“Don’t worry,” Nissim said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
“I’m not afraid,” she lied.
In truth, she had been terrified ever since the moment she had first agreed to this visit. Her parents’ divorce settlement gave her father four full weeks per year with her but he never made much effort to take advantage of that time. Every year, he made a perfunctory invitation to have her join him—first in Bahrain, when he’d been ambassador there, and now in Syria. Coming home to spend time with her had apparently always been too much trouble.
It wasn’t entirely his fault, she knew. Circumstances had conspired against them. Given his line of work, her mother’s lawyer had insisted that the divorce agreement include an exception stating that Alexa never had to join him in areas where she might be in danger. Since the divorce, that had pretty much been always. But her sixteenth birthday had triggered a codicil to that agreement, giving her the power to decide whether or not she felt safe joining him wherever he might be working. Her mother had not been fond of the idea of her coming to Syria but Alexa had decided it was time to call her father’s bluff. If his invitations had been genuine—if he really wanted her there—she’d find out pretty quickly.
Him not showing up to meet her plane did not bode well.
“Really,” Baz Nissim said. “You’re okay.”
“If there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said, “then why do we have an armed escort just to drive from the airport to the embassy?”
Nissim arched an eyebrow and seemed to reassess her.
“How old are you, again?”
“Seventeen.”
“Old enough, then, to know there are always dangers, but that the armed escort and your silent companion back there are the reasons why you needn’t fear.”
Alexa glanced at the security officer seated to her right, a stocky, square-jawed African-American who’d shaved his head down to the gleaming skin. She couldn’t argue Nissim’s point. She was probably as safe as she could be—under the circumstances. Syria had been locked in a cycle of violence and rebellion that had repeated itself every few years for two decades before the Tin Men had been deployed there to depose an unelected president willing to slaughter every last one of his own people to keep power. Alexa had been listening to her father talk about the situation for as long as she could remember.
She looked out the window again. “You can’t really blame them, y’know?”
Nissim studied her. “What do you mean?”
Alexa watched buildings roll by. “We took away their freedom. It’s only natural some of ‘em are going to hate us.”
The security officers shifted awkwardly. One of them grunted.
“We gave them freedom,” Nissim said. “The Syrian people can be anything they like. Men and women. Thanks to us, they get to choose their own paths.”
Alexa shot him a dubious look, giving him a small shrug. “Unless they want to fight about which path to take. That’s not allowed.”
“We brought democracy—“
“Democracy by intimidation,” she corrected. “Not quite the same as freedom, is it?”
“You’ve got a lot of opinions for a seventeen year old.”
Alexa met his gaze. “Trust me, if you grew up with Arthur Day for a father, you’d understand. If I came to the dinner table without an opinion and the ability to defend it, there was no dessert. That started when I was in the fourth grade. It’s one of the reasons my parents aren’t married anymore. I never minded it, but it drove my mother crazy.”
“I don’t expect your school teachers appreciated it much either,” Nissim said.
Alexa grinned.
“Well,” he said, “you’ll be happy to know your father hasn’t changed much. He still insists that everyone around him have an opinion. Fortunately for me, he doesn’t withhold dessert if I can’t back it up.”
The car slowed and Alexa looked up to see that they were approaching a building surrounded by a twenty-foot wall, which was itself surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Armed sentries were posted atop the walls. The gates drew back to let the lead car pass through.
“Don’t worry,” she said, craning her neck to survey their surroundings as the Mercedes glided into the interior courtyard of the embassy compound and came to a stop. “He’ll find some way to punish you.”
The security officer on her right tensed up.
“Mr. Nissim,” he said, “the Ambassador.”
Alexa glanced out the window and saw her father hurrying across the courtyard toward the car. His gray hair needed cutting and he looked thinner than when she’d last seen him many months before. He wore a bright blue tie with a crisp white shirt and gray trousers that looked like half of a suit, as if he’d forgotten the jacket somewhere. He looked deeply troubled.
Nissim opened his door and climbed out. Alexa wanted to see her father but her security detail did not move. Through the open passenger door, she could hear the men outside the car talking.
“Ambassador Day—“ Nissim began.
“Baz, listen,” her father interrupted. “Did you see anything out of the ordinary? Did anyone approach or follow your car?”
“Not that I noticed.”
Only then did Alexa’s father rap on the rear passenger window. The security man to her right popped open the door and stepped out. Alexa followed suit, getting out on the left and blinking against the brightness of the sun, lifting her hand to shield her eyes.
“Well, well,” her father said as he came around the car to greet her. “Look at you.”
“Look at you,” Alexa replied, making nice, poking her father’s belly. “Eat a sandwich once in a while, Ambassador.”
He smiled, all of his worry and dignified reserve crumbling as he swept her into his arms.
“Damn it, ‘Lex, it’s good to see you!”
“Good to see you, too,” she said, grunting as he squeezed her, and she was surprised to realize that she meant it. “Though I’m still rooting for you to be French ambassador.”
He stepped back, beaming down at her. “Shopping in Paris, I know. I’ll work on it.”
