Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

“Actually, I thought it was working rather well. At least until I publicly insulted you.”

  “That’s not what this is about,” she told him. “It’s about me wanting you to be someone you’re not. I love you, Jimmy, but I want to change you, and that’s . . . it’s just plain stupid. And so is being in a relationship with someone that I know—I know—will hammer me emotionally, someone who can’t—not won’t, can’t—give me what I need.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

  “Good,” she said, completely unsurprised at his total lack of response to her heartfelt words. It was nothing more than she’d expected.

  But then he did surprise her. He lowered his voice. “Don’t take the Agency field position. The bureaucracy will drive you nuts. Stay with Tom’s team. I know it’s where you really want to be, Tess, and . . . I was already planning on leaving. This assignment—it was really just one last favor to Deck.”

  “But . . .” Tess knew she shouldn’t ask, she couldn’t ask. That battery was going to run out far too quickly, and Jimmy and Deck were sitting in a twenty-eight-story death trap.

  “Tell me what to do,” Jimmy said, and they got to work.

  The Kazabek Grande used good old-fashioned locks to ensure their guests’ privacy. As Nash acted as the channel between Tess and the hotel computer, Decker located a master key.

  And a map of the hotel.

  It was enormous, four connected buildings constructed in a classic K-stani style, around a completely enclosed and private center courtyard.

  Back when Decker first came to Kazbekistan, that courtyard had been luxurious, with a swimming pool and lounge chairs and even a bar serving tropical drinks. There had been palm trees and lush greenery, flowers everywhere.

  Now the pool was bone dry, the trees brown, the lounge chairs broken and bent, their bright colors long since faded.

  “Suite 933, West Tower,” Nash announced, snapping his phone shut.

  They immediately headed through the eerily empty lobby to the stairs marked WEST in seven different languages. Nash wanted to get up there and get out as quickly as possible.

  “Not only was the call to Nizami’s cell phone billed to 933, but the hotel also received a special delivery from the Kazabek Kidney Center. The room was being used by one Mr. Ifran Aklamash Umarah. Tess is passing that name along to Tom Paoletti and the client.”

  “Good.” It was possible Sayid had used that alias before. Even though the terrorist leader was dead, it would still be useful to find out where he’d been and whom he’d talked to recently.

  As they took the stairs up and up and up, penlights out, Nash was quiet, almost pensive.

  He said some rather choice words though, when, upon hitting the ninth floor, a sign on the wall indicated that 933 was all the way down at the end of the dark hallway.

  The key did the trick. The suite was as dark as the hall, but at least there were windows.

  Jimmy went in first, flashing his light quickly around the sitting room and stepping briefly into the bedroom, making sure they truly were alone. He crossed to the windows, peeked out, then opened the curtains only a fraction of an inch.

  “Room faces the street,” he told Decker as he went back into the bedroom to do the same thing at that window.

  It wouldn’t do to have someone standing down on the street—one of Bashir’s men, for example—notice that a pair of rooms on the ninth floor suddenly had their curtains open.

  Still, the last rays of the setting sun streamed in through that narrow slit, providing just enough light for them to see.

  Decker quickly found the room’s safe in the bedroom. It was unoriginally placed behind an oil painting of an ocean sunset.

  He set to work as Nash methodically searched the room, sticking any papers he found into his pack.

  Murphy—bless his many talents—had managed to scrounge up some C4 before he was injured. There wasn’t much of the explosive, but Deck didn’t need a lot. With proper placement, like on the hinges—“This thing has its hinges on the outside,” he called to Nash, who laughed at the design flaw—it would pop open this safe. He cut a fuse, lit a match.

  “Fire in the hole,” he warned Nash as he stepped back.

  Bang. It hardly made more noise than a popped brown-paper lunch bag.

  And the safe hung open.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Nash came to look. “Whoa.”

  A laptop—probably the laptop, thank you, Jesus—sat on top of stacks and stacks of neatly packaged, crisply new United States currency. Hundreds and twenties. Mostly twenties. Old style—all green.

