The doctor left, and Robert turned to me. He crossed his arms again. "Tell me what you remember.”
I held his gaze, the blue-green of a gentle, yet dangerous sea…deceptively cold. The kind of water that, if you fell in, would freeze you so fast you'd hardly realize you were dying.
Was I dying?
"I need to speak with Dan or Merl."
I trusted Dan and Merl. They didn't want anything from me…not like Maxim. They'd know what to do.
Robert's lips thinned for a moment before he spoke. "So, you remember them?"
"Of course I do," I frowned.
"And you remember me."
I held his gaze and let a small smile steal over my mouth. "You're awfully hard to forget." His lips pursed, not amused. I sighed and glanced down at Blue, soot and dust from the battle still coating his fur. I'd gotten a shower and a clean set of clothes—lightweight black canvas, the kind of stuff meant for hot weather and dangerous fights.
"We captured Abu Mohammad al-Baghdadi." I glanced up at Robert, and he nodded. Working with the Peshmerga all-female fighting force, led by my friend Zerzan, we captured Abu Mohammad al-Baghdadi—one of the top theologians of Isis, the guy who found passages in the Quran that made it not only okay, but a moral imperative, to bring Sharia law to the world. "And I knew that someone on our team was going to try to kill me."
"Yes." Robert had warned me that the CIA had contracted with one of the men on our team to take me out after we captured al-Baghdadi. "And you refused to listen."
I shrugged. "I listened, and I chose to continue anyway. It was important."
Another flicker of emotion over his face. "Important enough to die for?"
"I wanted to die."
He grunted. "And now?" His voice sounded squeezed, almost like he didn't want to know the answer.
"I don't know what I want. I don't know what happened to me. Robert, I thought I was dead. I was lying there on the ground, bleeding, pretty sure it was all over, and then this woman appeared." I closed my eyes, going back to that moment—it was almost hidden, blocked by pain and trauma, like words on a memorial nearly erased by rain and time. "She stood over me, she had on a burka…and then I was running down that hill, right into that battle."
Robert paced away and then turned back to me, spearing me with a glare from across the room. "So, you don't remember being in a cave?"
I shook my head.
"You don't remember seeing me. Turning away from me?" he asked, his voice remaining flat—as placid as the sea behind his eyes. But I could hear the danger and feel the icy chill of those deep waters threatening to suck me under.
I shook my head again. "What are you talking about?"
"Sydney." He crossed the room quickly, grabbing up my hands. His were warm and calloused, and I let him hold me. "I went looking for you." He held my gaze, emotion flickering over the surface of that calm sea, a breeze stirring its glassy surface.
I smiled. "I'm not surprised. You aren't good at letting things go."
"I found you."
"Oh."
"Blue was there, with a pregnant bitch…that's how I knew he had puppies." He looked down at our joined hands. "You turned away from me. And…I didn't go after you. I'm sorry." His voice lowered so that I almost didn't hear him. "I didn't realize that you were under someone else's control."
Hot anger sliced through me. Under someone else's control? No fucking way.
"We'll get you back to the States." He kept looking at our joined hands. "The doctors who worked with you in Miami can probably help you again." I shook my head, chasing away the heat of my rage, clearing a line of thinking. I wasn't going anywhere without speaking to Dan or Merl. I trusted them. Robert Maxim could never be trusted. Not entirely.
"I need to speak to Dan."
"You don't trust me?" His voice was the same deep rumble of the thunder that ricocheted inside my brain.
"Nobody trusts you."
His gaze flicked down to Blue, and Robert pulled out his phone, passing it over to me. "Call whoever you want. I'll wait outside."
He gave up too easily.
I took the slim, elegant handset from him, our fingers brushing for the barest of moments. The ghost of a smile curled at the edge of his lips before he gave a curt nod and turned to the door, leaving me alone with Blue.
I looked down at my dog, who sighed and leaned against me. "What do you think?" I asked, but Blue didn't answer.
A voice inside my head whispered…you can't ever leave me.
A shiver ran over my body, and I stood up, testing my strength, needing to move, to free myself from the storm inside my mind.
Lightning cracked and thunder rolled, but I held onto myself. I knew what was real. Didn't I?
Anita
Dan's black leather couch creaked as he leaned forward and hit play on the laptop.
Through the tinted glass front wall of his office, high above the command center, we could see the giant screen covered in different operations and the operatives at their desks below, but they couldn't see us.
We were in a secret cave.
Dan sat back as the video began, his thigh brushing against mine and his shoulder depressing the back of the couch so that I tipped slightly into him, his body warming my entire side. I created space between us, leaning toward the screen as the video began.
A huge man holding a machete stood on a wooden stage. Before him a crowd jostled. The camera was set up to the side of the stage so that we could see the man's profile. The Butcher.
Dan reached forward and turned up the volume as a woman dressed in long black robes was pushed onto the stage from behind the camera.
With the volume raised, I could make out the chanting of the crowd. "Infidel! Infidel! Butcher her!"
