Heatseeker (Atrati)

by Lucy Monroe

  “What?”

  “This.”

  He kissed her. It wasn’t all-out passion. They didn’t have time for that. Spazz had found information on who lived in the house they were investigating and said Roman had sent a troubling e-mail.

  Whatever that meant, it precluded more hours of pleasure in bed with Rachel.

  Forcing himself to remember that, Kadin pulled back from the kiss.

  “As things to wake up to go, that’s pretty much in the top five,” Rachel said, sounding happier than she’d looked upon waking.

  He didn’t ask what her number one would be, since he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Works for me, too.”

  She nodded, squirming to get out of the bed. “We need to get a move-on.”

  That was usually his line, so it made him smile to hear her use it.

  She grabbed one of his T-shirts and yanked it on with quick movements before picking up her clothes from earlier and heading to the door. “I need a shower.”

  “Rachel?”

  She stopped at the door and looked back at him. “What?”

  “You okay?” He didn’t come right out and ask if she wished they hadn’t made love.

  That would just be too damn touchy-feely for him, not to mention that, if the answer was yes, he really would rather not hear it. But he didn’t like the preoccupied expression in her eyes.

  “Not really.”

  His gut tightened. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I just woke up with this feeling of foreboding. I’ve had them before, and it never means anything good.”

  He remembered that. “Like when your parents died.”

  Rachel had called him from work telling him about her feeling that day. Then she’d texted him later to say she thought it must have been about her friend cutting herself on a broken glass. She was taking the other girl to the ER.

  The rest of that day and night and the one that followed it had been the stuff nightmares were made of.

  And even after seeing how she reacted to losing her parents, how much she’d hurt, though she hid her pain from everyone but him, he’d walked away. He hadn’t just been an idiot at twenty; Kadin had been incredibly selfish and was only now realizing it.

  How stupid did that make him as a thirty-year-old man?

  “Yes.” She grabbed the door handle, her grip white-knuckled. “Is everything okay with Jamila?”

  “As far as we know. Her family and Chuma left the hotel for dinner a few minutes ago.”

  “Do we still have someone tailing them?”

  “Cowboy’s on it with Abdul’s man.”

  She nodded, looking no less tense. “That’s good.”

  “There’s no reason to believe she’s not okay,” Kadin tried to point out. “She’s been engaged to the spawn of satan for nearly a year and not gotten caught in the grinder yet.”

  “I know. I just … I feel worried.”

  He jumped out of the bed, grabbing his own clothes, except a T-shirt. He’d wear the one she had on after their shower. Smelling Rachel on him would never be a bad thing.

  “Let’s get showered, and then we’ll do a situation report over dinner, okay?”

  “Okay.” She blew out a breath, as if she was trying to relieve the tension, but it obviously didn’t work.

  Her entire demeanor was one of a woman on edge. And he remembered from past experience that feeling wasn’t going to leave her alone until she found out what was coming.

  “Did you have this feeling before Linny?” he asked and then wished he hadn’t.

  She stopped dead in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. “No. If I had, I might have been able to save her.”

  He couldn’t argue that, but Rachel’s premonitions, for lack of a better word, were beyond his comprehension. He didn’t understand how they happened, why they occurred sometimes and not others.

  All he did know was that they cost her emotionally, and she was a woman who couldn’t afford to pay more in that way.

  “You are one of the strongest people I’ve ever known,” he said as they entered the bathroom.

  She laughed at that, the sound more bitter than amused. “I don’t think so.”

  “I do. You were stronger than me.” Stronger than he’d ever given her credit for. “Still are.” She was going to be able to walk away from him and survive.

  He wasn’t so sure about himself.

  Suddenly Spazz’s taunt-fate-and-be-damned attitude of the last year made a hell of a lot more sense to Kadin.

  And only as he realized that did he also acknowledge that, in the back of his head for the last ten years, he’d had the hope that someday he and Rachel would find their way back to each other.