Alexa went on tiptoe to kiss her father’s cheek. He was so tall that she knew she would always feel like a little girl around him, no matter how many years passed. She sort of liked the idea.
Nissim had retrieved Alexa’s bag from the trunk. He set it on the ground by her feet.
“You’re sure you didn’t encounter anything odd?” the ambassador asked.
“Nothing,” Nissim replied.
The engine of the Mercedes purred a bit louder as it rumbled toward a concrete garage across the compound.
“The streets are empty,” said the previously silent security man.
Alexa’s father nodded. “I don’t like it.”
“You’re supposed to be in your meeting with the mayor right now,” Nissim said.
“He’s not there,” the ambassador replied. “There were only a handful of people at his office. The man I spoke to was not his usual receptionist. He told me the mayor’s ill and won’t be in the office for several days.”
Nissim shrugged. “It could be true, rude as it was for them not to call you to cancel.”
“It could be,” the ambassador said.
The security man glanced uneasily around the courtyard.
“But you think it’s something else,” Alexa said. She wasn’t used to seeing him so intensely focused on something other than writing a speech or reading reports.
Her father glanced at her, his eyes haunted. “I’m sure it’s fine. We’ve got a whole platoon of Tin Men in this city, not to mention a whole lot of U.S. Marines right here in the embassy. If one of these anarchy groups has something in mind, they’ll never get past our front door.”
The ambassador cast a meaningful glance at Nissim and the security man. His words hadn’t been an observation; they’d been an order.
“Yes, sir,” said the security man.
&n
bsp; Alexa’s father lifted up her travel bag and slung the strap across his shoulder, then slid his free arm around her waist and walked her toward the ornate front door of the embassy residence.
“Come on, kid. I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”
She knew he must have someone on staff to do that and it touched her that he wanted to do it himself, but the tension in his arms and the expression in his eyes hadn’t gone away completely and his demeanor had her unsettled.
“You said I wouldn’t be in any danger here,” she said quietly as he led her up the front steps.
He paused with the door halfway open and turned to her. Alexa could smell his scent—same old deodorant, same old Dad—and though the lines in his face had deepened, they hadn’t changed much. The steely glint in his eyes was new, though. New to her, at least. She had come to Damascus promising herself that she would try to put away old resentments, only to find a new one. Don’t get me killed, she thought.
“Take a look out there,” he said.
She glanced across the embassy compound. Several cars were parked in the shade of the wall. Armed Marines were posted at various points along its length. Nissim stood talking quietly with her father’s security man, out in the open and unafraid. Over the wall she could see the cityscape of Damascus, its towers and domes and blocks of apartments and offices. A plane sliced its white trail across the sky, but otherwise the city was quiet.
“I don’t think there’s anything we need to worry about, but I’ll make you this promise,” Arthur Day said, speaking quietly, so only his daughter could hear him. “If trouble comes, I will protect you.”
She smiled, on the verge of telling him that at a hundred and sixty pounds and never having fired a gun in his life there was not much he could do if the shit hit the fan. Something made her hold her tongue, and she wondered if it might be fear—fear that she might be speaking an uneasy truth.
“You can start by feeding me,” she said. “I’m starved.”
Visibly grateful to move on, her father smiled.
“I can fix that,” he said, and led the way deeper into the embassy.
As she swung the door closed, Alexa took one more look out at the city over the top of the wall. Heat haze wavered in the air and she saw a blackbird wheeling across the sky, the only thing that moved.
Unnerved, she chuckled softly to herself as she shut the door tightly.
“Welcome to Damascus,” she whispered. “Safest place on Earth.”
Kate heard Travaglini whisper the words on her commlink.
“Son of a bitch.”
They were turning into a narrow street of shops and rowhouses. Over the tops of the buildings they could see the massive, hulking presence of the Umayyad Mosque. The mosque was the spiritual center of Damascus, but also its physical center, dwarfing everything else for blocks around. In the distance, hills rose toward the sky, but here in the city’s heart, the Umayyad Mosque was a monolith.
Or it had been. The western half of the mosque had been destroyed during the civil war that had raged here when Kate had been in middle school. It was still in the process of being rebuilt, and for an instant her eyes were drawn to the jagged silhouette of the ongoing construction. When her gaze lowered, she saw the trouble that Travaglini had spotted—a pair of Tin Men dragging a bearded man from the doorway of a market and into the street.
One of the bots shoved the bearded man to the ground and, when he tried to rise, the other struck him in the head, dropping him to his knees. The two robots flanked the bleeding man, who cringed like a dog from his master’s wrath. Kate started running and Travaglini fell in beside her, their robot limbs far swifter than even the fastest human.
Kate was no tech—she didn’t know how the bots worked—but she loved to run. It felt more natural in this form than it did when she used the prosthetics her flesh and blood body had been fitted with. Most of the time, she preferred the wheelchair. The docs all told her she’d get used to the prosthetics eventually, and she suspected that was true, but this—running with her whole body, her whole self, even if it wasn’t really hers—was so much better.
As she hustled toward the two bots, one of them raised a hand as if to strike the man again. A bright yellow smiley face had been painted on the robot’s chassis, with pirate-style crossbones beneath it in the same vivid hue.
