Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I actually attempted to run a search for Sophia, born in the United States between 1965 and 1980, and came up with just under a trillion possible matches.” She made a noise of intense disgust. “Of course, that’s assuming both that she was born in the States, and that Sophia was the name her parents put on her birth certificate.”

  “Let me see that first list of addresses,” Nash ordered. “Maybe we can get a sense of the Kazabek neighborhoods she’s familiar with.”

  “It’s not a list.” Tess handed it to him. “There’re only two.”

  “Two’s better than none,” Nash told her.

  “I’m sorry,” Tess told Decker as Nash opened a map of the city, spreading it on Murphy’s bale of hay. “I wish I had better news for you. You know, I thought I was onto something with the gossip columns—one week the newspaper ran a photo and called them ‘Dimitri and Miles Ghaffari.’ I thought that might’ve been a typo—you know, that somehow her maiden name got used instead of her given name. But I got nothing from searching for Sophia Miles—I even tried alternate spellings. And another week they were called ‘Mr. and Mrs. Farrell Ghaffari.’ But Sophia Farrell came up blank, too—”

  “What?” Dave cut her off. “Wait, I was only half listening.”

  “I said Sophia Farrell came up—”

  “No,” he said. “Before that. You said . . . Did you say Miles?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I got nothing from it. I think it was just, you know, editorial brain farts on the part of the typesetters. This newspaper obviously didn’t spend a lot of money paying proofreaders. It was amazing how many times they misspelled both Dimitri and Ghaffari. And sometimes she was Sophia, sometimes Sophie, sometimes Saphia—”

  “Did you run Miles Farrell?” Dave asked her. He had such a peculiar expression on his face that hope sparked inside Decker.

  Tess blinked at him. “No.”

  “I mean, you did say it was possible that Sophia wasn’t her given name,” Dave said. “And although I didn’t know a Sophia Farrell or a Sophia Miles, I did know a Miles Farrell a few years ago. She’d be about the right age. And she was definitely American.”

  Murphy laughed, clearly tickled. “Davey, Davey. You are determined to win MVP for this op, aren’t you, dog?”

  Across the room, Nash stopped looking at the map. “You said you didn’t recognize that newspaper photo of Sophia Ghaffari.”

  “I didn’t. But I wouldn’t have. I never actually saw Miles,” Dave said. “When I dealt with her, she always wore a full burka. Never took off her veil. I think it made her feel more secure. I didn’t blame her—God forbid she’s seen talking to someone who’s later IDed as CIA, you know?”

  Jesus, that hope that had started as a tiny spark now filled Decker’s chest and damn near clogged his throat. He had to keep himself from grabbing Dave by the shirt and shaking him. “So she worked for you?”

  “She provided information, yes. But she never accepted any kind of payment,” Dave said. “Which was very unusual. On top of that, everything she ever gave me was golden. She apparently had access to people and places. . . . She was the first person to tell me that the American embassy was pulling out. I’m telling you, she knew about it before I did. I’m sure it must’ve felt to her like we were deserting her—deserting all the Americans in K-stan. Which, of course, we were. A few weeks later the K-stan government was overthrown, and the U.N. just sat back and let it happen. Most of the people who’d been working with us—working for democracy and freedom—were killed. I tried to contact her before I left Kazabek. I waited at the rendezvous point for three hours, but she never showed.”

  Contact. Rendezvous point. Holy fuck. Holy, holy fuck. Maybe there was a God, and maybe Decker was going to get a chance to make things right.

  More right than the current fucked-up tangle of wrong he had wrapped around his throat.

  “Because I never heard from her, I was afraid she was a casualty,” Dave continued. “But maybe she’s still alive. Maybe she and this Sophia are one and the same. It makes sense. Someone in Sophia Ghaffari’s social and business circle would have had access to the right people, to the kind of information Miles gave me—”

  Nash was thinking the same thing Decker was, only Nash had retained his ability to speak. And somehow he knew that Decker needed help.

  “How did you contact her?” Nash interrupted Dave, who was just starting to warm up to his new theory. “Did she have a way to contact you?”

  Dave blinked at Nash in total surprise. Flap, flap, with eyelashes that were ridiculously long for a man. Decker had never noticed that before, or the fact that Dave’s eyes were green, not brown. Each blink seemed to take an eternity. Flap, flap, flap. Five lifetime-long blinks before Dave turned to Decker. And spoke two of the sweetest words he’d ever heard in his entire life.

  “Of course.”

  The shopkeepers in the marketplace confirmed what Sophia had overheard last night from Michel Lartet—that the Grande Hotel had been structurally damaged.

  Access to Kazabek’s tallest building had been cut off from the street. In fact, that entire part of the downtown area was off-limits to both the general population and peacekeeping troops alike.

