Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I’m doing the best I can,” he told Tess now.

  She looked so sad. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  She closed the bathroom door behind her.

  He washed quickly, stripping off his briefs and soaping himself up all over. He rinsed by stepping into the bathtub and pouring the remaining water from the bucket over himself, his head included. He dried himself in the flickering light, hung the towel on the rack, and blew out the candle.

  And it was dark.

  Tess had doused the candle in the other room, and had gotten into bed. That darkness and silence were far from welcoming, and he nearly went back into the bathroom.

  But she’d left his side of the bed turned down—amazing how fast that had happened. One night and he already had a side of the bed.

  Jimmy slipped between the sheets and she turned to him, soft and warm and already drowsy.

  And naked.

  With an unwrapped condom in her hands. He nearly cried. Thank you, Gods of the Universe, for sending him this woman who somehow knew exactly what he needed.

  She covered him as he kissed her, and then she covered him even more completely, straddling him and pressing him deeply inside of her.

  “Tess,” he said.

  And she kissed him.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tess looked exhausted as she poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Have you seen Khalid?” she asked, looking from Sophia to Decker.

  “He’s in the yard,” he told her, finishing up the last of the rice cereal in his bowl. Guldana had added just the right spices to the gluey mixture. It looked awful, but tasted heavenly. Of course, breakfast always tasted particularly good on a morning after. After a life-or-death experience, that is.

  Some people had sex to get their blood moving. Others risked their lives.

  Some—like Nash, who apparently didn’t give a damn how late he kept Tess up—did both.

  Last night, Decker had taken on twelve-to-one odds—well, twelve-to-two after he got a weapon back into Nash’s capable hands. He’d gone in not knowing how hard Nash had been hit—he’d seen his friend take that blow to the back of the head and go down hard. It could have been bad.

  Instead it was merely half bad.

  And yet here Deck was. Alive. Having breakfast. And enjoying every bite.

  “What’s up?” he asked Tess.

  She had stopped in the door to the yard, the bright sunlight making her look even more weary. “I haven’t heard from Will Schroeder since the bombing. He hasn’t contacted you, has he?”

  “No.” Decker took his bowl to the sink.

  “If it’s okay with you, I’m going to send Khalid out to find him—to set up a meeting in the square for this afternoon.”

  He crossed toward her, aware that Sophia was tracking him. It would have made him self-conscious—the woman watched his every move and followed him if he strayed too far from her—if he hadn’t known a great deal about the psychological strains and stresses of prisoners. And although Sophia was no longer trapped in Bashir’s palace, the price on her head made her still very much a prisoner.

  The way the woman watched him wasn’t personal—she perceived him as holding the key to her freedom.

  “That’s not a good idea,” he told Tess.

  Frustration rang in her voice. “Just because Jimmy doesn’t want me going out alone—”

  Decker cut her off. “I don’t want you going out alone.”

  “But if I can get in touch with Will,” Tess argued, “then he can come with me. We can go out together—help check out that list of hospitals.” She lowered her voice. “Every day that passes, we have less of a chance of recovering that laptop.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m clear on that. But . . .” He glanced over at Sophia, who was—big surprise—watching him. “If you go into the city with Will that’ll leave Miles . . .”

  “I’d be all right,” Sophia said. “I can stay here alone.”

  “Excuse us for a minute,” Tess said to the other woman, and pulled Decker with her out of the house. She took him clear over to the gate before she stopped and faced him. “She’s always listening in, and I’m sorry, but I think we need to be more careful around her. I’m not really looking to contact Will so I can visit hospitals with him. I just used that to prove that she really does pay attention to everything anyone says.

  “We got an email from Tom this morning, Deck,” she continued. “He wasn’t able to call—something’s funky with our phones again—but he just received important information from the client. They got access to a cell phone belonging to Faik Nizami, an al-Qaeda operative based in Afghanistan. This is a man who’s known to have been in contact with Sayid repeatedly since 2001. On the evening before the quake, Nizami took a phone call originating from the Kazabek Grande Hotel.”

  Decker must’ve reacted, because she said, “Yeah. Jimmy said that was the last place he would have expected Sayid to stay—which made it high on his personal list of possibilities, even before Tom’s email.”

  Decker sighed. “Still, it’s just one phone call. It may not have been from Sayid.”

  “How about three?” Tess asked. “An outgoing call to Sayid’s personal cell on the morning of the quake, duration one minute seven seconds. Then another call, just a few minutes later, to the Kazabek Grande, duration twelve minutes. Check out this scenario: Nizami calls Sayid’s cell, they’re cut off. He tries calling back, can’t get through. So he finally calls using the landline at the hotel.”

  “Or,” Deck suggested, “Nizami is long-distance brokering some kind of meeting in Kazabek between Sayid and a third party. That third party—unknown—is staying at the Grande, and he calls Nizami the night before the quake. In the morning, Nizami contacts Sayid, gets the location for the meeting. Then he calls back that third party at the hotel, and passes that information on.”

  Tess looked at him. “Gee,” she said. “Way to burst my bubble.”

