Taking Fire

by Cindy Gerard

  Either way, they were playing with her.

  And it was working.

  This new wrinkle made the situation even more dodgy. The world knew that these assholes were loose cannons. Their interpretation of their religion was corrupted, and that made them not only unpredictable but more dangerous.

  It had been five minutes since the phone call that had created both hope and renewed fear for Meir.

  I want to come home.

  Taggart’s eyes filled and burned as the voice of innocence played over and over in his mind.

  He had to get out of here. “We should try to get some sleep.” He started to rise.

  Her arms tightened around him. “Stay with me. At least for a little while.”

  As much as he needed some time and space, he couldn’t make himself leave her. “If you’re not able to sleep, at least lie down,” he said, and when she did and then made room for him, he ignored the urgent need for solitude and stretched out by her side.

  For long moments, they lay that way. Talia in her men’s T-shirt and boxers, he in the bulky dishdasha. Inches of physical space between them, miles apart in every way except for the fear for their son.

  She badly needed sleep. So did he. Yet he was suddenly desperate for information about Meir. Something he hadn’t let himself ask for before.

  “Tell me about him.”

  The dark bedroom swelled with the absence of sound for several moments before she gathered herself and started talking. “In Hebrew, Meir means ‘giving light.’ ” Her voice grew tender with love. “He brought so much light into my life after . . . well, after a very dark period. He still—” She stopped, swallowed, and continued resolutely. “He still does.”

  Bobby had yet to see a picture of his son. He could have asked Rhonda to text the photo she’d hacked from Meir’s school records. Something held him back. Fear, he imagined. Fear that the only image he’d ever see of Meir was a photograph.

  “He’s always been a very inquisitive, intelligent child. And kind. I love that most of all about him.”

  The love in her voice said so much about her. Opened doors that led to thoughts of forgiveness, to wanting to reevaluate the reasons she’d done what she had, to believe she regretted not telling him about the baby.

  You were a soldier for hire.

  That truth cut close to the bone. She’d been right. Even now, he was still basically that same man.

  “What does he like to do? Like to eat?”

  “What most five-year-olds like. Pizza is his favorite, next to ice cream. He loves to watch and play American football. In Tel Aviv, he organized football games during recess.” She stopped, and he could see her mind framing a picture of Meir that was at once painful and sweet.

  “Was he . . . was his birth . . . ?”

  “He was six pounds, nine ounces, eighteen inches long,” she supplied, apparently sensing his hesitance and understanding what he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask.

  Look at all the lucky number threes he could make out of those stats, Bobby thought with a bittersweet smile.

  “And no, his birth didn’t cause me problems. He was eager to be born. Three hours, and it was all over. I barely made it to the hospital because I couldn’t believe things were going so quickly.”

  At the oddest times, during these desperate hours, he had pictured her in labor. The images would just appear. Her hair drenched in perspiration. Her body wracked in pain. His son arriving into the world with a lusty cry and ten beautiful fingers and toes.

  He felt a deep pang of loss that he hadn’t been there to witness the birth and to help her through it.

  “I bet you were a real warrior,” he said before thinking.

  She turned her head and gave him a small smile. “Didn’t have time to find out. Three hours? I hardly needed to channel my inner warrior for that.”

  Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe as he lay here beside the mother of his son, as their hands brushed against each other, then entwined, maybe this was where he needed to be. Not alone, mourning for a child he might never know, but in this bed, in this tenuous reunion with her, getting to know his son.

  He turned to his side so he could fully see her face. “According to my mother, I was bald and fat and happy.”

  “Meir had a head of thick black hair, a wiry little body, and a cry as strong as his father’s.”

  Pride, loss, yearning. This time, he couldn’t stop the tears. He lifted a hand to wipe them away; she stopped him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and pressed her lips against his cheek to catch them. “I am so, so sorry.”

  He’d tried to hold on to the anger that had been his companion since she’d left him in Kabul, but he couldn’t. He knew she was sorry. Sorry she’d deceived him. Sorry she’d kept his son from him. Sorry that everything they could have been together had been stolen by circumstance, duty, and war. Too much had happened between them to be forgotten. Too much to be forgiven. And he knew she was as sorry as he was that nothing they did in this bed tonight would change things between them come morning.

  Yet when she kissed her way to his mouth, he didn’t stop her. He opened to receive her tongue, the sudden hitch of her sob, her almost frantic need for connection.

  “I loved you,” she whispered against his lips, then spread tender, desperate kisses across his jaw and along his throat with a hunger that swelled with regret. “I loved you.”

  He shouldn’t let her say that. He shouldn’t let her do this. But they both needed something other than pain and fear to rule, if only in this moment. Needed release from the darkness shadowing their past together.

  He arched his back on a groan and tangled his hands in her hair as she unbuttoned the dishdasha and bared his shoulder. He gasped when the backs of her fingers fluttered down each inch of his body that she laid bare, then brushed against his growing erection as she trailed hot butterfly kisses down his chest and into the hollow of his belly.

