Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1

by Barton, Sara M.

  I thought about that young woman. She looked like most Caucasian girls, with milky white skin, pale eyes, and mousy brown hair. I would have never guessed she was Syrian, with the name of Fatima. What was she doing with a passport that identified her as Celia Dusquesne? What role did she play in the unrest in Syria? Was she related to Hashmi or Jamil? Even as I tried to fit the pieces together in my head, the biggest question went unanswered. What had Yuri done to her and why had he done it? And there was still the matter of the tattoos. Who put them there and what did they mean?

  As we came upon the tiny burg of Colchester Village, Ben steered the sedan into the parking lot of a Days Inn. It was half-filled with cars, most with New England license plates. Ben parked next to a blue Prius.

  “I’ll be right back,” he promised. A moment later, he was entering the office.

  “Why are we here?” I asked, half-expecting “Mr. Williams” to cite national security secrets as a reason for not answering.

  “You’re supposed to be trapped in the woods,” she replied, leaning over the back of the seat. In the golden glow of the motel lights, she seemed friendly enough. “We can’t take you back to the Bard’s. It would compromise everything.”

  “You two are going through with it? You’re going to let Yuri think he’s won?” I asked incredulously. “Mr. Williams” gave a slight nod, almost apologetically.

  “We have to, Bea. If we don’t, they’ll never stop looking for the package, and the contents are too precious to let get into the wrong hands.”

  “Listen,” I said with great insistence. “I can’t keep calling you Mister Williams. Is there something else, anything else I can call you? Howard? Phil? Joe?”

  “Call me Mavis.”

  “Well, Mavis, let me just say this has been one hell of a day.” That much was true. Not only had, I had witnessed my first murder up close and personal, I handled my second dead body. The last time around, a terrorist had left a dead woman in my bookstore. He had sliced her jugular vein open and then removed her left hand over in the biography section of the store. I found the hand propped up against the bottom shelf. I wondered how long it would be before Nizar’s body was recovered. Or even if it would be.

  “Here we are,” said Ben, sticking his head through the window. “Let me get you two into the room, so I can get back to the Bard’s.”

  “You’re not staying?” It hadn’t occurred to me that my husband would dump me in a motel with a stranger, especially a stranger posing as a man.

  “You’ll be in very good hands, Bea. Mavis is one of the most seasoned CIA officers around. She’ll take very good care of you.”

  “What does that mean? When Yuri and his people come barging into the room, she’ll beat them off with her cane?” I turned to Mavis. “No offense intended, but geez!”

  “None taken,” was her reply. I saw the conspiratorial look that passed between them and suddenly wondered what it was that I missed. Mavis disappeared discreetly into the bathroom, leaving us alone.

  “I’ll be back for you as soon as I can be,” my husband promised me.

  “Tomorrow?” Something about his behavior made me nervous. He wasn’t telling me anything specific. He was talking in general terms, like I was a school girl who needed to be reassured that Hamlet’s ghost wasn’t really hiding under the bed. I suspected it wasn’t the ghost or even Hamlet that was the problem.

  “You behave yourself while I’m gone.” He kissed me more ardently than he had in a very long time. There was urgency, almost a sense of desperation to the kiss. As if he were trying to make it count, just in case.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded. “Back to face Yuri? What are you going to do, kill the bastard?”

  “Bea, you know better than to ask me those kinds of questions. Now, I will say good night and I love you.” His lips lingered on mine. “‘Parting is such sweet sorrow.’”

  “Is it? Then don’t go,” I said encouragingly. “Stay here with me, where it’s nice and safe.”

  “I have work to do, love. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Ben, please don’t go!” I had an ominous feeling that was growing within, like one of those teeny-tiny little trick washcloths you buy at the dollar store. It starts out not much bigger than the size of a quarter, but the second it even gets a whiff of moisture, it balloons up into a hundred times its original size. The fear gripped my stomach when I saw that expression on Ben’s face. I was looking at a man who didn’t think he would come back alive. “Don’t you dare die on me, you bastard! Don’t you dare! I will never forgive you if you do. I will haunt you for eternity. You will have no rest. I will curse you forever!’