The woman—her face swollen with bruises and hair matted with blood—was young, hardly more than a teenager. She stumbled, and the Butcher grabbed her, pulling her into the center of the platform.
He leaned down and spoke to her, but it was impossible to hear him over the rowdy crowd.
Nausea swirled in my gut. I knew where this was going. I'd seen other videos of the Butcher, a famous Isis executioner who specialized in women.
The blade rose into the air and then swung down, whacking into the woman's thigh. The crowd erupted in applause and cheers, leaning toward the violence, the death…the murder.
The young woman hung from the Butcher's hand. Her face turned toward the camera for a moment, possibly looking at someone behind it, a serene smile gracing her split lips.
I cleared my throat, uncomfortable with the expression. Someone that close to death shouldn't look so calm. She should be fighting with every cell in her body to survive.
Why was she so passive?
Words from the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient India text vital to the Hindu tradition, drifted into my mind, as they often did.
Just as the dweller in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age, so at death he merely passes into another kind of body.
The crowd turned, and the Butcher's eyes flicked up, something off screen drawing his attention.
Dan sat forward, his elbow brushing mine as he rested it on his bent knee.
"That must be…" He didn't say her name. We both knew the story. Zerzan, our contact in the Peshmerga fighting force, had sent the video, and although it was barely twelve hours old, the rumors were spreading like wildfire on a dry and windy night.
The miracle woman took the city of Surama, then disappeared. Praise Allah. The prophet is showing her power to the world. The miracle woman is invincible. All women can rise up and change the world. Let the wolf out!
It was a very recent history playing out on the screen in front of us. It wasn't the only footage from the fall of Samara—an Isis stronghold in Syria—but Zerzan had said in her message that the footage was powerful. That it proved Sydney Rye was alive and working with the prophet.
The rumors of a miracle woman brought back to life by a female prophe
t—a messenger from God brought to earth to help women rise up against their male oppressors—started months earlier and had spread faster than anyone expected.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies were scrambling to deal with this new development, while my organization—Joyful Justice, an international vigilante network inspired by the vengeful acts of one young woman in New York City—was inundated with new requests.
The prophet claimed everyone decided their own value, and anyone who tried to stop a woman from expressing herself, living her life as a free and equal being, needed to be removed.
It was the kind of rhetoric that spawned new Butchers.
The crowd began to scramble, trying to escape the off-screen menace. The Butcher dropped his victim as an explosion sounded and dust and debris bloomed, instantly clouding a sunshine-filled day.
Through the veil of destruction, I just made out the Butcher leaping off the stage, his blade catching a reflection of flames before disappearing into the dust.
Another woman dressed in black robes, her blonde hair a tangled nest, climbed onto the stage and went to the fallen woman's side. Bent over the dying figure, the blonde head bobbed as her body shook. I recognize her from somewhere. She looked so damn familiar. Where had I seen her before?
"That’s Sydney's mother, April Madden," Dan said, his voice low.
I glanced over at him, my lips parting in surprise.
Dan's green gaze stayed focused on the computer screen. The blue glow lit his skin, tan from his hours of surfing and running. He insisted that everyone exercised outdoors here. The island, the command center for Joyful Justice, was a former paranoid billionaire’s escape plan. He had built an entire fortress inside an extinct volcano, then died of cancer before the world could implode and leave him safely cocooned on his own private island.
The fortress—with housing above ground level and the command center below, had enough room for a few hundred people. Who did the billionaire plan to bring? What did his utopia look like?
Joyful Justice bought the island from his estate several years ago. Was there something about this hunk of rock, in the middle of a wild, untamable ocean, that drew dreams like ours— visions of a safe world? But our dream was bigger than the billionaire’s: we didn't want to save a few hundred people; we wanted to save everyone.
Everyone.
Dan had found and purchased the island. Now, he was in charge of this headquarters of Joyful Justice, where all our missions were organized.
His team of experts worked ten stories underground, so Dan insisted that everyone spend at least an hour outside daily, working out, feeling the sun on their faces…remembering why they did what they did. What made life worth living.
Dan's sandy blond beard was streaked with the yellow of sunshine. His hair, grown out and still damp from a recent shower, was pushed back off his forehead. His brows were drawn together. "It's freaky how much they look alike. Like seeing thirty years into the future of Sydney," Dan said, his gaze riveted to the screen.
I turned back to the computer. Rye's mother, about Sydney's height and build but slower moving, not trained to kill like Sydney, held the dying woman in her arms, tears rolling down her cheeks. She glanced up at the camera for a moment, and those gray eyes—the color of sunlight blasting through a cloud cover to glint off a riled, windy sea—caught the lens for just a moment.
She wasn't afraid of death.
Just like the woman dying in her arms…but April looked like she wouldn't go down without a fight.
"Why is she there?" I asked. Dan shook his head, his lips pressed tight.
"We knew she was trying to find Sydney…I guess she did."
A hiccup of a laugh escaped me, and Dan turned, his heavy focus falling onto my smiling lips.
