Everything about this situation underlined the inherent wisdom of his policy to keep work and sex absolutely separate. If he ever had the chance to work for Tom Paoletti again—and as each hour slipped past, that seemed less and less likely—he was going to insist on leading only all-male teams.
That would handle the work part.
As for the sex . . .
Maybe in a year or two, Tess would be over her infatuation with Nash.
And maybe by then, Decker would have forgiven himself for taking advantage of Sophia Ghaffari.
Yeah. Maybe.
It would sure as hell help if he could find her and get her safely out of Kazbekistan.
“So my day sucked ass, too,” he said, breaking the silence, and Murphy, bless him, laughed.
“Who’s got good news for me?” Decker came farther into the barn. “What do you say, Dave? Can we pack it up and get the hell out of Dodge? Tell me please, sweet Jesus, that you found Sayid’s laptop this afternoon.”
Dave Malkoff shook his head. “Sorry, sir. I have nothing concrete—just a whole lot of public opinion that seems to imply Sayid was, indeed, staying with Bashir for an undetermined amount of time before the quake.”
Decker looked at Murphy. “Murph? You sitting on that missing laptop over there?”
“I wish. I’m still working on locating most of my contacts, boss. Although if you want some good news, Angel called. The caterer’s agreed to do the wedding lunch for only twenty bucks a plate.” He laughed. “I think she went into the negotiations flashing a few tattoos and packing some major heat. You can take the girl out of the gang, but you can never really take the gang out of the girl.”
“Why do I get the sense that you wouldn’t dare call Angelina a girl if you weren’t halfway around the world from her?” Decker asked, glancing over at Nash, who had folded his arms across his chest and was leaning against the barn wall, pretending to relax.
“You got that right,” Murphy agreed.
It was remarkable, really, how awful Nash looked. His clothes were stained with sweat and dirt. He was rumpled, as if he’d wrestled wild dogs in the dusty road before taking a long nap. Deck could see the line dividing clean from dirty near his partner’s ears and around his jawline. Nash had splashed water on his face rather haphazardly, as if the intention had been to wake himself up rather than to wash.
Which meant that it was possible that Nash had actually slept for part of the afternoon.
Which might explain the current friction—current additional friction—between him and Tess. If she had let him sleep for more than the three and a half minutes that he usually allowed for a combat nap . . .
“I was approached by Will Schroeder today,” Tess reported, her voice carefully void of all emotion as she sat on an overturned bucket. “Since he already knew that you and James weren’t your average relief aid workers and threatened to make that public knowledge, I made a deal with him.”
And so much for Decker’s theory about the too-long nap. She’d made a deal with Will Schroeder. Jesus. He didn’t dare look at Nash.
“I told him the truth—about Sayid. I thought our not getting kicked out of K-stan was more important than any one member of our group’s . . . discomfort at the idea of working with Schroeder,” Tess continued, carefully not looking at Nash either. “The pros seemed to outweigh the cons. He gets an exclusive story—but only when we’re ready to give it to him. We get his silence—and an extra set of eyes and ears out there. As long as he follows our rules—”
Nash couldn’t keep silent another second. “What makes you think he’s going to follow your rules, when he’s never followed anyone’s rules before?” he asked, pretending to laugh, pretending he was merely amused. But then he shook his head. “Never mind. It’s too late. We’ll just have to clean up this mess after the shit hits the fan.” He turned to Decker, still trying to play it übercool.
Although Deck knew his partner well enough to know that beneath that oh-so-casual attitude, Nash was beyond pissed off. He was, as Nash himself so aptly described it, on the verge of shitting monkeys.
“Unless you want me to make a preemptive strike,” Nash continued, now speaking directly to Deck. “I could find Schroeder and take him out of the equation.”
