Ambush

by Barbara Nickless

  “Roger that. Out.”

  Almasi said, “Cheap bastard like him, he’ll want a contract and a free meal.”

  The man in the trailer chuckled.

  With the man’s laugh hanging in the air, I whispered over my radio microphone. “T3. Cohen is here.”

  Nothing.

  The radio in the trailer crackled. “Ms. Almasi, the detective says he needs to ask you a few questions relating to the Jeremy Kane murder.”

  “Bastard’s actually doing his job?” A pause. “Tell him I don’t know how I can help, but regardless, he’ll need to wait. These meetings can drag on. Don’t offer any water or shade. If he insists on staying, let him bake for an hour or two.”

  “Roger. Out.”

  Overhead, the trailer creaked as someone moved.

  “Bring him around,” Almasi said.

  There came the smack of flesh on flesh. A man groaned.

  I gripped my pistol. The voices came from the north end of the trailer. I crept along the ground, heading toward the door set halfway down. I signaled Clyde twice to stay in place. Stay. Really, stay.

  I didn’t want him exposed during whatever came next.

  “He’s out,” Almasi said. “Get some water.”

  The floor creaked as footsteps came down the length of the trailer and stopped directly overhead. Water splashed into a sink—the man was standing above me, a foot away from where I lay.

  Time to act. Get the man while he was away from Cohen.

  A lit fuse of adrenaline raced through my body and exploded in my chest. I closed my eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. I imagined Cohen and Almasi and the man she’d sent to get water. I pictured where they stood or sat, what weapons they might have.

  Then I opened my eyes and slid through the grass, my passage covered by the sound of running water. I emerged near the door, stepped onto the first stair, and tried the knob.

  It turned.

  I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs, then yanked the door open and leapt inside, pulling the door closed behind me and turning the lock even as I spun to the left. The man stood in a tiny kitchen, his left hand holding a water glass, his right working to free a gun. Beyond him, the trailer was empty.

  The glass slipped from his hand and shattered against the linoleum floor. He brought the gun around.

  I fired two shots with the suppressed Glock, center mass.

  As he dropped, I whipped to the right. At the far end of the trailer a woman stood watching me, her mouth an O of surprise.

  Two feet from her, Cohen sat with one hand cuffed to the chair, the other forced onto a table and duct taped at the wrist. He looked worse in person than he had in the photo. His eyes were closed, his head tipped back against the seat. My heart stopped until I saw the rise of his chest.

  I told myself that later I would process how much they’d hurt him.

  Right now, it was enough that he was alive.

  My eyes went back to Almasi. Early sixties, iron-gray hair, eyes with an odd light in their gray-green depths.

  “Hands up where I can see them,” I said.

  She raised her arms.

  Behind me, the water still ran. The trailer was hot, the air close. Plumbing but no electricity. I looked over my shoulder. The man I’d shot was very dead. I moved to the end of the trailer, glanced at Cohen—who hadn’t moved—then frisked Almasi. I stepped back, holstered the Glock, and snugged the M4 into my shoulder.

  I centered the muzzle on her chest.

  “Uncuff him,” I said.

  “I don’t have the key.”

  “You can’t spend all that Saudi money if you’re dead.”

  The expression on her face changed, racing through a series of emotions that came and went so quickly I couldn’t catalog them. Whatever else she was, Almasi was a complicated woman. But at the end, fury radiated off her like a furnace.

  “Key is on the table,” she said.

  I held the gun between my shoulder and chin, swept up the key, and tossed it to her.

  “Hurry,” I said.

  While she bent to Cohen, I lifted a slat on the blind. No one outside yet. At least not where I could see them.

  “I have the bird,” I murmured into the radio microphone.

  Silence.

  Cohen groaned.

  “Mike,” I said.

  His eyes opened. “Sydney?”

  To Almasi I said, “Now the tape.”

  She peeled the duct tape away from his arm.

  “Help him stand.”