  “I still love you,” she whispered, as she stood up on her knees, tugged the T-shirt up and over her head, then shimmied out of the boxers. She moved over him, gloriously naked and yearning, and pressed hot, wet kisses down his cock before taking him into her mouth.

  He gasped as she sucked him, arched his hips to match her rhythm, and held on to control by an unraveling thread. This was physical union at its most primitive, primal level. But even more, it was an offering. An appeal for forgiveness and an acknowledgment of shared grief.

  He couldn’t hate her here. He couldn’t hate her now. He could only feel how deeply she cared and the honesty of her passion. And over it all, he could sense that she needed the physical release from all those crosses she’d carried, even more than he did.

  With his last ounce of control, he lifted her up, set her over his lap, and gripped her hips in both hands. “I need to be inside you.”

  She rose to her knees, straddled him, then surrounded him with her small hands and guided him home.

  And it did feel like home. God help him, it felt like the most natural and nurturing place he could possibly be, as she planted her palms against his shoulders and he lifted her up and down on his swollen cock.

  His rhythm grew faster, harder, then harder still, as emotion swamped him. She’d left him. Used him. She’d kept his child from him. And her apologies were too late and not enough.

  Suddenly, he realized that he was pounding out his anger and humiliation, wanting, in the wounded corner of his mind, to repay her for all the hurt she’d made him feel—and he stopped.

  God, oh, God, what was he doing?

  He drew her down so they were breast to breast, her head on his shoulder, her wild black hair falling across his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, ashamed for being rough with her.

  That was when he knew he had to let it all go. Not just give lip service but
let go of the anger, the pain, his soul’s demand for retribution.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered again, as he brushed the hair back from her face.

  “That makes two very sorry people,” she murmured, and this time he wiped away her tears.

  He loved her slowly then. Eased in and out of her sweet, wet heat, healing two wounds, rekindling the fires, until her breath rushed out in soft, catchy gasps, and his heart beat so wildly he thought it would explode.

  He came with a guttural groan just as she cried out in release. Then he clung to her, feeling a tentative sense of peace for the first time in six years.

  For long, floating moments, they lay together, she sprawled on top of him, he still inside her. Hearts beating wildly, breath hard to catch, bodies worn and wet and spent.

  When he drifted off to sleep, the words I loved you . . . I still love you whispered through his mind like a dream. But as with the echoes of a storm that pummeled and destroyed, then moved slowly off toward the horizon, the damage could never be forgotten.

  26

  Rami Yahya sat cross-legged against the wall and glared at the child. Thank Allah he was finally asleep again. Sleeping meant he was no longer asking for his mother, and Amir and Hakeem were no longer yelling at Rami to shut him up.

  He was not a babysitter. He was a believer. Yes, he was only sixteen, much younger than most of the men in Amir and Hakeem’s group. Yes, he was small for his age, but he was no less devout. No less of a man. He was a better soldier for Allah. He had the discipline. And he was no longer certain that Amir and Hakeem and their men were what he’d thought them to be.

  Across the large room, Amir sat at a table in deep conversation with Hakeem. He dared not say it aloud, but he’d figured out some time ago that Amir was not a true believer. Amir was the kind of Hamas man who made it difficult for the world to see the true cause. The world hated men like Amir, who professed his work was for Allah when, in truth, his work was for himself. Amir killed because he liked to kill, not to further the cause of Allah and of Palestine.

  Earlier today, he’d heard Amir and Hakeem argue. Amir wanted to make money off the boy. To ransom him for a profit, then kill him and the mother when she came for him.

  He still couldn’t believe that Hakeem, whom Rami had once admired, had given in. Hakeem had even telephoned the infidel’s mother, the woman they said had been responsible for the annihilation of the great Mohammed al-Attar in Afghanistan six years ago. She had not pulled the trigger, they said, but she had been responsible for leading a Mossad hit squad to Hakeem’s father and his men.

  They had been martyrs for the cause, and this operation in Oman was to serve justice. They said.

  Yet the woman still lived. And now they chose to seek justice against this little boy.

  He stared at the sleeping child, at the dried tears on his face and the way he curled into a tight little ball, as though making himself small would make him invisible. And he tried not to think about his own little brother. Or his mother.

  He dropped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He saw his mother’s face. Heard her comforting voice.

  “You are a good boy, Rami. Be a good boy now, and take your little brother outside for a while. The two of you, you are always underfoot,” she’d said with a smile.

  It was her way of letting him know she was not afraid for them to go outside. That she knew the streets were sometimes dangerous, but they should not live their lives in fear.

  “Life is to be lived,” his mother had told him often. “Do not be afraid to be a part of it. Do not live it looking from the outside in.”

  So he hadn’t. He’d gone to school. He’d learned his lessons. He’d said his prayers. He’d heard the call to arms. The call to rise up against the infidel dogs and fight for Palestine.

  “Let’s do it.” His friend Ehab’s eyes had been wide with excitement. “Let’s quit school and join Hamas. We will be heroes.”

  That was nine months ago. Now Ehab was dead. Martyred for the cause only six days ago, when he had strapped a bomb vest to his chest and walked into an Israeli deli.