  “Is it real?” Nash grabbed a pack, pulled out a bill, and held it up to the light. “Not even close. A ten-year-old would know this is a fake.”

  Decker stashed the laptop in his pack. It was an older model and nearly as heavy as that battery they’d lugged from Rivka’s. “What if that ten-year-old—or forty-year-old—hadn’t seen U.S. currency in years?” he asked. As was the case for a large portion of the population of K-stan.

  “Then it might look pretty damn real. What do you think Sayid was here to buy?” Nash helped him pull the counterfeit money out of the safe and jam it into their bags.

  “If we’re lucky, he’s kept some sort of diary or log on his laptop,” Decker said.

  “Dear Diary,” Nash said. “Today I came to Kazabek to purchase a rocket launcher. It’s only slightly used, and at twenty thousand dollars it’s quite a good deal. Especially considering the money I’m using cost only fifty dollars to make. Although, gosh darn it, I sure use up that green ink in my printer cartridge awfully fast.”

  Nash’s phone rang. “Hey,” he said, answering it. He stuck it between his ear and shoulder as they continued searching the room. “Good timing. Guess what Deck just put in his backpack?”

  It would be bad form to assume the laptop in the safe was the laptop they wanted, and walk away without checking carefully beneath the king-sized bed.

  “Shit.”

  Deck looked up. He didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Schroeder’s gone,” Nash reported to Decker. He paused, listening again. “Tess went down to check on him and Khalid, found Khalid in the barn. The kid was tied up and gagged so he wouldn’t run and tell Tess that Schroeder was leaving. She thinks the prick’s probably on his way over here. Khalid said he said something about wanting to get photos here at the hotel.” He paused.

  Photos. Decker rolled his eyes. God save them from reporters.

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who didn’t anticipate it, Tess. Dave should be back soon, and we will, too. Really, don’t beat yourself up over this. We’re not in any danger. There’s no way he’ll find the tunnel. Just . . . Yeah. Stay cool. We’re on our way.”

  And they were. Nash pocketed his phone as they shouldered their bags and went out into the hall. “I am so ready to be out of here.”

  Decker followed him into the stairwell.

  Eighth floor, seventh floor, sixth floor, fifth. As they hit the fourth, approaching the lobby, they both slowed slightly, just enough to be sure they were moving soundlessly.

  Nash covered his penlight so it was little more than a glow in his hand. Decker turned his off, slipped it into his pocket.

  As they drew closer to the door leading out into the lobby, Nash held up his hand. Stop. His light went off, too, since the door was ajar and the dim twilight from the lobby windows came in through the crack.

  He looked back at Deck, who nodded. Yeah, he’d noticed it, too. It wasn’t so much that he’d heard something as felt it.

  A microscopic change in atmospheric pressure due to additional bodies within an enclosed space.

  Or the invisible, soundless wake that continued to disrupt the air molecules long after someone had stopped moving.

  Or an electrical current that came from another living being. Or lots of other living beings.

  Nash already had his sidearm out and held at ready.

  And then they he
ard it. Snick.

  Most people, even when trying to be silent, just couldn’t hold completely still for very long.

  There was definitely someone out there.

  Again a snick, followed by an absolutely unmistakable rustle.

  Deck signaled to Nash—slowly, carefully, so as to disturb as few oxygen molecules as possible. Fall back.

  They went up the stairs, touching as little of the steps with the soles of their shoes as humanly possible.

  They had barely gone a half a floor when it happened.

  Decker gave Nash a What the fuck? look, but then instantly realized what it was.

  Aftershock.

  It started as a low rumble and worked its way up to a definite brain-rattling shake.

  Oh, boy. Hell of a time to be in a building that was on the verge of collapse.

  Apparently whoever was waiting for them in the lobby felt the same way. They all started talking—a babble of voices, a variety of dialects, but the same general message. We have to get the hell out of here.