Tess made a disgusted sound as she looked at Nash for the first time since Decker came into the barn. “Right. Decker’s going to tell you to go and kill Will Schroeder—”
Nash turned and smiled at her. His smile didn’t quite hide the fact that the muscle in his jaw was jumping. “I wasn’t talking about killing him, although now that you mention it, that does sound appealing,” he countered. “But no, I was thinking more in terms of a back alley ambush. A concussion and a broken jaw’ll get him sent back to the States. Although I better give him a broken leg, too, don’t you think? He’s a persistent prick. A nice rap with a length of pipe, right beneath his knee’ll keep him from doing any international traveling for a good long—”
“Stop,” Tess said, her eyes looking very large in a face that was far too drawn and pale. “No one here thinks you’re even remotely funny.”
Murphy shifted his weight, but wisely kept his mouth shut.
Again Decker broke the silence. And changed the subject. Taking sides was not going to help the team dynamic right now—although he was securely with Tess on this one. Will was a potential threat that she’d done her best to keep contained. “Needless to say, I didn’t locate Sophia Ghaffari. Any luck finding info we can use to track her? Tess?”
His comspesh stopped glaring at Nash and turned her attention to a pad of paper that she pulled up off the floor and onto her lap. “I don’t know, sir. I’ve got what seems like a lot of useless details. Hers and Dimitri’s last known address and phone number.” She looked up at him. “I tried calling, but the entire landline system’s down.
“I’ve got Ghaffari’s business address—same as his home.” She pulled some loose pages from the back of the pad and stood up, heading toward him as she continued to speak. “I did a cross-reference, and found that Furkat Nariman and his family are currently residing at chez Ghaffari, and that a transfer of property ownership was put into his name five weeks ago. Nariman is one of Padsha Bashir’s closest advisors. He also happens to be an outspoken advocate of GIK support of al-Qaeda.”
She handed Decker three pages, copies of documents printed out from her computer, then stood close enough to point to the signature line on the first.
She smelled like Emily. Well, okay, not exactly like Em, just similar enough. Like a clean American woman—like sweet shampoos and fresh-scented deodorant.
Sophia Ghaffari had smelled like a soap scented with herbs and spices that were more exotic, more like the musky aroma of incense—at least to his American nose. Whatever it was, it hadn’t completely masked the sharper smell of heat and sweat.
Of fear.
“Here’s where the document should have been signed by the previous owner—Ghaffari,” Tess pointed out.
Decker focused on the paper before him. It had been signed in a loopy and distinctive hand, the name quite clear—Padsha Bashir.
“Shit,” Decker said.
Nash came over to look, too. Dave and Murphy were right behind him.
“And check this out.” Tess pulled the second sheet onto the top. “I hacked into Ghaffari’s bank records. His accounts, both business and personal, to the tune of over a half million U.S. dollars—” Murph let out a low whistle as Tess pointed to the line that read U.S. $537,680.58. “—were emptied and closed on the exact same date as that property transfer,” she told them.
“And lookie who signed the withdrawal slip,” Murphy said, tapping the page with a finger that was twice the size of Tess’s.
“Padsha Bashir,” Tess said. “Again.”
Dimitri Ghaffari was dead. Sophia had told Decker the truth, at least about that. This was proof enough. In order for those finances to be transferred the way they had, Dimitri Ghaffari had to be dead.
“He just signed both of these documents as if the house and that money were his. And look at this.” Tess flipped to the third page. “Across town, just an hour later that same day, there’s a neat little deposit into Bashir’s account. Same exact dollar amount. He didn’t try to alter it or hide it or—”
“Why should he?” Nash cut in. “The money, the house—it was his.”
Tess still didn’t get it. She looked at Nash as if he were speaking Dutch.
“He married her,” Nash said tersely.
Dave was more exact. “Padsha Bashir married Sophia Ghaffari. At which point everything she owned became his.”
Tess shook her head. “But there was no marriage certificate.”
“There wouldn’t be,” Dave told her, “at least not one documented in computer records. Not if it was done in a religious ceremony.”
“And from what we know of Bashir,” Nash added, “it was a religious ceremony. Probably done within minutes of Mrs. Ghaffari achieving her widowhood.”