  They ate their dinner on the rooftop, everyone there except Cowboy.

  “So, the man living in the house Chuma’s been visiting is one Terne Lavigne,” Neil said, giving the name its proper French pronunciation. “He is a former corporate employee of SympaMed, living far beyond the means of someone with his background and without visible signs of income.”

  “His name came up in TGP’s research,” Jayne offered. “But we dropped that line of inquiry because we could not locate him.”

  Rachel remembered reading that in the file as well but said nothing.

  Neil nodded to Jayne, giving Rachel a searching look before adding, “When I dug deeply enough, I found out that Lavigne is also listed as a contributor to two of Dr. Massri’s pet political projects.”

  “What else did you find when you started snooping in files you’re not supposed to have access to?” Kadin asked.

  Beth jumped in with enthusiasm, showing how much she enjoyed the technical side of espionage. “He’s a silent partner in a weapons factory as well as primary shareholder in several African mines supplying raw materials to the factory.”

  The rest of the table discussed the significance of these discoveries, but Rachel didn’t add much to the conversation.

  Her sense of foreboding was too acute to be ignored. It didn’t help to find out that Jamila, her family, and Chuma had ended up at Lavigne’s house for dinner.

  “Do you think he’s the player we’ve been looking for?” Jayne asked.

  “The one at the very top of the entire organization?” Beth asked. She then had some kind of silent communication-between-geeks with Neil. “I think it’s possible.”

  Ethan smiled at them both tolerantly, clearly proud of his wife’s accomplishments of the afternoon.

  Rachel pushed her plate away, feeling sick. “And Jamila’s in that house.” A house they couldn’t get eyes or ears into.

  Jayne’s cell phone went off at that moment, the ring tone bringing the first lightening of spirit Rachel had had since waking. It was the 1980s hit “Who Can It Be Now?” by Men at Work.

  Rachel just knew Jayne had made that Whit’s ring tone. Considering how anal the man was about secrecy—or had been before this congressional audit—it was pretty apropos.

  Jayne’s conversation was brief and not a happy one. She hung up and turned to the others. “Ralph Giroux is missing.”

  “Who is Ralph Giroux?” Beth asked.

  “One of the autistic savants participating in the ‘Treffert’ think tank,” Rachel guessed, her sense of unease growing even stronger.

  Both Jayne and Neil nodded.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Neil added, “He’s a highly functioning autistic Frenchman with absolute brilliance in the area of mathematics and applied physics. He’s our acoustic-levitation genius.”

  “Missing, how?” Kadin asked.

  Jayne was typing into her phone. “He didn’t show up for his job today, and the la Sûreté agent assigned to guard him hasn’t been able to locate him.”

  “Agent? As in, a single Moroccan police officer?” Kadin asked, his tone showing what he thought of that situation. “When TGP learned of Abasi Chuma’s communications about grabbing up a Treffert tank member, each country’s government was given a heads-up to t
he danger their savant or savants might be in. Most have acted accordingly.”

  “Yes, but only a single officer was assigned to Mr. Giroux’s protection.” Jayne’s mouth twisted in a moue of disapproval.

  Rachel understood the reaction. The National Police of France, formerly la Sûreté Nationale, might be Morocco’s top federal law enforcement, but even the FBI usually worked in teams in cases like this.

  “Because he’s autistic, he didn’t rate adequate protection,” Kadin said with some bitterness.

  Rachel thought he must be thinking of his nephew. Despite being wrapped up in her own growing sense of anxiety, she put her hand on his arm and squeezed in an attempt to comfort him. The look he gave her said he appreciated it.

  But Rachel didn’t understand one thing. “Why didn’t your chief send Atrati to watch over these people?”

  “The Atrati weren’t given the contract. Each government was to take responsibility,” Kadin replied. “The think tank participants are located all over the world, doing most of their work online.”

  “Putting their results at risk for hacking by any Tom, Dickwad, or Harry,” Neil inserted with disgust. “The Atrati wouldn’t have let Giroux be taken,” he grumbled.

