Comeback

by Doranna Durgin

  He scrambled around the end of the desk and dove into the footwell, pulling a basket of smelly old burlap sacks in after him and then tugging the top sacks free to spill over him.

  It wasn't terribly clever. It wasn't even terribly convincing. But it was all he had left this moment, this evening, after these past three days.

  Which meant whether or not Betzer discovered him depended on his conviction that the faint noise had been a basic random nighttime noise. Rats. Cicadas. Anything.

  The two men advanced in silence, splashing a pencil-thin beam of light over the ground, the crates, the buildings. Cole caught glimpses of it through the warped desk backing. They eased around the contents of the alley—all to the good, because it meant they didn't want to leave trace of their passage. They found the desk, found the basket…kicked it. It jammed into Cole, smashing up against his side—not much of a blow, but somehow it made his senses reel, made him clamp his jaws just to keep from retching his nonexistent lunch onto his knees.

  He lost track of them for a moment, knowing how fatal such a lapse could be and yet powerless to do anything about it. When he could sort out the outside world again, they were nearly on top of him, returning from a fruitless search of the street. They kicked the basket again on the way by, this time out of frustration. An involuntary tear of pain leaked from Cole's eye; he put everything he had into controlling his breathing, turning that gasp into a slow, even—silent—exhalation.

  "It doesn't matter," said the man who wasn't Betzer. "I saw that woman of his take down Buzz at the Plush. She'll find Jones if anyone does, and then we'll have them."

  "Selena." Betzer snorted. "Now there's a piece of—"

  Watch it, Cole snarled silently, his pain momentarily forgotten.

  "—work." But there was a leer in his voice all the same. And warning, too. "She'd best watch her step. It's one thing to get lucky…another thing to see action in the big league."

  "Yeah? I kinda hope she doesn't watch her step at all. I'd like to take her on, all right."

  Sonofa—

  Yeah, that's thinking straight. Burst right out of hiding and throw yourself into a fight because of insults and implications at which Selena herself would merely laugh. Down, Cole.

  And by then they were headed away, off to wherever they'd stashed their bikes. Cole waited, and waited some more. His legs cramped, and once more he gave thanks for his modest stature. As much as he moved like a larger man, he barely topped five-ten, making him of a height with Selena. He'd found it an advantage in tight scrapes like this one, but he still needed to stretch his legs now and then if he wanted them to function when called upon, so eventually he emerged from his dark sanctuary to discover the streets abandoned and the moon halfway to overhead. About ten o'clock, he decided, opting not to give away his position with the LCD flare of his watch face. He retrieved his satchel, made his careful way through the crates, silent this time. Slower, too, he noted. Excellent. Just what he needed.

  But upon reaching the open ground and then the rock formation, he made an unexpected discovery.

  Not that he could call the local station anyway, given the evidence of a leak somewhere along the line. But now that he knew Selena was here, now that simultaneous relief and worry washed through him at the thought that she was hunting for him right here, right now, he might have chanced a call to her. Even if Betzer's group had a de-scrambler working the CIA phone frequencies, no biggie—he and Selena could have talked around it. She'd catch on right away; she'd keep up with his hints of eavesdroppers and she'd cover his ass.

  He just hadn't counted on the fact that Betzer might take his phone.

  Chapter 13

  Amazingly, she slept.

  For Cole's sake, she slept hard and fast, knowing she couldn't do anything with a middle-of-the-night arrival in Oguzka. But several hours before dawn she rose, carefully folded the silk salwar kameez, and pulled on sand-colored cargos over silk long underwear and a black waffle-weave shirt in a fatigue sweater cut over a snug silk camisole.

  She had to hand it to whoever had done the packing…they knew the Berzhaani fall climate. She'd bought a mid-weight jacket to use under her vest but otherwise wore her own clothes. Dobry had been less fortunate—his torso padding and overall beefy build left him few options in this region of small, wiry men. He wore a tunic over his own dark pants and a bulky, shapeless canvas jacket over that. She did find herself appreciating the way the body padding concealed his sleek SIG Sauer, if not the delay he caused by pulling it all together.

