacks down from the overhead racks.

  The bus jerked to a stop, and Decker saw exactly what three of the men chasing them were carrying in their arms.

  Injured children.

  Will Schroeder was standing in the aisle, looking from Nash to Decker, a lopsided grin on his face. “Well, isn’t t
his a happy surprise,” he said.

  “Get your ass off the bus and help these people,” Deck ordered the reporter as he pushed past him.

  “Right,” Will said, following him out onto the dusty street. “Because that’s what we’re all here to do. To help these people. Except Nash. We all know why he’s here.” He turned to Nash, who was right behind him. “Hey, Jim. Fuck anyone’s wife lately?”

  Nash ignored him, catching Decker’s eye. “I’ll set up triage.”