Tinderbox (Flashpoint Book 1)

by Rachel Grant

  The minister greeted her warmly, although it was clear he was troubled. He dropped behind his desk and folded his hands together on the surface. His French accent was more pronounced, as if he wasn’t making the effort to sound more Djiboutian than French. “I received a response just this day to my inquiries into the whereabouts of Monsieur Broussard. It seems he is missing.”

  Morgan stiffened in her chair. The shift was slight, but Pax was far too in tune with her physical reactions. “Missing? For how long?” she asked.

  “That is an excellent question. It appears no one has seen him since the Christmas holiday. However, he filed his final report of findings for the railway project in late January.”

  “I received an email from him with the final report attached,” Morgan said, her voice wary.

  “Yes. As did I. Authorities in Paris will trace the emails I received to see where they originated. He was supposed to have returned to France to finish writing up his report, but we can find no record of his flight, no indication he ever left Djibouti, however the hard copy of the final report was mailed from Paris.”

  “So the report was…a fraud?”

  “It is possible. I have asked his university colleagues to examine the report for inaccuracies or phrasings a geologist wouldn’t use. I have also given the Paris Police Nationale a copy to run through a program that will determine if it is consistent with his work.”

  “And why is this just being discovered now?” Morgan asked. “No one noticed he wasn’t in Paris?”

  “He had taken a year sabbatical to complete this project. Before he left Djibouti, he emailed his colleagues with the news that he planned to finish the report from a villa in Morocco, where he intended to holiday for a few months to finish out the sabbatical.”

  “So everyone in Paris thought he was in Morocco, and everyone here thought he was in Paris?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t until his rent lapsed that the landlord started making inquiries. His phone had been disconnected due to lack of payment. His email account was suspended due to inactivity.”

  “You said Paris’s Police Nationale are investigating. Are authorities in Djibouti involved?” Morgan asked.

  Lemaire’s shoulders lifted in a resigned shrug. “We don’t have the resources the authorities in Paris have. It is my hope that Police Nationale will send an inspector. After all, a Parisian has gone missing. Our local gendarmes won’t complain over Police Nationale interference.”

  “All leads must be cold,” Morgan said. “Broussard has been missing for more than two months.”

  Pax stepped forward. “Dr. Adler, you said earlier that Broussard emailed you, and he seemed excited about something. Do you believe that email was really from him?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. The light from the window framed her gold hair, giving his angel a halo. “I do. He was eager to discuss something he’d found, but he was going to take more samples to confirm. I can’t imagine why someone else would send such an email when the next message said to disregard the previous.”

  “So he might have disappeared between messages.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the dates he sent them?”

  She frowned. “The first was a week—no, two—before I left Virginia.”

  Pax took another step closer. “How many days between emails?”

  “I was in the waiting room to receive my final vaccination when I read it on my cell. I’d have to check my calendar, but I think it was eight days before my flight. So maybe five days apart?”

  “Still a big window,” Pax said. Did the geologist’s disappearance have anything to do with Desta or the bombing a week ago?

  “The local gendarmes will be eager for any information you can provide,” the minister said, then he cleared his throat and spoke the real truth. “Or at least it might spur them into action. It is entirely possible you, Dr. Adler, were the last person to communicate with him.”

  That statement sat with Pax like a tuna and mayo sandwich left out for hours in the Djibouti sun. What if Morgan’s observation of the anomalous alluvium was somehow related? He thought back to those blue pin flags. “There was writing on the pin flags. What did the flags say?”

  “Broussard noted the auger test number, depth, and date he did the test,” Morgan answered.

  “So we can compare the dates written on the flags to the date of his excited email and figure out where he’d been working when he emailed you?”

  He could see a subtle frisson of excitement course through Morgan. “Yes. Absolutely. Brilliant.”