  Decker knew Nash was thinking the same thing. But, Up, Deck signaled. He grabbed his penlight and switched it on, covering the bulb the way Nash had before, making sure there was enough light to be seen. He signaled again. Go up.

  Nash went, but he didn’t want to. “They’re about to clear out,” he whispered. “If we wait . . .”

  In the lobby, whoever was in charge spoke over the voices. “Hold steady! This will bring them down to us.”

  Something crashed—it sounded like one of the smaller chandeliers breaking free and hitting the tile floor—and there was a shout. “Here they come! From the South Tower!”

  And then a voice speaking English: “It’s an ambush—they’ve been following me for days—Decker, look out!”

  There was a ripping sound—an automatic weapon being fired. Who the hell were they shooting at?

  “That was Will Schroeder,” Nash realized. “Shit, did they kill him? If they didn’t, I’m fucking gonna. I can’t believe he led them here.”

  Another shout in the local dialect. “That wasn’t them, idiot! There’s no one over there!”

  “Six-man squads, each stairwell, now! Go!” Deck heard the command, and he and Nash broke into a full run, light bobbing. No need to be quiet any longer.

  Nash, however, had his phone out. “Come on,” he said as he attempted to dial. “Ah, Christ, don’t fuck with me now.”

  It was slowing him down. “Come on, Nash, move.”

  “God damn it! Deck! Check your phone!” Nash was the closest to wild-eyed that Decker had ever seen him. “Is it working?”

  And he knew what Nash was thinking. Tess. If what Will had shouted was true—that he’d been under surveillance for days—then he’d probably been followed when he went to see them at Rivka’s house.

  Where Tess was now.

  Alone.

  Decker checked his phone. “No.”

  “We have to get back there, and we’re going up!”

  Decker knew what Nash was thinking. Up, with no chance of a helo waiting there to pull them off the roof.

  “Dave’s probably back by now,” Decker told him. Dave—and Sophia. Jesus. If Rivka’s house was being watched—or worse, if everyone in there was brought in for questioning . . .

  “Yeah,” Nash said. “Yeah. Dave’s probably . . .”

  He’d pocketed his phone and was using his arms to help pull himself more quickly up the stairs. Which was good, because Decker could hear the sound of a squad of soldiers following not more than five or six flights below.

  The aftershock was over and the hotel still stood.

  Someone shouted. “Here, they’re in here!”

  Good, draw ’em all into this stairwell.

  “What’s Dave going to be able to do?” Nash asked Decker.

  “I don’t know,” Deck said. “But he’s Dave, he’ll do something.”

  “Where the hell are we going?”

  That Decker did know. “Seventeenth floor.”

  Nash knew instantly why they were going there. “Suite 1712,” he said. “North. North. We’re in the wrong freaking tower!”

  Back in the early 1970s, when the Grande was brand-new, you could make a full circuit of the hotel on each floor, passing from the corridor in the West Tower to the one in the North Tower to the East Tower to the South, and then finally back again to the West.

  Each tower had its own elevator, as well as a stairwell, but if you were staying, say, in 1712 in the North Tower, you could take any elevator—North, South, East, or West—and still find your way to your room. Eventually.

  But in the late ’80s, trouble came to town and often visited the Grande in the form of armed robberies and kidnappings of its wealthy guests. The hotel management erected walls on each floor between the towers, to restrict movement inside the hotel. It was an attempt to eliminate the vast array of escape routes.

  The walls that were built to separate the towers were little more than plasterboard over a cheap frame made of two-by-fours.

  Of course all the walls in this formerly four-star hotel were ridiculously thin.

  “Deck,” Nash said again. “We’re in West—not North! We’re in the wrong tower!”

  “No such thing,” Decker told him, “when you’ve got C4 in your pocket.”

  Jimmy hated this.

  But as much as he hated this, as frightened as he was about Tess’s safety, as freaked out as he was by the thought of this building coming down on his head, he loved watching Decker work.

  The man was relentlessly cool under pressure.

  They came out of the stairwell on the seventeenth floor, and Decker shone his penlight to the left without hesitation. “This way.”

