But the clock was ticking.
He heard the sound of the curtain being pulled back, and he glanced up.
Kathleen had pulled her thick, red hair back into a ponytail, and it made her features look wan and fragile. The robes and pants fit well enough. The canvas shoes looked a bit big, but they were better than going barefoot.
Careful not to connect his fingers with hers, he handed her a bowl of dates scattered with a few nuts. “I’ll bring more food later.”
She sat on the chair, hungrily devouring his offering. Relief found its way into Sayeed as he noted pink returning to her cheeks.
“So,” she said quietly around a mouthful. “Bakkar wants to know why I came to the Sahara?”
Sayeed nodded.
“You can tell him I’m looking for my sister, Dr. Jennie Flaherty. She’s a molecular biologist who disappeared from a medical convention in Burkina Faso. She was invited there to be the keynote speaker on hemorrhagic fevers.”
Sayeed knew this, of course, and so did Bakkar, but Sayeed said nothing, waiting for her to continue, hoping she’d let something slip that might be used to buy her life without getting him killed and—worse—blowing the operation.
“Jennie is a globally renowned expert on hemorrhagic fevers. Ebola is…” Her voice lilted. The brightness of emotion and desperation filtered into her eyes. She paused, staring at the dates in the bowl as she struggled to gather herself. “Ebola is one of Jennie’s specialties along with a recently discovered new strain, Ebola Botou. That’s…that’s why she was invited to Burkina Faso, to talk about it.”
Sayeed knew this, too. It was why the Maghreb Moors had specifically targeted Dr. Jennie Flaherty, under direct order from their organization’s mysterious leader, The Moor himself. Dr. Flaherty was one of the few people in this world with the potential to make the Ebola Botou virus airborne. And unlike the other Ebola strains, Botou had a unique incubation period and was genetically unstable. People infected with the strain would become contagious within fourteen hours yet show no outward signs until they suddenly succumbed about twenty-one days later. It was ideally suited for The Moor’s biological suicide attack, especially if made airborne.
The Iranian scientist who’d started the work to make it airborne had committed suicide as he neared the end of his project eleven months ago, finding death preferable to what he was about to accomplish.
The Moor’s plan had almost been scuttled, which was no doubt what the Iranian molecular biologist had hoped. Until the Maghreb underground, which kept tabs on such things, learned that one of the world’s foremost experts who had the potential to finish the Iranian’s work was coming to Africa, not far from the fringes of Sahara. Planning her abduction had been in the works two months before Dr. Jennie Flaherty ever set foot on African soil.
“I believe Jennie was kidnapped,” said Kathleen.
“And why do you think this?”
“How else does one just vanish from right inside a conference hotel?”
“This is Africa. Stuff happens.”
She leaned forward. “Yeah,” she said, bitterness twisting her features. “Like being kidnapped from your tent and being held captive in a camp of desert thugs.”
Frustration bit into Sayeed. This was not going anywhere useful at all. “Okay, so if you think your sister was abducted from a Burkina Faso hotel, what on earth brought you all the way to Adrar?”
“A postcard.”
He raised a brow. “Your sister sent you a card from Adrar?”
“No, from Tessalit. Written in Gaelic, asking for help. I flew to Tessalit, started showing Jennie’s photo around, and some villagers believed they’d seen her briefly in town, dressed in Berber garments. They thought she could have been traveling north with a group of men. Then a small group of Berber nomads came into town from the northeast, and one of the Berber elders said he’d seen a fair-skinned woman resembling Jennie crossing the Adrar Plateau with men on camels.”
Bakkar would not like this information, thought Sayeed.
Dr. Flaherty had tried to escape in Tessalit. She’d managed to briefly elude her captors but was recaptured within hours—it must have been just long enough for her to dash off a postcard and perhaps give it to some villager to put in the mail. And she’d been smart enough to write in code, calling for help in a language no one could read, apart from Kathleen, apparently. The postmark would have revealed a location—a start point for a search.
“Why did you come alone, Kathleen?”