  He was used to women admiring his body—Morgan was no different in that regard—but times like now, when she showed equal admiration for his mind, set her apart. Many of the women he’d known—hell, even his ex-wife—didn’t look beyond the big soldier exterior. But today in the field, Morgan had explained her work to him without using dumbed-down words or assuming he didn’t grasp basic geology.

  She knew he hadn’t gone to college, while she held a PhD. She was wicked smart and yet treated him like an equal. Given his line of work, that was unpleasantly rare. As if he needed another reason to want her.

  If he were a different sort of man, a different sort of soldier, there could be hope for something between them when this was all over, but his work was his life, and as long as he was in Special Forces, his job, his team, was his number one priority. Anything less could be fatal, for him or for team members who counted on him to have their backs.

  Morgan deserved better than coming in second.

  They asked Lemaire to keep them informed and left. At the base, they collected Morgan’s laptop from her CLU, then walked to the building that had Wi-Fi Morgan could use. Pax planted his hand on the small of her back as they climbed the steps to the front entrance. She looked at him askance, and he quickly withdrew his hand.

  Shit. He was slipping. On base, no less.

  They settled at a desk, and Morgan booted up the laptop. They wrote down the dates of the two emails from Broussard—both had been sent in January, just as she’d remembered.

  Task complete, he glanced at his watch. They’d been working in one capacity or another for twelve hours straight, much of it in the Djibouti heat. “You hungry? We can go to Barely North for a bite.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll just go to the cafeteria.”

  She was being wise, but a perverse side of him couldn’t help but press. They couldn’t have sex, couldn’t have a relationship, but at the very least he could enjoy her company for another hour. “You’ve earned a beer with your dinner.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sergeant Blanchard.”

  It was the first time she’d used his rank and title all day, and he found it didn’t sit well with him, that distancing formality, even though he’d wanted it earlier. “After hours, you can call me Pax.”

  “No. I don’t think I can.” She grabbed her computer and strode to the door. “Have a good evening, Sergeant. I’ll see you at oh-six-thirty sharp.” She was outside before he could utter another objection.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “The notation on the pin flags changed,” Morgan said. “The date is above the auger test number, and the number six is…off.” She pointed to the number. “I’ve read enough of his handwritten notes to recognize his writing. Broussard’s sixes aren’t always closed. I think he started with the bottom loop, making one curved stroke to form the number. Whoever wrote the number on this flag started at the top, rounded the loop, then crossed the line. Like a curl.”

  She glanced up at Pax, who had accompanied her on the long walk to inspect Broussard’s pin flags, while Ibrahim and Mouktar stayed back with Sanchez in the survey area to start the day’s fieldwork. “Broussard didn’t mark this flag.”

  He glanced back down the line they’d followed. “But he marked the others?”

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  She poked at the loose soil in the hole with the narrow, flat-edged shovel dig bums often
called sharpshooters. After a moment’s hesitation, she dug out the auger hole. It wasn’t as if she was messing up forensic evidence that would be collected. “I wish Djibouti had the resources to really investigate this,” she said as she removed the dirt. “It’s so unsettling, the idea that a man can disappear and nothing really will be done about it—locally, anyway.” She wiped sweat off her forehead with a gloved hand. “Two weeks after I got here, I found a woman’s pelvic bone on survey. She’d been dead at least six months, and it was definitely female—so it wasn’t Broussard. I reported it to the gendarmes, and they shrugged it off. People die, they said.”

  “Welcome to Djibouti,” Pax said.

  “That’s exactly how it felt.”

  “One of the first things I ever said to you was that Djibouti is pretty much lawless.”

  “Yeah. It’s finally starting to sink in.” She dug in with the sharpshooter and hit something solid. She scraped out the hole and reached inside to touch the bottom. “Solid hardpan, thirty centimeters below the surface.” She frowned. “Broussard might’ve stopped an auger test when hitting hardpan, but the flag says this was a two-meter-deep probe with a bucket auger. This isn’t even a third of a meter deep.”

