by Rene Fomby
“Then let me just log off the computer and leave a message at the front desk about where I’ll be for the next few days, and we can leave from here.” Gavin stole another long look at her outfit. “You look absolutely delicious, and as long as you can put up with my boring FBI-standard-issue black tie, we can go directly to the restaurant, and get there in time for wine and appetizers before the main course.”
Andy cocked her head at him. “I thought you said you didn’t hear that comment.”
Gavin smiled back at her with a quick wink. “After everything we’ve been through together, Andrea Patterson of the United States Navy, you still think I don’t hang on every pearl of wisdom that escapes that pretty mouth? I’m shocked. Devastated, really. And, by the way, I checked my fly before I ever left my workstation to meet you at the stairs. It’s a guy thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I get it,” she teased, turning quickly to head out into the hall. “I check out your fly every chance I get, too.”
68
Rabat
The flight came way too early the next morning for Gavin’s taste. Especially after all the wine the night before. And the five course dinner. And the dancing. He made a solemn vow to make sure his next field trip was with a male partner, as he tossed back two aspirin with a small glass of juice.
“You ready to go?” Andy asked, tapping her toe impatiently. “I mean, they’re not going to hold the flight for us.”
“Yeah, yeah, take a chill pill, Will.” Gavin rinsed out the glass and set it in the sink, then poured a to-go coffee, lifting his Styrofoam cup in her direction. “You want one?”
“No,” she answered. “Had more than enough back at the hotel. When I got out of bed very early so we wouldn’t miss the flight.”
“I hear ya. And we’re in good shape. I arranged for an embassy driver to pick us up, and he should be here in—” he looked at his watch “—just under five minutes. This ain’t New York or London, you know. The camels and mules have the good sense to sleep in past sunrise, so we’ll have the entire road pretty much to ourselves.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time, when you showed up late and I caught you checking out my ass.”
“And not for the last time, Andy,” he smiled at her. “From my law school days, I think we’d call that butt an ‘attractive nuisance.’ Like an empty swimming pool, just daring somebody to fall in and break their neck.”
“Well, you keep staring at it, and I might be able to oblige you on that broken neck thing.”
Just then a car horn beeped outside. “I believe our chariot has arrived, fair lady. And right on schedule.” He handed her his coffee cup and reached down to grab both of their bags. “If you don’t mind, I’ll handle the luggage, and you can go in front and show me to the car.”
“Mm-hmm. Again, putting you in the perfect position to scope out my backside. Gavin Larson, you are nothing if not predictable.”
“Consistency is a virtue, dear Andy. And practice makes perfect.”
“The question is, a perfect what?” she murmured only partially to herself as they headed out the door, headed once again for a mystery date with the city of Tunis.
69
Tunis
Andy had her head buried in the portable GPS unit, trying to make sense of the crazy warren of little streets they were winding through.
“I’m pretty sure you need to make a right turn just up ahead,” she suggested.
“Would that be like the left turn you took me on the last time, the turn that led us into a dead end that took ten minutes to back out of?” Gavin was visibly frustrated, and it didn’t help that he had to maintain a careful watch for all the people and animals who seemed to have no concern for the idea of sharing the road with a ton or two of deadly steel.
“Look. If you want to take over navigation duties, I’m more than happy to switch places. Although, from recent experience, you seem to have this thing about letting a woman drive.”
“It’s not that, and you know it.” Gavin slowed down as she indicated he should turn into a narrow little alleyway that appeared to be only inches wider than their car. “I just can’t make heads or tails of that military-grade GPS contraption you have.”
“And, clearly, I’m having the same problem. I mean, really. If this is the best Uncle Sam can do, no wonder we keep losing the terrorist fight. I bet they all just use cell phones.” She dipped her head closer to the screen of the GPS. “We should be coming up on the clinic in about a hundred feet or so. On the … left.”
Gavin had seen a printout of the clinic’s Arabic name, but it might as well have been a Rorschach test for all he could make out, even after all the time he had spent in Rabat. Andy was just a little more proficient, but it was apparently enough.
“There!” she pointed out as he braked to a halt.
“You can actually read all of those squiggles?” he asked.
“No, but I know what a medical clinic looks like when I see it. And the red crescent on the front is a dead giveaway—it’s the Muslim equivalent of a red cross.”
“Okay, then, I’ll take your word for it.” Gavin pulled the car up in front of the clinic and killed the engine. The alleyway was wider here, and even if another car came along, they could squeeze by without too much of a problem.
They both sat quietly for a moment, staring at the front of the clinic. Gavin was the first to break the silence.
“So, we haven’t really settled on a game plan, here. What do we lead with? Journalists from Al Jazeera? Representatives from the World Health Organization? Or shuffle our feet and pretend we’re the vanguard for the zombie apocalypse?”
“Why don’t we just ask them what happened to Doctor Marchant?” Andy suggested. “No badges or any of that nonsense, just keep it all low key and see what we can find out?”
