Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “He told you about it?” He couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

  But she just laughed. “Yeah, he told me all about it. Right. He told me the Disney version, without a body count. Deck, come on, I want to help Sophia, you know that, but not at that kind of price. I don’t know what happened last night, but Jimmy was really upset when he got back. I think we also have to consider the fact that we don’t know this woman—”

  “You honestly think she had something to do with last night’s setup?” Decker asked. “They’re looking for her. They want to bring her back to Bashir. She’s not in league with them.”

  “What I think is that we’ve got five people—besides our team—who know she’s here,” Tess told him. “Rivka and Guldana, Khalid, Will, and Sophia herself.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Getting back in Bashir’s favor seems to be a Kazbekistani national pastime. What are the two things he wants most? Sophia and Sayid’s laptop. We really only have Sophia’s story of why Bashir’s after her. And again, I’m sorry, I like her, I do, but I pick up a heavy stench of pants on fire whenever she opens her mouth.”

  “A . . . what?”

  “Pants on fire,” she said. “As in, Liar, liar . . . ?”

  “Got it. And yeah, she’s good at spinning.”

  “Yes, she is,” Tess agreed.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You think Sophia’s going to try to get back in Bashir’s good graces by—”

  “Delivering Sayid’s laptop to him,” Tess finished for him. “And I’m not saying I think that’s what’s going on. I just think we should be aware of the possibility.”

  “We don’t have his laptop,” Decker pointed out.

  “Not yet,” she said, “but we are going to get it.”

  “Shit.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  Tess glanced up from her computer and over at the bed where Jimmy was stretched out. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t,” he said. “I’ve been awake for a while. Hoping you’d notice me over here.”

  He smiled at her and it was too much. Combined with those eyes and cheekbones, and with the golden tan, gleaming muscles . . . She forced her attention back to her computer screen. “No sex while I’m working,” she said.

  “Two minutes,” he said. “That’s all I need.”

  She looked at him again and he wiggled his eyebrows.

  “Come on, admit it,” he said. “You’re considering it.”

  “No, I’m marveling at the fact that I’m sleeping with a man who attempts to entice me back to bed with the promise of getting made in two minutes. That’s less time than it takes to cook a soft-boiled egg, I’d like to point out.”

  “How’s twenty minutes sound?” he asked. “That’s the length of most people’s coffee breaks.”

  “I can hack into Kazbekistani bank records,” she said. “Why can’t I even find the blasted Grande Hotel? Is it possible they don’t have computer records?” As she said it, she knew that was absurd. A modern hotel with all those rooms? Their billing system had to be computerized. Had to be.

  “Imagine if you smoked.” Jimmy was still working on getting some. “You’d spend at least ten minutes every few hours having a cigarette. It’s actually more like fifteen, because not only do you have to get outside, but then you have to get to wherever it is they allow people to pollute the air. I remember back when I was a smoker, I spent some time at the Agency office in San Francisco.”

  It took everything Tess had in her not to look up. Jimmy had been a smoker who worked out of the San Francisco office?

  “They had this little sundeck on the twentieth floor where the smokers could huddle, out of the rain, under this one little awning,” he continued.

  She could see him from her peripheral vision—he had both hands behind his head and was gazing up at the ceiling.

  “The elevators were so busy it never took me less than ten minutes to get there from the ninth floor, and only slightly less, maybe eight minutes, to get back. Factor in the hike from my office to the elevator and the five and a half minutes I’m out there frantically sucking in the nicotine, and it’s practically a thirty-minute production number. Needless to say, not much work got done. Fortunately, I didn’t work in that office for long.”

  Tess’s heart was in her throat. It was kind of pathetic, actually, that she could be so excited, so moved by the fact that Jimmy Nash had actually volunteered information about himself. I remember back when I was a smoker . . .

  “Why’d you quit smoking?” she asked, her eyes still on her computer. Maybe this was the secret to getting him to talk about himself. Pretend she wasn’t really paying attention.

  “I started working with Deck,” he told her. “He was so freaking fit. It was definitely an ego thing—I wanted to be able to keep up with the big bad Navy SEAL.” He laughed. “Like that was ever going to happen. But by the time I realized it was hopeless, I’d already quit smoking, so . . .” He shrugged.

  “When were you in San Francisco?” she asked. “You know, my mother lives there.”

  “Yeah, I do know,” Jimmy said. “You mentioned that in your interview with Tom.”

  She looked up, startled. “You remember that?”

  “Your mom’s a sculptor, your dad’s a librarian, your parents divorced, and you bounced between the two of them. And spent too much quality time with your computer. You still feel safest when you’re plugged in. Tom was impressed that you had that good a read on yourself. I was, too.”

