by S. A. Beck
“Why would they vacation in Morocco? Wait, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Send them in. Find, question, and kill.”
“Usual fee, sir?”
“Usual fee,” General Corbin sighed, shaking his head. Taking over America was proving to be expensive. He needed to work on some more income streams. There was only so much he could skim off his government budget.
He leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers together on his stomach and thinking. Yes, the more he considered it, the more likely it seemed that some of the Atlantis Allegiance had come back to Marrakech.
He’d looked at the files on those street punks. They were smarter and more careful than the usual kids in their position, which was why the CIA had chosen them in the first place. Plus there were several of them. Even if one or two had been killed in some robbery or been picked up by the local police, always an occupational hazard when using criminals, the others should have still made their regular report. They’d never missed before.
So who had it been? Grunt or Vivian? Perhaps both?
No, not both. As far as he knew, they were the only muscle the Atlantis Allegiance had. One would have stayed behind in Timbuktu.
Both were tough and would be hard to catch, but the McKay twins would be able to run either of them down.
Oh yes, no one was a match for the McKay twins.
Not Grunt, not Vivian, not even Isadore.
Chapter 4
AUGUST 13, 2016, HOTEL CARAVANE, TIMBUKTU, MALI
3:15 P.M.
* * *
Otto Heike should have been happy.
Two months before, he had been in prison and had just run out of money to bribe his fellow inmates not to beat him up or worse. He had been facing a long stretch for an arson he had, for once in his life, not committed, and he had no hope that anyone was going to save him.
Now he was on the other side of the world with a beautiful girlfriend in an exotic locale and having the time of his life learning about guns and explosives from a mercenary who had shown him more care than his negligent parents ever had.
At least in theory. At the moment, all he could do was curl up on the lumpy mattress of his bed and make occasional runs to the bathroom to shoot toxic liquid out his backside or his mouth or sometimes both ends at the same time.
To make matters worse, his girlfriend, Jaxon Ares Anderson, was hardly ever around. She’d finally found her people and had been talking with them nonstop for the past couple of days. Of course, that had been the whole point of the Atlantis Allegiance making a dangerous trek across the Sahara in the first place, but it left Otto feeling alone and useless.
It didn’t help that Grunt had flown off to Marrakech to search for the computer hacker of the group, leaving Otto with no one to confide in. Jaxon was convinced it was a pointless mission. She seemed to sense that Edward was dead. That made Otto feel even worse. Jaxon’s intuition generally turned out to be right. She’d found that healing spring in the middle of the desert, after all.
He wished he could drink some of that water now. It would cure him instantly. They didn’t have much left, though, probably only enough for one seriously injured person, and the way people got hurt in this group, he knew he couldn’t waste it on something as minor as a bad case of food poisoning.
Lying on the bed and looking up at the cracked concrete ceiling, Otto tried to count his blessings. At least he wasn’t in jail, and at least he wasn’t completely alone. Doctors Yuhle and Yamazaki looked in on him every few hours to check how he was feeling and give him some medicine, and that medicine was finally beginning to work. He spent more time in bed now than sitting on the chipped bowl of the toilet (no toilet seat; this was Mali) hoping he wouldn’t keel over and expire. People cared about him in this group, but he couldn’t help feeling a bit left behind when everyone went off to do something cool.
After his tenth trip to the bathroom that day, Otto realized he was beginning to feel a bit better. Instead of running to the toilet every half hour or so, he’d made it a whole fifty minutes this time. He decided to dare a trip down the hall. He was getting cabin fever being stuck inside like this all day.
The Hotel Caravane wasn’t much to look at. The hallway was grubby, with cracked plaster on the walls and no decoration. It had no other guests than the Atlantis Allegiance. There had never been much tourism in Timbuktu, but after a terrorist group called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb had taken over the place for a brief time a few years ago, tourism had stopped completely. Otto wondered how the hotel had managed to stay in business.
