Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Murphy, too, stuck his head in the barn. “Excuse me, boss. Almost ready to go,” he called.

  Everyone addressed Lawrence Decker as sir or boss.

  Everyone but James Nash. “I’m not the one being unreasonable here, Deck.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Tess backed off. “We’ll handle this, of course.” She raised her voice. “Murph, you don’t need to come with me.”

  “You get into that wagon, Murphy,” Nash called, “and you stay there. Or I will make you sorry you were born.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” Tess looked at Nash as if he were scum.

  “Do you have plans to meet Will?” Decker asked Tess.

  The answer was no. Sophia could see it clearly in Tess’s eyes, but she obviously didn’t want to say it. “I’m sure he’s nearby, waiting—”

  “No specific time and place?” Decker interrupted Tess.

  “No, but he made it quite clear—”

  “Take Murphy,” Deck ordered.

  “Hah!” Nash said.

  “This time,” Decker continued, with an exasperated look at Nash. “And set something up with Schroeder for tomorrow. Using him and freeing up Murph is a good idea.”

  Tess looked at Nash. She didn’t say, “Hah!” But Sophia knew she was thinking it.

  “Is there coffee?” Dave asked, eyeing Decker’s still nearly full mug. He was wearing a Pink Floyd concert T-shirt with his jeans.

  “Inside,” Tess told him.

  Decker had already returned his attention to that printout, but now he glanced up. At Sophia. And then at Dave. “Be quick.”

  “You want some?” Dave asked Sophia.

  She shook her head as she watched Tess put bottles of water into her backpack. “No, thanks.”

  “Do you have your scarf?” Nash asked Tess.

  “Yes, I do.” She shouldered the pack, and as she straightened up, she looked hard at him, as if taking inventory of all of his bandages and scratches. “How’s your arm?”

  “Better,” he told her.

  “Your head?”

  “Fine.”

  Tess nodded. “Good.”

  She turned to go, but he caught her arm. “Tess, I’m, um, sorry about being late.”

  “I was just worried about you,” she said. “It’s frustrating, Jimmy, because I can’t insist that Murphy goes along whenever you leave. And if you don’t check in . . .”

  “I can take care of myself. I don’t need anyone’s help.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I get that. Loud and clear.” She looked over, as if she felt Sophia watching, and smiled. It was forced. “I’ve got to go. See you later.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Right.”

  Nash watched her as she went toward the door without looking back.

  Decker cleared his throat. “What did you find out last night?”

  Nash didn’t look over until Tess closed the barn door behind her. “Fifty K’ll do it.”

  Decker swore. “That much?”

  Nash looked from Decker to Sophia and back. “It’s going to be a match pot situation,” he said, and she realized they were talking about money. Fifty thousand dollars, U.S.

  Same as the reward Bashir had put on her head.

  Bashir, not his nephews, as she’d believed. She hadn’t managed to kill the bastard. Tess had broken that news to her last night.

  Which meant that if Sophia was caught, Padsha Bashir would hand-deliver her punishment.

  And it was going to cost fifty thousand dollars to smuggle her out of the country.

  She sat down heavily on the nearest bale of hay.

  She looked up to find Decker gazing at her.

  Not only would it cost fifty thousand dollars, but she would have to trust whomever she paid that fifty thousand dollars not to turn around and sell her to Bashir for an additional fifty thousand dollars.

  Assuming, of course, that she’d be able to get her hands on fifty thousand dollars.

  Decker knew what she was thinking. “I guess there’s no Swiss bank account,” he said.

  Sophia shook her head. “No.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Is that actually lamb stew that Guldana’s cooking?” Dave asked, coming back into the barn.

  “Yup,” Nash said.

  “What’s the occasion?” Dave asked. “I mean, is there an occasion?”

  “I got married,” Nash said flatly. “Rivka and Guldana wanted to throw a party to celebrate.”

