by Fiona Quinn
Her eyebrow arched. “It feels like this conversation has stirred the pot does it?”
“More like it’s stirred a wasp nest. My psychic distress is off the charts.”
“Isn’t that telling? That means the energy knows that things are about to change. Good for you. That’s brave.” She gave me a nod. “Some people feel that doing anything in the psychic space is hazardous. I, on the other hand, think that not doing things with our psychic selves is the hazard.”
Just like Doc thought it was telling that I’d had the biopsy metaphor, I thought her choice of the word “hazard’ not once but twice was telling.
Ia was afraid because she was a young woman and the journey was hazardous.
Was this the journey that my knowing warned me about?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
On the plane ride back to the East Coast, I tried to distract myself from my conversation with Doc.
Not an easy thing to do.
I spent the extra money to get an Internet connection and was doing searches for Kaylie’s case. I needed to convince General Elliot to let me go down range.
Funny thing, I wasn’t even worried about the going.
It almost seemed inevitable, like this had been written into my chapters a long time ago. Maybe it was one of those agreements that Doc was talking about.
No matter what I thought about the inevitability, I couldn’t get myself over to Iraq without the proper paperwork. Could I convince General Elliot to send me to the Middle East despite my contract?
The more arguments I had in my back pocket the better.
I developed a trajectory for where the group that the NSA had been tracking. It was the northeast boarder of Syria, near where the Yazidi lived. The nineteen Yazidi women who had been burned to death in the cage flashed into my imagination.
What a terrible place to be.
This group, had they completed their trek, would be crossing into Turkey. Kaylie could still be aiming that way. Could we flag officials to watch for her? Was that a safe thing to do or would it put a target on her?
I’d asked Margot for contact information from a CIA operative in that area, John Grey. She’d sent me a text that she’d hit a brick wall. He would have known the area and would be able to answer my questions.
Maybe Sophia would know. She had colleagues in Turkey.
Turkey was shipping the refugees around to various countries, trying to spread out the sheer volume of people. The Syrian population had been twenty-three million about the time Kaylie disappeared, and this statistic said that eight million had sought refuge in other countries in the ensuing years. Seventy-five percent of whom were women and children.
The refugee camp where the possible-Kaylie was headed was now moving the people on to Tajikistan.
A lot of those showing up were kids by themselves, their mothers were imprisoned, charged with being associated with ISIS and were awaiting trial.
How could they tell if these women were voluntarily with ISIS or simply trying to save their own lives as slaves and prisoners of ISIS?
What a nightmare.
Would Kaylie be facing trial? Could her kids have been swept along in this human tide? Prescott, I needed to reach out to him when I landed. Granted, it was Friday night here in D.C. It was the wee hours of Saturday morning for him. I had last seen Prescott on Tuesday. That wasn’t a lot of time for him to make progress, but it was also day five on the ever-ticking Kaylie clock. Prescott said it was a seven-day window.
He was searching for the children. The weight of finding Kaylie was on me.
Herman said my next step was to go find Trouble with a capital T. And then General Elliot had come back with virtually the same message though for a different task: How do I set Angel free? While he’d written “Trouble,” his sketch was of a Middle Eastern-looking compound with down arrows and a helicopter.
They let me see the tasking sheet that Doc had mentioned. Even though it looked like two bubbles to me, fear painted over me when I saw it.
Prescott had said that Kaylie’s nickname growing up was Trouble. According to Doc’s theory, Prescott wouldn’t have offered up that little tidbit had it not been something I needed to hear.
I focused back on the article. Eighty-four minors from Iraq underwent medical checkups. I looked at the dates. This was just last week. I wondered how often the BIOMIST system updated. Was it automatic? And if these kids were landing, was our medical team involved? Would they have captured the children’s blood markers? I made a mental note to ask Zoe. She had texted that she had an updated file for me based on the new parameters of Prescott’s search request. So possibly new leads. New answers.
Ah, look at this—UNICEF was trying to repatriate those kids to their mother’s nation of origin. I pulled out my pad. I had a lot going on in my brain right now. I didn’t want to let any of this slide onto a back shelf to be forgotten. One, Zoe. Two, tell Prescott about UNICEF repatriation.
I thought about all the children in the war zones, separated from their families. Families who were trying to seek asylum away from their hell. I thought about Zoe’s BIOMIST system applications. If only it weren’t a secret, think how it could be applied in our own country at our own borders. Then folks seeking asylum here in the US could be tracked, families reunited more easily. Of course, safety nets would need to be in place to keep the system from becoming something it was never meant to be. It was complicated. It probably needed the attention of professional ethicists.
I went back to the article to see if it mentioned a specific liaison at UNICEF who was involved with the repatriation of minors, if Prescott found Kaylie’s kids, they’d already know the process for getting the children to America. There in the last paragraph of the article, it said that some kids were in prisons because their mothers didn’t grant permission to repatriate their kids.
While I had questioned if Kaylie wasn’t revealing her nationality to stay safe, I hadn’t spent much time on the idea that Kaylie simply didn’t want to be found. Didn’t want to come home. Didn’t want her kids to be raised as Americans.