A Malian in his early twenties sat at the front desk, his feet propped up on the counter and a battered old radio in his lap playing desert blues through a tinny speaker. Otto remembered that amazing night with the Tuareg rebels in the desert, sitting by the campfire eating camel as they played steel guitars under the stars. His life sure had gotten interesting since running away from America.
“Hey man, feeling good?” the Malian said.
“I’m not dying, anyway,” Otto replied.
The guy flashed a peace sign. “Bob Marley.”
“Um, yeah, Bob Marley to you too.”
Otto decided to step outside and get some fresh air. The hotel was too dark and gloomy.
As soon as he got out, he appreciated dark and gloomy. The hot Saharan sun hit him like a sledgehammer, and its glare made him stop and blink, momentarily blinded. He’d been in the desert for a couple of weeks now, but he still hadn’t gotten used to it. He wasn’t sure he ever would.
Shadowing his eyes with his hand, he looked up and down the street. It was pretty quiet at this time of the day. Even the locals preferred to do most of their work in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun wasn’t so brutal. A man led a string of donkeys carrying some sort of plant in big bags. Another stood haggling at the salt stand just down the street. Salt stands were something he’d never seen before coming to the Sahara. Big slabs of pressed salt that looked like marble floor tiles stood in tall stacks in front of the owner, with more leaning against the building behind him. Salt was precious here and came on the backs of camels over the desert. Dr. Yamazaki had bought a big chunk of salt and mixed it with sugar and water, telling him to drink some of the mixture every hour to rehydrate himself. Being sick, he had to make sure to replenish his salt as much as he needed to replenish his fluids.
Directly across the street stood a clothing stand. A man in a peach-colored djellaba and a white skullcap sat cross-legged on a reed mat, putting some bright-green cloth through an antique sewing machine. Surrounding him were stacks of brilliantly colored cloth. Some were decorated with abstract designs that dazzled his eye as they shone in the sun, while others showed simple pictures of camel caravans or leaping gazelle.
Otto had some money in his pocket and suddenly got an idea. He’d surprise Jaxon with a gift! He touched his stomach nervously. It seemed to be all right. At least his room wasn’t far off. He could sprint back to safety if he needed to.
He went over to the tailor, who nodded at him and said something in Arabic, spreading out his hand to invite him to browse. Otto nodded back at him. He really needed to learn the local language. Only being able to speak English made him feel like an idiot. Every African he’d met spoke at least two languages, usually three or four.
He stared at the cloth, picking some samples up and examining them while wondering what Jaxon would look like dressed in the different colors. The tailor got up and held a bright-red cloth to Otto’s chest, saying something in an approving tone.
“Oh no, it’s not for me,” Otto said. “It’s for my girlfriend. Um, you have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”
The tailor seemed to understand the word “no” and figured Otto didn’t like the color. He put the red cloth down and picked up a deep-blue one, the color of the Tuareg.
“No, you see, it’s for my girlfriend.”
A flow of Arabic came from behind him. Otto turned and stared.
An incredibly b
eautiful European woman in her mid-twenties stood behind him. She wore loose green robes in the local style but had a bulky camera bag slung over her shoulder, worn hiking boots on her feet, and mirror shades hiding her eyes. A green headscarf shielded her head from the sun and covered the hair as was traditional here, although a stray blond lock had broken free to blow in the desert wind.
The tailor replied to her in Arabic, and Otto stood silently as they exchanged several sentences, occasionally gesturing at him.
Now he felt even more like an idiot. Whoever this was spoke Arabic like a pro, and here he was standing there tongue-tied.
At last the woman turned to him.
“So what kind of outfit does your girlfriend want?” Her voice sounded as lovely as she looked and had what sounded like a Russian accent.
“Um, I’m not really sure. It’s supposed to be a surprise, and I don’t have her measurements.”
