“I’ll get your scarf.”
He finally released her and went out the door, and Tess sat down heavily on one of the benches that lined the thick wooden table. He was right. She hadn’t been thinking. At all. She’d really blown it.
Decker was across the room, helping Murphy stack another crate along the wall. He was watching her, so she squared her shoulders, plastered a smile on her face, and stood up and went over to see what she could do to help while stuck here inside.
Deck met her halfway. His clothing and face were still streaked with that pervasive yellow-brown dust. He’d been the first one down into that basement, the first person those trapped children and teachers had seen, an angel come to lead them out of the darkness and into the light.
Then, as he did now, he’d looked American. Quietly strong and confident, with a nearly visible aura shimmering around him that spoke of a life lived with freedom from fear. Freedom and orthodontists for all—her team leader had a truly American smile with straight white teeth.
“You don’t need to be a cheerleader, Tess,” he told her now. “No one’s going to be surprised if you let it slip that you feel bad after seeing what we’ve seen today.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I know.”
Decker didn’t believe her. “You did a good job out there,” he said quietly. “Did Nash remember to mention that when he was dressing you down for whatever it was that you did or said that pissed him off?”
She sighed. “You saw that, huh?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were unbelievably kind. “He can be an asshole when he’s exhausted, and believe me, he’s exhausted. Don’t take it to heart.”
“I did mess up,” she admitted.
“So you learn from the mistake and move on,” Decker said. “Don’t dwell on it. Just don’t do it again.”
“I thought I was allowed to feel bad,” she countered.
He laughed as he headed for the door. “Yeah, but only about the things that matter.” He turned back, his smile gone just as quickly as it had appeared. “You know, no one’s going to think less of you if you cry. It’s good to let it out, especially after a day like today.”
Tess nodded and crossed her arms. “I know you don’t mean to be rude, but don’t you think it’s just a little offensive to say something like that to me? I mean, would you really tell Murphy or Dave that they should cry?” Or Nash, who probably needed to hear that more than any of them?
“Yeah,” he said. “I not only would, but I did. Dave Malkoff’s out in the wagon right now, weeping like a baby.”
“Really?” Tess laughed at herself for believing him enough to ask. He was an awesome liar.
“Yes about saying it, no about Dave,” Decker admitted, smiling again, too. He was an awesome liar with a killer smile. But what was real and what was an act? Was he playing the strong American for her, too? “But more’s the pity he’s not, huh?” His smile faded again. “This is going to be a long, tough assignment. Make sure you do what you need to do to take care of yourself.” He stepped closer, lowered his voice. “I know this can’t be easy for you, and I am sorry about that.”
He was talking about her having to work with Jimmy Nash.
“I’m okay with it,” she told him, but again, she could tell that he didn’t believe her. And at this point, after all that she’d seen and done today, she wasn’t sure she believed herself.
It was one thing to handle being so close to Nash in the sterile environment of Tom’s office or on an airplane. It was another entirely to be pushed beyond her emotional limits. God, they’d found the body of one little girl—she was probably twelve years old. . . . But she’d been one of dozens.
Decker looked over at Nash and Murphy, who were wrestling another crate through the door.
He cleared his throat and forced a smile that now only served to make him look as tired as he probably felt. “Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he continued. “You know, to make this any easier.”
“Hey, Tess,” Nash called, and she looked over at him. He was just as dusty as Decker—and just as capable of playing a role and hiding his true feelings. What awful things had he seen today that had made him want to cry? Not that he ever would, not in a million years. “Catch.”
He’d had her bag over his shoulder, and he tossed it to her now. She caught it. “Thanks.”
“Get the rest of our personal gear inside, will you?” he said.
“Yeah.” Her scarf was right there on top, and she pulled it out and put it on.
Tess turned back to Decker to thank him, but he’d already gone back to work.
The doors of the American embassy remained locked up tight.
Still, Sophia checked Saboor Square regularly for messages, all the while knowing that help wasn’t going to come from that quarter.
If she wanted to get out of this country—and she did—she was going to have to rely on former business associates, such as Michel Lartet. A French ex-pat, Lartet ran an illegal bar and gambling casino from the basements of his various properties. The location of his establishment was rolling—always different from night to night—and it sometimes changed even within the course of a single night. It hadn’t always been that way. But over the past few years, Lartet was kept on his toes by the ruling warlords like Padsha Bashir.
Although the former K-stani government had outlawed both alcohol and gambling, the officials assigned to enforce the law took bribes and payoffs. Not so Bashir and his compatriots.
Dimitri had always said that there was no payoff large enough for the warlords to allow Western contamination to remain within the borders of their country.
Out of all of her former friends and business acquaintances, Lartet was most likely to offer her aid. Or perhaps he would trade assistance for the promise of substantial payback. At least Sophia thought he would. She was not, however, willing to gamble her life on that.