  She grabbed his wrists, braced herself, and pulled. Cohen slid forward an inch.

  “Cohen!” I snapped. “On your feet!”

  He jerked.

  “Get him up,” I said to Almasi, “or by fuck I will blow out your knees.”

  She pushed and pulled Cohen from the chair. He wobbled to his feet.

  “Help him over. Bring the cuffs.”

  The anger in her face would have frightened Hades. But hell no longer scared me. Almasi draped Cohen’s arm across her shoulders and braced her shoulder in his armpit. She grabbed the cuffs, and they hobbled toward me.

  Cohen’s face looked more battered than it had in the photo. The bruising ran down the side of his neck and disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt. The tips of three fingers on his right hand were taped.

  His clothes were spattered with blood.

  Process it later.

  I peered out the slats. Two armed men now stood at the end of the corridor between the trailers.

  When Cohen and Almasi were close enough, I took the cuffs and ordered her to bring her hands together in the front. I snapped on the cuffs and pocketed the key.

  “Mike, can you walk on your own?”

  His eyes met mine. The darkness I read there made me flinch. Maybe I was afraid of hell after all.

  “Sydney.” His voice sounded like they’d scraped down his vocal cords with a metal file. “Water.”

  I found another glass and filled it at the tap, my eyes on Almasi. He drank it down, and his eyes cleared a little.

  I unslung the rifle and handed it to him. He took it with a nod.

  It had been more than ten minutes since I’d told Dougie where we were. We needed a vehicle. I did not want to walk Almasi and an injured Cohen past armed guards.

  I looked out the window again. The two men were conferring, and one pointed south, away from the trailer. They looked alert but not anxious. Given the size of the complex and the constant roar of the wind, they probably hadn’t heard the shots. And since Almasi was using the trailer to torture a cop, my guess was she’d issued a do-not-disturb notice to everyone on the complex.

  Her men didn’t yet know I was inside.

  I murmured into the mike. “T3.”

  Silence.

  A third man joined the first two. They talked, and then all three moved away. Now would be the perfect time to show up, Dougie.

  “All I want is the intel,” Almasi said. “I assume you have it by now. Turn it over, and we can forget about all this. You go your way. I go mine. Nice and civilized.”

  She didn’t look civilized. She looked like she wanted to hack out my eyes with a knife and then run them through a kitchen disposal.

  But beneath the anger lay another emotion. I peered more closely at this woman who had occupied my nightmares for years. In my mind, I’d made her godlike—all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. But here she stood in a sunbaked construction trailer in the middle of nowhere. A small, graying woman with age-spotted skin and a squint.

  Nothing about her was what I’d expected, other than the rage.

  Anger was often a cover for fear, or so my counselor said. I got that. I had plenty of both. But beneath Almasi’s more obvious reactions I caught a flicker of something else.

  “What?” she snapped at me, tired of my perusal.

  Grief, I realized. What Almasi carried in her eyes was grief. The profound kind. The kind I’d seen at memorials and funerals and in the eyes of the chapla
in when we carried bodies onto the base. The kind that breaks every bone in your body, but which you have no choice but to carry with you across a lifetime.

  Something terrible had happened to her. Whatever it was didn’t offer absolution for what she’d done. But it gave me a glimpse inside her armor.

  I would give Dougie a few minutes more.

  “Tell me about Kane,” I said. “Was it the photos he took that tipped you off? Made you realize he’d connected Valor with the weapons smuggled into Iraq?”

  She perched on the metal table where the keys had been. Probably she was okay with buying time, too. Give her men a chance to realize something was going down and move in.

  The dice could roll either way.

  Almasi cleared her throat. “The security cop? He was killed by a tramp.”

  “While you watched. Don’t you trust your own people to do their work? Or do you just enjoy watching good men die?”

  Cohen said, “She killed Kane?”

  “She had him killed. Guy by the name of Mark Fadden did the dirty work.”

  Almasi said, “No one will believe such a crazy story.”