“Because,” she said pointedly, quietly. “No one—not the U.S. State Department, FBI, Interpol, the Burkina Faso government or any other agency—was able to help me locate Jennie. And believe me, I badgered them all, for nine long months. It got so bad, I became convinced someone was hiding something, that I was being stonewalled.”
Sayeed knew from his handler that Kathleen was indeed being stonewalled. U.S. authorities had been made aware—via Sayeed himself—that Dr. Flaherty had been captured by the Maghreb Moors and was working under duress in the level-four lab in the castle on the ridge. A decision had been made at executive level to leave her there until the raid. Any earlier move to extract Dr. Flaherty would have jeopardized the sensitive, joint, international operation. Unfortunately, at the behest of the Pentagon, White House, CIA, Kathleen Flaherty’s sister had become a small pawn in a very big and dangerous game. It was unlikely she was going to get out alive.
“What else could I do but come here on my own? I’d already been to the newspapers, to political websites. I’d spoken with activists, met with my congressman, called the people at the university where Jennie worked. I set up a blog in her name, pleading for information. Nothing—not one thing—came from it all. How can someone just vanish, Sayeed? Into thin air? How come no one knows anything, yet people saw Jennie in Tessalit and on the Adrar Plateau?” She sat silent for a while, staring at the bowl in her lap as she worked to control her emotions. When she looked up, Sayeed’s heart clutched. “I had to do this,” she said quietly. “Jennie is… She raised me. She’s the most important person in my life.”
“What about your parents?” He spoke the question before thinking, and Sayeed realized something had just shifted in him. He was curious. He wanted to know more about her for himself. And he hated himself for feeling interest.
Her mouth flattened, and she glanced away.
“Kathleen,” he said. “Please, talk to me. Anything you say might help me.”
Her gaze jerked back to him. “Help you?” Distaste twisted her features.
“Yeah,” he said curtly. “It might help me save your life.”
“Why do you even want to?”
He stared at her for a moment. And he realized he wasn’t really sure of the answer. “Look, I ask the questions here, and if you don’t help, you’re not going to live.”
She lurched to her feet, bowl clattering to the floor. “I don’t understand what’s so important for them to get from me!”
“Sit down and just answer the bloody questions!”
She glowered at him, anger, frustration pinking her cheeks. “Fine.” She seated herself slowly. “Have it your way. My parents were academics,” she said, her voice going toneless. “My mother held a doctorate in philosophy and was so immersed in worldview analysis and her writing, she forgot she even had kids and a family. She left home when I was five. My father was an English professor who thought it necessary to bring a new fling home to his bed every few weeks. Other times, he’d stay out drunk for nights in a row. Jennie is twelve years older than me. She looked after me, made sure I bathed, had dinner. Got a bedtime story. Jennie—” Her voice caught. Tears gleamed in her eyes. “Jennie taught me everything. She…is my sense of home. My real family. I don’t know if someone like you can understand that.”
Someone like him.
Sayeed thought of his own family. His brutal father and uncle. His terribly scarred but beautiful mother. His own sense of loyalty to the now-deceased woman who had raised h
im and sacrificed so much to give him a decent life in the States. Sayeed’s family was the reason he’d joined the FBI—to hunt bad guys like his father and uncle. To seek justice for people like his mother. It was the reason he’d taken this mission for the CIA.
It was the reason he was staring at Kathleen Flaherty right now, asking these questions.
And he felt for her because, more than anything in his life, Sayeed had wanted a normal, wonderful family—a real sense of home.
“You’re right,” he said coolly. “A man like me doesn’t get to have a real family. How can you be sure the card came from your sister?”
“I recognize her writing. And Jennie was the one who taught me Gaelic when we were kids—we used it as our secret language. The card also has a picture of an oasis on the front. Jennie used to say Gaelic was our oasis in a turbulent home, a language only we could understand.”
“Any idea why someone would abduct your sister?”
Bakkar would want to know if Kathleen suspected anything or had told anyone of her suspicions.
“No. There’s been no demand for ransom or anything. I know foreigners are kidnapped for money in some African countries. And people are abducted in places like Nigeria all the time by local groups protesting foreign oil interests and such. But Jennie wasn’t involved in anything like that. Maybe it was a sex trafficking ring or some sort of human smuggling organization….” Her eyes filled again. She swallowed another ball of emotion.