  Tess dragged her gaze back to her computer. There was no reason to feel anything but admiration for the fact that he had a good memory. “No fair,” she said. “I didn’t get to sit in on your interview.”

  He laughed. “I don’t do interviews. I just grab on to Deck’s coattails and glide on in.”

  Did he seriously think that or was he just trying to be modest? “What did your parents do?” she asked, eyes on her computer screen.

  “Dad was a professor at a private boys’ school in Kent, Connecticut,” he told her. “My mother did the housewife thing. She, uh, did battle with breast cancer about ten years ago and she got rid of my father along with the cancer. They’re both in Florida now, but in two different towns.”

  He was talking about James Nash’s parents. It reeked of a cover story—what the Agency support staff had dubbed “Insta-Life.” It was as fabricated—and as false—as his Agency-assigned name. But really, what had she expected?

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, because it was the expected response to “my mother had cancer.” But what she was really sorry about was his inability to open up and tell her the truth.

  Last night, when he gave her that PG-13 version of his run-in with Leo the Claw, she knew.

  She couldn’t do this.

  Oh, she could do this. She could have a couple of days—or even weeks, if this assignment dragged on that long—of great sex with a man she was attracted to. But as for a relationship . . .

  No, this was definitely temporary. She needed trust, not watered-down half-truths and fictionalized parents.

  “Don’t you think it’s just a little creepy that you’ll sleep with me, and even claim to want a relationship, yet you can’t even tell me—really—about your parents?” Tess asked.

  He was silent, and she looked up at him.

  “I would love to know who you are,” she told him. Why did she bother? She should just close her computer, leap into bed with him, and redefine “coffee break.” But instead she sat there and talked at him. Did he hear any of this? “Skip your parents. Parents can suck. Parents are hard. Tell me a secret. Tell me something that you’ve never told anyone. You want to have a relationship, James? Talk to me. Otherwise, all we’re doing here is having sex.”

  He opened his mouth, and she had a moment of pure, shimmering hope. He was going to do it, and she was a big, fat liar, lying to herself about how this was only temporary, and she was only in this fo
r the great sex. Right.

  She was so crazy in love with this man, her heart skipped a beat when he told her he used to be a smoker, for the love of God.

  But then he spoke. “Actually, right now we’re not having sex. I couldn’t help but notice.”

  At first his words didn’t make sense. And then she realized that he had made a joke.

  Correction. He’d tried to make a joke.

  One day she’d look back on this and laugh. She’d be on the phone with Peggy, her roommate from her first year of college, and she’d say, “Remember that total dickhead super-agent type I had that fling with, first time I went out of the country on assignment?”

  And Peggy’d say, “Oh yeah, the James Bond wannabe. What a jerk.”

  And she’d say, “There I was, pouring my heart out, begging him just to talk to me, and he makes some stupid joke.”

  And Peggy’d say, “Because he was probably feeling really vulnerable—thinking that if he told you who he really was, you’d reject him, and like most idiot men, he was scared to death.”

  Tess closed her computer and stood up. She had to get out of here before she went over to that bed to comfort Jimmy for feeling so vulnerable. “Vulnerable, my ass,” she told him crossly.

  “What?” He sat up, his hair charmingly rumpled. “Time for a break?” he asked hopefully.

  Yeah, right. At the top of her agenda for all she had to do today was have two minutes of great sex with Mr. Vulnerable. It was right up there with hooking her computer battery up to that awful generator so it could recharge and lugging water up from the well, because until the power came back on—

  “Holy shit,” she said. She slapped her forehead. “The power’s still out. The banks all have generators—their computers are running. But the Grande Hotel’s been evacuated. The place is probably dark, the computer’s got no power, and any backup batteries are long gone. We’re going to have to go there with a power source, reboot their system . . .”

  Like Jimmy and Decker and Dave, she now had suddenly been dumped into wait mode. Wait for cover of darkness so they could go, undetected, into that hotel.

  They had about two hours until sunset.

  Two hours to . . . No. Put your libido down and step away from the man in the bed. . . .

  They had two hours to gather all the equipment they were going to need.

  “That generator we’ve been using to recharge our phones and my computer battery,” she said to Jimmy. “Is it portable?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Well, portable is subjective. Murph called it portable, but it’s heavy as hell. We can move it if we have to.”

  “All the way to the Grande Hotel?”

  He winced. “That’s going to hurt. But maybe if we got a baby stroller . . .” He thought about that. “Yeah, that would do it. Although God help us if we’re stopped by a police patrol.”

  Tess threw him his pants. “Get dressed. We need to go get a baby stroller.”

