Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Sophia lowered her veil as he went past, and pressed on. It couldn’t be much more than another mile now.

  Afterward—mere minutes after that first frantic kiss in the alleyway—Tess’s first thought was, God, she was an idiot.

  Could she be any more of an idiot?

  And she was a weak-willed, totally predictable idiot, to boot.

  Jimmy’s head was down, and he was still catching his breath, but eventually—like within the next twenty seconds—he was going to open his eyes and look at her. It would sure help if she knew what she was going to say.

  Sorry would make it sound as if she thought this was entirely her fault. But she had definitely not been alone in that mad scramble down those steps and through that rickety door into this dusty basement. Jimmy, after all, was the one who’d picked her up as if she weighed next to nothing and pressed her back up against this wall so she could wrap her legs around him and . . .

  Oh, God, she’d wanted him so much and it had felt so good. . . .

  But thank you was entirely too pathetic—as if he’d thrown her a bone. Which wasn’t the case. Because he’d wanted her. Even if he hadn’t told her—succinctly, albeit somewhat crudely—she would’ve caught on from his extreme sense of urgency.

  No, what had just happened here wasn’t about him rewarding or even comforting her. Once again, he’d been so quick on the trigger that if she hadn’t been equally revved up, he would have left her in the dust.

  This had been about taking, not giving. On both of their parts.

  Maybe she should just say, Excuse me. As if the sex they’d just had was nothing more than a biological accident, like burping or farting. Whoops. Excuse me. Couldn’t help that.

  “Shit,” Jimmy said. “Shit.”

  Of course, shit was an option she hadn’t considered. But, wow, it really did seem to say it all, didn’t it?

  And there it was, in his eyes as he pulled back to look at her. Total remorse.

  “Shit,” Tess echoed softly, because it certainly seemed to fit this situation.

  There wasn’t time for either of them to say anything more, because she heard it at the exact second Jimmy did—footsteps on the floorboards above them. Whoever’s basement this was, they had just come home.

  He quickly pulled out of her—all that solid, thick warmth suddenly gone—and helped her pull her pants back on, somehow putting himself back together, getting rid of the condom they’d used, all at the same time.

  Thank God they’d used a condom. Thank God he’d had one to use.

  Jimmy grabbed her hand and pulled her out the basement door and up the stairs, into the alley.

  “Shit,” he said again as a strong wind hit them. Apparently this was also a good comment to use after getting a faceful of sand.

  Tess tried to spit with her mouth closed. God, she now had sand in her teeth. She felt it crunch just from tightening her jaw.

  Overhead a helicopter thrummed—where did that come from? But talking meant opening her mouth again and there was no telling when another blast of sand was going to hit them.

  Jimmy jammed her burka down onto her head, and for once she was grateful for it.

  He pulled a bandanna from the same pocket that had held that lucky condom and tied it around his face, covering his mouth and nose. “It won’t be so bad,” he said to her then, “when the wind’s at our back. Do you think you can run?”

  Did he mean, Do you think you can run in that robe? or Do you think you can run after that wobbly-knee-making sex we just had?

  Either way, her answer was yes.

  When Sophia arrived, Decker was standing in the lobby of the Hospital of the Servant of the Rightly Guided—the Hospital Abdul-Rasheed.

  She knew from the look on his face as she approached him, that something bad had happened.

  “Murphy?” she asked.

  He pulled her away from the other people waiting there. It was especially crowded because of the storm that was coming. Most people were choosing to wait it out here, in the relative comfort of the hospital lobby. “He’s gone.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, sickened by the senseless loss. Poor Angelina, making wedding plans back in California. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know him that well, but—”

  “No.” Decker stepped closer, lowered his voice. “He’s alive. But we got him out of here on a Red Cross helo—”

  “Helo?” she asked.

  “Helicopter, chopper.”

  Ah. She’d seen one pass over her head just minutes ago. And she understood, instantly, why Decker had wanted her to come down here. Murphy was gone—and if she’d been here on time, she’d be gone, too.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I hurried. . . .”