  Ben touched a hand to his temple in farewell, a small smile upon his lips. But his eyes were not smiling. His eyes were drinking in the sight of me, as if it would be his last, and even as the door opened and he walked through it, I knew panic that I could not tamp down. This could not be happening. Surely there were other people who could face Yuri. Why couldn’t someone else murder the bastard? Why did it have to be the man I loved? And why did he let me have the last word?

  Chapter Twelve --

  “Are you okay?” I heard the bathroom door open and the other bed creaked as she sat down. My face was buried in my pillow as I tried to control the attack of nerves that threatened to undo me. What if Ben didn’t come back? What if he wasn’t fast enough? Why was he doing this on his own? It was just so wrong. I should be with him. Mavis should help him. After all, Ben said she was an experienced intelligence officer. What good were we doing here in this motel room, when Ben was heading into danger? I thought about that poor mama bear, with her hungry cubs. Yuri was a heartless, cold-blooded killer, and I had no doubt he would find a way to kill Ben. What if Ben was just a second too slow? What if he made the mistake of giving Yuri the benefit of the doubt? “Bea?”

  “Why?” It came out as a sob. “Why did he have to go?”

  “Someone has to do it, Bea. There are a lot of lives on the line.”

  I sat up, wiping my eyes, pushing the wayward locks off my face. As I turned to Mavis, I let out a scream. “What the hell....”

  “Oh, it’s me. I just got out of my travel clothes,” said the forty-something woman with short brown hair, now wearing a pair of blue shorts and a Florida Marlins tee shirt. Her feet were bare and I noticed her nails were sporting a cheerful pink polish. A quick glance at the tiny hands showed she had also done her fingernails in the bathroom.

  “You look so...so....”

  “Feminine? Adorable? What is it you’re trying to say, Bea? Spit it out, girl,” Mavis grinned. Never in a million years would I have expected such a transformation.

  “But the way you walked, your posture,” I insisted, “that all looked so real. I don’t understand.”

  “There’s a lot I can’t tell you, but here’s what you should know. The young woman, Fatima, was lured to the inn by Philippe Grapon.”

  “I knew it! I told Ben Philippe would be trouble for us! I should have banned that sleazy bastard from our establishment. I should have....”

  “Bea, are you going to listen to me or rant about what should have been?” Mavis asked, very matter-of-factly. I probably would have liked her, had I met her in another place, at another time, but for the moment, I was overly aware of the fact that she, like my husband, was an intelligence officer. Ben was supposedly retired from the CIA, but I was beginning to have my doubts about that. That sense of foreboding was clinging to me like stink on a skunk, and if Mavis was explaining things, it meant the CIA needed me in the loop. The last time this kind of guano hit the fan, I lost my pride and joy, Marbury Books.

  “Fine,” I retorted with little grace. “Brief me.”

  “The CIA had a leak in a very important mission. We were trying to establish relations with the emerging Syrian resistance. Fatima’s father, Jamil, was ensconced in the regime, but became one of the first to join the resistance. We were told by the French that Jamil was pretending to
support the group, but we couldn’t back that up, because our informants insisted he was legitimate. Jamil’s brother is still with the regime and extremely disappointed with him for turning against the Syrian president. He put a bounty on Jamil’s head, so Jamil asked the United States for help. In exchange for keeping his children safe, he would provide the CIA with intelligence on the ground in real time, using our equipment.”

  “Fatima was murdered by Yuri,” I told Mavis.

  “We know. He killed her because he was being paid by the Syrian government to monkey-wrench Jamil’s resistance group. Grapon was also being paid by the Syrian government. He’s double-dipping, working for the French, too. The DGSE originally offered to help smuggle Fatima’s sister, Wardah, out of Syria after Hashim’s men arrested Jamil’s wife. Fatima was studying in at a prep school in London. The plan was to bring her to the US, to take care of her little sister. In the meantime, we would try to get Azeeza out of Damascus and reunite her with her children, so that Jamil could take a greater role in the resistance.”

  “Why did Fatima have those tattoos?” I wanted to know. “Was it a secret message?”

