Sudden Deception

by Judith Price

  Lifting her gun hand above the shelf, she fired, giving her enough time to escape the room. A man began shouting in her direction and Jill turned around and fired directly into his belly, gutting him and knocking him backwards. She could not see how many others remained. “Nyet, nyet,” was all she heard. Jill had no time to think as she ran ducking in and around and between cars. She didn’t know the direction of the sniper, who was clearly firing to distract the assault coming in from the rear door.

  Then a lull—the gunfire had stopped! In a leap of faith, she ran and crouched along the backs of cars until she hit a break between two buildings and sprinted through.

  Behind her, a man yelled something in Russian. Did he see me? Shit. Her boots smacked the ground hard, and the pace reverberated through her knees. Only the moonlight and smattering of shop lights were lighting her way.

  Ducking into an alley, Jill glanced back between breaths and saw shadows along the buildings across a small parking lot. With that as her cue, she sprinted down into darkness. Rounding two more corners, she stopped fast when she noticed some stairs behind a glass door. Grabbing the handle hard, she shook it open. The door was not locked. She pulled herself in and ran up the two flights of stairs, only to find there was nothing at the top but a single door. This time the door was locked. She looked at the gun in her shaking hand. She looked back to the door; it had a small window and only darkness on the other side. This door must lead to the roof. Panting hard, she looked back down the dark stairwell, but no one had followed her. Not that she could see anyway. The sound of her heart pounding was loud. Jill let out a deep breath, satisfied she was alone. She put the gun back into her pocket.

  She couldn’t believe what had happened. One minute there was a meeting going on and the next second, everyone was shooting. She’d shot a guy, but she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t believe she had got out of there alive, or that Zayed appeared to be dead. Who wanted to kill him? And who were those Russians? Chechens? She could swear she heard two different Slavic dialects.

  Anxiously, Jill reached her still shaking hand into the pocket and pulled out the crumpled note. Holding the note up to the moonlight, Jill tried to read it but the writing wasn’t English or Arabic. It looked Russian. The way the words were formatted, it must be an address. There was no mention of David on it; at least nothing looked like his name. The feeling of her heart thumping faded as she contemplated what to do next.

  She slowly descended the stairs, carefully peering out the windows for any more shooters in the dark. The streets seemed quiet, despite some of the shops still being open. Across the small side street was a dress shop. The bright sign lit the dresses cascading like a curtain in the window. She could not see inside but the lights were on. Suddenly she remembered—she looked like a man! Could I be this lucky? Jill reached the glass door at the bottom of the stairs and looked one way and then the next. No one. There were cars along the main street, but the backstreets were silent. Where were the police? Surely someone must have heard all that shooting and reported it?

  Jill fled across the abandoned parking lot, past a mini-mart, and into the dress shop. The bell jingled as she shut the door behind her. She knew no one could see her in here unless they looked closely through the bright garments that served as curtains. Full hangers were squashed with an assortment of different patterns. The walls were lined with long abayas. One wall was piled high with folded clothes in lopsided piles. An old bearded man looked up at Jill from behind a counter. He didn’t seem to know whether to smile or yell at her to leave, as she probably looked more like a gay male model.

  Thick white eyebrows arched over the man’s eyes and she instantly recognized something she saw in Grandpapa’s eyes. She smiled and said, “Hello, marhaba.” The white-haired man said hello back. His accent was thick.

  “I need dress,” Jill said, pulling off the cap and shaking her short hair. She spoke slowly, in the hopes that he could understand. His arthritic hips hobbled over to where her finger was pointing and he happily began to pull a dress down. Jill shook her head.

  Jill wanted a common Afghan abaya. The rods bowed slightly with the weight of the jammed clothes. Jill was drawn to a bright blue dress. Although she hadn’t seen too many women wearing them here, she wanted to blend in as best as possible.