  “It was worth the try,” he told her with the same calm he’d used to reassure Khalid back in the barn. “We do the best we can—sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But now the million-dollar question is whether we should stay here to wait out the storm or—” He swore sharply.

  Sophia peered from the screen of her burka, following his gaze out the front windows.

  Two open trucks, each filled with a dozen members of Bashir’s patrols, were pulling up. It was clear the soldiers were intending to take shelter from the sandstorm here in the hospital lobby.

  “I need to leave,” Sophia told him. “Right now.”

  It was amazing how cool and collected her voice sounded to her own ears, considering the panic that was rising inside her.

  Decker didn’t hesitate. He took her by the elbow and headed for the side door.

  Where—no!—another truck filled with soldiers was pulling up.

  “Don’t stop,” he told her. “If you stop suddenly, it’ll draw attention to us. Come on, we can do this. We’re just going to walk right on past them.”

  She was safe, she was safe, she was safe. Decker would not let anything happen to her.

  “Hold on to your burka,” he told her as they approached the door, and he even managed to smile, as if he thought that was funny. “I mean that literally, hon. The wind’s picking up.”

  He wasn’t kidding. As they went outside, Sophia was glad for his steadying grip on her elbow. Without it, she felt as if she might’ve blown away.

  But coming out that side door, she realized where they were. “The Hotel Français is only a few blocks from here.”

  “Which way?” he asked.

  “Left.”

  Either way they had to walk right past the soldiers. Sophia kept her head down, her feet moving. . . .

  “Hey, American . . .”

  Don’t stop, don’t stop, whoever it was, they weren’t talking to them.

  “Hey!” It was louder now, and Decker did stop. “Where are you going in this weather?”

  “Is there a problem, sir?” Decker answered. It was a different dialect than the one Khalid spoke, but once again his grammar was perfect.

  The soldier laughed. “The problem is crazy Americans who don’t appreciate how deadly a storm like this can be.”

  “We’ve got a few more minutes before it gets bad, Lieutenant,” Decker told him, as calm as can be. “And we don’t have far to go.”

  They started walking again.

  “Hey!”

  Sophia withdrew her arm from the spacious sleeve of her robe, reaching to take her gun from the pocket of the jeans Tess had lent to her.

  Decker spoke to her in a low voice. “Easy. There’s still plenty of talking left to do.” He turned back to the lieutenant. “Yes, sir?”

  “Here, crazy American,” the man said. “Catch.”

  And he threw something at Decker. It was a scarf to tie around his face, to keep the blowing dust and dirt from his mouth and nose.

  “It’ll be useful,” the lieutenant said, “even though you don’t have far to go.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Decker said. “You’re too kind.” He wrapped it around his face.

  “Go with God,” the lieutenant told them as he followed his me
n into the hospital lobby.

  They walked on, Decker’s hand still on her elbow, Sophia’s heart still pounding.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  “Ilived here off and on for about five years,” Sophia told Decker, “starting the summer I turned ten.”

  The hotel was dark, the storm outside making the late afternoon seem more like night.

  Decker shook sand and dirt from his clothes and hair. He’d need two weeks of showers to get the last of it out of his ears.

  He followed Sophia up the stairs, thinking, Shit. This was the perfect end to one total goatfuck of a day. Murphy injured, Tess locked up . . . And now here he was, back at the scene of the crime, so to speak, where he’d let Sophia . . .

  Oh, yeah. This boarded-up hotel could be made into a memorial to Deck’s bad judgment.

  He should have known that Sophia wouldn’t be able to make it over to the hospital in time. Instead he’d risked it, which resulted in her being in danger of being discovered by Bashir’s men, which resulted in the two of them—tah dah da dah, sound the official Fuckup’s Fanfare!—right back here. Thank you very much. Alone together until the storm ended.

  Which could easily be until morning.

  Decker opened his phone. Nothing happening there. Not that he’d expected it. With this wind, their sat-dish was in Pakistan.