  For Selena didn't intend to wait for the station chief to get through his debriefing and come to conclusions about whether she was right—that Cole had been there, that they'd had unwelcome lurkers as well. And if she was right about Cole's tactics, and Cole was right that the Agency was compromised…then she couldn't tell the station chief where she was going, either.

  She just needed to go there and take care of it herself.

  Believe in it. Believe that her jitters and elevated pulse and readiness to move now meant something. At the very least, that the gut reactions she'd so recently come to doubt were indeed taking her in the right direction.

  For once, Dobry seemed to think so. He was as willing as she to cut loose from the station chief, at least for now.

  Of course he is. Less credit to spread around.

  She trusted that gut feeling, too. She simply believed that Dobry's motivation would drive him to do the best possible job, and that's all she could ask from him in any event.

  They met at the hotel door and assessed each other. Selena had a backpack she'd picked up in the hotel gift shop, one with Suwan, Berzhaan embroidered in flowing stylistic script beneath a silhouette of the generic rocky ruins so endemic to the area. The pack held extra magazines for her Beretta, heavy cord, a military first-aid kit—she hadn't forgotten about that blood, oh, no—duct tape, and snack food rifled from the hotel room's pricey little collection. The rest of it she'd packed away in her shapeless coat—the monofilament, the tiny flashlight, her knives…even the leftover bottle of fizzy water. She wore a navy hijab over her shoulders, ready should it become appropriate to cover her hair.

  Dobry had his metal case. Big, shiny and conspicuous. Selena opened her mouth to tell him to leave it…and changed her mind. Yes, they needed to move quickly and quietly. But once they reached Cole and Aymal, it might well be best to change everyone's appearance. So she gave him a short nod, and he did the same in return.

  Then they went outside and contemplated the ever-present issue of transportation. To buy, rent or steal?

  "Stealing leaves a trail for anyone who knows to look," Dobry said as they stood near the entrance of the compact parking garage affiliated with the hotel.

  True. But—"I don't think we're going to find any dealerships open at this hour." Though small motorbikes would be perfect, and Selena eyed a pair of them in the special parking corral just inside the garage.

  "Rent, then," Dobry said, his voice assertive enough so Selena quit eyeing the bikes long enough to follow his gaze to a stout white car sitting in a No Parking zone. "Put that scarf on."

  "You think it's a taxi?" She did as he suggested, although she wasn't as convinced as he. Berzhaani taxis came in two standard colors—yellow and white—and the white ones often had nothing to identify themselves other than their color and size. "This time of night?"

  "Probably just dropped off some drunken Western businessman, and hasn't given up on paying customers yet," Dobry said. "And there's only one way to find out. Besides, if it's not a taxi…maybe it's someone willing to sell what they've got."

  Nothing to lose. Selena pulled the scarf up and tied it beneath her chin, the conservative look. She gave her coat of many weapons a mental inventory and followed Dobry across the street to the potential taxi.

  The driver saw them coming and put aside a magazine he'd been reading by the light of a rare streetlight. His window was cracked, and Dobry leaned over and said in his poorly accented Be
rzhaani, "Taxi?"

  The man grunted and jabbed a thumb at the back door. As Selena settled into the lightly padded back seat next to Dobry and absently shoved the stinky console ashtray closed, the man said, "Airport?"

  A reasonable assumption, even sans luggage.

  "Ashaga," Selena told him, and waited for the inevitable query about the distance and the cost. But the man was evidently quite willing to let the crazy tourists spend their money however they pleased, and in the middle of the night at that. She could see the faintly puzzled gathering of Dobry's brow; he'd thought they were going to Oguzka.

  And so they were. But better to have an actual reason for their quirky tourist whims. Selena patted his arm in a proprietary way. "I've been looking forward to the sunrise over the temple since we got here. And Oguzka is such a quaint little village."

