Sheik's Revenge

by Loreth Anne White

  “I know you’re MagMo,” she said quietly, but doubt quivered through her. She’d been given no photo, and no biometrics indicators had been programmed into her weapon. Was it possible the CIA plant in the hotel courtyard could have made a mistake in identifying him as her target? No—that didn’t make sense.

  He laughed suddenly, loud. Hard. But stilled just as quickly, and there was a dangerous new edginess in his body that was palpable.

  “And that’s enough evidence for you? Who are you? Who led you to believe I was MagMo?”

  Uncertainty wormed deeper. She’d said too much.

  “Who sent you, Lili?” he demanded, his voice going low, dangerous. “Who was following you back at the market—who wanted you dead?”

  She remained silent and anger whipped through his body. He spun around, scooped up the GPS from the mat, held it in front of her nose.

  “You have a route mapped out in here to a small settlement called Amar’at. Is that where you were going in such a hurry when I found you in the casbah? What’s waiting for you at Amar’at, Lili?”

  She turned her face away, heart racing.

  “Let’s try this again. You said you missed your shot when you looked down your scope and saw it was me. Who’s ‘me’?”

  “Santiago.” Her voice came out thick. Emotion pricked hot behind her eyes.

  “So you were sent to shoot an alleged MagMo terrorist and you were supposedly shocked to see that this alleged MagMo was actually Santiago from Colombia?”

  Alleged.

  Sweat prickled over her body.

  “You really don’t know who you came to kill, do you?” He spat the words at her, derisive, mocking.

  And it cut.

  “You expect me to believe that you lay up there on the roof, waiting for some man called Faroud bin Ali to walk into your crosshairs? How were you going to know it was Faroud, a sign? Please…don’t tell me it was that Russian and his carnation.”

  Her face felt hot.

  He threw back his head and laughed again. Then he leveled his gaze with hers, right up close, hard obsidian eyes boring into hers, and he very gently cupped her cheek.

  “You’re a good liar, Lili,” he whispered softly. “Either that or someone is taking you for one wild ride.”

  Faith’s mouth turned bone-dry.

  “If you’re not Faroud…then who are you?”

  He looked at her in disgust, dropping his hand to his side. In silence he walked back to the blanket where he crouched down and picked up her purse. But he didn’t feel around the inside again. Instead he tossed her GPS and phone back into the bag, along with the batteries and knife. A dizzying wave of relief washed through Faith as he resecured her purse to his camel bag. Her personal secret was safe.

  For now.

  *

  Omair removed his sweat-drenched shirt and replaced it with one of the robes he’d bought at the market. He cinched the belt tight across his waist and thrust his jambiya scabbard into the front. Out of the corner of his eye he could feel his captive watching him from the tree.

  He could have told her outright who he was, but he preferred to keep her unsettled. It gave him an advantage. And if she thought he was MagMo, and she felt this was reason enough to eliminate him, she surely couldn’t be working for them. So who, then?

  Who else wanted him dead?

  Was it possible she’d been set up by someone to

  assassinate an Al Na’Jar prince without being made aware of what she was doing?

  Nothing made sense.

  It was imperative he find out who she was working for.

  At the same time, Omair reminded himself she was a pro. She was capable of playing him. She could be doing so now with her talk of MagMo.

  He wound the strip of cloth he’d bought at the market around his head, Tuareg style, leaving just a slit for his eyes—it was going to get cold tonight. He slung the rifle back over his chest and holstered his pistol beside his dagger. He then reached for a goatskin pouch, pulled out the stopper, and when he was certain she was watching, he took a deep, long swallow of water, his eyes holding hers.

  She turned her face abruptly away.

  Omair stoppered the water pouch and resecured it to his camel bag. Then he scooped up her chador and went over to her.

  “Can you sit, please?’

  “Excuse me?”

  He placed his hand on his dagger hilt. “Please, just slide down the trunk and sit, a leg on either side of the tree.”

  Faith clenched her jaw and slid down, her legs parted by the tree. He dropped to his knees in front of her, undid her gaiters, then untied and removed her boots and socks.

  She cursed. He was ensuring that if she did manage to bolt, she really wasn’t going to get far. She would have done the same if the situation was reversed.

  “Okay, you can stand up.”

  She pulled herself back up the rough palm bark and he untied her wrists, then rebound them, this time in front of her. He replaced the chador and veil, and then motioned for her to climb back on the camel.

  Faith walked gingerly over sand still hot from the day’s sun, small rocks cutting into tender, bare feet.

  Once back in saddle, he tied her hands to the horn in front.

  He’d effectively stripped her of shoes, water, food, communications and navigation equipment. And he’d inserted doubt into her mind for it to grow like a cancer. He was good. She had to be better.

  Calm and steady, Faith. Stay strong. Wait for a gap.

  But she knew she was weakening, and thirst was dogging her.

  He swung up into his own saddle. “Yaa!” he called out as he kicked his mount into action. Hers lurched after it, pain searing across her raw wrists as she jerked against her restraints.

  But hope flared hot and sudden in Faith as she saw he’d changed direction. They were now heading east—back toward civilization.

