Would she ever find out if she fled now?
Faith closed her eyes. This man was the closest she’d come to a relationship, as absurd as that might seem to some. But the man she’d fallen for had been Santiago. And now?
Now she didn’t know.
Had they met in another time, another life, she wondered if it might have been different. And Faith couldn’t help herself—she knelt down beside him and then, as if touching a tiger sleeping in a cage, felt carefully for his pulse again. It was there. Soft, then a little harder. Emotion swelled sharp and sudden into her eyes and spilled down her face. This was ridiculous, she thought, angrily swiping her tears away.
He could be exactly who she’d been told—Faroud bin Ali—and he could’ve been psychologically manipulating her all along.
Don’t think about it…just get out of here, find out if Travis set you up…then take it from there…
Fresh resolve burst through her body. Faith gathered up her bag, the blanket, and ran to where she’d last heard the camels.
She found them, ghostly shapes in the moonlight. She dropped to her knees in front of one, fumbled to unhobble its foreleg.
Copying her captor’s method, she took hold of the lead rope and, clucking her tongue, tapped the animal’s haunches with the camel whip. Protesting, the camel reluctantly folded its legs and knelt on the sand.
But as Faith was about to climb into the saddle, she hesitated again, remembering the blooms he’d left on her pillow, the way he’d made love to her, how he’d watched her all those nights in that miserable cantina, the tenderness she’d felt in his strong arms as he’d helped her drink her tea. Her chest hurt.
She wanted him to be innocent, dammit. And she couldn’t just leave him out here like this. He’d die without transport, water.
There were two water skins on this camel, one of them almost a third empty. Faith dismounted, and, fingers working fast, she untied the partially empty bag and placed it next to the fire. Then she dragged him over to the tarp. He was heavy, and her compassion was costing her energy and hydration. She covered him with another blanket she found in the saddlebags and then brought the remaining hobbled camel closer to him.
Hesitating, she touched his hair. Goodbye, Santiago, she whispered. It’s been one hell of a ride.
And, mounting her camel, she galloped fast into the night, aiming in an easterly direction. As she rode, Faith felt a weird ache in her heart. She was going to miss him, as crazy as that might seem, and it made her realize how pathetically alone she’d become in her life. She told herself she wasn’t worthy of more. She was an army brat who’d moved from base to base, never even trying to make friends. She hadn’t wanted anyone coming to her house to see her mother’s bruises, to witness her father’s drunken bouts. So she’d kept to herself, no peers.
Then she’d run away and ended up being bounced from one foster home to another. At the first possible opportunity Faith had joined the only family she’d ever really known—the military. There she was treated as an equal—her skills earned her respect. She always had backup.
That was her family, and her loyalty continued to lie with her country. She had to believe she could go back there, that Travis would offer a reasonable explanation.
But as she rode on, Faith was unable to quash the increasing bites of doubt, the obvious gaps in logic, or the anxiety over her pregnancy and what it would mean for her future as an assassin, or a refugee from her own country.
*
Nine hours later the sun was white-hot and high. Heat shimmered in oscillating waves off the sand and shadows were nonexistent. Faith was hunched forward in her saddle, listing with the rocking movements of her camel. Even behind her sunglasses she had to squint to avoid the blinding glare. When she thought she saw a clump of palms on the distant horizon, Faith prayed it wasn’t a mirage.
As she neared, relief welled through her—it was a wadi fringed with straggling trees and the possibility of shade once the sun had passed its noon zenith. Faith raised her long-range scope to her eye and scanned the horizon. About a mile beyond the wadi, in a slight valley to the east, she could see a few dwellings.
It was time to break protocol and call Travis. Faith also felt she’d put in enough distance between herself and her abductor to rest a while under the trees until the desert cooled a little.
The wadi was dry as bone dust. Faith hobbled her camel and crouched beneath the straggling fronds of a palm. It offered no respite from the heat. She took a small sip of water and powered up her captor’s sat phone. It was her first opportunity to look through it.
Unlike hers, his contained a list of contacts. The support language was Arabic. He’d entered no name for himself. She scrolled quickly through his contact list.
It included names like Julie Belard, Hunter McBride, Jacques Sauvage.
The rest were mostly Arabic and some entries were first names only, like Rafiq, Zakir, Dalilah, Tariq, Nahla. Faith frowned.
The name Jacques Sauvage felt familiar somehow. Where had she heard that name before?
She could dial one of these numbers—it might be a way to find out who her abductor really was. In case her child would one day want to know who its father was.
Anxiety rushed through Faith at this thought. She hadn’t yet decided what to do about the baby, so why was the notion of becoming a mother settling like this in her head?
Taking a deep breath, she used her own phone to dial Travis Johnson’s unlisted number.
She listened to his phone ringing half a world away in Washington, D.C. Calling the private numbers of STRIKE personnel had potential to jeopardize safety of the members, or compromise the entire unit. Doing this would cost Faith down the road, but if her captor was right, the move might save her life.
“Hello?” Travis said as he picked up. He sounded like he’d been sleeping.
“It’s Faith.”