The Russian woman gave him a smile that made his knees tingle. She lowered her sunglasses to reveal startlingly bright green eyes.
“Surely you must know her measurements by heart?” she asked.
“Um…”
She laughed. “It does not matter. Perhaps you can get her a headscarf. Is she Muslim?”
“No.”
“Then you should know her measurements by now,” she said, wagging a finger at him as if he were a naughty schoolboy. “Do not worry, all women need a headscarf in this climate. See, I have one. It keeps the sun off the head and the sand out of the hair. I will help you pick one for her.”
“I’m Otto,” he said, extending his hand.
“Jaxon’s friend, I know,” she replied, taking it. When Otto blinked in surprise, she laughed again. Those laughs were wonderful. They made him feel like he was floating on air. Otto needed to think of some jokes, fast. He wanted to hear that laugh again.
“Are you surprised?” she went on. “This is a small town, and foreigners are rare since the terror attacks. I am Nadya. I am friends with Dimitri Rublev. Do you know him?”
“Oh yeah, the guy who works in the manuscript museum.”
“He spends too much time there with his dusty old books instead of spending time with me,” Nadya said as she looked through the different lengths of cloth.
Otto didn’t know what to say to that, so instead he asked, “So what do you do here?”
“I am a photographer. This is a rich place to take photographs. It helps that I am a woman, one of the few advantages to being a Western woman in a Muslim country. It puts them at ease. I can take photos inside houses and of women. Do not try to take photos of these things yourself. It will insult them.”
“I don’t have a camera with me,” Otto admitted.
Nadya looked up from the cloth. Otto realized he had made a mistake.
“A tourist without a camera?”
“It got lost in a sandstorm while we were camping in the Sahara.”
That was half true. His phone and iPad got lost that way, which had included the only cameras he owned.
Nadya shrugged. “I think green or red would look good on her. She is one of the People of the Sea, yes?”
“You know about them?” Otto asked, surprised.
“Oh, they are part of the folklore here. Very photogenic, but they do not like having their pictures taken. You know they say all sorts of silly things about them? Some say they have magical powers.”
“I’ve never been superstitious,” Otto said.
“Oh yes,” she said quickly, “just superstition. Your girlfriend is not casting spells on you, is she?”
“No,” Otto said, chuckling.
She cast a cool spell on that Mauritanian cop, though, Otto thought. Made plants sprout up right out of the ground and grabbed him like a lasso. He’s probably still having nightmares about that little trick.
Nadya held up an emerald cloth with gold thread running through it. “I think this will work. It will contrast nicely with her dark skin and bright eyes.”
“Thanks. I’m not good at this stuff.”
“Men are useless at such things. But where is your girlfriend? Why are you not with her?”
“I’m kinda sick,” Otto admitted. He didn’t like to tell her that, but if he had to suddenly sprint for his hotel room, he needed some excuse. He wouldn’t want her to think he was ditching her. No, definitely not.
“Oh, poor you,” Nadya said, putting a hand on his cheek. “The food does not agree with you?”
Otto blushed, both from the contact and from her knowing that he had screaming diarrhea.
“Do not be embarrassed, Otto. It happens to us all in this part of the world. You are not going to run off on me, are you?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Good,” she said brightly. “Because I like your company. If you need to run off for a minute, do not be shy. It is better that you leave me for a short while than you have a little accident in your jeans, eh?”
Otto blushed again.
Nadya said something to the shopkeeper, who had been standing patiently nearby, and he took the cloth from her hands. Within a minute, he had cut and sewed it into a perfect scarf. A quick bit of haggling and Otto handed over the equivalent of three dollars.
“A bit overpriced,” Nadya told him, “but life is hard here, and it is all right if they charge us a little much.”
“Seems like a good deal to me.”
“Come,” Nadya said. “You can buy me a tea. There is a little café on the corner.”
Otto looked uncertainly at the front door of the hotel.