And so she had devised a plan.
She found Lartet’s bar easily. In fact, the people she’d asked implied that he’d been at this same location for quite a few weeks, which was a surprising turn of events.
These days, apparently, he was operating in the basement of a squat little building that housed a butcher shop above. Generators kept the freezers and refrigerators humming, even though the meat was probably stringy and exorbitantly priced.
The place wasn’t full by Lartet’s usual standards, but that was to be expected, considering it was after curfew.
As a woman in a burka, all but her eyes veiled, Sophia was noticed coming in, but quickly forgotten as she took a table in the shadows on the side of the room. She sat near a handful of other women, all prostitutes.
Prostitution was an extremely dangerous business in this country. Being caught was a guaranteed death sentence, one that was usually carried out by the woman’s own family—brothers and father and male cousins.
Never mind the fact that many women turned to prostitution as the only means for feeding that very same family.
Sophia had come into Michel Lartet’s bar, into this very room, dozens of times in the past eight years. But she’d come in as an American woman and had been welcomed as an equal. She’d take off her burka and robe once inside to reveal clothes she would have been arrested for wearing on the street. She sometimes wore shorts and a T-shirt, sometimes a slinky dress Dimitri had ordered for her—for him, really—from some catalogue.
She’d sat at the bar with the men, drinking and laughing. She’d noticed the women who kept on their burkas as they sat in the corner, and she’d understood why they might want to keep their faces hidden.
She’d also seen them leaving, one by one, with Lartet’s patrons as the night drew to an end.
She’d never had much compassion for them before—women who’d let their lives get so out of control that they had to sell their bodies just to eat.
Just to survive for one more day.
Even as recently as mere months ago, she’d foolishly believed that
she’d rather die than be reduced to such degradation. Sex without love. Sex with strangers. What woman with any self-esteem would resort to that?
Sophia had discovered as she’d lain with Dimitri’s killer, with her husband’s blood still splattered on her face, on her dress, in her hair, that there was little she wouldn’t do to keep from dying.
And as the days turned to weeks turned to months, as her survival depended on her ability to “entertain” her sworn enemy and his loathsome friends, she realized she’d never understood just how insignificant sex really was, how little true meaning it held.
The poetry, the magic, the beauty—the fanciful concept of true love—was all a pathetic attempt to romanticize something that was nothing more than a basic biological function. Sex was no more profound than eating or sleeping or taking a dump.
Sophia sat now among the prostitutes in Lartet’s bar, aware of the scornful glances she was getting from the other women. Before this, she’d never quite understood how the men who bought them for a night or an hour could differentiate one from another. They were all covered, enshrouded—the men could only guess what was underneath.
But now, as she sat among them, she realized that the Kazabek streetwalkers had their own variation of a New York City street hooker’s garb. Instead of miniskirts and tube tops, they wore the sleeves of their robes pulled up just enough to reveal intricate artwork done in henna on their arms. They kept their hands on the tables in front of them, artfully arranged. Young, soft hands, wrists adorned with bracelets. They wore toe rings and toenail polish and, like their sisters on Forty-second Street, they wore remarkably high-heeled sandals.
Apparently the language of women’s shoes was universal.
Sophia was wearing a stolen pair of flat leather sandals. They were a size too large on feet that were still swollen and red, sore from her barefoot run from Bashir’s palace. She hoped that the message received from her shoes was a warning about possible infectious diseases.
Her own wrists were unadorned. She was wearing the ring she still hadn’t managed to pawn—having chosen to arm herself with the ability to offer a bribe as well as one of those deadly looking little handguns she’d stolen. But she wore that ring turned around, the jewels hidden in her palm.
She caught another pointedly amused glance from one of the other women and knew, with some relief, that if a client approached, she wouldn’t be chosen first.
Not that she wouldn’t appreciate the chance to separate some man from his money. Of course, the services rendered would be a knock over the head instead of a roll in the dust.
But as appealing as the idea seemed, she wasn’t here for that.
She was here to watch Michel Lartet’s response to the message she’d sent him—a written message he should be receiving any moment. She wanted to see his reaction to her note, see if he’d gotten wind of the reward that was surely on her head. She was eager to see if the promise of a huge amount of money was enough to bring him into his hated enemy’s camp, or if he would be her salvation.
She was sitting close enough to the main bar to hear Lartet’s booming voice.
He was telling a joke—badly. A camel, a horse, and a zebra walk into a bar . . . Lartet loved to tell jokes.
And Dimitri used to tease him mercilessly—the two men had been close friends—for always blowing the punch lines.
Sophia sat, with her hands in front of her on the table, ring carefully hidden, and waited.
After Jimmy finished tucking Khalid’s horse into bed in Rivka’s barn, he came into a kitchen that was decidedly empty.