  She didn’t know why he’d switched direction, but she held on to that spark of hope, mentally fanning it to flame. Her captor had to stop to rest some time during the night. She’d make her move then. And she’d still be close enough to make it back to the city alive.

  *

  But as the hours ticked by the sky turned into a black blot filled with stars. A fat gibbous moon edged up over the horizon, painting the dunes silver, and Faith developed a terrible headache. Her throat felt raw. The muscles in her legs were cramping and she was becoming increasingly light-headed. She was also beginning to experience heart palpitations, which she knew was a sign of dehydration. In an effort to maintain blood flow to her vital organs, other blood vessels in her body were constricting.

  With the clear night sky the desert temperature began to plummet fast. Faith started to shiver.

  She knew that without water, confusion would soon set in. Finally would come coma, organ failure. Then ultimately, death.

  If hypothermia didn’t get her first.

  She wondered at what point in this process her baby would start suffering.

  The thought galvanized her.

  “Hey!” she called out to him. “I need water!”

  He responded by picking up the pace and jerking her in the saddle.

  As the minutes dragged by, she began to loll in the saddle again and Faith realized she was losing sense of direction now. She jerked herself back into focus as they crested a dune and saw lights in the distance.

  Her abductor brought their convoy to a standstill. He studied the distant lights with her nightscope.

  Faith’s heart kicked. It looked like a small settlement on the horizon. If she could just make it to those houses… She eyed the bag on Santiago’s camel where he’d stashed her shoes, socks and other equipment. She’d need to take those first. And water.

  He clucked his tongue, suddenly setting the camels in motion again, and to her surprise he aimed their caravan directly toward the settlement.

  When they were about two hundred yards out from what appeared to be a few square, flat-roofed dwellings,
he pulled her mount up alongside his, and leaning over, he untethered her camel from his.

  He placed her camel’s head rope into her fingers while leaving her wrists bound to the saddle horn.

  “Go,” he said quietly.

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “I said go.”

  “Where to?”

  His lips curved and she saw the glint of teeth in the dark.

  “That’s Amar’at up ahead,” he said with a nod of his head. “You’re going to take me to meet your friends, Lili. Go to the location you had marked in your GPS. I’m presuming it’s some kind of safe house. Ride to the house, call your contact to come outside. If there is more than one contact, call them all out. But tell them to keep at least five yards back from your camel.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no ‘safe house.’”

  He laughed darkly. Then his voice turned low, seductive. “Your denial is tiresome, Liliana.”

  He raised her high-tech night vision scope to his eye again. “The house you want is the third from the end of the row—that’s the one for which you have GPS coordinates in your system. There’s an old Toyota Corolla parked outside.”

  He lowered the scope and she heard a click as he took the safety off her rifle. “I’m right behind you. I’d advise you not to forget it.”

  He reached over and hit her camel on the rump.

  Faith gasped as her camel lurched forward, and she struggled desperately to work the lead rope with her fingers while her hands were tied. Finally the wretched beast slowed a little.

  Breathing hard and feeling warm again, Faith peered back over her shoulder into the darkness for signs of her captor following. But he’d vanished, like a shadow into the velvet desert night. Adrenaline spurted through her.

  This was her chance.

  If she could alert the occupants of the safe house to her predicament before he got to them, they might be able to help her fight him off, or at the very least alert her handler to the fact she was in trouble. At the same time, insecurity coiled low in her gut. Her handler, Travis Johnson, was the one who’d given her the dud evacuation number.

  Still, she had little choice right now other than to try the safe house.

  Slowly she guided her camel down the single dusty road that led between a few dun adobes. The settlement was eerily silent, flat white pumpkins gleaming ghostly in the moonlight atop corrugated tin roofs. She’d known Amar’at was tiny, but this…seemed off.

  A breeze began to blow as the desert’s thermal balance changed, sending the veil fluttering across her face, and caressing her bare toes.

  Then she heard, before she saw, a flag, flapping softly in the breeze. This was it—Travis had mentioned a flag. He’d said it would be flying the colors of Algeria—green and white with red sickle moon and star, although she couldn’t make that out in the darkness.

  Using her fingers she managed to tug at the rope and halt her camel. Faith studied the house with the flag. It was in pitch-darkness. And as her vision adjusted, a chill sunk through her—the flag was tattered. Torn white drapes fluttered eerily from windows with no panes. The Corolla outside was rusted, broken windows, no tires. The driver’s side door was missing.

  “Hello!” She called out in Arabic. “Is there anyone here?”

  A dog barked. A door banged in the neighboring house and a light came on in the window.

  Faith nudged her camel closer to the front door of the dark flat-roofed dwelling. She thought she glimpsed Faroud’s shadow ducking behind the wall at the back.

  “Is there anyone home?” she called again.

  Silence felt heavy. The desert wind whispered a soft omnipresent sigh around her and the ghostly torn drapes billowed.

  A strange feeling of unease curled through Faith.

  A neighbor came outside. He was holding a stick.

  “What do you want?” he called in Arabic from his yard.

  “I want to speak to the owner of this house.”