  Jimmy laughed. “Words that make a man’s blood freeze in his—”

  He froze, and she inwardly cringed, because she knew what he was thinking. Back when they weren’t having sex, they’d slipped and had sex. Without proper protection.

  It was quite the foundation for a solid, lasting relationship—small talk, sex, sex, more sex, and sheer terror.

  Yeah, they’d get far.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” she said, and escaped out the door.

  Sophia was in the barn, in the stall next to the horse named Marge, cleaning off the baby stroller that Nash had found in the shed.

  Decker’s latest news—that they may not be able to find someone willing or trustworthy enough to smuggle her out of Kazbekistan, even for fifty thousand dollars—had been devastating.

  It was good to have something to do with her hands, to keep her busy as she tried to figure out her next move.

  She was going to have to get out of Kazabek, that much was clear. Maybe she could go up into the mountains, well outside of Padsha Bashir’s territory. There’d be other dangers, other warlords, but none who had put a price on her head. She’d have to keep her face concealed, but that wouldn’t be too hard to do. She could make her way north, and maybe eventually find someone to guide her over the border.

  She’d been on her own like this before, with little resources. At age fifteen, she’d returned to Kazabek without her parents. Of course, back then she’d worn her hair cut short and had dressed like a boy. She’d pretended to be French. It was possible to get away with quite a lot simply by pretending to be French.

  She was going to need money to survive—lots of it.

  It was one thing for Decker to loan her thousands of dollars with the knowledge she would be out of Kazbekistan and working to pay him back. It was another entirely for him to give it to her knowing she could well be trapped in the mountains for years. Or captured and killed.

  “We’ll figure out an alternative,” Decker had promised her after dropping his bomb.

  She’d wanted to cry. Instead, she’d volunteered to wipe cobwebs and rust from a twenty-year-old baby stroller.

  Deck was clearly exhausted from whatever he’d been up to the night before—Sophia didn’t know what, no one had told her. But he lay down and took a nap, right there, on the floor of the barn.

  She’d positioned herself as close as she could without fear of waking him.

  The door now opened with a bang, and Nash came in.

  “Shhh,” Sophia started to say, but then ducked down so that she was out of sight, her heart pounding. James Nash had been followed not just by Tess and Dave, but by a stranger. A tall man with red hair.

  “Deck,” Nash said.

  “Yeah. Over here.” Decker sounded wiped, but he sat up. “Hey,” he greeted the redhead. “How’s the wrist?”

  “Broken. Hurts like hell.”

  “I bet. Thanks for your help with Murphy.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “If it had been me,” Nash said, “you would’ve let me die, right?”

  Sophia relaxed a little. Whoever this was, Decker and Nash knew him enough to joke with him. Except no one was laughing.

  “Schroeder’s been busy,” Nash told Decker.

  Will Schroeder—she’d heard that name before.

  “I was digging around,” Schroeder said, “asking people if they knew Sayid, if they’d seen Sayid, and lo and behold, I found someone who did and had. A taxi driver. Said he’d picked Sayid up, the afternoon before the quake, from—get this—the Grande Hotel.”

  From her hiding place, Sophia saw Decker exchange a look with Nash.

  “That’s great,” Decker said. “We already had reason to believe he’d been staying there—this is a good confirmation.”

  “When are you going over to the hotel?” Schroeder asked.

  No one answered him.

  “Dumb question. It’s going to be tonight, as soon as it’s dark. Well, good. I’m coming with you.”

  Nash opened his mouth, but Tess put her hand on his arm, stopping him.

  “Actually, I haven’t decided yet who’s going,” Decker said. “It’s not going to be easy getting in there undetected, and it’s certainly not going to be any safer once inside. For both of those reasons, I don’t want to go in with a crowd.”

  This time it was Tess who couldn’t keep from speaking. “I have to go.”

  “No, you don’t,” Nash said.

  “Yeah,” Tess said earnestly. “Jimmy, I do. First I have to get the computer running, then I’ll need to access the telephone records, and—”

  “If you get caught out after curfew . . .” Nash said.

  “If you get caught out after curfew, it’ll be bad for you, too,” she argued.

  “Did you like it there, in jail?” Nash asked. “You already had your one strike, Tess. In Kazbekistan, you don’t get another.”

  They had faced off again. Sophia looked over at Decker, who rubbed his forehead and sighed.

  “Okay, you tell m
e,” Tess challenged Nash. “How are you going to do it? How are you going to reboot the hotel’s computer system? Huh?”

  “Easy,” Nash shot back. “If I get there and my phone doesn’t work, I’m going to put that sat-dish you wanted so badly up on the Grande Hotel’s roof. And then I’m going to call you and you’re going to walk me through it.”

  Tess swore. “That’s so unfair.” She turned toward Decker.