Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  It was Tess herself who was going to keep that from happening.

  She was still completely hung up on Nash. She was good at hiding it, but it was there.

  No, Deck had missed any chance he’d ever had a long time ago.

  And somehow that prostitute knew that. The same magical way she knew that tonight Decker was particularly desperate for sex.

  Mindless, no-strings sex with some beautiful stranger.

  It would help dull those images of dead children that were cluttering up his head. It would replace those errant thoughts of Tess, of what could never be.

  The fifth prostitute with the dirty feet and what had to be stolen sandals, because they were much too big, looked up at him from across the room.

  Decker held her gaze as he finished his beer, as he felt his body respond to the glitter of her eyes. He’d never paid for sex before. Not ever.

  Desperate or not, he wasn’t about to start now.

  He lifted the empty can, signaling the barkeep to bring him another beer, and the world started to shake.

  “What the . . . ?”

  “Aftershock,” Nash said into Tess’s ear.

  They had slipped into an alley to avoid a passing peacekeeping patrol. Nash had pulled her behind a pile of bricks and building supplies. Together, they’d squeezed into an area that she would have had trouble fitting in by herself.

  Nash’s arm was around her waist—it helped if she thought of him as Nash, not Jimmy—and he held on to her as the earth shook.

  She still couldn’t believe what he’d said to her tonight.

  Decker told me that if you weren’t on his team . . . he’d be chasing you down the street.

  Was that why Deck had hired her? Not because he thought she’d make a good field operative, but because he wanted to shag her? Had he and Nash talked about her, after she and Nash had . . . Oh, God. She could just imagine their conversation. She’s not all that pretty, and her thighs could use some toning, but she’s low maintenance and she doesn’t need a lot of foreplay.

  And wasn’t that a very icky thought?

  A shingle from one of the buildings that was sheltering them crashed onto the ground and shattered.

  “Ow!” Nash said.

  She hadn’t thought it was possible, but he pulled her closer, tucking her head down and shielding her with his body.

  “Ow! Shit!” he said. “We better run for the street. Keep your head covered! Stay close—”

  She started to move, but just like that, it was over, and he caught her, holding her even more tightly. The sudden stillness was almost as freaky as the shaking had been when it first started.

  “Are you all right?” Nash asked her. His voice sounded odd.

  “Yeah. Are you?” She half expected him to make some kind of joking comment about the way the earth always seemed to move when they were in such close contact.

  But “I’m fine” was all he said, pulling her out into the alley. Despite the curfew, people were spilling out of their houses and into the street.

  There was more than just milling about in the open happening here—people were hurrying down the road, probably going to check on their grandmothers while they had the chance.

  “This is great,” Tess told Nash as they joined the crowd. “If we move fast, we can probably make it all the way downtown, to the Kazabek Grande Hotel.”

  Nash stopped short. “You said there was a church just down the street that was probably tall enough—”

  “To get us phone coverage right in this area, yes,” she said. “Its steeple is high enough do the trick. Probably. But if we want to be able to communicate from anywhere else in the city, the best place to put a dish is the roof of the Grande Hotel.”

  “It won’t be after it falls down,” Nash said. “Which it’s going to do, any minute.”

  “Well, until it does, we’ll have operational phones.” Tess started down the street but he didn’t follow. She glanced back at him but didn’t stop, and he finally ran to catch up.

  “There’s no way you’re getting into the Grande,” he said curtly. “That entire part of the downtown area was evacuated after the quake. All of the buildings have severe structural damage—one of them in that neighborhood already came down. The area’s completely cordoned off.”

  “Yeah, Decker showed me that photo,” Tess told him. “There’s yellow police tape blocking off those streets. It’s not going to be hard to get past that.”

  “Except if we cross that line, the police will think we’re looters and we’ll be shot on sight.”

  “Then we better not be seen.” Tess sidestepped a toddler who had run, laughing, into her path. She was glad someone was having fun tonight. She glanced back at Nash. “That is your specialty, isn’t it?”

  “Stop.” He caught her arm. “This is bullshit. There’s no way you cleared this with Decker. No way. I’m not letting you near the Grande. You want to prove how good you are, you’re going to have to do it another way.”

  He was dead serious.

  He was also bleeding.

  “You’re hurt,” she realized.

  Nash followed her gaze and reached up to touch his neck and then the back of his head. He winced and his hand came away red with blood, but he shrugged. “It’s not that bad. Heads bleed more than—”

  “You got hit by a tile,” she guessed, and guessed correctly based on his reaction—or rather lack thereof, “hard enough to make you bleed. And it doesn’t occur to you that might be something I’d need to know, so when you keeled over I’d at least have a half a freaking clue?”

  “It’s not that bad,” he said again, looking around to see who else might’ve noticed her rising voice. “It’s just—”

  “A ding,” she finished for him. “Yes. Right. I know.” She was furious and terribly, terribly upset. If Decker had appeared out of nowhere, she would have hauled back and socked him. She wanted him to have hired her for this job because she was skilled, because she was a good field operative, not because he liked the way she looked without a shirt. That was something she’d have expected from Nash, but not Decker. Never Decker.

