by Sarah Black
John nodded.
“So now General Painter and Jen are in détente, not even speaking. And I am in the doghouse with both of them for the rest of my fucking life.”
“Why did you stay, Sam?” John studied his moody, conflicted face. “So Jen, is she…?”
“Yes, sir. She’s the one, even if it’s from a couple of thousand miles away. And besides, who else would have me?”
“Okay, when are we leaving?”
“2200 tonight from Dulles. We’re going through Paris.”
“Send the Horse-Lord an open-ended ticket. He just might be able to get away and join us. Have you packed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go get your bags. Take a taxi back here. I don’t know how long we’ll be gone.”
When Brightman had gone to collect his luggage, John dialed Gabriel. He picked up on the first ring. “Gabriel, you okay?”
“Yeah, John. I’m fine. I was just pulling out my phone to call you.”
“How’s he seem?”
John could hear the breath catch in Gabriel’s throat. “Like he’s about five years old. Whatever happened, he scared himself. He isn’t talking yet, but he grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go.”
“Gabriel, I had an idea. I talked to Billy this morning. He said something about cooking a cowboy fry-up.”
“Yeah?”
“What would you think about letting Juan go up to Cheyenne? Spend a few weeks learning how to be a cowboy with Cody Dial? Billy might like a quick trip home before the summer’s over.”
Gabriel was quiet, thinking it over. “They met when Cody was down here, right? When Kim and Billy had their art show?”
“Yeah.” John was remembering Cody Dial’s comment about Juan. Boy’s got a chip on his shoulder. “I think Billy told me he’s got three older brothers.”
“That might be the very thing, John. It will get him away from these idiots for a while, anyway. I still haven’t talked to Martha. What time are you leaving?”
“2200.”
“I’ll send an e-mail to let you know what’s happening. Hey, I had an idea, too. It’s a lawyer thing—you remember Cato the Elder?”
“Yeah. He was always giving speeches, right? Oh, wait a minute. What was it…?”
“Carthaginem delendam esse! Carthage must die! He was a Hawk, of the ancient Roman variety, ended his speeches with the reminder that they still needed to destroy Carthage. If the boys were big Spartacus fans, I bet they knew the line.”
“Totally out of context!” John complained. “History has been reduced to a few clever sound bites. Nobody understands anything.”
“You can’t complain about that since you quit teaching.”
John found himself grinning at the phone. “Yes, I can. So you think Forsyth was playing Cato the Elder, and young Hannibal Green was the general, and… oh, God, then the Islamic police decided to step in? Hey, I found a Hannibal quote when I was reading this morning—I will use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome! Sounds more like Hollywood than Carthage. Gabriel, there’s more. Both boys are Jewish. I’m just praying their passports don’t have any recent stamps from Tel Aviv.”
“Let me go talk cowboys with Juan. He told me you called. Thanks. He was better by the time I got home. More like himself.”
“I was worried. Take all the time you need, Gabriel. If you need to spend some time with the family, anything, just do it.”
“You’re my family, too. You don’t have to stand at the back of the line anymore, waiting your turn. Oh, by the way, did you tell him I know how to drive a motorcycle?”
“Affirmative. I told him you could drive anything. I love you. Come if you can. It won’t be as much fun to stand on a pillar in Carthage and stare out across the Mediterranean without you. Brightman should have sent you an open-ended ticket.”
“I love you, too. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
John stuck the phone back in his pocket, but kept his fingers wrapped around it for a few moments, as if he could keep that small connection to Gabriel a little longer. It had been a rough couple of months with the kids. They weren’t talking about it much, both of them in a wait-and-see mode, but the problems appeared to be escalating.
Martie, Gabriel’s eight-year-old daughter, had only spent one weekend with them since her mom had agreed to let Gabriel have visitation at John’s house. Kim and Billy had painted her walls pale lavender at John’s request, and one wall had a fantasy castle/princess/unicorn theme that John thought was very beautiful, if you went for that sort of thing. Which apparently Martie did not. She had studied the room, her face blank, then she unrolled a large poster of an Apache Attack Helicopter, courtesy of the New Mexico National Guard, and had taped the poster to the lavender wall over her bed with masking tape. “I’m not six anymore,” she’d said, which John took to mean she was affronted by the lavender walls. Then she’d asked Gabriel if he had any night vision goggles she could use.
She spent most of the weekend roaming around the house, leaning against Gabriel and asking what he was doing. She got bored after a couple of hours and went to the garage to hang with Kim until he had to go to work. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t two men working on their computers during the day and reading in the evening. She studied John’s bookshelves after she had searched the entire house looking for a TV. “Do you have anything good to read?”
“What do you like to read?”
“Like, stories?” she said. The tone of her voice let him understand that he was too stupid to be the cool Double Dad she was expecting.
Juan had not wanted to come at all. Gabriel had started going back to his old house a couple of mornings a week to have breakfast with the kids, but he said they were both giving him the silent treatment. He and Martha were getting along a little better, though.
