She didn’t let him finish. “More about you than you know about us? Yes.”
“That’s going to change right now. Who exactly do you work for?”
Tess shook her head. “You don’t get to ask questions. You get to sit there silently and listen.”
He laughed. “I’ve got to hand it to you, babe, you’ve got balls, but—”
“We’re here because al-Qaeda has eight different training camps in Kazbekistan—and those are just the ones we know about. We’re here because, for the first time in years, the borders are open to the West, and we won’t create an international incident if we’re caught going someplace unauthorized. We’re here because there’s been lots of Internet chatter similar to right before 9/11, and we will not—will not—allow a terrorist attack of that magnitude to happen on U.S. soil—or anywhere else—ever again. We’re here because Ma’awiya Talal Sayid died in Kazabek, in the Cantara hospital, from injuries sustained in the quake. Do you need me to spell Ma’awiya for you?”
Will shook his head. “No. Shit, this is . . . What proof do you have that—”
“The White House is going to hold a press conference announcing Sayid’s death tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. U.S. eastern time,” Tess said. “You will not release any information about Sayid to the Boston Globe—or any other news organization—before 11:30 a.m. U.S. eastern time.”
He sputtered. “You’re kidding, right? You just hand me the biggest story of the year—”
Tess spoke over him. “You will not identify me or anyone I work with at any time.”
“—and you think I’m not going to use it?”
“Sayid’s death is not the biggest story of the year,” she interrupted herself to tell him. “Not even close.”
That shut him up pretty quick.
“You will not even so much as speculate on the presence of U.S.-sanctioned counterterrorist teams currently in K-stan,” she continued. “You will stop staking out our house, you’ll stop following us. In fact, you won’t draw any attention to us in any way. If you have information for me, you’ll contact me discreetly. Otherwise, you’ll wait for me to contact you.”
“Lots of rules,” Will said.
“Yes,” she agreed.
He shook his head. “I don’t think—”
“This agreement is nonnegotiable,” she told him.
Will was silent for several long moments, just watching her.
“So you give me this information about Sayid’s death,” he finally said, “information that I’m not supposed to use, and I get . . . ?”
“You get proof that I’m a solid source of accurate information,” Tess told him.
“Suppose I refuse? Suppose I tell you to take your rules and stick ’em where the sun don’t shine, and go call CNN—”
“Then my associates and I will be out of the country and you’ll be minus a source,” she told him. “A very valuable source.”
He thought about that. Good boy, Will. Think hard. Realize exactly what all this means.
“You’re here because you’re looking for Sayid’s laptop,” he finally theorized.
Tess clenched her teeth to keep from smiling. She had him. Locked in. Thank God.
“Yes, we are,” she told him. “And you will not include that information in any of your news reports. Not until after we find it. At which point, you’ll get an in-depth exclusive—but it will be on my timetable, is that understood?”
“Yeah.” He was silent again, no doubt realizing that that exclusive would get him a whole lot of attention. Maybe even more than Jackie got from her pictures.
Will leaned closer. “Can you at least tell me if there’s any weight to the rumors that Sayid was in Kazabek to meet with Padsha Bashir?”
“Tess!”
She looked up to see Nash crossing the yard. He was breathing hard and dripping with sweat, as if he’d run hard for several miles.
She was on her feet and heading toward him before she even knew it. “Jimmy! What happened? Are you all right? Is Decker . . . ?”
Something had to have happened to Decker to make Jimmy this upset. He pulled her, hard, into his arms, and she held him tightly, bracing herself for the bad news.
Which didn’t come. “Deck’s okay—and you are, too—thank God. Thank God.” He pulled away. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Christ, I stink. . . .”
“I don’t care,” she told him. The entire front of her shirt was now damp, but that didn’t matter. “Are you all right?” she asked him again. “What happened?”
He looked around—at Will Schroeder and Khalid, at the dozen or so other relief workers who were watching them, curiosity on their faces.
It was then that Tess saw something that looked an awful lot like realization flash in Jimmy’s eyes. Realization, along with a little bit of Oh, crap, what have I done?
He laughed weakly, ran a hand—and she could have sworn it was shaking—through his hair, pushing it back, out of his eyes. “Well . . .”
“This is James Nash,” Tess announced as she went to get him something to drink before he suffered heatstroke. “My husband.”
She handed her water to Jimmy, who nearly emptied the bottle in one long swallow. Khalid was right there with more for him.
“Thanks,” Jimmy said.
The group had begun to disperse when it was clear he wasn’t some random madman off the street. But Will Schroeder and Khalid both remained nearby.
“Do you want to sit down?” Tess asked.