Sayeed stared at her. This woman was so out of her depth, it was unbelievable.
“I can’t decide,” he said slowly. “Whether you are incredibly brave or terribly stupid to have come here on your own. The Sahara is not a place for a woman alone.”
“Which is why Jennie needs me. I’m all she has left fighting for her right now. Jennie sacrificed so much of her youth for me. Now it’s my turn. And if I don’t make it out of this damn camp alive, at least I will have died trying to help her.”
Damn, but in this instant, Sayeed felt a deep kinship for this woman. He got her. Wholly. Because he too would go to the ends of the earth for someone he loved, for family, for honor. In fact he had—it’s why he was here.
“Does anyone back home know you were in Adrar, Kathleen?” he said softly
She sniffed, rubbed her nose. “No. The U.S. airline and travel agent I used know only that I went to Tessalit. I should have called and told someone I was following a lead to Adrar, but I’d become so numb from authorities not listening to me that I wanted to find concrete proof before I did.” She paused. “If I did anything stupid, Sayeed, it wasn’t in coming to the Sahara alone, it was in not making sure someone knew where I was every step of the way because no one is even going to know I am missing.”
“You didn’t even tell a friend?”
She cast her eyes down. “No.”
Sayeed raked his hand over his hair. Bakkar would be pleased with this news. But then what? Once he told Bakkar, she was as good as dead.
She got up slowly from the chair, took a step toward him. Space in the tent shrunk.
But he didn’t back away.
“But you know what?” she said very softly, taking another step closer to him.
He moistened his lips, his blood going warm at her proximity, his head buzzing with tension. “What?”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a thing you’ve said—I think you know something about my sister. And that’s why you took my box of photos from my tent.”
Sayeed couldn’t breathe. She was too close. He needed to think. He needed air. Needed to goddamn touch her. He backed quickly toward the tent flap before he did.
“Just…wait here.”
Worry shot back into her features. “Why? Where are you going?”
Without answering, Sayeed stepped outside. He let the tent flap fall closed behind him, and he exhaled heavily. Dusk was turning to night, and the large fire circle at the center of the camp had been lit. Men were gathering around the flames, sitting cross-legged and passing round a hookah pipe as the younger boys set bowls of food and pots of mint tea on mats in the adjacent eating tent.
Sayeed climbed the boulders behind his quarters and sat for a while on the warm rock.
A gibbous moon was creeping above the castle ruins, throwing haunting stone patterns into relief along the ridge. And a downdraft had begun—cooler night air rushing down the cliff face to replace the residual day’s warmth rising up from the valley. Sayeed watched the shadows around the fire, and he listened to the intermittent laughter. Bakkar and Marwan would be waiting for his report in a matter of hours. He rubbed his brow, tormented by the decision he was being forced to make.
Inside the tent Kathleen paced. She stopped in front of the metal rod where Sayeed had hung his robes. He’d looped his belt over the rail, and his scimitar was in the leather sheath. Adrenaline pumped through her. She reached out and fingered the handle. He must have his small dagger with him, but he’d left this larger weapon here. Could she use it? She swore to herself, then laughed somewhat hysterically. He hadn’t left this by mistake, Sayeed knew she wouldn’t hurt him. She was as good as dead without him to protect her. So how in God’s name was she going to get out of this place? She spun around, paced some more.
She had to think positively.
She had to believe she was going to make it out of here—for Jennie’s sake. If she died in this place, hope for Jennie died, too.
Sayeed was the key. Kathleen had to do whatever it took to make him want to keep her alive. Which meant she’d need to bite her tongue.
She heard footfalls outside.
Kathleen jerked around as the tent flap opened. And froze in horror.
It wasn’t Sayeed.
It was one of the other men.
He stepped slowly into the tent, his gaze pinning her, his features twisted in lust. He came toward her, slowly, menacingly.