  “Oh, that’s tonight?” Dave turned to Sophia. “You better plan to stay out of sight. Frankly, the dyed hair isn’t that good of a disguise. Rivka and Guldana used to run with the university crowd, and I don’t know who all’s likely to attend their party, but God forbid someone comes who used to know you. If they see you, they’ll definitely recognize you.”

  “I’ll stay here in the barn,” she said.

  “You need me to stick around?” Nash asked Decker.

  “No,” Decker said. Dave was here, making himself comfortable on a second bale of hay. But Decker turned to Dave. “Look, I have to run out, too. Can you get started without me? I should be back in about an hour.”

  Get started?

  “We’ll be fine. We have some questions that you might be able to help us with,” Dave told Sophia. “About Bashir—his palace, his organization—as well as Ma’awiya Talal Sayid. You’re one of the few Westerners who’s ever actually met both of those two, uh, gentlemen.”

  “Where are you going?” she heard Nash ask Decker as they headed out of the barn.

  Deck glanced back at her before he went out the door, but she didn’t hear his reply.

  This was ridiculous.

  That there should be gridlock in downtown Kazabek was completely absurd.

  “I’m going to go see if I can’t find out what the problem is,” Murphy told Tess as he climbed out of Khalid’s wagon.

  “What problem?” Will Schroeder asked. “Things are back to normal in the Pit.”

  Just as Tess had expected, the redhaired reporter had waved them down not a half mile from Rivka’s house. He’d hopped into the back of the wagon. What a coincidence. He was heading over to the relief coordination headquarters for this sector of the city, too.

  The people at the sector HQ had sent them—volunteers with a horse and wagon, a real rarity—over to the main HQ, in City Center. There were supplies that needed to be picked up and distributed.

  Will, of course, stuck around to help.

  Which meant that he sat there in the wagon with her, hogging the shade from the umbrella, much cooler than she was, dressed in his short-sleeved T-shirt and shorts.

  City Center wasn’t really that much farther downtown, but considering they couldn’t move faster than the herd of sheep being driven along the road in front of them . . . It had been a solid two hours since they’d left Rivka’s.

  It was doubly frustrating for Tess, since the appearance of Will meant that Murphy didn’t have to babysit her anymore. But Murph wasn’t going anywhere until he found out exactly where Tess would end up.

  “I have my phone,” she’d argued.

  “Will it work when you’re over at City Center?” he asked.

  “It might.”

  “And it might not,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll wait and find out where you’re going. A few more minutes won’t matter either way.”

  That had been an hour ago.

  “I heard the BBC broadcast this morning,” Will told her now. “The news about Sayid’s death is still their top story. There’s lots of speculation about whether or not the U.S. has possession of his infamous laptop. Fox News says we have it, Aljazeera says no way. Of course, they’re getting ready to release a video that will prove Sayid’s still alive.”

  Tess leaned forward to address Khalid. “How close are we?”

  “It’s just another block,” he told her.

  “Okay,” she decided. “Let’s just start loading the wagon from here. Will, you’re with me. Khalid,
when Murphy gets back—”

  “Here he is now.”

  And there Murphy was, indeed. He was half a block away, heading back toward them, a full head taller than everyone around him.

  Boom. The sudden loud noise—an explosion—was incredible. And just as stunning was the pickup truck that seemed to launch into the air just behind Murphy.

  Tess grabbed Khalid around the waist, pulling the boy off the bench seat and down into the wagon bed as the shock from the blast hit them.

  It pushed them back, and they bounced and scraped along the wood. Will must’ve slammed against the rickety boards at the wagon’s end, breaking through them. Because Tess, still clinging to Khalid, hit the road so hard that she saw stars, her head bouncing in the dirt.

  Murphy.

  Dear God.

  Debris was raining down—chunks of metal and wood, some pieces burning. Tess pushed both Will and Khalid beneath the wagon.

  What looked like a hubcap landed on the sidewalk, but oddly, she couldn’t hear it hit.

  “Are you all right?” Tess tried to shout over the ringing in her ears. She had to get out there—she had to find Murphy.