There was a long beat of silence. “Where are you?” His voice was suddenly crisp. “Your tracers haven’t been operational.”
So he had tried to track her.
“The mission was accomplished,” she lied.
Two seconds of silence ticked by.
“What is your present location?” he said. “We’ll send an evac—”
“Why didn’t the evac number you gave me work?”
“We’ll go through it all in debrief. Just tell me where you are now.”
So he knew the evac number was inoperational—he didn’t question or deny it.
“I’m at the safe house.”
Dead silence filled the space between them. Her heart thudded loud in her ears. She’d called his bluff.
He cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Give me the coordinates of the house.” But while he spoke slowly, it sounded as though he was suddenly moving somewhere rapidly, possibly to his office, to a computer, somewhere he could track her GPS, or this sat call. Urgency bit into Faith. She had to get off her phone and dismantle her GPS battery. Fast.
“You have the coordinates of the safe house, Travis.” She said coolly. “You’re the one who programmed them into my system.”
“You can’t be there—”
“Why, because it doesn’t exist? Because Faroud bin Ali doesn’t exist? Because the operative in the Algiers hotel courtyard was actually a Russian arms dealer who’s now dead?”
Silence.
Faith’s heart dropped like a cold stone.
“I get the message, Travis,” she said quietly.
“Faith, we need to go through this in debrief. Just give—”
“It’s been nice knowing you.”
“Faith—wait!”
She killed the call, a cold, white anger slicing through her. Faith rapidly dismantled the phone battery then scrabbled in her bag for her GPS. She’d powered it up back at the camp at least nine hours ago—they could have been tracking her all that time. She hoped to God there wasn’t already a chopper in the air.
Faith scrolled rapidly through
her GPS mapping software, memorizing the details of her location, the route she wanted to take. If she made an abrupt turn northwest from this point it would lead her toward the Atlas Mountains. From there she might be able to cross into Morocco unnoticed. It was her only option. She knew someone there who could potentially help her create a false ID and disappear.
With shaking hands she removed the GPS battery and tossed it under the tree with her sat phone in disgust.
Nausea and exhaustion rolled over Faith. She yanked the turban off her head and rested her head back against the rough bark of the palm for a moment, trying to gather her wits. And then the reality sunk in—hard.
There was no going back now, no going home.
No more Faith Sinclair. She was done. Retired.
Good as dead to the world.
Faith began to laugh, a little maniacally, at the thought. She was free. Solo.
She stilled, a chill washing through her now. She was wrong. It wasn’t just her. She had a life growing inside her.
Faith closed her eyes. Heat was like a blanket. Trying to calm her breathing, she placed her hand on her tummy. And as she sat like this she was overcome by a sense of presence. She wasn’t alone. She had a tiny little life with her. And a sweet warmth filled her chest.
Maybe there’s a reason you came to me, she whispered, holding her tummy as a mounting hot breeze started to swish through the dry tattered leaves overhead.
Maybe I need you in my life now.
An overriding primal maternal urge swelled through her, filling her chest with a sensation Faith couldn’t even begin to articulate. She had a child inside her. It didn’t matter who the father was, it was her baby.
And for the first time since the stick had turned blue Faith just sat and tried to absorb, process, the reality; the depth and breadth of what this was going to mean to her. A baby. She was going to be a mom.
The corners of her lips curved as hot tears pricked behind her eyelids.
She wasn’t without fear. Faith didn’t know the first thing about being a mother. But she could try. She certainly couldn’t go home and be a soldier any longer. She had no family anymore, not one soul in this world she could truly turn to, or lean on.
She had to do something different. A new name. A new country. A child.
It would be a good, solid cover.
And as the idea took hold and grew powerful inside her, it steeled her will to survive. She was going to stay alive for this baby. She was going to get out of this mess, secure a new identity, and she was going to raise her child, protect it.
A sense of newfound purpose began to hum in every molecule of her body. This baby, thought Faith, had just become the most important driver in her life.
And it was good she didn’t know the true identity of the father. That way she’d never be tempted to break cover by trying to find him. And if he never knew he had a child, he wouldn’t ever come looking. This way Faith could sever every possible link with her past, which was imperative, because if she left the slightest chink, there would forever remain a chance STRIKE could find her.
She was going to give this baby a future.
And no one in this world was going to take that from her.
*
An hour later the hot breeze had turned into a steady wind that felt like a hair dryer turned to full blast. Faith bent into the wind as it flapped her robes, dried her skin, cracked her lips. Sand was beginning to lift in spindrifts off the ridges of dunes, getting into her eyes, her nose, gritting between her teeth.
But she was determined to keep going as long as she could before hunkering down against what appeared to be a mounting sandstorm. She needed as much distance as possible between herself and the last known GPS location STRIKE might have on her. If there was any consolation, the coming sandstorm would obscure her tracks.
The wind started to make a whistling noise, and the sky began to darken with clouds of sand. For a moment Faith thought she heard a chopper thudding above the noise, above the haze, but it disappeared. Or was perhaps a trick of her mind.