John had invited Martha out to lunch at the Melting Pot in Albuquerque, a fancy fondue restaurant that was popular with the ladies-lunch crowd. She had agreed and had dressed beautifully for the occasion in a red silk dress with a thin belt around her slender waist and pumps. It had not gone well. They were formal with each other, and courteous, but he did not think she was prepared to trust him yet. But he was determined to maintain open lines of communication, and to forgive her previous attempt to get him thrown into Leavenworth and stripped of his life’s work. John had a migraine by the end of lunch, and Martha looked like she might have taken a bite out of her tongue. They left fifty dollars’ worth of nearly untouched fondue on the table. Gabriel had seemed a bit irritated that John hadn’t told him his plan to take Martha to lunch, though, so he’d not asked her again, and she had not returned the invitation. John thought the situation might best be described with an analogy, fighters who had retired to their corners to drink some water and get their lacerations superglued shut.
Chapter 10
THEY changed planes in Paris, and Sam tried out his general’s aide chops, carrying all the electronics and instructing the flight attendants on what the general needed for his comfort. John had to chew on his tongue to keep from grinning and spoiling the boy’s pleasure at his new job. John had never been one of those generals the press liked to interview. He was always too busy and his work required the ability to keep his mouth shut and his head down. So he’d never developed the need to listen to sound bites of himself speaking. He actually thought that he was most effective in the work because he looked quiet. Gray eyes, brown hair, a little under six feet, strong and fit, but not so buff people would notice. Except Gabriel, of course. Gabriel loved his gray eyes and loved running his hands down John’s chest, over his flat belly. John thought he would be prepared to live on celery if need be so Gabriel could continue to look at his chest with that same heat in his eyes.
He’d slept on the plane to Paris, so John pulled out the tablet and started making lists. He thought he might know the man who was the regional security officer at the embassy in Tunis. Greg Mortimer was CIA. If he was the same guy, they had worked an o
p together for the JCS back in ’98, ’99, if John was remembering correctly. He was another quiet guy, the kind who could sit in the back of the room and fade into the walls. The defense attaché was a stranger to him, a navy man, but John had met the head of station once before. He was happy to see a woman in power, and Madeline Grant was a strong, capable woman with a flair for languages. She would be a good contact if they had a life-or-death emergency. But John hoped they could avoid having to involve the embassy. There was a certain risk to doing business overseas, and it was understood that businesses needed to get themselves and their people out of their own messes. But the embassy was there, and John would call on them for help if the situation deteriorated to the point that safety was compromised.
And then there were young Ms. Painter and her colleagues at Amnesty International. John was not used to thinking of this group as one to call on during an emergency. He had, in fact, been involved in a mission to extract a couple of PhDs who had been taken for ransom during a nasty little regional conflict. The doctors were anthropologists, like Jen, and were helping identify remains after a tribal dispute had escalated into a tribal war. They had struck him at the time as extremely opinionated, and they tended to paint military men with the same brush as other armed combatants, down to and including armed children, even when their asses were being dragged out of the fire. John would have to take her measure before he counted on her in an emergency. He would also have to evaluate how Sam responded when he was around Jen. John hoped he would not morph into a whipped puppy.
“Sam, how do you and Jen get along now?”
Sam shrugged. “She orders me around like I’m eight years old. She acts like she’s better than me because of the noble work she’s doing, and all I’m doing is pulling a trigger and causing destruction. I think she’s a spoiled little princess, and sometimes I just want to pull her over my lap and spank her butt.” He glanced at John out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry, sir. TMI?”
“No such thing as TMI on a mission, Brightman.”
“She was like that girl in class who was always the smartest, and she just got used to thinking she was right all the time, you know? And if she wasn’t right, she could talk her way out of anything. That’s the thing that pisses me off. She doesn’t know how to admit she’s wrong. She can’t back down. That’s a skill you need to learn if you want a relationship. That’s what I think. You know those girls I mean? The smart ones? The ones that drive you crazy?”
A picture of Martie flashed through his mind, taping up a poster of an Apache Attack Helicopter on the lavender walls of her bedroom. “Yes, I think I do. Sam, I’m going to send you a list of emergency contacts. We need to be able to get in touch with help very quickly, because if something were to happen to me, you would need to step in and take charge.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Exactly what I said. The mission has priority. So if you have to step in and take charge, say if the bad guys take me hostage, you need to be able to complete the mission. You can always come back and get me later. You’ll be my fail-safe, you understand? But we must get these two boys home. If Gabriel can get free and join us, he takes over. It’s not that I don’t trust you, Sam, but he has had my back for over twenty-five years. He has significant combat experience, and we’ve worked together so long he knows what I want to do before I do.”
“I really, really hope the Horse-Lord can get to Tunis before somebody takes you hostage. I do not want to be the one to explain to him that I lost you.”
“We’re just talking possibilities, Brightman. Best to have a backup plan. Nothing to worry about.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is somebody meeting us at the airport?”
“Yes, sir. General Painter sent one of his guys over to Tunis two weeks ago. That’s Jim Fields. He was supposed to be watching out for Jen. He’s gonna meet us at the airport and brief you.”
