“Whatever the case, we need to find out who they are,” he said. “Up for a little breaking and entering?”
MUNICH
THE FINAL WATCHER was in the plaza directly in front of the building where the Dehler phone was, putting him in plain sight of at least twenty people at any given moment. Not exactly the best location for Nate to incapacitate him.
Nate would have to lure the guy to a more private spot. He studied the area, and quickly realized there was only one good choice.
He waited until a large group of people was crossing the square before he strolled right past the man without looking at him, and entered the apartment building. It took him less than a minute to find a maintenance room. The pitiful door lock gave way with barely a wiggle of his pick. Inside were half-filled shelves and buckets and mops, but not much else.
Nate activated the comm mic again and covered it partially with his hand to distort his voice. “She’s moving!”
“Moving?” the remaining watcher said. “Aren’t you—”
“I’m inside. Get to the ground floor. Go left, and keep an eye on the stairs at the end of the hall.”
“Yes, sir. But-but what if she sees me?”
“Don’t let her!”
“Yes, sir.”
Nate propped the maintenance room door open just wide enough for him to watch the hallway. One of two things was going to happen. Either the watcher would walk by, allowing Nate to sneak up behind him, or—
Steps in the hall, approaching Nate’s position.
As they neared the maintenance room, they paused. Nate scooted behind the door right before it was pushed inward.
He had to give the watcher points. The instructions had been to make sure the woman didn’t see him, so it made sense that the kid wouldn’t pass up an excellent hiding spot from which to carry out his assignment.
Too bad for him, he’d chosen Nate’s option number two.
The moment the man stepped over the threshold, Nate slammed the door in his face and yanked him inside.
It was almost unfair how easy it was to put the kid in a sleeper hold. As soon as the watcher went slack, Nate eased the door closed and laid him on the ground. The guy’s wallet contained one Austrian driver’s license, four hundred and eight euros, and a folded piece of paper with a two-line string of numbers written on it.
He pocketed the license, but the fifth, sixth, and seventh numerals in the top string on the paper caused him to take another look: 4-1-5. The area code for San Francisco. Since there were too many numbers for either strand to be a phone number, he thought it must be a coincidence. Until he took a moment to scrutinize the other digits.
“What the hell?”
Buried within the string were two more sets of numbers he recognized. The first set was also three digits long, and the last had four. When all three sets of numbers were taken together, they did make up a phone number. One Nate knew well.
He found the guy’s phone in another pocket, used the unconscious man’s thumb to unlock it, and called the number.
As Nate anticipated, it was answered by an automated voice saying the phrase he’d heard many times: “Routing number.”
He looked back at the string of numbers, thinking the code was hidden in it somewhere. But he would only be guessing at what it was so he hung up. It didn’t really matter anyway. He had his answer.
The number was the emergency contact line at Helen Cho’s agency.
She had warned Quinn and his team not to look for Liz’s killer. Now Nate understood why. Helen was after the woman herself.
Slow down. You’re getting ahead of yourself, he thought.
He had yet to lay eyes on Dehler and confirm she was Liz’s killer. He didn’t even know if the woman upstairs was Dehler. Too many looming questions. He had to accept the possibility that Helen’s people were here for an entirely different reason.
He started to shove the watcher’s phone back into his pocket, but paused.
I wonder…
He unlocked the phone again and opened the photo app, hoping for pictures of the watchers’ target, but the only pictures saved were location references. Nate checked the man’s texts. There were only two numbers the guy had been communicating with. From the contents of the first conversation, Nate guessed that number belonged to the guy’s girlfriend. The second, however, was clearly an exchange with the older guy Nate had left sleeping across the street. With a scroll backward, a picture of a woman appeared, accompanied by a one-word message: DEHLER.
If a gaze could burn a hole in something, the phone would have been ablaze.
It was the woman Nate had seen in Barcelona when he was trying to get Dima out of the country. The woman Dima had seen kill Liz.
Two weeks of searching and he’d finally found her.
But so had Helen’s people.
The head watcher would be waking soon enough, and he’d call in reinforcements. If he got his hands on Dehler, all would be lost. Helen would never let Nate and Quinn anywhere near her. At most, Nate had an hour.
And only one choice—grab her and move her someplace he could keep her until Quinn arrived. If that turned out to be infeasible, then Nate would have to do what was necessary to balance the scales.
Revenge might be an ugly business, but he had no intention of letting his desire for it go unfulfilled.
He pulled out his own phone and touched a name near the top of his favorites list.
ATHENS
JAR AND DAENG were riding the elevator up to Gomez’s apartment when Daeng’s phone rang.
“Hey,” he said, answering. For the next few seconds, he listened, then, “All right. Got it.”
The door opened as he hung up, revealing the entrance to the woman’s apartment, three meters down a short hall. Instead of exiting, though, Daeng pushed the button for the ground floor.
“What happened?” Jar asked.
“That was Nate. He found her.”
“Munich?”
A nod.
Jar pulled out her phone. “I will get us a flight.”