  The old man shuffled through the tight gowns to find the right size for her. He pulled one out and held it up to her. “Good, good, khalas.” Jill reached into a money belt under her shirt, pulled out some green paper, and paid for the dress. She then plucked out the treasured piece of paper and asked the old man if he knew what it said.

  “Russia, Russia,” he babbled. “La la, no Russia, no Russia.”

  He looked up and said, “Wife Russia, grocery,” and walked out the back door.

  Before Jill could go after him he returned with a pudgy old woman. Trustingly, she held the note up for the old woman to see. Her aged hands shook slightly as she gently took the note from Jill and held it out far from her face, scowling intently. She was dressed in a drab polka-dotted outfit that fell to the ground, cinched tightly at her overgrown waistline. Her gray curly hair, uncovered, disclosed she was not Muslim. Jill thought that to marry a Muslim one had to be Muslim, but she quickly pushed the curiosity away as the woman began to speak a form of Arabic to her husband.

  “Address, village,” he translated back to Jill. His worn spotted hand pointed at a name on the note. “Petrovich, name Petrovich.”

  “Petrovich,” Jill repeated, and the couple nodded. Jill needed to find a phone. She needed to call Karine and have her run this name in association with LSA. Maybe there was intel on it. Maybe Karine had found information on Zayed? But that didn’t matter now, did it? Jill also needed to get to this place written on the paper.

  Jill held up her hand and mimed holding a phone. But the old man slowly shook his head. Turning, he pointed to the left window and said, “Typing shop, go, typing shop.” Jill stood for a moment remembering how lucky she had been to have Zayed with her, and then pushed the thought away. Right now she needed to get in touch with Karine. She would have time to think about Zayed later.

  With excitement and apprehension, she slipped into the abaya, complete with the burqa over her face. She waved a thank-you to the old couple and moved slowly towards the door. She looked out the glass at a dark and empty street. The door jingled as she walked out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  18:33 Zulu Time—KUSHKA, AFGHANISTAN

  Once outside, the part of her dress that crisscrossed over the eyeholes obstructed her view, causing her to miss a stair. Her body lurched forward and her boot smacked pavement, saving her from tumbling into a tangled ball of robe. She tried to get some bearing on where to go. From what Jill could translate from the old man's flurry of hand gestures she was to go out the store, go left down the side road for a ways, then turn right and it would be there on the right side of the road. He then ended the gestures with “Insha’allah.”

  “Typing shop,” she said to herself. Moving in the direction suggested to her, Jill attempted to blend in as a local woman. She rounded the next corner and saw through her imprisoned view several shops with lights on. Jill thought she could see the outline of a typewriter in the shop at the end, but it was still too far away to make out and the burqa was not helping matters. Just as she was about to step down off the curb, intuition stopped her. Jill placed her foot back onto the curb and warily looked around. In an effort to appear that she had dropped something, her head tilted slightly down as she further scanned her surroundings—first to her left and then back towards the typing shop. As her eyes passed along the street, she saw it. There, directly across the road to her immediate left, was the café where the gunfight just happened. Instantly, Jill became apprehensive and backed slowly into the closed doorway of an abandoned shop. She patted her right quad to gain comfort from the gun. Could this really be the same café??

  She peeked out from the dark doorway and looked up and down the
street. Two men were standing a few shops up to the right across the road, smoking. Luckily they weren’t looking in Jill’s direction. She looked back over at the café, which was now dark. Shattered glass gleamed in the bright orange light of the sign above the café.

  It’s the same café, she thought and wondered where everyone was. It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes since she escaped the attack. How could it be cleared away so fast? Where are all the men who were killed or wounded? For a second, Jill wondered if she was in a dream, still sleeping snuggled somewhere between hell and back. In the States, crowds would have gathered by now. Police tape would be up. At least two black-and-whites holding the crowd back waiting for CSU to show up. There seemed to be commotion on the back side of the café as there were several cars stopped in disarray with their headlights on, but it was too far away for her to see any details. Jill mulled over her escape that led her to the dress shop. She couldn’t seem to retrace how she ended up so close. “Shit,” she muffled under the burqa.