“Oh, come on,” she said, taking his hand. “It will be good for you to get out. You must be bored staying inside your hotel room for two days.”
Otto wondered how she could have known that. Oh well, he must have mentioned it. Tucking Jaxon’s scarf under his arm, he followed Nadya down the street, both of them sticking to the narrow slice of shade cast by the buildings.
The café was a little adobe building no different from all the others. It had no sign, and the only way to tell it was a café was that the front door was open, something you never saw in a private residence.
Inside was a dim little room with a few scarred wooden tables and some rickety chairs. In one corner sat a silent trio of Tuareg men, lifting their indigo veils to sip their tea without showing their faces. Their people were the reverse of all other Muslims, with the men covering their faces and the women going unveiled. At another table sat a couple of Malian men in Western clothing having a loud conversation while studying an Arabic newspaper.
Nadya chose a table away from the talkers and sat down. All eyes followed them, although the two men with the newspaper hadn’t stopped talking.
Otto had gotten used to being stared at in this part of the world, but he realized that what really caught their attention was the sight of a woman sitting in a café. That wasn’t done anywhere south of Marrakech, and not so much even there. Nadya didn’t seem to care, and when the waiter came, a skinny kid of no more than fourteen, she ordered some tea in her fluent Arabic.
She pulled out a packet of Camel cigarettes.
“Smoke?” she said, offering them to him.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Smart boy. It is a bad habit. Do you know the story of Camel cigarettes, why they are called this?” she said, holding up the packet to show the image of the camel with a pyramid and a few palm trees in the background.
“No.”
“Back when they started business a hundred years ago, Egyptian tobacco was considered the best. The Americans put a camel and a pyramid on their Virginia tobacco to make it look Egyptian.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“The Americans steal a lot from this region, as do the British and the French. The Russians, we give.”
Otto wondered how true that was but couldn’t think of a polite reply before getting distracted. Nadya put a cigarette in her mouth, lips pursing slightly. She pulled out a gold Zippo lighter, flicked open the top, and li
t it. A long, steady flame danced before him, brilliant in the café’s dim interior. The flame made Nadya’s green eyes sparkle, the fire reflected in both of them looking like a vein of gold within an emerald. Otto gasped at the beauty of it.
Nadya held that pose for what seemed like an eternity. At last she leaned a little forward, a little closer to him, and touched the end of her cigarette to the flame. The tobacco crackled and shone like a little coal. Otto shivered.
Nadya snapped the Zippo shut. Otto jumped a little.
“You are interesting,” Nadya said, looking into his eyes.
“Me?”
“How old are you?”
Otto was tempted to exaggerate his age, but something in her steady gaze told him that he wouldn’t get away with it.
“Eighteen.”
“Aha! I thought so,” she said and put a hand on his. “This is why you are interesting. You are so young. Of course I am young too. I am only twenty-eight. I suppose this makes me sound old to you?”
“Not at all,” Otto replied, his throat going dry.
“I am at the age when one is expected to be doing interesting things. For years I have been a photographer. I have gone all over the world. But you, you are doing the same thing at an age when most people are stuck in a dull classroom.”
“I, um, dropped out. The traveling life seemed more interesting to me.”
Nadya nodded appreciatively and squeezed his hand. “And that makes you interesting. When I heard such a young man had come all the way from America to visit Timbuktu, I said to myself, ‘Here is a man I want to meet.’ I am happy to say I am not disappointed.”
Otto couldn’t believe his ears. Was this stunning woman really interested in him?
Suddenly he felt guilty. What would Jaxon think if she saw this? He pulled his hand away. Nadya didn’t try to hold on.
The tea came, and they spoke of their travels in the Sahara. Nadya had been in Timbuktu for some time and appeared interested to hear of his adventures through the desert, asking for all sorts of details about the trip. Otto was careful what he revealed but gave her a long description of the sandstorm. She nodded and listened with rapt attention. That made Otto feel good.