Kathleen lunged for the scimitar on the rail, but it was too late. The man surged forward and flung the back of his hand across her face. Pain sparked and blackness spiraled through her brain. She bent over, bracing her hand on the small desk, trying to hold on to consciousness. The taste of blood filled her mouth. He came up behind her, clamped his hand over her mouth, forcing her to swallow blood. She tried to bite him, couldn’t. He pulled her away from the desk, and in trying to hold on to the desk, Kathleen felt a pair of scissors on the surface that Sayeed had used to cut bandages. She clasped them in her fist as the man dragged her out of the tent and through the dirt.
Once behind the tent, he pulled her between some rocks and pushed her onto the ground. He pinned her flat on her back with his arm across her neck. Kathleen struggled to gasp in air as the man yanked up her robes and began pulling her pants down. Kathleen wriggled, tried to scream, but couldn’t. Fabric tore. She suddenly realized she still had the scissors in her fist, and as the man tried to yank her pants over her buttocks, she stabbed him in the head.
He jerked back in shock.
Kathleen used the moment to scream and squirm out from under him. But as she tried to run, he dived for her legs, tackling her and slamming her back into the dirt.
Chapter 5
A terrifying scream cut through the night. Sayeed lurched up—Kathleen! They were killing her! He scrambled down the rocks, rushed to the front of his tent. The flap was open, no one inside. He heard her scream again. The sound came from somewhere in the rocks behind his tent. He raced round the back.
There, in the darkness, out of sight from the men around the fire, a close associate of Qasim’s had Kathleen pinned by the neck to the ground and was lying on top of her.
Rage exploded through Sayeed’s veins.
He drew his jambiya and lunged forward. The man rolled off Kathleen as Sayeed bore down, kicking up to his feet like an acrobat as he drew his own dagger. He flipped it into his hand and faced Sayeed, waving the blade back and forth as he rocked foot to foot.
Kathleen scrabbled backward through the dirt.
/> Sayeed kept his focus on the assailant. “Get into the tent,” he growled at Kathleen as he and her attacker slowly circled each other, blades glinting. The man lunged. Sayeed dodged. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Kathleen crawling on hands and knees toward the tent, pale skin showing through the rips in her robe. Adrenaline turned him violent. Sayeed thrust forward, almost slicing into his opponent’s waist, but the man parried, circled, breathing hard, eyes glittering.
Sayeed circled, thrust again. This time he felt his blade connect with his opponent’s flesh. The man swore violently and barreled forward. Before Sayeed could deflect the blade, the tip his opponent’s curved dagger caught his hip, slicing a line of burning fire across it. Sayeed’s heart pounded. He felt warm blood on his hip. He circled again, his body in a low crouch, muscles wire-tense, his blade held out front.
In the periphery of his mind, Sayeed was aware that the chatter around the campfire had gone silent. The men were all listening, but no one appeared to help or interfere. They were going to let Sayeed and the attacker sort this out themselves or fight to the death.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kathleen returning around the side of his tent. Clutched in her hands was the scimitar he’d left inside the tent. Her assailant was momentarily caught off guard by her reappearance, and Sayeed used the moment to thrust forward. The man leaped backward, his heel connecting with a small rock. He tripped, falling hard onto his back. Air whooshed from his lungs. The impact seemed to wind and stun him for a nanosecond. Kathleen went for the gap, gripping the hilt of the scimitar in both hands, raising it high it over her head as she rushed forward.
“No!” Sayeed yelled. “Don’t do it, Kathleen.”
She hesitated, glanced at Sayeed.
“They’ll kill you. There will be nothing I can do to stop them.”
She seemed frozen in a moment of conflict.
“Put it down, Kathleen. Slide the sword over to me. Please.”
Slowly, she stepped backward. She placed the weapon on the sand, kicked it over to Sayeed’s feet. But as Sayeed bent to retrieve it, the man rolled onto his stomach and reached for his own sword that he’d left at the base of the rocks during his attack on Kathleen. Scimitar in hand, the attacker spun round and lurched back onto his feet. Screaming, he ran forward, blade raised high. Sayeed swung hard to his left as the scimitar came down. He blocked the man’s sword with his own blade. Metal clanged against metal, the sound of connecting blades ricocheting up the canyon walls, echoing among the rocks of the castle ruins above.
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