  She dropped down next to the hole. “The auger hole is a token, dug just deep enough to look real on the surface, with a pin flag planted in the loose soil at the right interval.” She slipped off her gloves and opened her water bottle. She splashed the cold liquid over her face before drinking. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Most likely,” Pax said.

  “Broussard found something out here that got him excited. But we know from the dates it wasn’t Linus. He worked in the area where Linus was found in December, two weeks before he flew home for the holiday. He returned right after the New Year. The last place we can be certain he worked was the area we surveyed yesterday. He dug those tests on January eleventh, and this auger test, dated January sixteenth, is bogus.”

  Pax dropped down to sit on the dirt beside her. “Yesterday, you noted something that made you curious and want to talk to the geologist who went missing after working in that very area.”

  A chill ran up her spine. Who would have thought she could be chilled when the heat index was a hundred degrees?

  “Could this be about mineral rights?” Pax asked. “He might have found signs of valuable deposits.”

  “It’s possible. This area has never really been surveyed by a geologist before—which is why that World War II monograph for the Vichy government was so important. Until Broussard came through here, they didn’t even have a basic soil map for the western half of the country.” She scooped up a handful of dirt and sifted it through her fingers. “For all we know, Djibouti could be sitting on a massive diamond mine.” The dry silt wouldn’t stick to her fingers. She blew on her open palm, sending the fine coating of dirt floating into the hot air.

  “But I don’t think so,” she continued. “Given the alluvium deposits, it’s possible Broussard found something even more valuable to Djibouti.” She glanced down the wide, ancient valley. “I think there was water here, more recently than anyone ever realized. It’s hard to imagine, but glaciers cut through this area once upon a time. When they melted, there would have been lakes, even springs.”

  “If there was water here in the recent—geologically speaking—past, what does that mean for Djibouti today?”

  “Over the millennia, lakes could have seeped down, and the springs cut off. It’s possible Djibouti is sitting on a deep aquifer capped by anticline rock. Given the lack of geologic survey, no one would know.” She bit her lip. “I’m no geologist, and I’m definitely no expert in arid environments. But what if? What if Djibouti is sitting on an untapped supply of water? Lack of water is the one thing that keeps the country dependent upon Ethiopia and Eritrea—and the US and China. Water would change everything.”

  “Could you find the aquifer, if there is one?”

  She shook her head. “No way. We’d need a geologist. We’d need Broussard.” She frowned. “If it’s there, it could be hundreds of meters deep. Broussard would have merely seen the signs on the surface.”

  “If Broussard made a find like that, who would he have told?”

  “Natural Resources Minister Ali Imbert, certainly. I’m not sure if he’d have told Lemaire.”

  Pax’s gaze scanned the landscape. “Let’s get you back with the team. We’ll use the sat phone to call the local gendarmes and tell them what you learned from the pin flags, and hope they care enough that a man went missing to look into it.”

  She nodded and used the flat edge of the sharpshooter to scrape the dirt back into the hole, then replaced the pin flag.

  In the end, Pax made the call, because the officer on the phone didn’t speak English. He translated her words into French, then hung up, a dissatisfied frown marring his handsome face. “They won’t do shit,” he said.

  “It will come down to Police Nationale, then.”

  He nodded. “If this ends up being connected to Desta, Interpol will get involved—they investigate drug and sex trafficking. But for now, all we’ve got is Police Nationale.”

  “I’ll call them when I get back to the base tonight.” In a way, contacting the French police would be easier. Geology wasn’t her specialty, and it was unwise to dangle the hope of fresh water to people in lawless, dry, impoverished nations.

  Part of the problem was Broussard had been the expert on the region. Others could be called in to examine the area, but they didn’t have his experience, his knowledge of this part of the world. He’d worked in Ethiopia and Eritrea. If there were a deeply buried aquifer, its location and volume would likely remain a mystery without someone with matching expertise retracing Broussard’s steps.