  “Nash called me,” Sophia said as she led him down the hall. “On Murphy’s phone. He said he was on his way to Tess. He seemed to know where she was.”

  “Yeah,” Decker said. “I’m sure he arranged for her release. He was, uh, pretty upset.”

  “I know that they’re not really married,” she told him.

  “No, actually, they are.”

  She gave him such a disbelieving look that he couldn’t help it, he laughed. “Okay,” he admitted. “They aren’t. Who gave it away?”

  “You did,” she told him.

  Now it was his turn to look at her quizzically.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she said. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious that you’re in love with her.”

  Decker stopped short. “You’re wrong. I’m not.”

  “My mistake.” Sophia opened a pair of French doors into an enormous room with big windows. There was slightly more light in there, and Decker slowly followed her in. “This was my favorite room in the hotel. The grand ballroom. This was where Yousef, the eldest son of Prince Zevket, first met Madeleine Lewis. Do you know that story?”

  “No.” The windows looked out on the hotel’s center courtyard. It was dusty and neglected, with a center fountain that had broken in two. Did Sophia really think he was in love with Tess?

  But she had gone into tour guide mode, ultrasmooth and extra fake. She sure could tap dance when she thought she needed to. He wished she didn’t think she needed to when she was around him.

  They’d been on the verge of some kind of breakthrough this morning, before Khalid had burst in. She’d actually started to cry—real tears, not those crocodile ones she did so well.

  “It was June 1920,” she was telling him now, as if he gave a good goddamn about Prince Whosis and Madeleine . . . Albright? No, that wasn’t right.

  “Madeleine was the daughter of a famous nature photographer—Reginald Lewis.”

  Lewis, that was the name.

  “Yousef gave up his kingdom to be with her, and Madeleine, well, her father disowned her, too,” Sophia continued. “But they didn’t care. They went to America together and lived happily ever after. Until Hitler invaded Poland and started World War Two. Madeleine lost her husband and both of her sons in the war.” She sighed dramatically. “I used to wonder, what if, when she stood in this room, at the very moment that she fell in love with Prince Yousef, what if she had the power to know what was to come? All that heartache and loss . . . Would she have taken that same path anyway?”

  She fell silent, staring out the window, down at the courtyard, at a dried piece of brush that was being tossed about in the wind.

  “I used to think no. If she knew, how could she bear to . . . ,” she said softly as Decker held his breath, as the real Sophia peeked out. “But now . . . I don’t know.”

  She looked up and laughed much too brightly—an attempt to slam the door shut that didn’t quite work. “I mean, twenty-two years of happiness—that’s more than most people get, don’t you think?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but Decker answered it anyway. “I think life is hard,” he told her. “I think sometimes some people get lucky, and then it’s less hard for them, for a while. I think twenty-two years of happiness is a gift. If that’s really what they shared. And you’re assuming a lot there, because a lot can happen in twenty-two years.”

  She turned again to look at him. “She’s really nice, you know—Tess. Sometimes you can say that about people and it’s not meant to be a compliment, like nice is something bad, but I don’t mean it that way. Tess really is genuinely nice. Except she’s in love with Nash. That must be fun, huh?” She laughed again, more fake merriment. Being here with him like this must really be making her nervous. He didn’t blame her. He was on edge, too. “Although she’ll get over that soon enough.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “Trust me, she will.”

  Decker smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Time will tell.”

  “Yes, it will,” he agreed.

  “You could just kind of hang out, you know, underneath the basket, ready for the rebound. . . .”

  “You play basketball?” he asked, desperate to change the subject.

  “Yeah, right.” She laughed, far too gaily. He wished she would cut that out. “I’m the star center of the Kazabek women’s basketball league. Can’t you just see us running down the court, burkas on?” Her smile weakened, but then came back, brighter than ever. “Seriously though, Dimitri was a big Lakers fan. He lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and got hooked. Thank goodness for satellite TV.”