What if Dr. Kaylie Elizabeth Street was a jihadi bride?
“Oars in the water,” I told myself. “We have to find her to ask.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I drove right from the airport to Sophia’s house. A text from her dropped as I was making my way to the garage where Gator had left my car.
Now, I was sitting on her couch, my right leg tapping the floor impatiently. Sophia wouldn’t tell me about her update on the phone. I needed to come talk to her.
Then, Sophia decided we needed tea.
It was a stalling tactic.
Finally, Sophia emerged from the kitchen balancing a tray. “I have a contact who’s willing to help you,” she said without preamble, setting the tray, laden with plates of snacks and mugs of chai, on the coffee table.
“That’s a funny hitch in your voice.” I reached for the mug and napkin she stretched toward me. “Thank you.” I put my nose over the steam and inhaled deeply. “This smells delicious.”
“The reason I asked you to come over,” she ran her hands down the back of her thighs as she sat down, “I spoke to one of my contacts, a woman in Syria. She knows a story about an American woman.” Sophia took her own mug and settled back into the throw pillows, nesting in. “She guesses it’s an American woman, at least.” Sophia blew across the surface of the hot liquid. “That woman spoke Arabic with an American accent.”
I leaned forward in my seat, balancing my mug on my knee and trying not to get too excited. “When was this? Where was your contact at the time?”
“My contact is a woman named Mushkila.”
“Mushkila?” I pulled my brow together. “Her parents named her Mushkila? Like ‘problem’?”
“It’s her military call sign. The ways it’s used it means Trouble. As in, ‘If you stand against me, you will meet Trouble.’ It comes from a local saying.”
Trouble with a capital T. Tw
o different tasks given to two different remote viewers. Both had come up with the same answer. I was supposed to go looking for Trouble. And now there were two Troubles—Kaylie, and this Syrian contact. I’d call that an affirmation despite the thirty-five percent probability that everything I’d been told was flat wrong.
“Where is Mushkila?”
“Right now, she’s on the Syrian-Iraqi border. In the Kurdish region where the allied troops have cleared most of the ISIS fighters. She’s willing to wait there if someone’s coming quickly.”
“Do you trust her?”
“I knew her before the war. We were friends. I’ve helped her with her work. I trust her to get a job done.” Each short, clipped sentence was delivered in a staccato beat. Sophia obviously was uncomfortable with what she was saying.
“Mushkila and her husband were both educated people and had been part of the resistance that were trying to protect and save the antiquities. Her goal is to stop the free flow of money to ISIS. She works to interrupt the trade routes for both relics and drugs, but she has a harder time interrupting the slave routes. If her unit attacks, too many innocent people are hurt or killed. This then makes slave trading a safer money stream. These are businessmen. They weight their risks. A human commodity can sicken or fail to perform. Drugs and relics don’t need to be kept alive, but the resistance will try to stop the drug and relic trade to stop ISIS from funding their war. The slave market makes the resistance fighters think twice about their attacks. They won’t use flyovers, for example. You can see how this becomes a problem for the resistance. Every success Mushkila’s unit has in helping me with the relics means she and her fighters are encouraging slavery. She says it’s like the whole country is on fire, and all they can do is stomp on the coals to try to put it out.”
“You said, ‘her unit.’ It’s amazing that she’s in the fight given the gender roles in that part of the world.”
“ISIS captured and beheaded her husband, crumbled her village, and killed the families. She’d been away visiting friends during the attack. On her route home, she came across some men, fleeing on foot. They warned her away because ISIS had captured the other young women and girls. Mushkila went to the village, took her uncle’s rifle and what bullets she could find and went after them. She ended up killing the ISIS guards and freeing most of the women. The mothers took their daughters and sought refuge in other villages. But many of the young women had nowhere to go. They decided to form a unit, train, and fight together.”
I frowned. “Mushkila must be an incredibly brave woman.”
“Not the way she tells the story. She said saving the girls was an accident.”
I shook my head, not understanding.
“When she discovered what had happened in her village, she wanted to curl up in a corner and die. She tried to commit suicide, put a gun in her mouth, but she couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger. She decided she’d get the ISIS soldiers to kill her.”
I could understand. I’d been in that mental space for brief flashes in my own life. “Wasn’t she terrified she’d be taken prisoner and sold as a slave instead?”
“Exactly.” Sophia took another sip of her drink then put the mug on the floor by her feet. “But she didn’t feel that she had a choice. And that’s why the story unfolded the way it did. She went after the ISIS unit wearing her uncle’s clothes, hoping that as a man, they’d shoot her. She even sought out the group with the RPG, thinking that would be a faster more definite death.” Sophia talked while watching out the window instead of looking at me. “As she was shooting, she decided she’d kill as many of the ISIS fighters as she could while waiting for them to kill her. Lo and behold, in her rage, she killed them all and saved the others. Mushkila’s unit is absolutely fearless.” Sophia turned her focus back to me. “Savage. Soon other women with the same aim came to fight with her. An army of women. It’s tricky to focus on killing the men when the fighters hold so many women and children in front of them as human shields.”