Dave Malkoff was out in the stable. Clutching a bucket, he’d crawled into an empty stall to sleep, still terribly sick.
Tess had worried he’d be uncomfortable sleeping in the barn, but ol’ Dave had been adamant about it. Jimmy had pulled Tess off the man when she’d looked as if she was settling in for a fight. He recognized where Dave’s head was at. He knew that the only thing worse than being wicked-ass, groaning sick was to be wicked-ass, groaning sick within earshot of teammates. Teammates whose eyes Dave wanted to be able to look into over the next few weeks without wondering if they’d heard those nasty noises he was going to be making all night long.
Although, to be honest, each time Dave gave the old heave-ho, within earshot or not, Jimmy’s respect for the man only climbed higher.
Jimmy had checked on him one last time after kissing Marge-the-gelding good night, and had found him sticking a needle into his arm. Dave was so freaking sick, he was actually giving himself an IV. It was just a saline drip to keep him from getting dehydrated, but still.
“I’ll be okay by morning,” Dave had said, looking up at Jimmy from the floor. The man was wrapped in blankets and shivering despite the eighty-five-degree Fahrenheit sweatfest they were enduring. “Don’t tell Decker.”
Jimmy sighed as he shook his head. “I am Decker,” he told Dave.
Who didn’t understand. Of course, his teeth were about to rattle out of his head.
Jimmy spelled it out for him. “If I see or hear something, it’s going to get back to Decker. There are no exceptions to that rule. If you’re looking to hide something from Deck, you better hide it from me, too. I should also point out that hiding something—or trying to hide something—from Deck is the quickest way to find your ass. Because it’ll be on the next flight home. You follow?”
Dave nodded. And took a deep breath, obviously ready to list the top ten reasons why it would be a mistake to ship him off to the nearest hospital.
Jimmy didn’t let him make a single sound. “On the other hand, arguing with me is not the same as arguing with Deck, so save it for when you see him. Which, incidentally, probably won’t be until tomorrow morning.”
There was so much relief in Dave’s eyes at that news, it was as if Jimmy had told him that power was out, making the electric chair non-operational.
“If you look like this in the morning—,” Jimmy continued.
“I won’t,” Dave said.
Jimmy rephrased. This guy had bowling balls. “If you feel like this in the morning—”
“I’m feeling better already.” Dave forced a smile. It was a worthy effort that was completely blown by his having to lunge for his bucket.
“I’ll check on you later.” Jimmy left Dave to his private conversation with the bottom of that plastic pail.
He passed Murphy going out as he went into Rivka’s tidy house. Curfew, shmurfew. In fact, the curfew was a good thing. It would keep the streets clear of innocent civilians. Anyone out and sneaking about in the night was either dangerous or very dangerous.
Deck himself had ninja-ed out after helping Jimmy lock Khalid’s wagon in the yard. Like Murphy, he was going into the heart of Kazabek to try to touch base with his various contacts, get a read on what the street people were talking about—not just the news but the rumors. You could learn a lot from rumors, if you knew how to read them.
Although Decker also had an additional agenda—to locate and talk to this Dimitri Ghaffari guy. Jimmy had no doubt that Deck was going to get right on top of that special assignment from Tom Paoletti.
Jimmy was a little jealous as he washed the day’s grime from his face in Rivka’s kitchen sink. He’d be getting ready to break curfew and go out himself if Rivka had been home or if Dave hadn’t been so sick. But he wasn’t about to leave Tess alone in an empty house.
Of course this meant that he and Tess were alone together in an empty house.
She’d already gone behind the curtain, into the tiny pantry where Rivka had cleared just enough space for her to put her sleeping bag. If Jimmy was lucky, she was already asleep.
But the curtain moved—these days his luck was for shit—and she came out into the kitchen.
“Okay,” she announced. “I’m ready.”
Jimmy stared at her. She was dressed in basic evening black—minus the heels and pearls.
Black pants, black shirt, black nylon shoulder holster, black cammy paint cover
ing up all those freckles . . .
Pippi Goes Commando.
He laughed. “No, you’re not. Go wash your face and get ready for bed.” Hindsight, which came immediately after he spoke, made him realize that just a little more finesse might’ve allowed him to avoid the shit storm that was now bearing down on him at high speed.
“Excuse me?” Tess said.
If real life had a sound track, that song that went, “You’re not the boss of me, now,” would have been playing. At a very high volume.
“Tess. Come on. You’re exhausted,” he said, even though it rarely worked to play the “Let’s be rational” card after laughing in someone’s face.
She stepped closer, close enough to kiss him—or to speak without being overheard. “So’s Deck and Murphy,” she pointed out practically inaudibly. “They’ve both gone to do their jobs. I’m going to do mine.”
Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint Page 12