  “Fadden’s dead,” I said. “Just so you know.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Fadden.” But she smiled. Probably all to her benefit that her hired hand was dead. Hard to testify from the grave.

  “What I’d like to know, while we’re standing around being civilized”—my voice was thick—“is why. Why you told your brother, James, to allow those weapons into Iraq. Why you told him to send a special-ops team on a mission and then let the bad guys know they were coming. Why you had to kill innocents like Malik’s mother, who was only trying to help us.”

  I was guessing about who’d given the orders, but it sounded right. I felt a cold satisfaction when I read the truth in her eyes.

  She was—in fact—our Alpha.

  I stole another glance out the window. The stretch of grass lay empty.

  Almasi said, “Why is a complicated question.”

  I looked at her cold face, the arrogant confidence that she would not only get away with her crimes but profit from them. In that moment I didn’t care what tragedy might have motivated her. Rage exploded through me, unspooling lines of fire through my veins like heated wire.

  I pushed her back down the length of the trailer and into the chair where Cohen had been sitting. I yanked my knife from my pocket and opened the blade. Her eyes went wide, and her pulse leapt in her throat. I looked around, found the roll of duct tape, and sawed off a length, which I slapped over her mouth.

  Her face turned ashen.

  I grabbed the table they’d used with Cohen. The surface was red and sticky.

  “Sydney,” Cohen said. “We need to go.”

  “Not yet. We’re waiting for a ride.”

  I looked on the floor and found the pliers she’d dropped.

  “Is this what they used on you?” I asked Cohen.

  He looked at me, then at Almasi. He nodded.

  I leaned my weight into her, pressing her into the chair, and grabbed her manacled hands. I forced them onto the table.

  She bucked in the chair, curling her fingers tight into her palms, her skin slick with sudden sweat. I wrenched her left ring finger free and pressed it down, holding it in place.

  Cohen moved to the other side of the table. I didn’t risk a glance, afraid of what I might see in his face. Approval or condemnation. Both terrified me.

  Then he took the duct tape, used his teeth to tear off a length and strapped down her wrists above the cuffs. She kicked her feet against the floor and rocked her body. The chair banged against the floor.

  “She killed Jeremy Kane,” Cohen said.

  “And a lot of other people.”

  “And she’s the one who wants to kill the boy you went to find. And you.”

  “That’s her.”

  A muscle jumped in his cheek. “I’ll do it.”

  “This won’t look good in a trial.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He held out his hand. “I know exactly how it’s done.”

  I glanced at his bandaged fingers, then gave him the pliers.

  He pressed the tip just under the left side of her fingernail. A bead of blood appeared. She gave a muffled scream behind the gag.

  I leaned in. “You feel ready to talk now?”

  She nodded hard, her breathing labored, the pulse in her throat galloping with her heart.

  “Smart woman. I’m going to remove the tape. Make a sound, you lose the nail. Understand?”

  Another nod.

  I kept my grip on her finger while I peeled back the tape, ready to slap it on again if she drew breath to scream.

  Her eyes stayed on the pliers.

  I said, “Let’s start with your husband.”

  “What?” Her eyes darted to me, and two spots of pink appeared on her cheeks.

  “Arvin Almasi. Let’s talk about him.”

  “We haven’t been together in years.”

  “But you’re still married, aren’t you? Still protecting his family in Iran.”

  “His family can rot in hell.”

  “Not his family,” Cohen said. “Her child.”

  Almasi’s lips drew back, and she made a guttural snarl. But side by side with her wrath came a flicker of panic.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “I heard her on the phone,” he went on. “She has a daughter in Iran.”

  She snapped her teeth. “You’re wrong.”

  But pieces of the puzzle jostled into place, the outline of a picture taking shape.

  Not greed. Blackmail.

  I said, “Is she Arvin’s?”

  She lifted her chin and stared us both down. “Fools. Both of you.”