  Damn it. Damn Decker.

  And damn Jimmy Nash for being right about her wanting to prove how good she was. She was guilty of wanting to do some serious hotdogging.

  And not just to impress him and Decker either.

  “You were right,” Jimmy said. “I should have told you. I really didn’t realize how hard I got hit. I’m sorry.”

  And just like that, her anger was gone.

  “I’m sorry because you were right, too,” she whispered. Her eyes were filled with tears—where did they come from? Oh, God, she wanted that anger back, because this feeling of sadness, of sorrow, of hurt, of regret and wistful longing it had left in its place was not helping her at all.

  All of the emotions of these last few minutes were teetering on top of those from this terrible day, from this week, from these months since she’d invited Jimmy Nash into her life. . . .

  Please don’t let her start to cry.

  If he reached for her, she was going to break down completely.

  But Jimmy kept his distance. “If we hurry, we can get the sat-dish on the church and get back to Rivka’s in time to catch a few hours of sleep before dawn.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t sleep,” Tess said, steeling herself. She could do this. She did not have to fall to the ground, weeping. And she could be concerned about this man because he was a teammate, no more, no less. “Not until Murphy checks you out. If you have a concussion—”

  “I don’t have a concussion.” Nash actually laughed. “It’s barely a scratch.”

  Ah. Scornful indignation came roaring back, thank God. “And you know this because you’re some kind of genetic mutant who can see the back of your head?”

  “I know this because if it were more than a scratch, it would be bleeding like hell.”

  “Funny,” she said. “It looks to me as if you’re bleeding like hell.”


  “Trust me,” he said. “If I were—”

  “Zip it,” she ordered. “And sit down so I can see if your ding needs stitches.”

  The overhead lights continued to sway, long after the building stopped shaking.

  It was the only sign in the bar that the aftershock had ever happened. No one reacted. No one got upset. No one so much as blinked.

  Sophia watched as Michel Lartet brought two more cans of beer to the little American’s table. There were two Americans in the club tonight—the big one at the bar who’d been there when she’d arrived, and this littler one who’d come in after.

  The little one was definitely one of the relief workers. A do-gooder with no money. Although he probably had something in his wallet. He’d been looking at her as if he were considering taking her along when he left here tonight. That sort of purchase had to cost, didn’t it?

  She watched as the American invited Lartet to join him. The barkeep had just barely sat down when her messenger, a street kid named Asif, finally came in the door.

  She’d started to think he wasn’t going to show. She’d given him the note for Lartet and told him that Lartet would pay him to take an answering note back to her. She’d made a plan to meet Asif in the chaos of the Saboor Square market in the morning.

  It seemed the logical place to connect, considering she found herself going back there, morning, noon, and night. Foolishly hoping that she’d be rescued.

  But knowing that she was going to have to rescue herself.

  She’d given young Asif a burka and robe to wear. He’d protested, of course, as any teenage boy would when told to dress as a woman. She’d informed him he wouldn’t be paid if he didn’t wear it, if he didn’t speak in a disguised, high-pitched whisper.

  The promise of money made him consent.

  Asif now handed Lartet the note. “Forgive me, sir,” he hissed from beneath his veil. “It’s urgent.”

  “Excuse me,” Lartet said to the little American, and Sophia watched as he sat back in his chair and unfolded the piece of brown paper bag she’d written on. He held it up so it caught the light.

  Lartet looked up from her note and over at Asif, his eyes narrowed. “Where did you get this?”

  “From a stranger,” Asif said, sotto voce and falsetto, as Sophia had instructed. “She told me to wait to deliver your reply—that you would give me a fifty.”

  Actually, she’d said Lartet would pay him twenty. Trust Asif to be greedy. That was money she would end up owing the Frenchman. With interest.

  Lartet laughed. “A stranger? Surely you can make up a better story than that, Sophia.” And then, moving faster than she’d dreamed a man of his size could move, he pulled off Asif’s veil, revealing the boy’s face.

  Asif made all kinds of noises of outrage.

  Sophia.

  Lartet stared in genuine surprise at the boy’s dark curls, at his straggly, teenaged beginnings of a beard. He’d expected her to be under that burka. He was not going to help her. On the contrary, if she had delivered her own message, which she’d actually considered doing, she would be held at gunpoint right now, about to be shipped across town to Bashir’s nephews.

  And suddenly it made perfect sense. The reason Lartet’s club had been so easy to find, the reason he was no longer forced to hide his location.

  Lartet was already working for Padsha Bashir.

  He carefully folded the brown paper and put it into the front pocket of his shirt. He took out a pen and wrote her an answer on a cocktail napkin. What a fool. Even if she hadn’t been here to see his attempted betrayal for herself, she would have known not to trust him just from that.

  If he’d truly wanted to help her, he would have written right on her note, sending it back to her, making sure she knew he was being careful not to let proof that she was still in Kazabek fall into the wrong hands.

  As Sophia now watched, he folded the napkin and handed it to Asif. Then he took out his wallet and gave the boy not a fifty note, but a full hundred.