  It wasn’t so much a matter of if the building would fall, but rather when.

  Aftershocks still shook the city, and everyone Sophia spoke to seemed confident that the hotel was a death trap, waiting to topple.

  As she sat outside a shelter that was opening for the night in one of the most conservative mosques in City Center, she adjusted her veil so that she could gaze up at the Grande Hotel. It gleamed in the distance, its windows reflecting the golds and reds of the setting sun.

  From here, it looked no different than it had the first time she’d seen it, on her first visit to Kazabek with her parents, all those years ago. It had been shining and pristine, with room service inside and limousines out front, and she’d gazed at it wide-eyed from the backseat of the taxi as they’d driven past.

  Years later, she and Dimitri had spent their wedding night in the bridal suite. The circular driveway had been partitioned off from the street with concrete dividers to keep car bombers at bay, and the limos were few and far between. The fact that the power went out regularly in rolling blackouts helped hide the shabbiness and decay—not that she’d cared.

  Dizzy with the knowledge that Dimitri had followed her to Kazabek, that he was willing to give up everything—everything—just to be with her, she’d been hopelessly in love.

  Foolishly in love.

  Much like the Kazabek Grande Hotel, Sophia would look the same now, too, to someone who had known her seven years or even two months ago. Prettier than she had a right to be for a woman with a brain, as Michel Lartet had so often told her.

  But inside, she was structurally damaged.

  Had she escaped certain death this morning thanks to the whim of that American? Or had she survived only because he didn’t fully comprehend the enormity of the reward Bashir’s nephews had surely posted for her return?

  Or had his intention all along been to help her—help he would have given regardless of whether she serviced him, help he no longer cared to provide after she’d tried to put a bullet in his brain?

  Had she lost her chance to be rescued because she’d forgotten what it was like to live in a world where heroes still existed, where help came for free?

  Oh, how she wanted to go home.

  But her home was inhabited by strangers.

  And Dimitri was dead.

  She’d come the closest she’d ever come today to her own death. All day, as she alternately ran through the city or hid, sleeping only in brief snatches, she thought about that moment in the hotel bathroom, where she had been ready to choose immediate death over return to Bashir’s palace.

  Right now, that choice was hers to make any time, at any given moment.

  She had a handful of bullets for each of those two guns the American had returned to her. But she’d need only one.r />
  Well, two, actually.

  One for Michel Lartet.

  Killing him would be easy enough to do.

  In theory, at least.

  Sophia sat and watched the volunteers at the mosque set up a sign bidding all in need to enter.

  She knew that inside the walls of this mosque, her desire to spend the night covered by her robe and veil would be respected.

  But the thought of spending the night completely covered—in this suffocating heat—was unpleasant.

  Still, she needed water. Food.

  She would have both of those things here.

  What she wouldn’t find was a place to lay her head where her heart wasn’t filled with fear.

  It was only a matter of time before Bashir’s men started searching these shelters, looking for her. And unlike the Muslim clerics, they would not hesitate before tearing off a woman’s veil.

  If she went to the Grande, she could sleep undisturbed—provided the building didn’t fall.

  She’d have access to Western clothes there—assuming the boutique in the lobby hadn’t gone out of business in the past two months. The hotel also had a store that sold bottled water, so she’d have plenty to drink, as well as sundries.

  She’d always loved that American word—sundries.

  Aspirin and cold medicine and toothpaste. Things travelers might’ve forgotten to pack. Makeup and breath mints and hair care products. Shampoo and blow dryers.

  Hair dye.

  Sophia got up slowly, careful not to jar her side, to aggravate her most recent collection of bruises, and started to walk. Away from the mosque’s promised sanctuary. Toward the Grande Hotel. She could get inside easily, despite the guards and the area’s restrictions.

  She knew a way in through an underground tunnel that began in the basement of the Sulayman Bank Building, seven blocks to the south. The bank owner’s son, Uqbah, had visited Minneapolis during a trip to the United States and had come home raving over the underground system that allowed people to get around the city, untouched by inclement weather. He’d built a private route, traversable via golf cart, from his office to his favorite lunchtime spot at the Kazabek Grande Hotel.

  Because it just wouldn’t do for a sandstorm to keep him from his afternoon dalliance with his mistress.

  They’d lunched together many times. Dimitri, Sophia, Uqbah, and his beautiful friend, Gennivive LeDuc, who lived in a suite right there at the hotel.

  A devoted People’s Party member whose message was diluted by his failure to cease his wasteful personal overspending, Uqbah had been killed in the days following the overthrow of the government and the warlords’ return to power.

  Weeks earlier, Genny LeDuc had packed her bags and left Kazabek on the same flight that took the American ambassadors to safety. She’d sent Sophia a postcard from the south of France.