  Fortunately, Broussard’s breadcrumbs were metal pin flags that held up to the heat.

  That evening, after speaking at length with a Police Nationale inspector, Morgan decided to go to Barely North for dinner. Savvy had canceled their nightly sparring match—being typically cryptic as to why—leaving Morgan free. Concern over the missing geologist had her belly in knots, and a beer might help her relax. Unfortunately, Barely North risked a different kind of tension. She might run into Pax.

  Having him by her side in the field was a delicious, torturous pleasure. She’d wanted him before, but now she knew him better and enjoyed his company. His mind. His humor. His quiet competence. Like a reduction sauce simmering on the back burner, the flavor of desire had intensified.

  But the connection she felt with him, this intensity, this flavor, could never be tasted. Could never be savored. Maybe another man in Barely North would catch her fancy. A fling could be just what she needed to get the Green Beret out of her mind.

  As if a fast food burger could satisfy a hunger for French cuisine.

  Business in the club was light, with fewer than half the tables and barstools filled. She settled onto a seat at the bar and was quickly pulled into conversation by a group of sailors. They were fun and lively, but her heart wasn’t in it. She wasn’t in the mood for fast food.

  A man from Pax’s team slipped onto the barstool to her right. “Can I buy you a drink, Dr. Adler?”

  “Morgan, please.” She tried to remember the man’s name and came up blank. The names on their uniforms were so convenient, but in the bar, everyone had to wear civvies.

  “Chief Warrant Officer Sebastian Ford,” he supplied. “Call me Bastian.”

  Right. He was one of the two officers on the A-Team, the assistant commander—just above Pax in the team hierarchy. Flirting with this man would be a seriously dumb-shit idea. “Thanks, Bastian, but I’m all set for drinks.”

  “I have it on good authority you aren’t involved with Pax.”

  She appreciated his directness, because it meant she could be equally direct. “Yes, but I’m also not an asshole.”

  He tilted back his head and laughed. He was handsome; she’d give him that. Black hair and almond-shaped eyes that hi
nted at Native American or Asian heritage. Fine, chiseled features. Nothing like Pax, who had a darker, southern European complexion and a face of hard angles. Pax wasn’t easily handsome like this man, but Pax was hot in a different way.

  “I take it I’m the asshole?” Bastian asked.

  “Only if you intend to hit on me.”

  “Then I guess I am.”

  She picked up her drink. She’d find another place to sit.

  He caught her hand to stop her. “Stay, please? I won’t do anything to make you uncomfortable.”

  “I’m not going to be the target in a pissing contest between you and Pax.”

  “He’s told you about me, has he?”

  “No. He’s never mentioned you at all. But I’m the daughter of a general. I spotted your swagger at fifty yards.”

  He laughed again and waved the bartender over and ordered a drink. “Tell me about your project, then. I hear you’ve been finding really old shit.”

  She was tempted to say no, they hadn’t found any coprolites, but odds were he wouldn’t get the joke and explaining it would take all the funny out of it. So she told him about the village site and the alluvium and the missing geologist, and he pretended he hadn’t heard the story in a debriefing already.

  “Want to play pool?” he asked when the conversation waned. He nodded toward an empty table.

  “Sure.” She slid off the barstool. She hadn’t ordered dinner, but the truth was, she wasn’t hungry. Low-level nausea had settled in her gut when she acknowledged Broussard had probably been murdered. A beer, she could handle. Food not so much.

  Bastian was a typical guy when it came to playing pool. Lots of strut and swagger and just decent enough to back it up.

  But Morgan was better. She botched her first two turns to let him get complacent, a little sloppy, so he’d go for the difficult shot to show off, thinking there was no way she’d catch up. But he messed up the shot, and it was her turn. Time to reset his ego. She picked up her pint glass and downed the last quarter of her beer, then grabbed the stick and proceeded to run the table.