  Maybe she’d begin to relax if he wasn’t looming over her. Decker didn’t often loom—he just wasn’t that tall—but she was on the short side of average. He sat down on the floor, leaning back against the wall beneath the windows.

  “I know I make you nervous,” he said, figuring why the fuck not simply grab the proverbial bull by the horns. “I hope you’re not afraid of me.”

  He’d managed to surprise her. “No,” she said. “I’m not.”

  She slowly sat down, not quite beside him, but not on the other side of the room either. And he could see in the dim light from the windows that she’d stopped with the fake smiles.

  “What happened between us—,” he started.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.” Damn it, now she was on her feet again.

  “What do you want to talk about?” he asked, looking up at her. “Dimitri?”

  It was obvious that was the last thing she’d expected him to suggest. “You want to talk about Tess?”

  “Okay,” he said, because he knew an affirmative reply would keep her off balance. He didn’t particularly want to share his feelings about Tess with her, but what the hell. He’d already shared physical intimacies with this woman, and being honest about this might do him good. “I’ll tell you this—you’re partly right. I probably could love her—it wouldn’t take a lot. You said it yourself—she’s genuine all the time, and I like that about her. I like her—I admire her—very much.”

  The expression on Sophia’s face made him keep going.

  “I’m also attracted to her,” Decker confessed. “She’s, uh . . .” How should he say this? “She’s got a body type that I happen to appreciate. I mean, I like women with women’s bodies and she’s got one of those. And a brain to match. Smart women do it for me. I just don’t get why some women think they need to pretend they’re stupid to be attractive to men.” He laughed. “Maybe so they’re attractive to the stupid men, but . . . I also happen to think that Tess is the best thing that ever happened to
Nash, if you’ll excuse the clichéd expression. I’m okay with that—really—because to be honest, I don’t know if I could handle two years of happiness, let alone twenty-two.”

  Sophia slowly sat down next to him. “Why not?” she asked softly.

  She was finally here with him. The real Sophia. The strangely shy Sophia, who didn’t quite know what to say to him without putting on her big fake act. The one who’d been forced, for months, to give sexual favors to strangers. The one who’d probably seen her husband murdered right in front of her eyes.

  “Because, like I said, life is hard,” Decker said slowly. “And sometimes it can be brutally harsh. I’ve seen some terrible things that . . .” He shook his head. “It’s hard to explain, Sophia. I’m not keeping secrets from you, I just can’t . . . Maybe what I feel is like survivor’s guilt. How can I let myself be that happy when . . . I had friends on the Cole, and in Khobar Towers. Friends who died on 9/11. They don’t get even one more day of happiness, you know?”

  She nodded, her face pale in the fading light.

  “But then I come to places like Kazabek, and I think what the hell am I doing here? I’m fighting terrorism, but I’m only fighting the symptoms. I’m not getting anywhere close to the cause.” Decker was silent for a moment. “In the end, I just do the best I can. That’s all I can do. That’s all anyone can do, I guess.”

  They sat for many long minutes in silence, as it got darker and darker in the room, as the wind howled outside.

  “I can’t talk about Dimitri,” Sophia finally whispered. “I . . .”

  “That’s okay,” Decker said quietly.

  He could barely see her in the dimness. She was sitting with her back against the wall, knees up, arms folded around them. As he watched, she rested her forehead on her arms.

  “I loved him,” she admitted. “And he loved me. I lied about that . . . the other day.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I pretty much knew that.”

  “We were working—I was working—with this group that was trying to restore democracy to Kazbekistan,” she said softly. “It was so stupid. I should have known Bashir would find out that we were involved. It was a death sentence if we were caught, but I never thought . . . We’d done business with him in the past, gone right into the palace. A lunchtime meeting didn’t seem out of the ordinary. But I trusted the wrong people. Michel Lartet—he was Dimitri’s friend, and . . . I trusted him because it was so obvious that we’d all make more money with Bashir out of power. It never occurred to me that Lartet would sell us out.”