  Ethan shook his head in clear disgust. “Politics.”

  A mix of emotions swirled through Rachel.

  Jayne getting the call from Whit on her case brought home the fact that Rachel was no longer the agent of record in any of these matters. In fact, she was officially on voluntary unpaid leave.

  Right this moment, Rachel didn’t have a job, and she couldn’t be sure she’d have a career to return to when she got back to DC.

  Since Linny’s death, Rachel had lived for her job. She didn’t have anything else. And now that was in jeopardy, and her assignment was unequivocally in someone else’s hands.

  She’d thought she wouldn’t mind. That it didn’t matter. But she’d been wrong.

  The emptiness that spread through her at the realization she was no longer officially working the case fed an undercurrent of malaise Rachel had been doing her best to ignore since getting out of that cell in the mountains.

  Added to that, her connection to Kadin seemed to be loosening by the moment. The Atrati had not been given the contract to protect the presumed members of Chuma and Massri’s think tank. He had not chosen to share that information with her.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised. She really shouldn’t. It wasn’t her case, and there was nothing she could do about it, but she’d thought maybe their … friendship at least went beyond official roles and job titles. That it extended to communicating about things.

  She’d been wrong.

  She felt the extinguishing of that tiny flicker in the vicinity of her heart that she could only describe as hope.

  She’d defined the parameters of their relationship. Sex and help protecting Jamila Massri.

  Only now, as Rachel realized how sharply defined those parameters were in Kadin’s mind, did she understand that the tiny place inside her heart had wanted more. A lot more.

  Bile rose in her throat as her own self-perpetuating blindness rose to mock her. Once again she’d made the wrong choice for her own happiness.

  It didn’t surprise her. She seemed to be a professional in that regard.

  Her gut cramped, and she wanted nothing more than to make a beeline for the bathroom to empty the contents of her stomach. But she’d shown all the weakness on this assignment that she was going to.

  Swallowing down the bitter taste in her throat, she concentrated on breathing, doing her best to track the conversation around her.

  “Are you okay?” Beth asked, her expression and tone indicating her worry.

  Rachel did something she seldom allowed herself to do, unless it was for the sake of the job. She lied. “I’m fine.”

  She was unable to inflect her tone with any level of animation, but that could not be helped. She felt dead inside.

  But Jamila Massri was still alive, and Rachel was determined to keep her that way.

  She leaned forward toward Neil, getting his attention with a touch to his knee.

  He stopped talking to Jayne and looked at Rachel. “Do you have an idea?”

  Not about the missing Frenchman. He wasn’t her assignment. She didn’t have an assignment, just a commitment to a young woman who deserved better than the future in store for her.

  “We can’t get sound in Lavigne’s house, but can you get heat readings?” Rachel asked Neil.

  He stared at her. “I might happen to have something with me that can do that. Thermal imaging comes in handy when planning an extraction. You think they’ve brought Ralph Giroux to the house here in Marrakech? That would be a pretty bold move, considering.”

  She hadn’t been thinking of Ralph Giroux, but she didn’t say that. If it got her what she wanted, heat readings placing the people inside the house, she’d go with it. “It’s possible.”

  “There’s no way of interpreting the heat signatures as belonging to any particular person,” Jayne pointed out, her tone dismissive. “We don’t know how many servants and guards Lavigne keeps in his employ.”

  “The location of those readings could tell us something, though. If there’s a person in an isolated area of the house while the rest of the household is at dinner, that might indicate a prisoner,” Rachel disagreed.

  Heat signatures could also indicate if Jamila was in a room away from the others. Rachel’s sense of impending doom was the only thing competing with the malaise growing inside her.

  She might be wrong, and it could have everything to do with Ralph Giroux and nothing to do with Jamila Massri, but either way, sitting around and doing nothing was not an option.

