Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

Jimmy didn’t want Tess anywhere near the sadistic warlord. Even being in the same city with the son of a bitch was bad enough.

  He sat down in the chair so he could take off his boots. Damn, his feet hurt. He and Deck had clocked about seven miles tonight at hyperspeed, and these boots weren’t made for running.

  Tess was hovering, ready to help him out of his jacket, and then his shirt. She was checking him for more dings.

  “I didn’t realize Deck was going with you tonight,” she said, pulling him up and out of the chair so he could take off his pants.

  “He tagged along, hid in the shadows. . . .”

  Clearly his erection wasn’t as much of a distraction to her as it was to him. But it wasn’t as if she didn’t notice—how could she not? She was just more interested in taking inventory of his injuries.

  “That must hurt.”

  She was talking about his knee. It was rug-burned. He’d scraped it right through his jeans, or maybe because of his jeans. And he was going to have a bruise there, too. It was already starting to turn purple.

  “I’ve had worse,” Jimmy said. “You know, sometimes I think Deck’s got some kind of sixth sense—like he knows there’s going to be trouble before it happens.” He shook his head. “All the nights he didn’t come, I didn’t need him. Tonight I did, and he was there.” It was doubly freaky, because it had happened before.

  “Maybe he picks up something from you,” she suggested. “Maybe you give off some kind of signal that something’s wrong and—”

  “Tonight I didn’t know,” Jimmy said. “Tonight, I was caught completely off guard.” That was what shook him up so much—the fact that he hadn’t spotted the setup going in. That was the kind of careless mistake that could get him killed. Or worse, it could get Decker or Tess killed.

  God damn it, he hated that he’d put them both in danger.

  “Maybe it’s subconscious on your part,” Tess said. “Maybe it’s subconscious on his part, too. Whatever, it is, I’m glad for it. It’s what makes you guys such a good team.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Decker would be good with anyone—and maybe even unstoppable with a better partner. You said yourself I’m not a team player.”

  “What? Jimmy, I was mad at you at the time.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less true.”

  She led him into the bathroom, taking one of the candles in with them and setting it on the back of the toilet. “You and Deck are unstoppable. You’re legendary.”

  “Notorious,” he corrected her as she splashed some of the water from the bucket into the plugged sink.

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it.” She wet a washcloth and got to work cleaning all the bits of dirt and cement from his hand.

  “Ow!”

  “Better find a bullet to bite, because this is going to take a while.”

  “This would hurt less if you were naked,” he told her, and she glanced up at him.

  “You’ve used a variation of that line on me before.”

  Crap. “Sorry.”

  “I bet.” She glanced up again. “Now might be a really good time to tell me what happened tonight.”

  What was there to tell? Leo had made the mistake of using force, of instigating violence, of putting the death card into play. Tell me where Sophia’s hiding, or we’ll kill you. Once Leo did that, the game became deadly. And when Decker burst through the window and threw Jimmy that weapon . . .

  “Leo the Claw made a big mistake,” he told Tess now.

  She laughed. “Leo the what?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what he calls himself. Leo the Claw. What the hell does that mean? And oh, by the way, never trust a man who gives himself his own nickname.”

  Tess laughed again.

  That was good. He was entertaining her.

  “I did some business with him a few years ago, before he became ‘the Claw.’ He was bipartisan back then—you know, he worked for the highest bidder. I actually liked the guy. . . .”

  Jimmy realized that he’d fallen silent and that Tess was looking at him, concern in her eyes. He forced a smile. “But apparently he’d had one run-in too many with Padsha Bashir and discovered he liked staying alive so much, he was willing to make less money and pledge allegiance to Bashir.

  “So fast-forward to a couple of days ago. I contacted him, not knowing about his new connection to Bashir, and told him I was looking to smuggle a friend across the border, how much would it cost?

  “I think that’s where I gave it away—you know, that my ‘friend’ was Sophia. Because Leo said fifty thousand dollars U.S. and I didn’t leap out of my chair and say the K-stani equivalent to Are you out of your freaking mind? I just sat there and nodded, because I was thinking that it would probably end up being at least that much—the same as the price Bashir had put on her head.

  “So okay,” Jimmy continued. “I don’t realize it, but I’ve given it away. I come back here”—thank God Leo’s men hadn’t followed him then—“and Leo the freaking Claw toddles off to see his business partner and says, ‘Yo, yo, yo, I think I’ve found Bashir’s missing girl, but I’m a little understaffed.’ So the partner gives him a half a dozen more men—” All amateur soldiers with lousy aim. All no longer of this earth, poor bastards. “And they wait for me to return. Which I obligingly did tonight.