  Then her thoughts turned to Zayed. She considered going back into the café to see if there were any signs of his body, but the sound of footsteps stopped that thought short. A man walked past the café, his shoes crunching the shards of glass. Oddly, he didn’t glance at the shattered window. He simply walked in Jill’s direction. His gait seemed harmless enough, strong, but not determined. Out for a night stroll perhaps? He wasn’t wearing army boots, just thick-soled sandals. She stood in the dark, almost holding her breath. Frozen, Jill allowed her eyes to follow him as he passed the doorstep where she stood, crossed the road, and disappeared into some sort of mechanical supply store.

  Jill’s brain spun. She needed to get to the typing shop, but the only way for her to reach it was to walk past the café. She hesitated; she needed some nerve now. She also needed to find a damn phone. Another scan. Nothing. She clenched her hands and huffed, then walked out from the dark doorway and started towards the shop.

  Down the street men were moving about. She knew it was uncommon for a woman to be out alone at night, but she hoped no one would notice. She suddenly began to feel very hot under the abaya. Adrenaline mixed with apprehension and intent. She walked towards the first corner of the café and made a split decision not to look inside. Breathe, Jill, breathe. Just a few more steps. Glass crunched under her boots. Shit. She stepped lighter to avoid attracting attention. She had no peripheral vision when she walked past the broken window. Jill let out a long breath at the sound of her boots slapping clean pavement. She kept moving at the same pace and her heart rate began to slow.

  Three doors past the café, and there was the typing shop on the right. Light shone through the bars in the windows. Jill opened the glass door and a musty smell greeted her. The breeze from the opening door ruffled the edges of the papers tacked to veneer wood paneling. Inside, a herd of old dusty computer screens faced her.

  Shelves were crowded with an array of paper, ink cartridges, books, and a round alarm clock that read 20:57. Seated at desks were three men and one woman, heads tilted down, concentrating on the glowing screens in front of them. The wood paneling was warped, the bend forcing a cobwebbed shelf away from the wall. The head of the man closest to her lifted. Jill detected annoyance as he got up to approach her from behind the cluttered counter. Jill looked around and noticed a phone/fax machine in a makeshift phone booth to her right. She pointed to the phone and pulled out a one-hundred-dollar US bill. The Afghan man looked at it, and then back to Jill. He said something in a language Jill did not understand, then he examined the bill and said, “You call US?”

  Jill nodded.

  “Twenty minutes khalas.”

  Khalas must mean finish—she had gathered that much on this trip by now.

  A small table holding a dirty cream-colored phone sat in front of a raggedy chair. The numbers on the phone were in Arabic and she hoped they were in the standard order. Arabic was written in the opposite sequence from English—right to left—so numbers in Arabic were written from left to right. A cloud of dust rose from the chair as she sat down, and Jill suddenly realized that the old woman in the dress shop made no mention of David.

  She picked up the cruddy phone and dialed zero-zero-one and then the number. The sound of a phone ringing reassured her that she may have gotten the number right. The sun should be up by now in Tucson, Jill thought.

  “Boy, I sure am happy to hear from you,” Karine said.

  “Same,” Jill replied quietly.

  “Jill, you alright?”

  Jill’s hand had a slight tremor. She was trying to hold the phone away from her head for fear of getting who knows what disease from it. “Five-W,” Jill whispered. That was the code for Karine to know that Jill couldn’t talk and that something was urgent. Who, what, when, where, why, and of course how—the fundamentals of clear and concise communication. At least that’s what David’s mantra was. And that was exactly what Jill needed.

  Focus, Karine. Jill and Karine had rehearsed this over a bottle of wine one evening. They never thought they would ever use it, but they had prepared for this moment. Please focus, Karine.

  “You can’t talk?” Karine asked fast.

  “No.”

  “Okay, you hurt?”

  “No.”

  “You need something?” Karine realized before she finished asking that it was a dumb question. As rehearsed, Karine continued, “What do you need, Jill?”