  The man eyed her warily as he came forward, his fist tightening around his stick. She could feel the anxiety in his posture, feel him wondering why a woman was traveling alone in the dark with no shoes.

  “No one lives there anymore,” he called, stopping a few yards away.

  The unease sunk deeper.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. That house has been empty for more than a year, ever since the old man died.”

  More than a year?

  This was not possible.

  Faith’s handler had informed her this was the house of a friendly contact who’d help get her out of the country in an emergency, provide her with papers.

  “Maybe someone comes by every few days or so?” she offered.

  The neighbor shook his head. “When the old man died his son left to find work in Algiers. He never returned.”

  A robed figure suddenly emerged from the front door of the abandoned house. She squinted, unable to see who it was in the faded dark.

  Then her heart fell.

  It was Faroud—or whoever he was. Holding her rifle. He must have entered from the back, swept the house, and come out through the front. It’s what she would have done to flush out anyone who might have been inside while keeping her covered at the same time.

  He came slowly up to her camel, nodded at the neighbor who backed away at the sight of his gun. The man turned, scurried back to his house. The door slammed. Curtains shut, dimming the pale light that had spilled into the night.

  Faith looked up. Stars—a whole milky band of them—arced across the sky. Amid the constellations she saw a bright falling comet. She concentrated on it, and wondered when it had all gone wrong.

  And she wished at this moment she’d never met Santiago, Faroud, or whoever he was.

  He took the camel rope from her fingers. She didn’t resist.

  “No one inside,” he said quietly as he led her camel away, hooves crunching sand on the dark street. “It’s been abandoned for a very long time. Whoever hired you, Lili—they didn’t want you back alive.”

  Chapter 7

  The band of stars moved across the black vault of North African sky as the moon grew small and high. The desert became a haunting ocean of undulating silver shadows and the vastness, the solitude, was formidable—no sound apart from the creak of leather, the chinking of camel rings and pots against the saddle, and the odd snort and huff from the animals. A bitter cold had descended with the clear air, and it was especially brutal after the day’s heat.

  Faith’s toes and fingers grew numb, her thighs sore. She shivered uncontrollably. Her lips were cracking and her tongue felt uncomfortable in her mouth. On top of that her sense of disorientation was increasing and making her want to throw up.

  He was winning, damn him.

  The psychological coup de grâce had been the abandoned safe house. It had knocked her badly.

  “So, what did happen to your safe house?” he called out from the darkness ahead. “Did your employers set you up to the kill the wrong man, then hang you out to dry?”

  She gritted her teeth against the chattering. “I don’t believe that was Amar’at,” she yelled back at him. “It was some other village.”

  He stopped his camel and swung back.

  “Oh come on, Lili,” he said as he came alongside her mount. “You’re a professional. You had to have had that GPS location and route burned into your brain.”

  “I got disoriented,” she said, slurring her words slightly now—a sign of hypothermia setting in. “It could have been some other village.”

  But even as she tried to justify the missing safe house, doubt was stalking in the dark corners of her mind like a hungry jackal.

  Her handler, Travis, had personally programmed the safe house route into her GPS. And because this job had been such a rush, he’d also personally prepared her equipment for the mission while she’d been in debriefing. Everything had been ready and waiting for her on the jet—the
sat phone, long-range rifle, GPS, dossier. Travis had even marked the rooftop from which she had to shoot.

  Faith had always trusted Travis with her life—she’d had to. He’d never set her up like this, would he? Not unless he’d been ordered to by someone higher up. The thought was like ice in her veins.

  Was it possible STRIKE brass wanted to retire her? Had clearing her in debriefing simply been a ruse so they could set her up by sending her out here? But then why ask her to kill this man and tell her he was Faroud bin Ali?

  “You know what I think, Lili?” His voice came out of the dark and it seemed to be in front of her, then behind, then to the side. She swayed slightly in her saddle, her mind reeling with another wave of nausea and confusion.

  “I think the plan was for you to shoot me, then have you silenced with a bullet from the minaret, but the shooter from the minaret faltered because you missed, and for a moment he was unsure what to do. In that moment you escaped.”

  Faith shook herself, willing her captor to shut the hell up. Mistakes happened. There could be a rational explanation, and she’d find it. She kept repeating this to herself.

  “What I need to know is why your people told you I was MagMo.”

  The jackals of doubt nipped closer.

  “Can you tell me, Lili?”

  “Could be mistaken intel.” Her words came out thick, and badly slurred now. “Or you could be lying. The man in the minaret could have been your own security,” she countered, her tongue feeling too big in her own mouth. “You could’ve put him up there to watch over your meeting.”

  “If he was my security detail I would not have killed him when he approached you in the market. And he would have shot you while you lay in waiting for me on the roof. Yet he only attempted to kill you after you’d fired on me, am I correct?”

  A cold depression swamped her and she shuddered again with cold, almost sliding from the saddle this time. Her hands, bound to the saddle horn, stopped her from falling.

  *

  He was watching her intently, his black eyes glinting in the moonlight through the slit in his turban. The jewels in the jambiya hilt winked from his waist.