  “In a way. She was accompanied to New York by one of our couriers, carrying the family Qur’an, which her father gave to her for safekeeping. Philippe intercepted Fatima on the British Airways flight and saw it in her possession. He assumed it was being used as a means of communicating a secret message to Langley, so he drugged her. But she didn’t know anything. When he saw the rose and the bee tattoos, he thought they referenced the cipher. He killed her accidentally with an overdose of sodium pentathol, which he tried to reverse with an injection of liquid cocaine, to jolt her system back to life. What he didn’t know was that the drugs, which Yuri provided to him, weren’t meant to get answers. Yuri needed Fatima dead. She was part of a plan to draw Ben into this mess. You were supposed to be the next victim.”

  “To force Ben to go after the CIA station chief for Syria?” Mavis looked at me with something akin to admiration. I shrugged. “Yuri talked a lot when he thought there was no one to overhear his phone conversations.”

  “Ah,” she nodded. “People get sloppy and forget that loose lips sink ships.”

  “So, all of this was part of a Russian operation to assist the Assad regime and to thwart the CIA?”

  “And the DGSE. They used Grapon because he is being put out to pasture in six months and he’s angry about it. He wanted a million for his retirement fund and the Syrians agreed. You see, Assad wants to prevent NATO from assisting the rebel forces. Having Grapon onboard was supposed to be his trump card. Grapon was supposed to carry that Qu’ran back to Syria and then brief the Syrians on NATO efforts, identify intelligence people across the NATO alliance, and so on.”

  “I knew he was a creep, but that really takes the cake.” I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and sat up. “Wait a minute. Where is Wardah? And who will take care of her, now that her poor sister is dead?”

  Mavis said nothing. She merely cast her eyes upon me and waited.

  “Hold on there, lady!” I put up my hands as if to fend off the unspoken request. “You can’t be serious!”

  “Bea, Wardah needs a temporary home,” said the seasoned intelligence professional. “She has to be mainstreamed into an American school. Edward speaks Arabic, as does his friend, Mrs. Gillman.”

  “You people already had it set up, didn’t you? You were going to dump the kid on me as a done deal!” Of all the bloody nerve. This was such a typical CIA move.

  “You’re forgetting one thing, Bea. Fatima was going to take care of Wardah, at least until Azeezah was brought from Syria. We were going to relocate Fatima in an American university with a new name. Now, if we cannot spring Azeezah, that little girl is on her own. What better place for her than the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast? She has plenty of places to play, adults to keep an eye on her, and surely you can’t begrudge the child a temporary home. She’s already lost her sister. She may lose her mother. And all because her father had the courage to stand up to Assad’s regime.”

  I sat there on the edge of the bed, contemplating the contrived scheme, thinking all the while how much like a Shakespeare play this all was. And then it hit me.

  “Let me guess. You people called her sister Celia Duquesne. Does that mean Wardah would play the role of Roselind?”

  “Of course. What else would you call a child whose Arabic name means Rose?”

  I thought about the tattoos Fatima wore, how Ben had said they were part of the cipher for the code.

  “Ben doesn’t know?” I asked.

  “Know what?” Mavis was watching me with great care.

  “That the CIA wanted the girls to stay at the Bard’s?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I was going to set all that up as ‘Mr. Williams’ when I got here.”

  “I understand the reason for the rose tattoo. It was for Fatimah’s benefit, because she was the caretaker for her little sister, whose name means rose. But the bee,” I said, my eyes studying her face for the slightest twitch, “that was a symbol for me, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. We were counting on you to be her temporary guardian, until her mother arrives. It was a way to help Fatima feel safe coming to America. We expected her to figure it out. Edward and Mrs. Gillman were going to teach both girls.”

  “What was Ben supposed to do?” There was more than a hint of suspicion in my voice as I suddenly realized what was staring me right in the face. “You deliberately sent him to Syria to get Azeezah?”

  “There was no other way,” Mavis tried to explain, but even as her words poured forth, all I could think of was the look on Ben’s face as he was leaving. As if it were the last time he would ever see my face. As if he were saying goodbye. “He knows the country, Bea. He has a lot of contacts there. He can work with the resistance. And he’s no longer a CIA officer.”