"What's so funny?" he asked. In my peripheral vision I saw the young woman go totally limp in April's arms.
I shook my head. "Nothing. Just." My eyebrows rose of their own accord. "It's not totally surprising that Sydney's mom can do whatever she wants."
Dan's mouth twitched into a small smile. "Must run in the family."
On screen, April released the young woman, laying a hand over her eyes to close them.
A black-clad figure, an Isis soldier, climbed onto the opposite side of the stage and aimed his weapon at April.
She turned to run and fell forward onto her hands and knees; her face, tear-streaked and coated with dust, was so close to the lens I could see small flakes of debris caught in her eyelashes.
My breath stopped. The soldier loomed behind her. I was about to watch Sydney Rye's mother die.
Blood exploded from the man's chest. He looked down at it, confused, before falling to his knees and tipping over, apparently dead.
April scrambled to her feet and looked around, trying to find the killer. No savior appeared. April's attention fell onto the Isis soldier's Kalashnikov, and she picked it up, her spine straightening and a smile pulling at her mouth. April Madden leapt off the stage into the chaotic crowd, disappearing off screen.
The camera caught the dust, fire, and smoke of war. The stage remained empty except for the young woman's body—deathly still in a world swirling with horror—every living person who passed the camera trying to avoid her fate.
The crowd shifted and all began to run in one direction, away from the square, away from where the Butcher had run. Away from the Miracle Woman.
A dog entered the frame, a giant mastiff, golden with a black muzzle and curled tail.
"I think they're called Kangals," Dan said.
He was flicking through his phone. Another dog appeared, a third, and then I saw Blue…Sydney Rye walking next to him. His head even with her waist, he was almost as broad as the mastiffs he moved with. Blue's nose tapped against Sydney's hip. She leapt onto the stage, the dog's circling around her—watching over her, but also herding her—as if she was a sheep, their charge.
Sydney bent down next to the body and felt for a pulse. Apparently finding none, she rose, and her head jerked toward the camera.
Those gray eyes pierced right through the lens, and I caught my breath, again. My hand shot out and grab Dan's forearm, squeezing.
Those eyes.
She looked desperate. Desperate to survive. Desperate to live. Willing to do anything. She was feral.
I recognized the look and the emotion behind it.
The scars on my body lit up as if fresh cigarettes were being ground into my flesh. Memories flashed; my muscle shook as I tightened the chain around my rapist’s neck. Swallowing revulsion, I forced the sensations in my body to go away and sucked in a deep breath of Dan; ocean, sunscreen and warmed computer plastic.
They pushed me to where I could see Sydney was on the screen. They pushed me until I would do anything to escape, anything to survive.
And I did.
I fucking survived.
Sydney turned and jumped off the stage, the dogs following in her wake.
I looked down at my hand holding on to Dan and consciously unlocked my fingers, but his free hand came up and closed over mine, warm and calloused and comforting.
Tears sprung unwelcome to my eyes. Inhaling through my nostrils, I willed away the sting and quickly swiped my eyes with my free hand. There was work to do. Our mission was bigger than any one person. Certainly bigger than me. Bigger than what those men took from me.
Frustration squeezed my throat. I didn't want them to have any power anymore. Would I ever be free?
"I think we need to call the Joyful Justice council together," Dan said, referring to the governing body of our organization. His phone vibrated next to him, and I pulled my hand out from under his, freeing him to answer it. He looked at the screen. "It's Robert."
Dan's voice was a deep baritone when he answered, putting on a tough facade for Robert Maxim. That was a man to show no weakness to— he'd exploit it. He'd destroy us all, if it served him.
Dan's body tensed. "Sydney, where are you?"
"She's on th
e phone?"
He nodded and stood, pacing away.
I turned back to the screen, the video continued to play, showing an empty stage except for one dead body through a swirling mass of smoke—a hellscape.
But of course, Sydney Rye had survived.
She always did.
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Flock of Wolves (A Sydney Rye Mystery, #10)
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A Note From Emily
Thank you for reading In Sheep’s Clothing. I'm excited that you made it through my whole bio right here to my "note". I'm guessing that means that you enjoyed my story. If so, would you please write a review for In Sheep’s Clothing? You have no idea how much it warms my heart to get a new review. And this isn't just for me, mind you. Think of all the people out there who need reviews to make decisions. The children who need to be told this book is not for them. And the people about to go away on vacation who could have so much fun reading this on the plane. Consider it an act of kindness to me, to the children, to humanity.
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About the Author
Emily Kimelman not only writes adventure, she lives it every day. Embodying the true meaning of wanderlust, she's written her Sydney Rye mysteries from all over the world. From the jungles of Costa Rica to the mountains of Spain, she finds inspiration for her stories in her own life.
While living under communist rule in the former Soviet Union, the KGB sprinkled her with "spy dust", a radioactive concoction that made her glow and left a trail they could follow. She was two. She was destined for amazing things after that, and she continues to find adventure to inspire characters like the badass Sydney Rye.
In Sheep's Clothing Page 19