“You spoke with her? She thinks she can help us find Kaylie?”
“Her unit was doing reconnaissance in the same GPS area as the coordinates you gave me from the NSA. Her unit saw the women were in danger from an approaching ISIS group and were trying to get word to them, warning them to disperse into the hills and travel in smaller groups. Before they got to them, the attack began. The women who were doing the reconnaissance work didn’t have resources to help.”
I scooted to the edge of my seat. “They saw the attack?”
“The ISIS fighters hit them with RPGs, then rounded everyone up who was still capable of walking. They left the others to die of injuries and exposure. Mushkila’s group was going to go after the women who were captured, but the fighters moved the women further north before the unit could act. They were waiting for drone information from a CIA contact when I talked to her last.”
Silence fell. I could feel Sophia debating, weighing, unsure. Since I didn’t know any of the circumstances, I sat quietly and let her process.
“My contact thinks she can help you find the women.” Sophia’s voice was so soft I could barely hear her.
“That’s wonderful.”
“No, you don’t understand. My contact thinks she can help you. She won’t work with a group that’s led by men. She only interacts with women-led groups. She’s learned to be leery of men and their motives. She knows the U.S. won’t send in a military group, that this will be paid contractors who are trying to find the American. It’s my fault. I was playing up your role in this rescue attempt to get Mushkila to trust the situation and the idea of working with a unit. I thought it would be enough that you were directing them from the United States.”
“All right. I can do that.” Maybe. Hopefully.
Her gaze held steady on me. “You’re considering this?”
I swallowed. Yeah it sounded crazy. What did I know about going into a war zone? And if I went, would my lack of skill put our task force in more danger?
“Weigh into that decision, the goal of the unit isn’t to stay alive. If you do go, you should understand that. They’re okay if they die, and they’re okay if you die trying to save other women.”
Well, then…that was scary. But, according to Herman Trudy’s remote viewing response to how to help Kaylie, I needed to look for Trouble with a capital T, that coupled with my knowing, I thought in all probability (well—better than probability, sixty-five-ish percent) this meant I needed to do it in person. In along the Iraqi-Syrian border.
“St. Ia was a martyr,” a tiny voice whispered from the back of my mind.
I pushed back against those thoughts—two women named Trouble in the same part of the world? What should I do about Kaylie? Go looking for Trouble. How can I help Angel’s soul? Trouble, written with capital T.
It seemed like that was the place to be.
Destiny was destiny, right? I felt little bubbles in my veins as my survival instincts took notice of my thoughts.
“Mushkila has a CIA operative that she works with. He provides her with intelligence analysis to help her unit in the area. You know how this works. In this non-permissive environment, without a verified identification, the CIA will not bring in special operations. They won’t even get a plan in place for someone else to intervene. If you go in with an Iniquus mission force, and things go badly, they most probably won’t act to get you back out.”
“You’re worried. I get that. We won’t know what things look like until we get there. Does your contact know where ISIS took their captives?”
“Her reconnaissance has been on site watching. The captured women are being warehoused. The field reports said the ISIS fighters were pulling the women’s veils off and taking pictures.”
“For a slave auction?” I asked.
“Exactly. They’ll probably sort them, too. After they see the women without the veils, certain ones will be set aside for the fighters’ rewards. Others will be sold for whatever the owner wants to do with them. I�
�m trying to identify the website. If I can find it, we’ll have all the photos of the women, and we can tell if the woman from the picture made it through the attack. If she’s dead, your case would be closed.”
“If I got Iniquus researchers involved, would they be able to help find the auction site?”
“It’s probably easiest if I work my contacts.”
“I appreciate it. I’d imagine if Kaylie survived and was warehoused with the others, that the only way to get to her is to get to all of them.”
“That is exactly why Mushkila is willing to wait and willing to help. But she said it has to be you.”
“Okay, thanks. Sophia, I had been given a clock to save this woman. That timetable got messed up when the refugees were attacked. I think you’ve started a new one. If we’re going to get to the possible-Kaylie, I’ll need to do it before the slave auction closes and the women go off to their new owners. Finding out about that auction, not just for the picture but also for the timing is important.” I stood and set my mug on the tray. “I need to go talk to General Elliot about all this.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Sophia said as she gave me a good-bye hug.
I headed to my car.
I met a man with seven wives, my knowing sing-songed in my ear.
“I’ve got it. I’m going already!”
Chapter Thirty
I stood in General Elliot’s home office, my notes from these last few days in my hand.
St. Ia had tapped the leaf and created, out of magic, a conveyance to get her from where she was to where she needed to be.
Perhaps I had done a similar thing by gathering these leaves of paper to hand to General Elliot.
He sat behind his desk; his face unreadable.
I’d briefed him on everything I knew, everything I thought I knew, and the much bigger chapter on what I didn’t know about this case and about me. I held nothing back.