Chapter Ten
XA014
“HOW DID YOU find me?” Dima asked. “I do not even know where this place is.”
She was sitting on her bed, the light off to avoid drawing the attention of the security patrols. Orlando sat beside her, while Quinn had pulled over a chair from under a small, wall-mounted desk.
“It doesn’t matter,” Quinn said.
“It does,” Dima countered. “If you can find me, anyone can.”
“I doubt it,” Orlando said. “And just so you know, you’re in North Carolina.”
“North Carolina? That is in…the south, correct?”
“Yes. On the coast.”
Dima digested this for a moment. “Why are you here?”
Quinn said, “Because we’re going after Liz’s killer.”
Dima blinked in surprise and then looked down. “Of course.” She paused. “I am…I am so sorry about what happened. She is dead because of me.”
“Don’t ever think that,” Orlando said. “You didn’t pull the trigger.”
“But the assassin was there because I was there. I was the one who was supposed to die.”
“If it’s anyone’s fault,” Quinn said, “it’s mine and Nate’s for putting her in that position, not yours. But that’s not what we’ve come to talk about. We want the woman. And we think you can help us find her.”
“Me? Until Barcelona, I had never seen her before. I have no idea who she is.”
“We didn’t expect you would. But you do know who hired her.”
Even in the dimness of the room, Quinn could see her eyes widen. “No. No, I cannot talk about that.”
Before Quinn could speak, Orlando touched his thigh and said to Dima, “We know this is a very sensitive subject for you. Someone wants you dead. There’s nothing scarier than that. You’re thinking that if you share anything with us, it will make you more vulnerable. I’m guessing you’ve also been told b
y those who brought you here that you are to talk only to authorized personnel, and to say nothing to anyone else. Am I right?”
Dima glanced at Orlando and then looked away, lower lip trembling as she nodded.
“Even if your…hosts’ motivations are tangled up between what’s best for you and what they want, ultimately they are trying to help you. We get that, and we won’t do anything to destroy that. Our motivation is not as grand as that of the US government’s. Ours is personal. If you don’t want to help us, we’ll respect that choice. But please, consider it carefully before you say no.”
Dima was staring at her lap, her staccato breaths growing louder and louder until suddenly she clasped her hands over her eyes and started to cry.
Orlando put her arms around her and allowed Dima to sob into her shoulder. When the worst finally passed, Dima wiped her eyes and pulled away.
“I-I apologize,” she said.
“Nothing to apologize for,” Orlando said.
The young woman looked drained from the cry, but it had also taken away much of the stress that had been radiating from her.
“I’ll tell you whatever I can,” she said.
Though his expression didn’t show it, Quinn felt a sense of relief unlike any he’d had in a long, long time. “Thank you,” he said.
“I ONLY KNOW of India from the stories my grandmother used to tell me,” Dima began. “She had been a child when India and Pakistan declared independence from the British Empire in 1949. Back then, her family lived in Porbandar along the Indian west coast. But we are a Muslim family and India was decidedly Hindu. Like many in their community, her father—my great-grandfather—decided their future lay in Pakistan. They took what belongings they needed and moved across the border to Karachi.
“My parents and aunts and uncles were all born in Pakistan. Both my mother and my father, whose stories were similar, had shown great intellectual promise from young ages, and were presented with opportunities none of their siblings had, including scholarships to attend university in the UK.” For the first time since Quinn and Orlando had arrived, Dima smiled. “That’s where they met and fell in love. They both earned PhDs, my father in archeology and my mother in chemistry. As soon as they returned to Pakistan, they got married, and a year later, my sister Noor was born. I came three years after that.
“Unlike the rest of the family, my parents were secular, and while they taught us how to navigate Islam, they brought us up to be more like them than their much more conservative siblings. When we were old enough, they sent us to boarding school outside London. It was…amazing. The things we learned, the way we were treated as equals despite the fact that we were women. It wasn’t like that back in Karachi.
“I was so happy. I thought I had the greatest life ever. For a while I guess I did. But not long after I turned eleven, that all went away.”
ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Dima heard footsteps in the hallway outside her classroom but paid them little attention. Though she wasn’t enthralled by Mrs. Kantor’s lecture on the pre-World War II political situation in Britain, she knew it would be on the exam the following week so she was trying to pay attention.
When the door opened, the entire class turned to see Mr. Mallack, the headmaster himself, standing just outside. A jolt of nervous energy shot through the room, everyone wondering who was in trouble.
“Mrs. Kantor, if I may have a moment,” the headmaster said.
“Review chapter fourteen,” Mrs. Kantor told the class. “Quietly.”
She walked into the hall and Mr. Mallack shut the door.
Telling kids their age to be quiet, especially in the face of someone’s impending doom, was fool’s play. Throughout the room, whispered conversations broke out.
“Who does he want?”
“I heard Ian shoved that new kid into a wall.”
“Someone must have cheated.”
“All I know is that it’s not me.”
Hannah, a girl from Southampton who sat in the chair next to Dima, said, “Maybe they found that cigarette Laura hid by Mr. Oster’s class.”