John closed his eyes, tried to rest. Thought about Gabriel and Juan. Gabriel had sent an e-mail just before John got on the plane: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, take 2. Cheyenne or Bust. Love you.”
Gabriel on a motorcycle. Seemed like he was taking Juan on a little father and son road trip. John gave himself a few quiet moments before the plane touched down, picturing Gabriel rolling down out of the Rockies on a Harley.
The airport in Tunis was quieter than John had expected, with more armed men than tourists. The man waiting for them waved to Brightman, led them to a waiting car. It was a heavy old Mercedes and had bulletproof windows, a point the Tunisian driver pointed out with pride.
Jim Fields looked like he had been in-country for some time, his shirt loose, billowing cotton against the heat. John remembered the heat and the dust from his last trip to Tunisia. He’d come with Omar al-Salim in the early eighties. He’d been on sabbatical, finishing his dissertation, and they had taken a tour of the great libraries, the seats of scholarship from the ancient world.
The city looked considerably more crowded on this trip, he thought, watching out the window, and no one looked happy. He noted several crowds of young men, bearded, wearing a mix of native loose cotton clothing and military gear. He’d read that, after years of oppression by the western leaning government, Tunisia’s ultraconservative Salafists were gaining power and alarming everyone with their combination of radical Islam and militancy. These crowds of young men, they looked like they were getting ready to storm the embassy walls. More alarming were the boys playing ball or sitting on corners. Hundreds of them, with nothing to do, while the driver steered them through the city streets from Tunis to Carthage. Too many young men with nothing to do, no jobs, no future, and trouble was likely to follow.
“Sir? General Mitchel?” He looked over at Sam. Fields had turned around, was watching him from the front seat. “We’re here.”
The Regency was blue and white, marble and ocean and sky, and it looked as opulent as a palace. He could see the Mediterranean out past the white marble columns and the swimming pool that was as bright and shiny as a jewel. The place looked deserted.
The driver came around, opened his door. “Thank you,” John said.
The man had the curly dark hair common in Tunisia, pale, pockmarked cheeks, and he gave John a little bow. “If you need anything, sir, a driver or a tour guide, I would be very pleased to assist you.” He spoke English beautifully, with a faint touch of Oxford. He offered a card, and John took it, looked down. Youssef Shakir, Tours in French, English, and Arabic, followed by a cell number.
“Mr. Shakir, do you speak these languages yourself?”
“Yes, I do.”
John switched to Arabic. “Then perhaps I could ask your indulgence to assist me in reacquainting myself with your beautiful language?”
“I would be most honored, sir,” he said, in the same language. “I am at your service.”
“Fields, do we have anything scheduled? Or can I ask Mr. Shakir to come tomorrow for an hour?”
Fields shrugged. “If you want. We won’t be done by tomorrow, that’s for sure. Himself’s daughter is waiting inside. Said she wanted to tell you herself what she’d done.”
“Who, Jen? Jennifer Painter?”
Fields’s mouth turned down. “Yeah.”
“Sam, go on in and see her if you want.”
“That’s okay, sir. You can go first.” Youssef handed him a card as well, and Sam tucked it into his portfolio. “I’m General Mitchel’s aide,” he said, and the Tunisian gave another small bow.
“I will bring your luggage into the hotel.”
They had several porters and hotel desk staff helping them walk the ten steps into the hotel and vying for the job of carrying their few bags. John left Sam to handle all their checking in duties. Fields pushed through the doors to the outdoor patio and took a seat by the pool. His back was to John and the rest of the staff in the lobby, and John wondered about the attitude. If the man had been holding a big sign that shouted, “Leave me out of this!” he couldn�
��t have been clearer. Youssef was waiting next to his car, watching them.
“Sam.” Brightman left the desk and walked over to him. “Make sure our driver was paid. I didn’t see Fields give him any money.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brightman was carefully ignoring the girl who was waiting in one of the big lobby chairs, her feet propped up and a tablet computer gone to sleep in her lap. She had her head back, a faint snore coming from her partially open mouth. Even discounting the fact she was caught napping, John had to admit the child was not an attractive girl. She had a pug nose and ginger freckles spattered across her cheeks. Her hair was curly ginger brown, pulled back into an untidy ponytail. She couldn’t have been much over five feet tall. Was this humble little bean of a girl the one Sam was waiting for? Why, for God’s sake? The boy was as handsome as a Viking. He nudged her foot, and she frowned in her sleep, wiped across her nose with the back of her hand, then blinked wide hazel eyes up at him.
Sharp, he thought, one of those girls who always thought she knew best. Isn’t that what Sam had said? The girl sat up, scanned the lobby until she spotted Sam, then she stood up and held out her hand. She was wearing a shapeless brown dress nearly down to her ankles, with a scarf over the shoulders that could be pulled up over her hair. “General Mitchel? I’m Jennifer Painter.”
John shook her hand. “Hello, Jennifer. Do you have some critical information, or can you wait for Sam and give both of us a briefing?”
She blinked in surprise. “I can update Sam, but I thought I better tell you. You’ve come to get the guys out, right? I know where they are.” She hesitated. “And why they were taken.”