Jimmy shook his head. “No, I’m . . . Look, this is so stupid. I was . . .” He looked from Tess to Will and Khalid and back, and the smile he gave her was rueful. And terribly sweet. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but . . .”
Tess turned to Will and Khalid. “Will you give us a minute please?”
But Jimmy stopped them from moving out of earshot. “No, it’s okay. It’s just . . . I freaked out. I was across town and I started hearing these rumors about an explosion. And then people starting saying how some kid strapped TNT around his waist and walked into a relief aid station and blew himself up along with twenty people—all Westerners. And then I heard that it was here, in this same neighborhood that Khalid told me he was going to bring you to today, and . . .”
And he’d run, all the way here, to make sure she hadn’t been hurt. Tess’s heart was in her throat as she reached for him. “I’m okay.”
He held her tightly. “I know. I see. I’m”—his laughter was shaky—“a total fool.”
Will Schroeder was staring at them, openmouthed.
Jimmy ignored him as he pulled back to look at her. “I shouldn’t have let you go out without me. That’s not going to happen again. In fact, pack up your stuff. Khalid, get the wagon. We’re calling it a day.”
“It’s barely half past noon,” Tess protested. “We promised to stay for a six-hour shift.”
But Jimmy pulled her close again and spoke into her ear. “I need to contact Tom, stat.” More loudly, he said, “Our phones are out again, or I would’ve called you. I ran all that way, in this heat. . . .” He swayed. “Wow. Maybe I should sit down. . . .”
Tess wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “Help me get him into the wagon,” she ordered Will. Her voice shook, and she hoped it came across as worry for Jimmy, rather than disappointment. This was all an act, a way to get her back to Rivka’s—to her computers.
And she’d actually thought . . .
Well, on the bright side, if she’d been fooled, everyone else surely had, too.
Jimmy’s knees gave out—he really was a brilliant actor—just after he was up and in the back of the wagon. Without Will’s help, and without Tess throwing all of her weight into keeping him from falling, he would have landed face-first on the wooden boards. As it was, it was quite a struggle to set him down gently. It somehow ended with Tess sitting in the wagon bed, with Jimmy’s head solidly in her lap, his eyes closed.
Khalid tossed her backpack in next to her and scrambled up onto the driver’s seat. He ca
lled out an order to his tired horse, some magic command to give the beast new life, and they lurched forward. Will had to jump back to keep the wheel from rolling over his foot.
“Thank you,” Tess called to him.
“I’ll see you,” he said.
“Yeah, he’ll be following you around in earnest now,” Jimmy murmured. His eyes were open, now, and when she looked down at him, he winked. Winked, damn it.
“No, he won’t, and when did we lose phones?” she asked instead of pulling back and letting his head bounce on the hard wood of the wagon bed, the way she wanted to. Khalid was still watching and listening.
“I don’t know when the system went down,” Jimmy told her. “All I know is that when I tried to use it, it kept cutting out.”
Tess leaned across him to reach her pack. Pulling it closer, she unzipped the side pocket that held her phone. She opened it and nothing happened.
Troubleshooting 101’s first rule was to always check the power button. Oops. It was off. She turned the phone on, and it immediately beeped.
“Mine’s still working,” she told him.
There was a message waiting, but Jimmy reached up and took her phone out of her hands. “Let me see that.”
“The signal’s not strong,” she said, “but the system’s definitely still up. Maybe you’ve got a hardware problem.”
He was pushing an array of buttons, clicking on the menu and . . . He handed it back to her.
“Aren’t you going to call Tom?” she asked. She looked at her phone. “Hey.” He’d deleted that message. “What if that was important?”
“It wasn’t,” Jimmy said. “I’m going to wait and send Tom email.” He looked pointedly up at Khalid and back. “Encrypted,” he mouthed silently.
“You didn’t even listen to it. How do you know . . .” . . . it wasn’t important? She figured it out before the words left her mouth.
He knew because he’d left that message. He’d called her when he’d heard those rumors about the suicide bomber, and her phone hadn’t been on. He honestly hadn’t known if she was dead or just an idiot.
He’d deleted the message, but he hadn’t been able to erase the phone’s list of missed calls—a record of the times that he’d called but hadn’t left a message. She quickly flipped over to that menu and . . . Whoa. He’d called her seventeen times in a forty-eight-minute period. While running through the debris-cluttered streets of Kazabek.
His freak-out hadn’t been an act. The act had come after he’d found her, safe and sound.
Jimmy was watching her from his vantage point, down in her lap. His expression was unreadable, but he was a very intelligent man. He had to know that she now knew . . .
“I’m sorry I had my phone off,” she told him.
“Wake me when we get to Rivka’s,” he said, and closed his eyes.
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CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
“You did what?” Jimmy stopped right there in the doorway to Rivka’s barn, staring at Tess. What she had just told him was un-fucking-believable.