  Khalid said something she couldn’t hear. He had a scrape on his face, but other than that looked to be in one piece.

  Will was saying something, too, cradling one arm against his chest. “Think I broke my fucking wrist,” she read his lips more than heard him. Would her ears never clear? “Are you okay?” he asked her.

  She nodded. Was she? Everything seemed to be still attached. She’d hit her head, scraped an elbow and a knee. . . .

  Khalid was gesturing. Above them, the cart was lurching and rocking. And then she could make out his words, very distantly, as if he were speaking over a transistor radio from far, far away.

  “My horse!”

  She let the boy go since the worst of the debris seemed to have fallen. He scrambled out into the street to calm the animal and to push burning embers off its back.

  She followed, Will behind her.

  “Car bomb,” she heard him say in that AM radio voice.

  No shit, Sherlock.

  The smoke was thick and greasy, rolling up into the sky from the flaming skeletons of two different vehicles. The truck she’d seen in the air had landed wheels up and was burning. The other looked like some kind of cargo van.

  Most of the crowd had scattered, rushing to cover. But now the injured and bleeding were picking themselves up off the ground if they could, dragging themselves away from the fire.

  From where she was, Tess could see no sign of Murphy.

  “Stay with Khalid,” she ordered Will.

  Nearly everyone was moving in the other direction—away from the blast site. Some people just sat in the street. Some would never get back up again.

  The smoke was chokingly thick. Tess had lost her scarf, so she pulled the front of her shirt up over her mouth and nose and headed to where she’d last seen Murphy.

  “He rules with fear,” Sophia said. “I didn’t meet anyone in that palace who wasn’t scared to death of him. Even his nephews.” She laughed as she shook her head. “He plays them off of each other, in a constant competition. It would have been funny to watch if, um . . .”

  If she hadn’t lived every moment wondering if she’d be executed now or later.

  Deck sat in the barn and just let Dave run the interview with Sophia. His trip into the city had taken a little longer than he’d expected, and she’d already answered most of Dave’s questions about Bashir’s palace, about the layout of the place and the security there—the number of guards, any patterns and routines they might fall into.

  Dave had a legal pad upon which he was taking notes, and when Decker had come in, he’d already filled dozens of pages with his spidery scrawl.

  “Keep going,” Deck had said. Dave could catch him up later. No need to make Sophia answer these difficult questions twice.

  “A rumor that I’ve heard,” Dave said now, “is that Bashir’s sterile. Some late childhood illness . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” Sophia told him. “I’m pretty sure that’s true. I don’t think he believed it at first. That’s probably what got him started with his vast collection of wives—you know, it must be the woman’s fault that there are no children, so find another wife. That and the fact that he stood to gain financially from killing his enemies and marrying their wives. Neat little trick, huh?”

  She shifted in her seat, glancing briefly at Decker. He could see that she was trying to be nonchalant. She was trying to pretend that talking about this wasn’t hard as hell.

  The porcelain paleness of Sophia’s face—the part that wasn’t bruised—was accentuated by her hair, now dyed a dark shade of brown. The short cut that Tess had given her made her look young and fragile. It was an effect enhanced by the clothes that Tess—who was much taller—had given her. On Sophia, Tess’s shirt hung loosely from her shoulders, and her pants had to be cinched with a belt around her waist.

  “That was a power thing, too,” she added. “His marriages to the wives of the men he wanted to best. I don’t think he enjoyed sex even half as much as he liked winning. It wasn’t about pleasure for him, it was about inflicting pain and humiliation. Half the time, he didn’t . . .” She cleared her throat. “You know, ejaculate.” She forced a laugh, but she didn’t meet either of their eyes. “I don’t know, maybe he was saving that for one of the wives that he liked—assuming he was even capable of liking anyone—and . . . Is this going to show up in some Agency report?” Now she did speak directly to Dave. “Make sure you include the fact that he has terrible halitosis. Terrible. And flatulence.”