  Was it . . . ? Yes.

  They ran to the end of the hall, but Decker didn’t blow a hole in that flimsy wall that had been constructed directly on top of the diamond-patterned corridor carpeting.

  Instead he used the pass key he’d lifted from the front desk to unlock the door to the last room on the right.

  They went inside and closed the door behind them.

  The goons giving chase wouldn’t realize they’d lost them until they hit the roof.

  At that point, they’d probably start a room to room search, but they’d restrict it to the West Tower.

  Of course, by the time they got down to the seventeenth floor, Decker and Jimmy would be long gone.

  By the time the soldiers got to the seventeenth floor, Jimmy would be back at Rivka’s, where Tess would be waiting, safe and sound.

  Tess, who loved him, but who recognized that he was poison and thus didn’t want to be with him.

  Jimmy didn’t blame her. If he could have, he would have run away from himself a long time ago.

  Damn it, wasn’t that what he had done when he joined the Agency?

  No. They’d changed his name, but they hadn’t changed who he was.

  Decker was standing on the bed, tapping on the wall behind it, searching for the studs. He seemed satisfied as he stepped back onto the floor. “Help me move this.”

  Jimmy grabbed one side of the metal bedframe, and together they pulled the mattress and box spring away from the wall.

  Deck knelt on the floor, tapped the walls one more time to make sure he’d gotten it right. He took from his pocket the remainder of the C4 explosives he’d used to blow the safe in Sayid’s room and went to work.

  If there was one thing Deck was good at, it was blowing shit up. It was one of those special Navy SEAL skills.

  Jimmy took out his phone. Nothing. “Fuck.”

  “Aftershock probably knocked over the dish I put upstairs,” Decker said, lighting the fuse. “We’ll be out of here soon.” He stood up, moved back. “Fire in the hole.”

  Pop.

  Only a SEAL could blow something up relatively quietly.

  Decker had blown a neat little hole in the wall, near the baseboard. Using his foot, he kicked out more of the plasterboard, making it big enough fo
r them to squeeze through.

  “Help me,” he said again, and Jimmy grabbed one side of the bed, moving it back in place, against the wall.

  Talk about brilliant.

  Someone coming in to give the room a cursory look would never see the hole.

  Jimmy went first, under the bed, through the hole, and into the adjoining room—which was in the North Tower. As was suite 1712, which held the elevator shaft leading down into the tunnel that would take them safely back to the financial district.

  And then back to Rivka’s.

  And Tess.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tess was in the kitchen with Khalid when the earth started to shake.

  It was worse than usual, so she grabbed the boy, pulling him with her into the doorway to the yard, praying that this was just an aftershock, that this wasn’t another massive quake.

  Please, dear God, don’t let the Grande Hotel fall. . . .

  She’d spoken to Jimmy a matter of minutes ago. There was no way they could already have moved out of the hotel complex. Not yet.

  Shaken off the kitchen table, a pan fell with a clatter, and the glasses clinked in the cabinet.

  Thankfully, whatever it was, it didn’t last long.

  “Are you all right?” Tess asked Khalid, who nodded.

  She grabbed one of the lanterns, still swinging from its hook, and ran swiftly upstairs, passing Rivka on the landing.

  Guldana was spending the night with their eldest daughter, whose husband had broken his leg in the quake and was still in the hospital, in traction.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him as she went by.

  “Sadly, I’m growing used to being shaken about.”

  Cr-r-r-ack! It started with a single explosion in the distance, but didn’t stop there. It kept going, rumbling and roaring like thunder gone mad.

  It was the kind of sound the Kazabek Grande Hotel might make as it collapsed.

  Tess couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. “Is that from the south or north?” she asked, her heart in her throat. Please, God, no . . .

  Rivka only shook his head.

  She ran for the bedroom. “Searching for service . . .” her phone told her.

  She grabbed the robe and burka she’d been given at the police station, grabbed the bag that held the last portable sat-dish they’d brought with them.