  “Meaning you’ve hung him out to dry!”

  “No. That’s not the case at all. He has cover. He knows Azeezah. We couldn’t risk being fooled by Yuri, Philippe, or anyone else. We couldn’t risk having them substitute another woman. He volunteered. He owes Jamil. He was his handler back in the day.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense!” I insisted. “How come he didn’t recognize Fatima?”

  “The last time he saw her was in 2000, when she was only eight years old.”

  “Oh,” I sighed. “He knew he was going back? He didn’t protest?”

  “He understood our predicament. We must let Yuri and Philippe believe they have succeeded in sending Ben to destroy the CIA station chief. He will deliver a Qur’an to Damascus, but it will not be the one that belongs to Jamil’s family. We’ve filled it with disinformation we want the Assad regime to act upon. We are deliberately pulling the Syrian station chief, but making it look suspicious. It kills two birds for us. We get the chance to replace our guy in Damascus with fresh blood, and we get Yuri to convince the Russians they made a brilliant tactical move.”

  “Very Shakespearean indeed,” I groaned. “Does it never end?”

  Chapter Thirteen --

  It was three days before I moved back to the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast. It took nearly that long to flush Alexi, Serge, Petra, and Boris out of the woods, one by one. Petra left first, heading into town for a food run. She was picked up for speeding, and when she couldn’t identify herself properly, she was accused of being Doris Heffenberg, wanted for killing her elderly mother up in Keene, New York. Petra had little choice but to call the Russians for help. She was expelled as a spy, but she didn’t give up her boys. Alexi fell down a ravine and had to be rescued when he broke his leg. He apparently never saw the trip line stretched across his path and went head over heels. Serge was caught when he thought he was capturing me in the woods -- it turned out to be a female state trooper that he assaulted. Within minutes, he was surrounded by a group of S.W.A.T. members who just happened to be practicing their tactics in the forest. Since the state police had announced their planned exercis
es publicly on the morning of their excursion, Serge never suspected that it was a planned effort to flush him out. As for Boris, he held out the longest, spending three days crisscrossing the far end of the woods in his effort to hunt me down. He was picked up when he returned to Yuri’s station wagon. By then, Nizar’s body was apparently quite well along in its decomposition, and the state police had staked out the area, expecting the car’s owner to return for it. Yuri had charged Boris with getting the flat tires fixed, handed him the keys, his weapons, and left the woods to follow Ben to Damascus, so Boris was left holding the proverbial bag. The bullets in one of the guns matched the bullets in Nizar’s corpse, and since Boris had gunpowder residue clinging to his shooting hand after he fired shots at something moving in the bushes that turned out to be a raccoon, there wasn’t a credible explanation. He was carted off to await trial for murdering Nizar. With all four out of the picture for very different reasons, they looked incompetent to their Moscow handlers. Since Petra and Boris had both been identified as Russian spies, the heat was on and there was little the Russians would gain in sending in another team or two to kill me. After all, Ben had gone to Syria on the promise that Yuri would release me once he had done his bidding. Yuri had never had the opportunity to carry out his plan, and now it was too late.

  I was on pins and needles as Ben’s absence dragged on. The first week had me biting my nails to the skin. Uncle Edward and Mrs. Gillman tried to keep up a cheerful front, but I wasn’t having any. Even Puck did his best to comfort me on the long evenings I sat in the library, curling up beside me on the chair, seeking a tickle now and then. Mr. Darcy occasionally joined us.

  Titania, the tabby, and Oberon, the calico, both got used to sharing my bed. It was a great relief not to sleep alone. After all the years that I had spent watching Ben come and go on assignment, this was the first time in our marriage that I had grown used to his constant presence, not to mention the regular lovemaking, and now I found it nearly impossible to function without him. I tried to convince myself that I was still the same independent woman I had been in Washington, when I had forged a life for myself that allowed me to thrive in Ben’s absence. The truth was I didn’t want to do without my husband. I missed the feel of his hands on my body as he loved me, the sound of his laughter as he teased me, even the glower on his face as we argued. Whatever would I do without Ben?