Laura had never smoked a cigarette in her life, and had only stolen it from her older brother, who was five levels ahead of them, on a dare. Hannah and Dima had been there when Laura stuffed it behind a display cabinet in the hallway.
Dima glanced down the aisle at Laura. Her friend looked nervous, undoubtedly thinking the same thing as Hannah.
Dima was about to tell Hannah she might be right when the door opened again.
Mrs. Kantor reentered the room while Mr. Mallack remained in the hallway. Instead of focusing her attention on Laura, though, Mrs. Kantor’s gaze stopped on Dima.
“Please gather your things and join Mr. Mallack in the hall,” Mrs. Kantor said.
Dima froze, certain Mrs. Kantor was speaking to someone else, but the woman’s eyes remained on her until Dima could no longer deny she was the chosen one.
She closed her book to stuff it into her bag.
“What did you do?” Hannah whispered.
“Nothing,” Dima whispered back. She could think of no reason at all why the headmaster would need to see her.
“Dima,” her teacher said. “Please hurry.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Kantor. I’m coming.”
Dima closed her bag and hurried toward the door. It had to be a mistake. Whatever they thought she’d done, they were wrong. She’d clear this up. Everything would be okay. And in no time she’d be back in the room, trying to stay awake.
As soon as she stepped into the hall, Mr. Mallack said, “Follow me, please.”
She wasn’t sure how to interpret the look on the man’s face, but the anger or disappointment she’d expected to see wasn’t there. That made things even more confusing.
When they entered his office, Dima had another surprise. Not only was Mrs. Goodwin, the assistant headmaster, waiting there, but Noor was, too.
“Please, have a seat,” Mr. Mallack said, motioning to the empty chair next to Dima’s sister.
As Dima sat, she shared a look with Noor, and saw her sister was just as confused as she was.
For a moment, it appeared as if the headmaster didn’t know what to say. When he finally spoke again, his voice didn’t resonate with the same power it usually did. “There was an…incident this morning.”
“Incident? What kind of incident?” Noor asked.
“I’m afraid your parents—”
If Dima could have stopped time, she would’ve done it at that moment. Nothing that came after those four words could be good. She did not want to hear anything more. But hear it, she did.
“—have…died.”
The short story was that Dima and Noor’s parents had been shopping at an outdoor market when a car bomb had gone off nearby. “Wrong place, wrong time,” the girls were told over and over. The fact that the bomb could have easily taken out dozens but had killed only their parents was considered a good thing.
The true story was one she would learn later.
With their parents dead, guardianship of the girls would have transferred to their father’s older brother. But the man—an iman at one of Karachi’s larger mosques—had no time to deal with children, and appointed the middle brother to the job.
If anything, Hammad Kassab was even more devout than his brother the iman. His first action was to recall Noor and Dima to Pakistan, making it clear they had already received more education than a woman would ever need.
Their new lives couldn’t have been more different than the ones they’d had up to that point. Now they had to be covered head to toe in robes whenever they went out, which was seldom, and were told they were to be neither seen nor heard.
The only saving grace was that one of their aunts was not keen on the suppression of women, and on the days Dima and Noor were in her care, she allowed them access to books and the internet, something the girls took every advantage of. But these visits were few and far between.
For the most part, they were servants, or more accu
rately slaves since they weren’t being paid. From early morning to late at night, they toiled in their uncle’s household, day after day after day.
The bigger shocks were still to come, though.
One day, Noor was pulled from the kitchen and taken to a different house where she was dressed in clothes that weren’t hers. She was then ushered into a room where she was married to a man she had never met until that moment.
It was another week before someone told Dima what had happened. She had cried herself to sleep for a month, if not more.
A whole year passed before she saw her sister again. The occasion was a visit by Noor’s husband, Tahir, to Dima’s uncle’s house. The purpose was a meeting where it was agreed Dima would marry Tahir’s younger brother, Bilal, the shocking news whispered into Dima’s ear by her sister when they had a brief moment alone.
The ceremony took place six months later, after which thirteen-year-old Dima was subjected to a whole new level of horrors.
It was in that first year of being Bilal’s wife that she overheard the conversation revealing her parents’ deaths had not been random. Their liberal, secular beliefs had apparently evolved into participation in a secret, anti-fundamentalist organization. Their murders had been arranged by the very uncle who’d become Dima and Noor’s guardian. He had deemed the girls’ parents heretics who had brought shame to the family. Dima swore then and there she would make him pay for it.
Things were if not good then at least consistent until she was almost eighteen. Her husband was not pleased she’d yet to get pregnant, but he was often away so the beatings were few and, more times than not, halfhearted. If he ever suspected Noor had been slipping Dima birth control pills—that she got from who knew where—he would have probably killed them both.
The next big change came when Tahir took Noor on a trip to the north and brought Bilal with them. Though no one said why they had left Dima behind, she knew the answer. Bilal enjoyed his time away from his wife. Sometimes too much, if the rumors were true. She didn’t mind, though. She cherished every moment he wasn’t around.
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