She, however, was maddeningly calm as she went inside and made herself comfortable on the overturned bucket that she’d claimed as her spot during their meetings. “I think you probably heard me perfectly well the first time.”
“ ’Scuse us.” Murphy attempted to squeeze past, Dave right behind him, and since squeezing wasn’t one of Murphy’s talents, Jimmy was forced to step farther into the barn.
“Will Schroeder?” he asked Tess.
“Yes. Will Schroeder.” She pretended to look over some notes she’d made on a yellow legal pad.
The early evening sun streamed in through the cracks in the battered wooden door, illuminating the dust that hung in the air.
It should have been soothingly pastoral.
But Jimmy was on the verge of meltdown, and Tess knew it, too. He could see wariness in her eyes as she risked another quick glance in his direction.
He cleared his throat. “You actually told him about . . . ?” He couldn’t say it. He probably could’ve screamed it, but he was trying his goddamnedest not to have a complete nutty. Especially since it would be his second for the day, and his policy was one nutty per millenium. If that.
“I told him we’re here to find Sayid’s laptop.” She finally met his gaze. “I had no choice.”
“No choice?” His voice sounded tight. “Are you trying to get me killed? Is this some kind of twisted revenge?”
Dave had just sat down, but now he stood. “Maybe we should give them a few minutes alone,” he said to Murphy.
But Murph settled back on his favorite bale of hay. “Are you kidding? This is just starting to get good. Revenge for what?”
Tess held her ground. “Of course I’m not trying to get you killed! Don’t be ridiculous.”
Jimmy couldn’t stop himself from pacing. “You don’t understand how much that prick hates me.”
“This wasn’t about you.” Tess put down her legal pad. “Look. If you could get past your childish bias against Will Schroeder for just half a second—”
“Don’t you god damn get condescending with me!” As he spun to face her, he lowered his voice instead of raising it, which was probably a mistake, because he knew from experience that doing so made him sound and look dangerous as hell.
Dave and Murphy apparently thought so, too, because they were both on their feet.
Ready to protect Tess.
From him.
“Jesus Christ,” he said to them. “What do you think? That I would actually . . . ?” He could see from their faces that they did, indeed, think exactly that. “God damn it.”
Tess was on her feet now, too, still talking. “—you’d realize this was the perfect way to deal with him. The only way. He’s ambitious, he’s smart, he’s eager to prove to Jackie Bennett just what she gave up by dumping him—and God, Jimmy, he knows who we are. He could blow our cover at any given moment. Now it’s in his best interest to keep quiet.”
“He didn’t know about Sayid.” He turned to Dave and Murphy. “Sit.”
They sat, but not without exchanging a look. Silently communicating exactly how they were going to take him down if he lost it and went for Tess’s throat.
Christ. Give him a break. He wasn’t a freaking animal.
“So I gave him a heads-up on a story that’s going to break big in twenty-two hours.” Tess was no longer trying to keep her annoyance from ringing in her voice. “Do you honestly think that after he heard the White House news bulletin that Sayid was dead he wouldn’t know exactly what we were doing here? This way, he’s on our side. Under our control.”
“Our control? Your control.”
“Yeah. My control.” Anger flashed in her eyes. “Is that what’s bothering you? The fact that I might have actually done something that you couldn’t manage to do? You know, you can be so fucking immature.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The tough talk simply didn’t work well with that nose and those freckles. Pollyanna from the ’hood.
He must’ve sounded as if he were on the verge of madness—and maybe he was—because Fred and Ginger rose to their feet again, obviously eager to dance.
But this time it was Tess who glared at them. “You can’t be serious! You actually think you’re going to have to defend me—from James?”
Murphy shrugged. “Shit happens.”
Dave was less succinct. “The pressures in the field sometimes trigger volatile behavior. And in this particular group of personnel, there’s a greater degree of unfamiliarity among teammates—”
“Yeah, well, hello, Dave, meet James Nash. You, too, Murph. Shame on you. I happen to know that one of Jimmy’s goals on this mission—possibly even his primary one, despite the fact that it shouldn’t be”—that was a not so subtle message aimed with a flash of her eyes at him—“is to keep me safe. So in the future, please don’t insult him by implying otherwise.
”
Tess was fiercely indignant—for him.
He’d treated her like shit more than once, including this afternoon when he’d refused to talk to her at all on the ride back to Rivka’s house. And he’d thrown a bona fide freak-out today, imagining the absolute worst-case scenario—Tess, torn to pieces by some zealot with a bomb.
In his mind, as he’d run all that way—seven miles—he’d sifted through the rubble and dust and blood, collecting all that was left of her.
Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint Page 25