  “Like I said, when I arrive, my guard’s down . . . And so they bring me into this little room, and they’ve got me in this chair, and Leo’s doing his Nazi interrogator routine. And Deck comes through the window, Leo dives for cover, and . . . Off we go, running six-minute miles in work boots through a disaster zone. It took us a long time to get here because we had to make sure we weren’t followed.”

  They had been.

  At first.

  But Jimmy had gone around behind the man trailing them, in a move Decker called “circling back on their own six.” He’d taken the tracker out silently and left him there as a warning to anyone who might come after. As a warning to Leo. Don’t ever fuck with me again. . . .

  “I think this is as clean as it’s going to get,” Tess told him.

  He looked at his hand. Out, damned spot. . . . “Thanks. It’s . . . Thank you.”

  “So . . . are you going to tell me what happened?” she asked.

  Jimmy laughed, but it was obvious she wasn’t being funny, and he felt his smile fade away.

  She was just standing there, waiting.

  So he said, “Okay, I left out where they hit me on the head and I fell. I mean, I figured you knew that because . . .” He held up his scraped hand as exhibit A. “But other than that . . .”

  She nodded, folding her arms across her chest, as if she were cold. “Okay.” She pointed over her shoulder at the bedroom. “I’ll, um, be out here while you finish getting washed up.”

  He’d disappointed her. He knew he’d disappointed her. But what was he supposed to say?

  There were more of them and they had superior firepower, but it still felt like slaughter, like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Or, That last man didn’t hear it coming. One second, as far as he was concerned, he was alone. The next he was in a headlock, and then he was dead. He barely had time to struggle, didn’t have time to reach for a weapon.

  It had helped that he had been one of the ones in the room—laughing—while Leo had described the effect of a full electrical current attached to a man’s gonads.

  But the truth was, Jimmy had seen too much death, too much bad for the alleged sake of good.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” he told Tess now.

  She looked so sad. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  She closed the bathroom door behind her.

  He washed quickly, stripping off his briefs and soaping himself up all over. He rinsed by stepping into the bathtub and pouring the remaining water from the bucket over himself, his head included. He dried himself in the flickering light, hung the towel on the rack, and blew out the candle.


  And it was dark.

  Tess had doused the candle in the other room, and had gotten into bed. That darkness and silence were far from welcoming, and he nearly went back into the bathroom.

  But she’d left his side of the bed turned down—amazing how fast that had happened. One night and he already had a side of the bed.

  Jimmy slipped between the sheets and she turned to him, soft and warm and already drowsy.

  And naked.

  With an unwrapped condom in her hands. He nearly cried. Thank you, Gods of the Universe, for sending him this woman who somehow knew exactly what he needed.

  She covered him as he kissed her, and then she covered him even more completely, straddling him and pressing him deeply inside of her.

  “Tess,” he said.

  And she kissed him.

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

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tess looked exhausted as she poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Have you seen Khalid?” she asked, looking from Sophia to Decker.

  “He’s in the yard,” he told her, finishing up the last of the rice cereal in his bowl. Guldana had added just the right spices to the gluey mixture. It looked awful, but tasted heavenly. Of course, breakfast always tasted particularly good on a morning after. After a life-or-death experience, that is.

  Some people had sex to get their blood moving. Others risked their lives.

  Some—like Nash, who apparently didn’t give a damn how late he kept Tess up—did both.

  Last night, Decker had taken on twelve-to-one odds—well, twelve-to-two after he got a weapon back into Nash’s capable hands. He’d gone in not knowing how hard Nash had been hit—he’d seen his friend take that blow to the back of the head and go down hard. It could have been bad.

  Instead it was merely half bad.

  And yet here Deck was. Alive. Having breakfast. And enjoying every bite.

  “What’s up?” he asked Tess.

  She had stopped in the door to the yard, the bright sunlight making her look even more weary. “I haven’t heard from Will Schroeder since the bombing. He hasn’t contacted you, has he?”

  “No.” Decker took his bowl to the sink.

  “If it’s okay with you, I’m going to send Khalid out to find him—to set up a meeting in the square for this afternoon.”

  He crossed toward her, aware that Sophia was tracking him. It would have made him self-conscious—the woman watched his every move and followed him if he strayed too far from her—if he hadn’t known a great deal about the psychological strains and stresses of prisoners. And although Sophia was no longer trapped in Bashir’s palace, the price on her head made her still very much a prisoner.

  The way the woman watched him wasn’t personal—she perceived him as holding the key to her freedom.

  “That’s not a good idea,” he told Tess.

  Frustration rang in her voice. “Just because Jimmy doesn’t want me going out alone—”

  Decker cut her off. “I don’t want you going out alone.”