  “Your scenario might be right,” he told her. “And even if it’s not, that potential third party might’ve left some information in his hotel room that’ll lead us to Sayid’s accommodations.” He pushed himself up so that he was sitting on the fence—just a guy having a chat with a pretty young woman in the sunlight on another cloudless day in Kazbekistan. “I assume whatever plan you have in mind doesn’t involve us doing a room by room search of the Kazabek Grande Hotel—which, I feel compelled to point out, has been structurally damaged and is in danger of collapse.”

  Tess smiled, and it made her look far less tired. “Jimmy mentioned that, too. Do you know, is he claustrophobic?”

  “I don’t think so,” Decker said.

  “He hates the idea of having to go in there.”

  “He was in New York City on 9/11,” Decker told her. “I’m pretty certain he watched the Towers come down from a close proximity.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I don’t really know for sure, though. He never talked about it. Not with me, anyway.”

  She gaped at him. “Everyone talked about 9/11. Where they were, what they did . . .”

  “He didn’t,” Decker said. “He doesn’t. Talk about things like that. I know him better than anyone—I know what he’s going to say and do before he does it. But I don’t have a clue where he came from, where he’s been, what he’s seen and done, and . . . I know the things that matter, though. I know I can trust him—and I do. With my life. I also happen to know that he loves you—”

  “That’s really funny, because he insists you love me.”

  Well, here was a conversation he’d never thought he’d be having. Decker had to laugh. “I really do admire the hell out of you. If I didn’t love you before, I love you now—just for having the balls to say that.”

  She was not amused. Her cheeks were turning pink, too. She’d embarrassed herself. Or maybe she just felt embarrassed for him. “I’m sorry, let’s not go there. I know that . . . I didn’t mean to—” />
  “I love you as a friend,” he clarified. “You’re good for him, you know.”

  “My plan”—she cleared her throat—“is to get inside the hotel, access the computers, and search the guest records for Nizami’s cell phone number. That outgoing international call would definitely show up as an additional charge to the room. When we find a record of that call, we’ll have Sayid’s room number. Assuming scenario number one.”

  Decker gazed at her. With her long sleeves and her long pants, she was starting to perspire in the heat. Or maybe it was the prior topic of their conversation that had her sweating.

  “Can you hack into the hotel records from here?” he asked. “If we have to go in, I’d prefer knowing the room number in advance—spend the least amount of time possible in a building that’s about to fall.”

  She nodded. “I’ll try.” She glanced back at the house, where Sophia was standing just inside the door, in the shadows, watching them. She lowered her voice even more. “Excuse me for being out of line, sir, but you and Jimmy were nearly killed last night and I think we need to be more careful.”

  “He told you about it?” He couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

  But she just laughed. “Yeah, he told me all about it. Right. He told me the Disney version, without a body count. Deck, come on, I want to help Sophia, you know that, but not at that kind of price. I don’t know what happened last night, but Jimmy was really upset when he got back. I think we also have to consider the fact that we don’t know this woman—”

  “You honestly think she had something to do with last night’s setup?” Decker asked. “They’re looking for her. They want to bring her back to Bashir. She’s not in league with them.”

  “What I think is that we’ve got five people—besides our team—who know she’s here,” Tess told him. “Rivka and Guldana, Khalid, Will, and Sophia herself.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Getting back in Bashir’s favor seems to be a Kazbekistani national pastime. What are the two things he wants most? Sophia and Sayid’s laptop. We really only have Sophia’s story of why Bashir’s after her. And again, I’m sorry, I like her, I do, but I pick up a heavy stench of pants on fire whenever she opens her mouth.”

  “A . . . what?”

  “Pants on fire,” she said. “As in, Liar, liar . . . ?”

  “Got it. And yeah, she’s good at spinning.”

  “Yes, she is,” Tess agreed.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You think Sophia’s going to try to get back in Bashir’s good graces by—”

  “Delivering Sayid’s laptop to him,” Tess finished for him. “And I’m not saying I think that’s what’s going on. I just think we should be aware of the possibility.”

  “We don’t have his laptop,” Decker pointed out.

  “Not yet,” she said, “but we are going to get it.”

  “Shit.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  Tess glanced up from her computer and over at the bed where Jimmy was stretched out. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t,” he said. “I’ve been awake for a while. Hoping you’d notice me over here.”

  He smiled at her and it was too much. Combined with those eyes and cheekbones, and with the golden tan, gleaming muscles . . . She forced her attention back to her computer screen. “No sex while I’m working,” she said.

  “Two minutes,” he said. “That’s all I need.”

  She looked at him again and he wiggled his eyebrows.

  “Come on, admit it,” he said. “You’re considering it.”

  “No, I’m marveling at the fact that I’m sleeping with a man who attempts to entice me back to bed with the promise of getting made in two minutes. That’s less time than it takes to cook a soft-boiled egg, I’d like to point out.”

  “How’s twenty minutes sound?” he asked. “That’s the length of most people’s coffee breaks.”

  “I can hack into Kazbekistani bank records,” she said. “Why can’t I even find the blasted Grande Hotel? Is it possible they don’t have computer records?” As she said it, she knew that was absurd. A modern hotel with all those rooms? Their billing system had to be computerized. Had to be.