  Jayne thought it over for a few seconds before giving Rachel a look of approval and nodding. “That’s possible,” she said to no one in particular. “Although he is a French citizen, TGP has deemed the data he was working with potentially harmful to the U.S., so locating Mr. Giroux is now officially part of my assignment.”

  Rachel expected a shard of pain at this reminder that the assignment was no longer hers, but she felt nothing. She was going numb inside, her focus narrowing down to Jamila Massri and keeping the young woman safe.

  “How close do we have to be to get an accurate heat reading on the house?” Kadin asked.

  “Closer than I’d like. Fifty feet. Twenty-five to thirty would be ideal” Jayne responded.

  Kadin nodded. “We have to wait for it to get dark, then, or at least dusk. There’s too little cover around there.”

  “No.” Through the numbness, Rachel’s inner alarm was increasing in volume, not decreasing. “That could be too late.”

  The sun didn’t set for another hour.

  “It’s not likely they’re going to torture Giroux for information while they’ve got other people in the house.”

  “You mean Jamila and her aunt?” Ethan asked, having been quiet to this point, though his keen senses had taken everything in. “You think having the women there will inhibit them pushing their agenda with Giroux tonight?”

  “Yes.” Kadin sounded so certain.

  But Rachel knew he was wrong. Oh, not about Giroux. Chances were, the autistic man was safe, at least for the night. Criminals as astute as these men had proven to be would have researched their quarry enough to try positive forms of persuasion first.

  But Kadin was wrong in thinking that the women’s presence would prevent something bad from happening. Rachel was almost sure that Jamila’s being there meant exactly the opposite. That something bad was going to happen to her.

  Rachel stood up. “I’m feeling a little tired. I think I’ll lie down for a while.”

  Her lack of animation gave credence to the lie, and she could see the acceptance of it as truth in the eyes of the others around the table. They’d been thinking of her as fragile all along; her withdrawal just fed that belief.

  Kadin made to stand, but she shook her head. “Stay here. You’
ve got planning to do.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “For Jamila’s sake,” she added for good measure.

  He frowned, looking really unhappy about sending her off to bed alone, but in the end, he nodded.

  Rachel ignored the continuing look of concern Beth shot her and the slight pity that flickered briefly in Jayne’s eyes. Neither woman would understand what drove Rachel right now. How could they?

  She went directly to the room she shared with Kadin and made quick work of donning the loose-fitting djellaba he’d bought her over her clothes, then adding the brightly colored khimar, similar to a large head scarf, over her hair, pulling one side up to cover her face like a veil.

  She found Kadin’s backup KA-BAR in his duffel where she’d noticed it when looking for the T-shirt she’d worn earlier. She strapped the combat knife around her calf, adjusting the sheath to fit her smaller frame. He didn’t have a backup handgun in the duffel, but she was betting she knew someone who would.

  Rachel went looking for Jayne’s room. She found the other agent’s things in the room Eva had vacated only that morning.

  A quick search revealed a small stash of colored contacts like the ones Rachel herself often carried on assignment. She chose a pair that would change her eyes to hazel, not the dark brown she’d worn as part of her cover in Egypt.

  Different enough to be unrecognizable with her body covered by the loose folds of the djellaba and the rest of her features hidden behind the khimar.

  She also found Jayne’s gun and a silencer. Rachel took them both, along with extra clips of ammunition. She loaded the gun and screwed the silencer into place before tucking the gun into her waistband under the robe and the extra clips into the side pocket of her Bermuda-length cargo shorts.

  The djellaba was better at concealing weapons than a standard-issue FBI suit. No telltale bump showed either at her waist or where the KA-BAR knife was strapped to her calf.

  Rachel removed her shoes for the trip down the stairs to the first floor, careful to be soundless as she made her way to Neil’s command center.

  It didn’t take her long to find the small handheld thermal-imaging camera. She’d been trained on one similar in her job at the DEA. Learning the use of thermal imaging was standard procedure for drug enforcement agents.