  “But if I can get in touch with Will,” Tess argued, “then he can come with me. We can go out together—help check out that list of hospitals.” She lowered her voice. “Every day that passes, we have less of a chance of recovering that laptop.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m clear on that. But . . .” He glanced over at Sophia, who was—big surprise—watching him. “If you go into the city with Will that’ll leave Miles . . .”

  “I’d be all right,” Sophia said. “I can stay here alone.”

  “Excuse us for a minute,” Tess said to the other woman, and pulled Decker with her out of the house. She took him clear over to the gate before she stopped and faced him. “She’s always listening in, and I’m sorry, but I think we need to be more careful around her. I’m not really looking to contact Will so I can visit hospitals with him. I just used that to prove that she really does pay attention to everything anyone says.

  “We got an email from Tom this morning, Deck,” she continued. “He wasn’t able to call—something’s funky with our phones again—but he just received important information from the client. They got access to a cell phone belonging to Faik Nizami, an al-Qaeda operative based in Afghanistan. This is a man who’s known to have been in contact with Sayid repeatedly since 2001. On the evening before the quake, Nizami took a phone call originating from the Kazabek Grande Hotel.”

  Decker must’ve reacted, because she said, “Yeah. Jimmy said that was the last place he would have expected Sayid to stay—which made it high on his personal list of possibilities, even before Tom’s email.”

  Decker sighed. “Still, it’s just one phone call. It may not have been from Sayid.”

  “How about three?” Tess asked. “An outgoing call to Sayid’s personal cell on the morning of the quake, duration one minute seven seconds. Then another call, just a few minutes later, to the Kazabek Grande, duration twelve minutes. Check out this scenario: Nizami calls Sayid’s cell, they’re cut off. He tries calling back, can’t get through. So he finally calls using the landline at the hotel.”

  “Or,” Deck suggested, “Nizami is long-distance brokering some kind of meeting in Kazabek between Sayid and a third party. That third party—unknown—is staying at the Grande, and he calls Nizami the night before the quake. In the morning, Nizami contacts Sayid, gets the location for the meeting. Then he calls back that third party at the hotel, and passes that information on.”

  Tess looked at him. “Gee,” she said. “Way to burst my bubble.”

  “Your scenario might be right,” he told her. “And even if it’s not, that potential third party might’ve left some information in his hotel room that’ll lead us to Sayid’s accommodations.” He pushed himself up so that he was sitting on the fence—just a guy having a chat with a pretty young woman in the sunlight on another cloudless day in Kazbekistan. “I assume whatever plan you have in mind doesn’t involve us doing a room by room search of the Kazabek Grande Hotel—which, I feel compelled to point out, has been structurally damaged and is in danger of collapse.”

  Tess smiled, and it made her look far less tired. “Jimmy mentioned that, too. Do you know, is he claustrophobic?”

  “I don’t think so,” Decker said.

  “He hates the idea of having to go in there.”

  “He was in New York City on 9/11,” Decker told her. “I’m pretty certain he watched the Towers come down from a close proximity.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I don’t really know for sure, though. He never talked about it. Not with me, anyway.”

  She gaped at him. “Everyone talked about 9/11. Where they were, what they did . . .”

  “He didn’t,” Decker said. “He doesn’t. Talk about things like that. I know him better than anyone—I know what he’s going to say and do before he does it. But I don’t have a clue where he came from, where he’s been, what he’s seen and done, and . . . I know the things that matter, though. I know I can trust him—and I do. With my life. I also happen to know that he loves you—”

  “That’s really funny, because he insists you love me.”

  Well, here was a conversation he’d never thought he’d be having. Decker had to laugh. “I really do admire the hell out of you. If I didn’t love you before, I love you now—just for having the balls to say that.”

  She was not amused. Her cheeks were turning pink, too. She’d embarrassed herself. Or maybe she just felt embarrassed for him. “I’m sorry, let’s not go there. I know that . . . I didn’t mean to—”

  “I love you as a friend,” he clarified. “You’re good for him, you know.”

  “My plan”—she cleared her throat—“is to get inside the hotel, access the computers, and search the guest records for Nizami’s cell phone number. That outgoing international call would definitely show up as an additional charge to the room. When we find a record of that call, we’ll have Sayid�
�s room number. Assuming scenario number one.”

  Decker gazed at her. With her long sleeves and her long pants, she was starting to perspire in the heat. Or maybe it was the prior topic of their conversation that had her sweating.

  “Can you hack into the hotel records from here?” he asked. “If we have to go in, I’d prefer knowing the room number in advance—spend the least amount of time possible in a building that’s about to fall.”

  She nodded. “I’ll try.” She glanced back at the house, where Sophia was standing just inside the door, in the shadows, watching them. She lowered her voice even more. “Excuse me for being out of line, sir, but you and Jimmy were nearly killed last night and I think we need to be more careful.”