  Some people had all the luck.

  With Sophia’s current string of bad luck, the Kazabek Grande would fall the moment she set foot in the formerly opulent lobby.

  Still, as far as death went, she preferred that to a beheading.

  And it was far less definite in terms of being life-ending than a bullet from the barrel of her own gun. There was a chance that the hotel wouldn’t fall at all, that she’d get in and out while the building still stood, that she would survive.

  Even though she had to hurry to get to the financial district before curfew, she chose not to take a short cut, going instead through Saboor Square.

  Automatically checking the wall where she’d made her mark with a piece of limestone and . . .

  Sophia stopped.

  She wasn’t supposed to stop. She knew that. It brought attention both to her and to the mark on the wall—to this entire method of covert communication. To follow procedure, she should walk right past. Circle around and walk past again if she needed to, never giving the code on the wall more than a cursory glance.

  But she was out of breath from hurrying, pain burning her side, and she bent down, pretending to adjust her sandal.

  She had to count bricks, make sure she was checking the right one. It had been so long, and of course the brick she was supposed to use for her message changed, depending on the date.

  But that was indeed the mark she’d left several days ago—a vertical line on the twelfth brick from the end, seventh up from the ground.

  And that was definitely a horizontal line, bisecting hers.

  An answering mark.

  In years past, before the United States government and the U.N. had pulled out of Kazbekistan, leaving the people at the mercy of the warlords, that answering mark had meant she should check the side of the butcher’s shop. Made of wood rather than bricks or stone, this was the neighborhood’s bulletin board. In a society where most people still didn’t have telephones, everything from legal notices to birth announcements to scribbled reminders to pick up fresh vegetables on the way home from work was posted there.

  Sophia would look for a message tacked to that wall that started with the words “Lost dog. Answers to the name Spot.” The message would contain a time and location—a place where she and her unnamed CIA contact would meet.

  She’d scribble an answering note right on the sheet. “I have found your dog,” meant she’d be there. “American, go home!” meant she couldn’t risk meeting him then.

  But in the aftermath of the earthquake, the butcher’s wall was covered with flyers posted by people who were searching for missing family members. A message about a lost dog wouldn’t last long. It would be pulled down to make room for more important matters.

  Which was no doubt why, two bricks over, written in chalk on today’s brick in fact, was a small Arabic numeral nine and the letter T, with a square around both of them.

  Nine o’clock. At the Tea Room, here in Saboor Square.

  They’d met there many times, she and her CIA friend.

  Sophia made herself start walking again. She forced herself to keep breathing. She was feeling light-headed from lack of food, from fatigue, from pain. And from sudden overabundance of hope.

  It was entirely possible that her worthless, battered ass was about to be saved.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Jimmy was lying on a bale of hay, arm throw up and over his eyes, when Tess brought three cups of coffee into Rivka’s barn. She set one down nearby, careful not to disturb him, and he didn’t let on that he wasn’t asleep.

  “You okay?” she asked Decker quietly as she handed him a cup.

  Deck smiled. Shook his head. Laughed. He was obviously still embarrassed as hell. “I don’t know. I hate waiting. I’m not very good at it. And I’m . . . pretty nervous.”

  Tess glanced over at Jimmy again before she sat down cross-legged next to Decker, right there on the dusty floor. “Maybe I should’ve made decaf.”

  “No, this is great,” Deck said. “This is . . .” Jimmy could see the muscle in his jaw jump as he made himself meet her gaze. “Very nice of you. Thank you.”

  “Dave’ll find Sophia and bring her back here,” Tess reassured him.

  Deck forced another smile and said, “I know. He’s been a valuable asset to this team.”

  They were both so freaking unbelievably nice. In fact, they were the top two genuinely nicest human beings Jimmy had ever met, and had this been another time and another place, he might’ve given in to the urge to shout at the pair of them to give up and just go get married, for the love of God.

  How could Tess not see that Decker was crazy about her?

  But now was probably not the time to put that topic of discussion out on the table.

  Not after Decker had announced, right smack during a meeting no less, that he’d had a sexual encounter—holy shit—with Sophia Ghaffari that very morning, during a power struggle that had gotten out of hand.

  And sainted Mary, Mother of God, how hard had that been to do? To stand
there in front of an audience that included Tess Bailey and . . .

  He’d told an almost no-detail version of what had happened, putting the blame on himself.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed you,” Deck had said, “but Tess had to know why I need her to be in the room with me when Dave brings Sophia back here tonight. I didn’t want there to be any surprises. What I did was stupid and wrong—”

  Tess cut him off. Her cheeks had been tinged with pink that Jimmy had first thought was from embarrassment. “What she did was wrong. You said no.”

  Decker shook his head. “Apparently not with enough conviction.”