Hawkins, she thought, of course.
“Private Hawkins!” she snapped.
He flinched, twisting to face Kate and Travaglini as they ran up.
“Explain yourself,” she demanded.
Kate’s external weapon was still holstered at her side but Travaglini had drawn his and held it in both hands, his stance hostile.
“You’re out of your sector, Corporal,” Hawkins said.
“Answer the question,” Travaglini snapped.
Hawkins cocked his head. They were using external speakers, but everything that the Tin Men saw and heard and said was being recorded. Anybody else would be very careful about what they said next, but Hawkins had never seemed all that worried about pissing off the brass.
“We’re questioning a civilian about suspicious activities,” said the other bot, Hawkins’ partner for the day. “Doing our job, or we were until you interrupted.”
The bot had a playing card detailed on his forehead—the ace of spades—but Kate didn’t need to see the marking to know it would be Mavrides. The two always managed to partner up. If Hawkins had mastered the art of being a prick, Mavrides was his apprentice.
“It’s a liquor store,” she said, gesturing at the shattered door. The place sold beer and arak and wine. There were a hundred like them in a four mile radius. “And the sign says it’s closed. So what kind of suspicious activity are we talking about here?”
Something shifted inside, a crunch of broken glass, and Kate dropped her hand to her sidearm. She glanced at Travaglini and nodded for him to check it out, even as she returned her attention to Hawkins and Mavrides.
As Travaglini approached the open door, the cringing man who knelt in their midst began to mutter in Arabic, his mouth still bleeding from Hawkins’ blows. His eyes were wide with desperation. The onboard translator gave her an approximation of his words—he was pleading for them to leave his girls alone.
Anger rippled through Kate. “Stay cool,” she called to Travaglini.
“Look, don’t make this more than it is,” Hawkins started.
“Yeah? Then maybe you should tell me what it is.”
“We already did,” Mavrides snapped. “Suspicious fucking activity. We’re doing our job, you stupid—“
“Shut it!” Hawkins barked.
Mavrides’ head swiveled abruptly to stare at Hawkins, but the kid didn’t say another word.
“We were walking by, that’s all,” Hawkins said. “A short cut to our sector. City’s a ghost town today, like it’s holding its breath, waiting for some really bad shit to go down. We see the girls in the shop window, watching us. Then this guy…” He gestured to the kneeling man, presumably the shop owner. “He drags them away. I got a glimpse of his face and he didn’t look pissed at them, Katie. He looked like he was crapping his pants. Pretty clear he knows something—and if he does, I want to know what it is.”
“So you broke in and dragged him into the street?” she asked.
Hawkins and Mavrides didn’t answer, maybe to keep the confirmation of their breach of protocol off the record, but they all knew how it had gone down.
“Wade,” Travaglini said, coming to the door.
In front of him were a pair of terrified girls, perhaps eight and ten. The second they spotted the shop owner they ran out the door to him and the family embraced. Kate wanted to rip Hawkins and Mavrides to pieces. Hawkins had shot innocents, intimidated locals unnecessarily, and faced disciplinary action multiple times, but he’d never strayed so far across the line that they’d given him his walking papers. This time, though—
Kate studied the liquor store owner, listened to him shus
hing his daughters and telling them all would be well, watched him as he cast frightened glances up and down the street, and she knew: even assholes are right once in a while.
“Shit,” she whispered.
The man’s gaze locked with hers. He knew he’d made a mistake, knew that she’d realized that it wasn’t the Tin Men that terrified him. This guy was afraid of something else entirely.
“Please,” he said in English.
Kate surveyed the street, then looked at Travaglini.
“Get them inside,” she said.
“Corporal—“ Hawkins began.
“Right now!”
“On your feet,” Travaglini said to the shop owner. “Take your daughters back into the store, sir. Quickly, please.”
He spoke in English, but the bot had an onboard translation system that worked both ways. The words were coming out in Arabic. Kate snatched up her sidearm and put her back against the wall, watching the opposite roof and scanning doorways again. Hawkins and Mavrides followed suit. Twitchy, gun barrel sweeping from side to side, Mavrides seemed all too ready to fire.
Travaglini got the civilians inside and Mavrides followed. Hawkins hesitated a second and then went in, with Kate bringing up the rear. She stayed by the door, brandishing her sidearm.
“What?” Mavrides said. “What’d you see?”
Kate ignored him, turning to the shopkeeper, who had pressed himself up against shelves laden with wine bottles, holding his daughters close. The older girl had buried her face in her father’s chest, but the younger one glared back at Kate with enormous brown eyes, beautiful and defiant.
“Tell me what you’re afraid of and we’ll leave you alone,” Kate demanded.
The man shook his head, tears springing to his eyes. “I don’t know. I swear to you—“
“Bullshit!” Hawkins roared, so loud that the man bumped against the shelves and sent several bottles of wine crashing to the floor, the meaty scent of Lebanese red filling the shop.
“No!” the shopkeeper said, clutching breathlessly at his girls. “I swear it. I heard only that the streets would not be safe for my daughters.”
Tin Men Page 4