  “Imagine if you smoked.” Jimmy was still working on getting some. “You’d spend at least ten minutes every few hours having a cigarette. It’s actually more like fifteen, because not only do you have to get outside, but then you have to get to wherever it is they allow people to pollute the air. I remember back when I was a smoker, I spent some time at the Agency office in San Francisco.”

  It took everything Tess had in her not to look up. Jimmy had been a smoker who worked out of the San Francisco office?

  “They had this little sundeck on the twentieth floor where the smokers could huddle, out of the rain, under this one little awning,” he continued.

  She could see him from her peripheral vision—he had both hands behind his head and was gazing up at the ceiling.

  “The elevators were so busy it never took me less than ten minutes to get there from the ninth floor, and only slightly less, maybe eight minutes, to get back. Factor in the hike from my office to the elevator and the five and a half minutes I’m out there frantically sucking in the nicotine, and it’s practically a thirty-minute production number. Needless to say, not much work got done. Fortunately, I didn’t work in that office for long.”

  Tess’s heart was in her throat. It was kind of pathetic, actually, that she could be so excited, so moved by the fact that Jimmy Nash had actually volunteered information about himself. I remember back when I was a smoker . . .

  “Why’d you quit smoking?” she asked, her eyes still on her computer. Maybe this was the secret to getting him to talk about himself. Pretend she wasn’t really paying attention.

  “I started working with Deck,” he told her. “He was so freaking fit. It was definitely an ego thing—I wanted to be able to keep up with the big bad Navy SEAL.” He laughed. “Like that was ever going to happen. But by the time I realized it was hopeless, I’d already quit smoking, so . . .” He shrugged.

  “When were you in San Francisco?” she asked. “You know, my mother lives there.”

  “Yeah, I do know,” Jimmy said. “You mentioned that in your interview with Tom.”

  She looked up, startled. “You remember that?”

  “Your mom’s a sculptor, your dad’s a librarian, your parents divorced, and you bounced between the two of them. And spent too much quality time with your computer. You still feel safest when you’re plugged in. Tom was impressed that you had that good a read on yourself. I was, too.”

  Tess dragged her gaze back to her computer. There was no reason to feel anything but admiration for the fact that he had a good memory. “No fair,” she said. “I didn’t get to sit in on your interview.”

  He laughed. “I don’t do interviews. I just grab on to Deck’s coattails and glide on in.”

  Did he seriously think that or was he just trying to be modest? “What did your parents do?” she asked, eyes on her computer screen.

  “Dad was a professor at a private boys’ school in Kent, Connecticut,” he told her. “My mother did the housewife thing. She, uh, did battle with breast cancer about ten years ago and she got rid of my father along with the cancer. They’re both in Florida now, but in two different towns.”

  He was talking about James Nash’s parents. It reeked of a cover story—what the Agency support staff had dubbed “Insta-Life.” It was as fabricated—and as false—as his Agency-assigned name. But really, what had she expected?

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, because it was the expected response to “my mother had cancer.” But what she was really sorry about was his inability to open up and tell her the truth.

  Last night, when he gave her that PG-13 version of his run-in with Leo the Claw, she knew.

  She couldn’t do this.

  Oh, she could do this. She could have a couple of days—or
even weeks, if this assignment dragged on that long—of great sex with a man she was attracted to. But as for a relationship . . .

  No, this was definitely temporary. She needed trust, not watered-down half-truths and fictionalized parents.

  “Don’t you think it’s just a little creepy that you’ll sleep with me, and even claim to want a relationship, yet you can’t even tell me—really—about your parents?” Tess asked.

  He was silent, and she looked up at him.

  “I would love to know who you are,” she told him. Why did she bother? She should just close her computer, leap into bed with him, and redefine “coffee break.” But instead she sat there and talked at him. Did he hear any of this? “Skip your parents. Parents can suck. Parents are hard. Tell me a secret. Tell me something that you’ve never told anyone. You want to have a relationship, James? Talk to me. Otherwise, all we’re doing here is having sex.”

  He opened his mouth, and she had a moment of pure, shimmering hope. He was going to do it, and she was a big, fat liar, lying to herself about how this was only temporary, and she was only in this for the great sex. Right.

  She was so crazy in love with this man, her heart skipped a beat when he told her he used to be a smoker, for the love of God.

  But then he spoke. “Actually, right now we’re not having sex. I couldn’t help but notice.”

  At first his words didn’t make sense. And then she realized that he had made a joke.

  Correction. He’d tried to make a joke.

  One day she’d look back on this and laugh. She’d be on the phone with Peggy, her roommate from her first year of college, and she’d say, “Remember that total dickhead super-agent type I had that fling with, first time I went out of the country on assignment?”

  And Peggy’d say, “Oh yeah, the James Bond wannabe. What a jerk.”

  And she’d say, “There I was, pouring my heart out, begging him just to talk to me, and he makes some stupid joke.”

  And Peggy’d say, “Because he was probably feeling really vulnerable—thinking that if he told you who he really was, you’d reject him, and like most idiot men, he was scared to death.”