  “Tell her I’ve been worried about her,” he instructed Asif. “Tell her I’m glad she’s safe. Don’t tell her I took off your veil, and there’ll be more where that came from.”

  Asif pocketed both the napkin and the money and went back out into the night as Sophia tried not to clench her fists.

  Sit still. Stay calm. Don’t lose it—if she did, she could lose her head.

  “Excuse me for just another moment,” Lartet said to the little American, who’d watched the entire exchange without a single change in his emotionless expression.

  Lartet then crossed the room, toward one of the two K-stani men at the bar. He leaned close, giving the young man in the blue shirt some kind of instruction.

  And Sophia’s note.

  The man nodded, pocketed it. And went out the back door with a sense of purpose.

  Sophia sat in silence.

  But she wanted to scream. She wanted to stand up and run out of the club. She wanted to turn to the other women who were sitting at the tables near her and ask just how long Michel Lartet’s club had been here, at this very same location.

  Had it been two months?

  Had he started working for Bashir two months ago?

  Had Lartet been the one who had betrayed her? Had he been the one who had told Bashir that she and Dimitri had been working to reinstate a democracy in this country, working to put the warlords like Bashir out of business for good?

  Had Lartet traded Dimitri’s life and her freedom, her body, her heart, her very soul, for Bashir’s protection?

  Sophia closed her eyes to banish the image of Dimitri’s head rolling across Bashir’s palace floor. She opened her eyes against the memory of Bashir’s stinking breath in her face as he grunted and pushed himself inside of her, against the too vivid picture of him using his razor-sharp sword to violate her mind just as thoroughly as he and his horrible friends had violated her body.

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, staring at her hands clenched in front of her on that table.

  Lartet had gone back to sit with the little American. They were talking about the relentless heat, about the quake, about a betting pool that someone had started sometime in the past few days.

  “For a hundred dollars American you can pick a date and a time,” Lartet said. “And if the Kazabek Grande Hotel falls on your date and time, you win the pot.”

  Sophia’s legs finally worked well enough for her to think about standing up.

  “And if it never falls?” the American asked.

  Lartet laughed his big booming laugh—the way he used to laugh with Dimitri. “I suppose you could bet that, if you want. Although then you’d have to wait for never to collect the pot, wouldn’t you?”

  Sophia pushed back her chair, knowing without a doubt that Lartet had killed Dimitri as surely as if he’d taken Padsha Bashir’s sword and beheaded him himself.

  “What’s that pot up to?” the American asked, his voice like his face. Bland and unremarkable. Nothing special, nothing too noticeable. He glanced in her direction, though, noting her movement.

  “Five thousand dollars,” Lartet said. “And growing.”

  Sophia rose to her feet. Again, another flicker of the American’s eyes in her direction.

  But the American’s attention was quickly back on Lartet. He smiled. “I’ll think about it.”

  Lartet shrugged. “Okay. But don’t wait too long.”

  “You know, I’m wondering if maybe you could help me out,” the American said as Sophia headed toward the door. “I’m looking for a man name of Dimitri Ghaffari.”

  Sophia tried not to react. She didn’t trip over her burka, she didn’t falter. She hardly hesitated, yet the American’s eyes were on her again.

  She slowed down. Changed her route. Headed toward the back, toward the ladies’ water closet.

  Lartet was shaking his head, frowning and making a “don’t know” face as she went past them. “I haven’t seen Ghaffari in . . . gee, it
must be months since he was in here last.” He leaned in closer to the American and asked the question she was dying to have answered. “How do you know him?”

  Sophia knew everyone Dimitri knew because he had been her front. Their business, although it bore his name, had been all hers. He’d merely followed her script at business meetings with the men who wouldn’t deign to make deals with a mere female. She would sit off to the side, in a burka much like this one she was wearing now, and laugh at them—all the way to the bank.

  “He’s a friend of a friend,” the American said vaguely, “who owed Ghaffari some money. When he heard I was coming to Kazabek, he asked me to get in touch with him. He feels badly about not paying the loan back sooner, but he hasn’t been able to make it past the K-stani border for close to three years now.”

  Lartet stood up. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  The American looked up at him. “If you see Ghaffari, let him know I’m looking for him. I’ll try to stop back in, in a couple of nights.”

  Sophia pushed open the water closet door, then closed and locked it behind her. How long did it usually take a woman in a long robe to pee? She counted, as slowly as she could, to a hundred, then unlocked the door.

  Just in time to see the little American climbing the stairs that led out of the club.

  And to see Lartet pulling his second helper aside and speaking to him, much in the same way he’d spoken to the other young man.

  This one nodded and headed out the door after the American.

  Sophia tried not to hurry as she crossed the room, as she went up those stairs, too.

  She pushed open the door that led out into the night. In the moonlight she could see the American heading south on the boulevard, Lartet’s man trailing about a half a block behind. She waited until there was space between them. And then she followed.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Jimmy couldn’t get comfortable.

  After he and Tess had returned to Rivka’s, they’d first gone into the barn to check on Dave, who was sleeping with one hand touch ing his bucket, as if making sure it stayed within reach.