*
Omair examined the tracks around the wadi,
furnacelike wind whipping at his robes as he held on to his camel rope. Faith appeared to have rested here awhile, but now her trail veered suddenly off to the northwest, away from civilization—and potentially water. He frowned, wondering why. Then he caught sight of her discarded GPS battery and sat phone lying in the sand, and he pursed his lips, thinking.
If she’d powered up her GPS and used her phone to call the people who’d hired her, and discovered she really had been set up, she might’ve feared they’d come after her. Which would be good enough reason to dismantle any tracking device and head off in an opposite direction.
He mounted his camel, and followed her new path, into the teeth of a hard wind that had the makings of an imminent Sahara sandstorm. He moved fast, because the blowing sand was beginning to obscure her tracks.
He figured she didn’t have too much of a lead on him. From the passage of the stars in the night sky Omair figured he had been unconscious maybe an hour, max. He’d used a shard of flint dug from the sand to slowly saw through the belt that bound him. It hadn’t taken that long.
His advantage now was speed and proficiency on his camel, and knowledge of the terrain.
At the same time he knew he’d never have made it this far, this fast, without the water she’d left him, or the camel. It told Omair she cared. She trusted his story enough not to have killed him, but not enough to stay with him. He couldn’t blame her—she had no idea who he really was, and she’d likely set out to try to verify things on her own.
But the Sahara was a dangerous place, and Faith wasn’t going to get far without knowing where to find more water.
And Omair wanted to find her, alive, not only because she was the one link he had to whomever was trying to assassinate him, but because, deep down, he wanted to get to know this woman better.
He’d never met anyone like her. He almost smiled at the thought—she’d make one hell of a partner if he ever considered having a relationship that meant more than staying the night.
About an hour later, moving at a good clip, he crested a ridge and saw her. She was bent into the wind, traversing a valley of flinty ground beneath a wall of rocky caves, heading toward softer sand in the distance. She’d changed from her chador into the robe she’d been sleeping on, a turban wound around her head. Smart woman, he thought. It would be easier to travel alone looking like a man. And from her northwest course she was heading straight toward the hostile Atlas Mountains. He figured she might be aiming for Morocco.
Omair kicked his camel into a gallop, an odd rush of excitement swirling through him as he barreled down the dune after her.
*
Travis Johnson listened carefully to Isaiah Gold’s words. He wasn’t concerned about the call being traced—the prepaid cell phone Gold had instructed him to buy guaranteed anonymity.
“It’s imperative she be found, stopped,” Gold said. “Before she brings everything down.”
Travis moistened his lips. This was an opportunity for him, if he played his cards right. Already Gold had intimated there’d be a position for him in the new
regime if the senator won the election, and all indications were that he would.
“Does the senator know about this?” Travis said into the phone.
“This is my show,” said Gold. “It has nothing to do with the senator. But if we do get into the White House, I will need men like you on my team.”
Travis inhaled slowly, a soft excitement trilling through him.
“She called a few minutes ago,” Travis said.
“Did you trace the call?” He could hear the bite of adrenaline in Gold’s voice.
“I got a read on both her sat phone and GPS. Her last known coordinates place her a few miles out from a small desert settlement called Maktar. When she called, I saw from the system that she’d powered up her GPS nine hours prior to
phoning in. The route she’d taken to that point puts her on a trajectory toward Maktar, but I suspect she’ll have changed direction after making contact.”
“We’ll need to use an Algerian team from this point,” Gold said quickly.
“You mean MagMo operatives?”
“We can’t sanction U.S. personnel—this has to stay under the radar. I have a contact. I’ll get back to you as soon as I have further instructions.” Gold killed the call.
Unease tightened in Travis’s chest.
Collaboration with known terrorists was a risky career move. But he was now in this to the hilt—he stood to lose as much as anyone else if his operative wasn’t silenced, and soon.
But he also knew Faith.
She would not make this easy for them.
Chapter 9
The wind shrieked along the unprotected ridges, mounting in speed and strength as clouds of sand began to blot light from the sky. Faith bent into the wind, trying to keep in the leeward valleys to avoid the brunt of the rising storm. She saw the black shape closing in on her too late.
It was him!
Adrenaline exploded through Faith and she kicked her camel into a high-speed gallop. But he was the better rider and was gaining on her fast. In an effort to shake him, Faith veered suddenly to her left, trying to head up the dune, but the move cost her. The sand was soft, deep and the dune steep. Her camel faltered as he cut rapidly up her inside tack. Lurching off his mount, he smashed into her, knocking her from the saddle.
Faith slammed to the ground, air whooshing out of her lungs, sunglasses flying off her face. He landed with force on top of her, crushing her into the sand, the rifle slung across her back ramming into her spine. He grabbed her arm, twisting it painfully behind her.
“Don’t move,” he growled near her ear. “Or I will break it.”
She lay dead still, trying not to breathe in a mouthful of sand, terrified the blow to her stomach had hurt the baby, or that the rifle still strapped to her back would go off.
When she didn’t move, he rolled off and turned her onto her side to face him. Wind whipped the loose ends of his turban and his eyes, unprotected by shades, showed not anger, but deep concern.
Sheik's Revenge Page 11