  “Research.”

  “Where—Kushka?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I guess the when is now, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Jill said with annoyance.

  “Who?”

  Karine tapped on the keys as Jill answered, “Petrovich,” She look up at the people in the typing shop to see if anyone had flinched with acknowledgement. No one did.

  Karine repeated the name and told Jill she would run it alongside LSA and the unknown village outside Kushka. “I’ll also run it against your friend Zayed,” Karine said as if she just scored a goal. Jill didn’t respond. No need to tell Karine she thought he was dead. Besides, she was curious to find out who he really was.

  Jill twisted her head toward the computer geeks. No one seemed to notice her. She still whispered, “The old man said it was thirty minutes from Kushka,” Jill said hurriedly. “David?” Jill said with hope. Karine’s sigh answered her question.

  “Wait, what? What old man?” Then Karine finished her own question with, “Never mind. You can tell me later.”

  After several minutes on hold, Karine came back almost out of breath and sounded excited. “I had to run to the central computer system for this guy since the name sounded Russian. Jill, Petrovich’s name is Vladamir Petrovich. If it’s the same guy, he is a former Soviet Navy captain who broke into a nuclear storage facility several years back at Murmansk. That’s a shipyard.” Karine gasped for air. “He took five pieces of a reactor core containing six kilograms of enriched uranium.”

  “Is there any connection to LSA or David?” Jill whispered, looking through the grate at the uninterested people.

  “Well, when I first ran the name there were over six hundred and fifty responses to Petrovich. But when I added anything with nuclear weapon jargon, I came up with five, and then when I added Kushka, this is the only name that came up.”

  “He must be the one,” Jill whispered excitedly. “Did you get any information on the town outside Kushka?”

  “Does the name Towraghond sound familiar?”

  “That’s the name.” Although to Jill it sounded much different when spoken by a woman with a cowboy Western accent than it did coming from a little old Russian woman.

  “Well, it’s about twenty miles past the Turkmenistan border on the side of the mountain. It looks like a donkey trail. I heard they have wild donkeys there; have you seen any? Did you know that the donkeys came from Tennessee in the late eighties?”

  Jill grunted at the trivia, a downside of any researcher.

  “Never mind,” said Kari
ne who got back on track. “The road is windy but it looks like a car can drive on it. But a four-wheeler would be better. They have those over there?”

  “Karine, focus.”

  “Right.” Karine gave map coordinates. “Not that this will help you unless you have a GPS. You have a GPS out there?”

  “No,” Jill said between gritted teeth.

  “Oh, and Jill, this guy is no boy scout. He was part of the Spetsnaz, the Soviet Special Forces, trained to operate and manage nuclear weapons. I don’t get a good feeling from this, Jill. Do you think David was following a story about stolen nukes or something?”

  “Not sure. Anyway, thanks, I’ll call again soon.”

  She was about to hang up when Karine said, “Jill—” and hesitated. “Well, um, well, there is some bad news … well, you’ll think it’s bad anyway. It’s about Matthew McGregor.” Jill winced. “He’s getting a book written about himself, and, well, I got a call from the writer wanting to interview you. Just thought it’d be better I told you before you saw it on the news. Worst torturer of women before he killed them an’ all, ya know?”

  There was silence for about thirty seconds while Jill wondered if Karine had actually just said that to her. “Crap, like I need this now,” Jill responded ambivalently. And with that, Jill hung up and turned around, hoping no one had been listening. There was no sound of a typewriter, something you might expect in a typing shop. But nobody was looking her way. There was just the odd click-clack of the mouse and keyboard strokes. The woman at the desk lifted her head, more out of curiosity than suspicion, Jill figured.

  Exiting the shop, her eyes swept the street and noted no more headlights behind the café. Jill stood there unmoving. She was in over her head and she knew it. Damn.

  She needed a minute to go over her thoughts about Petrovich, David, and what the hell to do next. Jill moved to the doorway of the closed shop next to the typing shop.