“You’re no fun,” Gavin answered, stepping out of the driver’s side of the car. “My go-to was definitely the zombie apocalypse.”
Gavin made sure the car was locked—one could never be too sure in the sketchy neighborhoods of radicalized Third World countries—and they both slid a gun into the back waistband of their pants and headed inside.
At first glance, the inside of the clinic looked pretty much like any medical facility outside of the Western world. The walls were all whitewashed, the floors concrete but clean. Posters lined most of the waiting area, all in Arabic, but almost identical to the kind of medically informative posters that appeared in, say, Peoria. A young twenty-something woman sat behind a desk at the back of the waiting room, clad in a tan-and-brown robe and scarf that covered everything but her face. Gavin was immediately struck by how pretty she was. Not uncommon in the Middle East, but maybe a bit enhanced by the fact that the face was the only part of her body that was showing.
Andy took the lead, perhaps surprising the young lady a bit. “‘Ahlan wa sahlan. Do you speak English?”
She shook her head no, but quickly disappeared into the back, and after a few minutes a man appeared, about the same age as his receptionist, but dressed in clothing that indicated he was a doctor. Or close enough to it.
He looked them over quickly. “American?”
Gavin nodded, and the doctor seemed to tense up just a little. “I am Doctor Youssef Rejeb. How may I help you?” he asked.
Andy looked over at Gavin, suggesting he take the lead. It was a Muslim country, after all.
“Doctor Rejeb, we’re trying to trace down the whereabouts of a doctor named Yves Marchant. Used to be with Médecins Sans Frontières, but I understand he may have left that group to start this clinic—”
The clinic doctor’s eyebrows popped up. “Doctor Marchant. Yes, yes. Whatever happened to him? We have been so worried. He just—vanished one day. I hope he’s okay?”
Gavin shared a quick glance with Andy. “Well, we’re not completely sure, but we’ve come across some information that suggests something very bad may have happened t
o him. And possibly to some of his patients. Do you have any inkling as to why he suddenly disappeared?”
The young doctor seemed to be mulling over how much to share with these strangers. And American to boot.
“I took over this clinic when Yves disappeared. It was a mess—the whole place was ransacked, files pulled out and thrown all over the floor. At first we thought it might have been a burglary, someone after the drugs or the medical equipment, but nothing seemed to be missing. Except, of course, for Doctor Marchant and his entire staff. All gone, like they had never been here. We checked with their families, and no one seemed to have a clue where they went. Just—one day they left for work at the clinic, and they never came home. Just like that.”
“How many people were on staff here?” Andy asked, careful to keep her tone on the quiet side.
“I don’t know, maybe five or six. It wasn’t a very big clinic back then.”
Gavin quickly did the math in his head. That left over thirty more bodies unaccounted for. “The patients. Did—any of them disappear as well?”
The doctor rubbed a finger against his lower lip. “Hard to be sure. The files were such a mess. We basically just piled them all up in one corner and started over from scratch. Occasionally we would get a nurse to dig through it all to find an old lab value or something, but it was almost impossible to figure out what records belonged to which patient. So, finally, we just boxed it all up and put it all in storage.”
“Is there any chance we could get a look at any of that?” Andy asked. “Maybe something in those records could give us a clue as to what might have happened, who it was that broke in here.”
“I—I’m not sure about that. Even as messed up as they are, those records are confidential …”
Gavin reached into his pocket and pulled out his ID. “I can appreciate that, doctor, but this is an official investigation. Into the possible murder of almost forty people associated with this clinic. Any help you can give us to get to the bottom of what happened would be greatly appreciated.”
“American FBI!” Doctor Rejeb’s eyes widened with alarm. “Certainly. I would assume you have permission—”
“Yes, we’re working closely with your government on this,” Gavin lied, putting his ID back into his pocket. “So, about those files—”
70
Tunis
Andy wiped a bead of sweat off her brow with the sleeve of her shirt. “Boy, he wasn’t kidding. This is a regular cluster truck. And we’re already four hours in, with no end in sight.” She was squatting on the floor in front of a tall stack of file folders and loose papers, trying to sort them into some kind of order while skimming through everything to see if anything irregular stood out from all the routine medical records. Gavin was busy doing the same, just a few feet away.
“Yeah, this would have been a royal pain in the butt even if everything was in order. But at least Marchant was French. If all this was in Arabic, we wouldn’t have a clue as to what any of it meant.” He pulled up one sheet from the pile in front of him. “Hello, what do we have here?”
Andy scooted over a little closer, leaning in to get a better look. “What did you find, G?”
“It appears to be an invoice of some kind. A bill, addressed to a company out of Brussels.” He handed it over to her, scrunching his face in thought.
“Okay. So why—oh! I see. That’s quite a bill.”
“Right, it is, isn’t it? So, humor me here, why would a tiny medical clinic in the middle of nowhere be billing a pharma company out of Europe for almost twenty smackers?”
“Actually, almost twenty-one thousand, if you throw in the cost of the supplies they have listed on the back.”