  “He’s blackmailing you with the life of your child.” Here it was. That grief. Some of my rage ebbed before a dull gray sweep of horror. “You and Arvin married just before the 1979 revolution that put the Islamists in power. He was an engineer who claimed to be madly in love with you. You had a child together.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  I nodded to Cohen, and he brought the pliers back to her finger.

  She squirmed. “Stop! Please.”

  “Then explain it to us,” I said.

  “Yes. Just please stop.”

  Cohen lowered the pliers.

  She said, “When I met Arvin, I was a widow living in Iran with my daughter. I was there to help my father negotiate a contract with the Iranian government. This was two years before the revolution.” Her eyes turned red, and she blinked. “Arvin was home after studying in the US. We fell in love. Got married. At first, everything was good. Arvin adopted my daughter. We were happy. Then we began to hear rumors of rebellion.”

  “And Arvin was part of that.”

  “Not at first. But he changed. As an engineer, he was highly respected. Useful. Men came to him shortly before the shah fell. They flattered him, told him how important he was. But what they really wanted was Valor’s weapons. I told Arvin this, but he was a fool. He listened to their flattery.”

  I let loose of her and straightened. The flat light of the sun filtering through the blinds felt oddly cool. “If you were worried, why didn’t you leave?”

  “I meant to. I was going to walk away from Arvin and take my daughter and get out of there. But I had to close down our offices, get our staff out of the country. I thought I had time.” Her gaze went away, staring into the past. “Then the embassy fell.”

  The picture came into focus. “Much later, he let you leave. But he kept your daughter.”

  “Miriam,” she whispered. “He took her from me.”

  Her shoulders dropped, and her fear for herself slipped away. In its place came an expression I’d seen once or twice on my own mother’s face. A naked panic you find only in a parent’s eyes.

  “He placed her with a family. I was allowed to see her only every month or so. He promised it was just for six months. Then a year.” Her head sank to her m
anacled hands. She spoke into her fingers. “Then three. I was helpless. I had no rights in the new Iran. After three years he sent me back to Texas. He needed me to make sure the ayatollah’s government got what it wanted. He kept Miriam so that I would do as he asked.”

  “And did you?”

  “What choice did I have? Miriam. . . . she and I talk. She doesn’t understand why I left. She has no idea what Arvin did. But she is healthy. Happy.”

  I looked at her bowed head. The sensible haircut and shoes. The heavily veined hands with the neatly trimmed nails I’d been angry enough to actually rip out. This woman had permitted the deaths of American troops. Had ordered the torture and deaths of who knew how many others. By any definition, she was a monster.

  But for a few moments, she was also a mother. And what wouldn’t a mother do to save her child? What wouldn’t she sacrifice, even if what she ransomed wasn’t hers to give?

  A terrible story of treachery and deceit, with a child standing on each end. Miriam, the first bargaining chip. Malik, the final pawn.

  And Laura Almasi in the middle, determined to sacrifice one to protect the other.

  Cohen handed me the pliers and moved away to look out the window.

  “Anyone?” I asked him.

  “Not yet.”

  To Almasi I said, “And Arvin is still in Iran?”

  “Mexico. He left three months ago.”

  My heart was already racing, but it managed to find the accelerator. “He’s hunting for Malik.”

  “Yes. But I imagine he’s also recruiting for one of Iran’s terrorist organizations. That’s what he does.”

  I pictured Zarif’s compound. The privacy. The security. His determination not to be seen with me, and his insistence that I leave the country. Maybe he, too, was a hunter, looking for men like Arvin Almasi.

  “Given how many people you’ve killed,” I said, “I’m surprised your husband is still breathing.”

  “He dies of anything but natural causes, Miriam dies, too.”

  Of course.

  “You’ve done as he’s asked for years,” I said. “Would he really hurt Miriam now? You could take this to the Feds. Offer a plea deal—Arvin for you. Expose him for what he is. Then take it all the way to the White House and have them demand your daughter’s return. Why keep making this worse?”