  Now it was Dave’s turn to clear his throat. Come on, Dave. Say something comforting, something kind. That must have been awful—what you went through. To have your entire life just . . . stolen from you. To have to fight to stay alive, to endure, even while knowing it was possible your life could end instantly, on the whim of a man who hated you. . . .

  “It’s important, Sophia, that the information we include in our reports doesn’t come off sounding, well, as if it was provided by someone with a definite agenda. You know, in terms of wanting to make Bashir look bad,” Dave said.

  Oh, Dave.

  Sophia laughed. And laughed. “I don’t have to make things up so Bashir looks bad. All anyone has to do is go into the wing of his palace where he keeps his wives and count their scars. Do you know that he gives his new brides a special gift upon their marriage—” She cut herself off, her hand up over her mouth. “No. No one will ever believe that.”

  There were tears in her eyes now—real tears. Decker wanted to push this, to ask her what it was that no one would believe. He wanted her to stick around for a while—this seemingly honest version of Sophia. But if he’d thought she looked fragile before, well, this Sophia looked as if she might break into a million pieces.

  So instead he asked her, “Do you want to take a break?”

  “No.” She wouldn’t look at him. She straightened up, quickly wiping her eyes. “Let’s get something in this report that will make a difference, that’ll make people understand who and what Bashir is. He’s always been described as a religious man,” she told them. “But that’s total bullshit. He uses some of the beliefs of Islam to his advantage, but he is in no way the devout Muslim that most people think. He plays the part in public. He even had some top level al-Qaeda leaders fooled for a while—including Sayid. But they caught on, and they wanted nothing to do with Bashir.

  “The falling out was mutual,” Sophia continued. “That’s one of the reasons I knew Sayid wasn’t staying at the palace. He was no longer welcome. But you know what? I thought of a way that you can double-check me if you want.”

  Dave looked up from his notepad. Glanced at Decker, before giving his full attention to Sophia. “Double-check you?” he asked. “How do you mean?”

  “Ma’awiya Talal Sayid had some kind of serious medical condition,” Sophia told them. “Did you know that?”<
br />
  “No,” Dave said.

  Decker sat up. Shit, no.

  “I don’t know exactly what it was,” she continued, “but he needed some kind of treatment that I think involved, I don’t know, maybe blood transfusions? Once when I saw him he had these tubes—they looked like they were filled with blood—attached to his arm.”

  Decker looked at Dave. “Why would someone need blood transfusions?”

  “Maybe Murphy would know. Sophia, please, go on.”

  “Both times he stayed at Bashir’s palace, there was a shipment of medical equipment from the hospital. I’m not sure exactly which hospital is closest to Bashir’s palace—”

  “L’Hôpital Cantara,” Decker said, exchanging a look with Dave. There would no doubt be records of such a shipment.

  “This,” Dave said, “is exactly the break we needed.” He flipped back several pages in his notepad. “I have Sophia’s estimate of the dates Sayid visited Bashir over the past two months.”

  Excellent. “Can you describe the equipment you saw?” Decker asked Sophia.

  “I think there was an IV stand in his room. You know, one of those metal hook things, like a coat stand on wheels? And a tall machine—a box with tubes . . . maybe it was some kind of monitor.” Sophia looked from Decker to Dave and back. “This helps?”

  “Yes,” they said in unison.

  “We know Sayid was in Kazabek at the time of the quake,” Dave told her. “We don’t know where he was staying. But if he needed medical equipment supplied by a local hospital . . . Well, we’ll find out exactly what equipment was shipped to Bashir’s palace in the past and see if there was a similar shipment made elsewhere in the city several days before the quake. If we can get that address, we’ll more than likely know where Sayid was staying.”

  But what were the chances that his laptop was still there?

  “Dave,” Decker asked, “do you have a contact at—”

  “The Cantara hospital?” Dave finished for him as he stood up. “Not yet, but I’m about to make one.” But then he stopped, obviously remembering Decker’s request that he not be left alone with Sophia. “That is, unless you want me to—”