Gavin nodded, a smile growing slowly on his face. “And after four hours of digging through all this, have you seen even one other business-related document? Anything other than medical records?”
“Not even a hint,” she agreed. “But if the clinic staff packed up everything they found into these boxes, there should have been a lot—”
“More than just this one document,” Gavin said. “Which means, whoever is behind this, they must have cleared out all of the business records before they left. And then tossed everything else to cover up what they were looking for.”
“Except they screwed up and left this one little invoice behind. It must have been filed away in a patient folder accidentally,” she suggested.
“Or someone intentionally misfiled it, or tossed it on the floor. To leave a record behind of what had happened. A cookie crumble in the forest, pointing to whoever was responsible for killing almost forty people in cold blood.”
“And then burying them out in the desert, under the watchful eye of the Tunisian army. That would take some major huevos. And a whole hell of a lot of moolah.”
“The kind of moolah a European pharmaceutical company might be able to put together? Sounds like we need to get a better handle on this—” he glanced back at the invoice “—Crismon Pharmaceuticals. Something tells me they might just have the answers we’re looking for.”
“I’m with you, G.” Andy stopped to sweep a hand across the piles of medical records surrounding the two of them on the floor. “But, just to be sure, we need to finish up what we’re doing here. Where there’s one cookie crumble, there might be two. And I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much vacationed out as far as Tunisia is concerned. I’m ready to cross this country off my bucket list for good and move on to greener pastures.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Brussels can wait for a few more hours. But, make no mistake, I agree. Sitting in a dirty storage room sifting through randomly sorted medical records isn’t exactly what I signed up for when I went through the academy.”
“That makes the two of us,” Andy nodded. “But, look at the bright side. At least I’m not bent over a toilet barfing my guts out like I was last night, right?”
“No, this is definitely a better look for you. Although I did get in some quality time checking out your backside from the other room. There’s that.”
“That’s just gross, Larson!” She tossed a file folder at him, which he mostly dodged, and then they both settled back into digging through the piles of paper, Gavin with a small smile on his face and Andy slowly plotting her revenge.
71
Rabat
The long trip back from Tunis had left them huddling in a conference room in the embassy at Rabat, planning their next steps.
“So a side trip to Brussels is out for now?” Andy asked, sipping on the diet soda Gavin had retrieved for her from the embassy kitchen.
Gavin finished logging onto the conference room’s computer and toggled the video to the flat screen monitor at the end of the table. “For now, yeah,” he agreed, pointing to the screen and flipping through a short list of documents, finally ending up with a photo shot through the door of a cleared-out office. “I was able to pull up some background info on the company, and it seems to be some kind of corporate shell. They have an office in Brussels, but it’s completely empty. Not even a chair or magazine rack. So, until we know more, Brussels looks like a dead end.”
“So where does that leave us? Where do we go from here?”
“Honestly, Andy, I’m not all that sure. I’ve got three different government agencies working on the case as we speak, trying to identify how Crismon ties into any of this, but I’m not optimistic that we’ll get any answers anytime soon. So it’s a waiting game.”
“And while we’re waiting, I’ll be picking up another assignment somewhere else,” she suggested.
“And I’ll be back to playing solitaire on the computer. But—until your boss back in Washington sends you flying off to who knows where, putting out another fire for the good old U-S-of-A, you might as well enjoy the time you have left in Rabat. So, which will it be tonight, French or local?”
Andy took another sip of her drink, thinking. “Well, my stomach seems to be pretty much back to normal, s
o if you can vouch for the local, I’m willing to give it a shot.”
“Excellent!” Gavin quickly logged off the computer, then stood up and walked over to her side of the table, taking her hand. “Then let’s get you back to your hotel to freshen up, and with any luck we’ll light up this old town like a Christmas tree.”
“Okay, but maybe not so much wine this time around,” she complained. “My stomach may be okay, but my liver is still on the mend from our last outing.”
“No promises, my lovely lady,” he said, putting one arm lightly around her waist as he escorted her out of the conference room and down the hall. “We’ll just have to see what the long night brings us.”
the last librarian
72
Siena
The grapes were plumping up nicely, and Sam picked a couple to sample, handing one to Maddie, who was happily skipping along the path heading toward a small pond not far from the castle. Maddie tried it, but immediately spit the grape out, turning up her nose in disgust. “Yucky, Mommy! What was that? That doesn’t taste like a grape!”
Sam bit into the remaining grape in her palm, and spit it out as well. “Well, Maddie, I guess maybe they’re not yet ripe. Or maybe wine grapes are supposed to taste like that, all sour, not at all sweet. I don’t know—I’m just as new to all this as you are.”
“Should we give one to Barley?” Maddie suggested. “He’ll eat it. He eats everything!”
Hearing his name, Barley bounded back up the path toward them, his ears flopping as he ran.
“Hmm. Do you think that would be fair to him, princess? I mean, if we don’t think it’s worth eating, why should we mistreat poor Barley? And are we sure they’re even safe for him?”