“Minutes? My God,” Tess realized. “Are you saying that Bashir killed Dimitri Ghaffari and then . . . ?”
Instead of being indicted for murder, he’d married Sophia—and gained complete possession of Dimitri’s home, Dimitri’s money.
Dimitri’s wife.
Sophia had told Decker she’d been a prisoner in Bashir’s palace for two months.
Two months.
She’d told him. She’d asked for help, and he treated her with suspicion and mistrust.
“Did you find any information that might help me locate Sophia now?” Decker asked Tess.
She looked down at her notepad, shaking her head. “It doesn’t look good. I found two previous addresses. Various shipping and import permits—records of fees paid, that sort of thing. A long list of mentions in the weekly English-language newspaper—gossip column stuff. Lots of background on Ghaffari. He went to school in France, worked for a few years at an uncle’s import business in Athens, spent five years in the Greek Islands, running some kind of windjammer-type cruise business—you know, high-class cruises on sailboats for tourists? That was right before he came to Kazabek.”
“Oh, man,” Murphy said. “You ever been to Greece? It’s gorgeous. All blues and greens and white sand. To willingly leave that for the Pit . . . You’d have to be crazy. Or running from the law.”
“Or in love,” Dave suggested.
Murphy and Nash turned and looked at him. Decker, too. It was such a non-Dave thing to say.
“What?” Dave said defensively.
Tess was the only one who took it in stride. “Yes,” she agreed. “That’s my guess, too. Especially since shortly after his arrival in Kazabek, when Ghaffari makes his first appearance in the newspaper gossip column, he’s accompanied by his, quote, beautiful American wife, unquote.”
She looked at Decker then, and he knew from her hesitation that she was about to hit him with bad news.
“This is already more information than I’d hoped for,” he said.
“Yeah, well . . . I found very little mention of Sophia at all,” she reported. “There’s no record of their wedding, no engagement announcement, nothing like that—and I searched Greek, French, and U.S. databases as well. Almost any time her name appears on Kazbekistani documents, she’s Sophia Ghaffari. Without knowing her maiden name, there’s no way I can find out where she came from—and I’m having no luck finding it. I mean, someone knows it. Someone has to know it.”
“Yeah, well, there’s no guarantee that knowing her maiden name would provide us with any information we could use to locate her right now,” Decker tried to reassure her.
“I actually attempted to run a search for Sophia, born in the United States between 1965 and 1980, and came up with just under a trillion possible matches.” She made a noise of intense disgust. “Of course, that’s assuming both that she was born in the States, and that Sophia was the name her parents put on her birth certificate.”
“Let me see that first list of addresses,” Nash ordered. “Maybe we can get a sense of the Kazabek neighborhoods she’s familiar with.”
“It’s not a list.” Tess handed it to him. “There’re only two.”
“Two’s better than none,” Nash told her.
“I’m sorry,” Tess told Decker as Nash opened a map of the city, spreading it on Murphy’s bale of hay. “I wish I had better news for you. You know, I thought I was onto something with the gossip columns—one week the newspaper ran a photo and called them ‘Dimitri and Miles Ghaffari.’ I thought that might’ve been a typo—you know, that somehow her maiden name got used instead of her given name. But I got nothing from searching for Sophia Miles—I even tried alternate spellings. And another week they were called ‘Mr. and Mrs. Farrell Ghaffari.’ But Sophia Farrell came up blank, too—”
“What?” Dave cut her off. “Wait, I was only half listening.”
“I said Sophia Farrell came up—”
“No,” he said. “Before that. You said . . . Did you say Miles?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I got nothing from it. I think it was just, you know, editorial brain farts on the part of the typesetters. This newspaper obviously didn’t spend a lot of money paying proofreaders. It was amazing how many times they misspelled both Dimitri and Ghaffari. And sometimes she was Sophia, sometimes Sophie, sometimes Saphia—”
“Did you run Miles Farrell?” Dave asked her. He had such a peculiar expression on his face that hope sparked inside Decker.
Tess blinked at him. “No.”