  Rami felt tears well up in his eyes when he thought of his friend, and he questioned the need for him to die. As he questioned the need for all those other people to die. The mother and her baby daughter? Their only “sin” had been walking by the deli at the wrong time. The Koran does not preach war, Rami. His mother’s voice came to him again as he sat in the dark, wanting to sleep, but his mind wouldn’t stop working. What these men do, these Hamas outlaws, in the name of Allah? It is not what he asks. He does not ask them to kill.

  At fifteen, he could not see it her way. He’d seen the many online videos and calls to arms. He had thought they proved his mother was wrong, and he had become Hamas.

  Now he was here, his mother’s words in his head, Ehab’s death in his heart.

  This small boy’s life in his hands. This small boy, who had never done anything to anyone.

  27

  “Can you tell me, please. Have you seen this man?” Talia asked the waitress in Arabic.

  “Can you not see that I am busy?” She was very young and very pretty and very irritated, but she managed a tight smile.

  “Only a moment,” Talia insisted, and held up the phone with the picture of Amir al-Attar for her to see.

  The girl balanced her tray of empty drink glasses on her hip and, with an impatient scowl, looked at the photo. “No. I do not know this man.” Then she rushed off toward the bar to fill another order.

  Talia slumped back in the booth, her strength and her optimism wavering.

  She and Taggart had left the safe house a little before nine a.m., walked to the street where Sanju and his taxi waited for them, and, once again, started the long and tedious process of searching for a sighting of Amir.

  Throughout the day, Taggart had been in contact with Rhonda, who had steered them to restaurants and tea shops, then on to the bars tonight. It was closing in on midnight now, and they had stopped in at least ten clubs. Still no sign of Amir. Still no sighting of a light blue VW Golf or a cream-colored Toyota Highlander with the license-plate numbers Rhonda had texted to them.

  “Maybe we’re not looking at the right kinds of clubs,” Taggart said into Talia’s phone as they walked out of a bar in a lower-rent part of the city, where the blast of Arabic rock music followed them out the door. “Maybe Amir has a taste for more expensive booze and a higher class of working girl.”

  Talia walked straight to the waiting taxi and collapsed into the backseat, while Taggart stayed outside, talking to Rhonda.

  She’d held it together between six and seven p.m., the window of time when Meir had been taken by Hakeem. The twenty-four-hour mark. Now thirty-two hours had passed. And each hour drove her deeper into a despair that manifested as a numbing fog. Like she was sleepwalking but awake.

  But she’d die before she gave up on finding her son.

  She glanced out the window and watched Taggart, the lights from the bar and the darkness of night casting shadow and gold across his face. And for a moment, she let herself think about last night. Those moments in his arms were the one place she could go to escape the pain, hopelessness, and despair. In those moments, he had been his true self with her. He had hated her. He had loved her.

  And she had hoped.

  But in the stark sun of the brutally hot morning, it was clear that he couldn’t give her the one thing she needed from him: forgiveness.

  Everything about the way he acted told her she’d be foolish to think he ever would.

  “Last night,” he’d said when they’d met in the living area after dressing for the day. “It shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry . . . if I hurt you.”

  She’d nodded. “I understand.”

  And just that quickly, he’d closed the door. All day, he’d been kind and polite and encouraging a
nd relentless in his search. But the man who had held her, who had kissed her, who had filled her in the darkest part of need, was as gone from her as Meir.

  She startled when the door opened on a hot rush of air and he slipped inside the air-conditioned taxi.

  “We’re going to try another section of town.” He leaned forward and gave Sanju an address.

  Then he slumped back against the seat and closed his eyes. “Rhonda found another resource who says the chances are good there will be both ‘regular girls’ and freelancers at the Muscat Holiday Inn.”

  “The Holiday Inn?”

  He shrugged. “So she said. Also Trader Vic’s, a club called the Left Bank, and another one called Rock Bottom. The Golden Tulip supposedly also has ‘temporary companionship’ hanging out at the bar. Apparently, prostitution is rampant in Muscat; there’s even a high-end prostitution racket in the classy hotels. There are no Omani women in the business but a lot of foreign women willing to make money from the oil boom.”

  She looked straight ahead and prayed he was right.

  * * *

  The woman sitting at the bar, smoking and looking watchful, was blond and slim and dressed for sex. She was on the north side of forty but still attractive enough to draw business—until she opened her mouth and the attractive wore off real quick.

  Bobby introduced himself and Talia.

  “Lauren. From London,” the woman said, tamping out her cigarette and giving them a long once-over. “Lookin’ for a party, luv?”

  Bobby glanced at Talia, and Lauren laughed. “No need to be shy. Three works for me. And I’ll say this, the two of you, yer both crackin’ good to look at, but it’ll still cost double. I’ll show ya a real bang of a good time, though.”

  “Actually, we’d like you to take a look at something.” Bobby pulled up Amir’s photo on Talia’s phone.

  Lauren looked a little disappointed but got over it quickly. “Give it over, then. Let’s ’ave a look-see.”