“I mean, you did say it was possible that Sophia wasn’t her given name,” Dave said. “And although I didn’t know a Sophia Farrell or a Sophia Miles, I did know a Miles Farrell a few years ago. She’d be about the right age. And she was definitely American.”
Murphy laughed, clearly tickled. “Davey, Davey. You are determined to win MVP for this op, aren’t you, dog?”
Across the room, Nash stopped looking at the map. “You said you didn’t recognize that newspaper photo of Sophia Ghaffari.”
“I didn’t. But I wouldn’t have. I never actually saw Miles,” Dave said. “When I dealt with her, she always wore a full burka. Never took off her veil. I think it made her feel more secure. I didn’t blame her—God forbid she’s seen talking to someone who’s later IDed as CIA, you know?”
Jesus, that hope that had started as a tiny spark now filled Decker’s chest and damn near clogged his throat. He had to keep himself from grabbing Dave by the shirt and shaking him. “So she worked for you?”
“She provided information, yes. But she never accepted any kind of payment,” Dave said. “Which was very unusual. On top of that, everything she ever gave me was golden. She apparently had access to people and places. . . . She was the first person to tell me that the American embassy was pulling out. I’m telling you, she knew about it before I did. I’m sure it must’ve felt to her like we were deserting her—deserting all the Americans in K-stan. Which, of course, we were. A few weeks later the K-stan government was overthrown, and the U.N. just sat back and let it happen. Most of the people who’d been working with us—working for democracy and freedom—were killed. I tried to contact her before I left Kazabek. I waited at the rendezvous point for three hours, but she never showed.”
Contact. Rendezvous point. Holy fuck. Holy, holy fuck. Maybe there was a God, and maybe Decker was going to get a chance to make things right.
More right than the current fucked-up tangle of wrong he had wrapped around his throat.
“Because I never heard from her, I was afraid she was a casualty,” Dave continued. “But maybe she’s still alive. Maybe she and this Sophia are one and the same. It makes sense. Someone in Sophia Ghaffari’s social and business circle would have had access to the right people, to the kind of information Miles gave me—”
Nash was thinking the same thing Decker was, only Nash had retained his ability to speak. And somehow he knew that Decker needed help.
“How did you c
ontact her?” Nash interrupted Dave, who was just starting to warm up to his new theory. “Did she have a way to contact you?”
Dave blinked at Nash in total surprise. Flap, flap, with eyelashes that were ridiculously long for a man. Decker had never noticed that before, or the fact that Dave’s eyes were green, not brown. Each blink seemed to take an eternity. Flap, flap, flap. Five lifetime-long blinks before Dave turned to Decker. And spoke two of the sweetest words he’d ever heard in his entire life.
“Of course.”
The shopkeepers in the marketplace confirmed what Sophia had overheard last night from Michel Lartet—that the Grande Hotel had been structurally damaged.
Access to Kazabek’s tallest building had been cut off from the street. In fact, that entire part of the downtown area was off-limits to both the general population and peacekeeping troops alike.
It wasn’t so much a matter of if the building would fall, but rather when.
Aftershocks still shook the city, and everyone Sophia spoke to seemed confident that the hotel was a death trap, waiting to topple.
As she sat outside a shelter that was opening for the night in one of the most conservative mosques in City Center, she adjusted her veil so that she could gaze up at the Grande Hotel. It gleamed in the distance, its windows reflecting the golds and reds of the setting sun.
From here, it looked no different than it had the first time she’d seen it, on her first visit to Kazabek with her parents, all those years ago. It had been shining and pristine, with room service inside and limousines out front, and she’d gazed at it wide-eyed from the backseat of the taxi as they’d driven past.
Years later, she and Dimitri had spent their wedding night in the bridal suite. The circular driveway had been partitioned off from the street with concrete dividers to keep car bombers at bay, and the limos were few and far between. The fact that the power went out regularly in rolling blackouts helped hide the shabbiness and decay—not that she’d cared.
Flashpoint Page 24