  Ugh. She made a good tourist.

  But not so much of a tourist that she didn't figure the cab driver for having some English. He glanced at them in the tilted rearview mirror and she instantly looked aside—not quite the behavior of an American woman, but she didn't want to attract anything but a cursory curiosity, and the modest behavior would turn her from exotic to boring same-old, same-old. Dobry looked at her in surprise, as if he hadn't expected such subtlety of her.

  Get real. As if managing recalcitrant governments, local informants and building cooperative counterterrorism efforts didn't take people skills.

  Or, say…navigation skills. "This isn't the way to Oguzka," she murmured to Dobry, leaving it up to him to raise the question.

  Dobry cleared his throat. "Pardon my interruption," he said, a stock nicety in Berzhaan, "but I notice we're not headed for Ashaga."

  "Ashaga?" the man said, looking at them in the rearview mirror with his forehead wrinkled like an old hound's; he didn't slow down. "You said airport."

  Okay, maybe there'd been another reason he hadn't questioned them. He just hadn't actually listened to Selena. She should have had Dobry give the directions. Not that she wasn't perfectly capable of bowling her way through such chauvinism when the circumstances were right…but these weren't the right circumstances.

  And meanwhile they still headed for the airport.

  "Pardon," Dobry said. "We'd like to go to Ashaga."

  "Or as close as we can get," Selena murmured, since the temple wasn't actually directly accessible by vehicle.

  Dobry turned on a little Western charm. "The ride to Oguzka is long enough—we're not paying for the extra miles!"

  "Yes, yes," the driver said, and slowed to take the next turn.

  Except that it was a little too soon and a little too slow, and even as Selena caught Dobry's gaze to let him know she thought so, the car door flung open into the darkness, a space filled by the man who leaped in beside her, half on top of her. Braced against Dobry, she tried to shove him right back out—but her big, loose coat caught under the intruder and hampered her.

  Dobry went for his pistol, fumbling to reach under his jacket—and then froze, right about the time Selena felt cold metal against her cheek. "All right," she said. "We'll pay for the extra miles. No problem. Really."

  And at the same time she was thinking of the effort that had gone into this moment—posting a car outside the hotel, having someone in position—or close enough to it—to join them at this prearranged spot. She wondered…if she and Dobry hadn't walked right up to the taxi, would the driver have brought himself to their attention? Or simply followed them, waiting for the right moment to strike?

  She had the feeling these men hadn't left anything to chance. For all she knew they had someone posted inside the hotel, watching the room. Or surveillance outside the room, making Dobry's debugging sweep a moot point.

  No, they hadn't left anything to chance…and they weren't about to leave Selena or Dobry any easy openings. Who the hell were they?

  "I heard you had an immodest mouth," the newcomer said, prodding her painfully with the muzzle of his gun.

  "It's better than a dumb ass," Selena muttered in English.

  Dobry overrode her words, a little too loudly. "Take my wallet," he said, gesturing with the hand that had been reaching inside his coat, and his Goff voice held convincing fear. "Take whatever you want."

  The newcomer wasn't that easily fooled. "I have no interest in your wallet. Keep your hands where I can see them, if you want your partner to live."

  "Really, we're just friends." Selena tried to take in everything at once—their route, the man's weak spots, and any details that might indicate their motives—but she'd lost her sense of direction and her heart had taken up its warp-speed beating, making her fingers tingle and her ears pound.

  But Dobry's mouth was right beside her head, and she had no trouble hearing him over her internal distractions. "If this isn't a robbery, what do you want from us?"

  "See if you can figure it out," the driver said. "It's not like you haven't been warned, even if you did kill the messenger."

  Selena cleared her throat, trying to ignore the gun in her face. "We weren't, actually. Warned. If you're talking about the Kemeni—" been at anyone else's death recently, Selena? "—he never had a chance to say anything."

  Her backpack sat at her feet and she fought the impulse to grab it, to lay into him with the first weapon that came to hand. Her words seem to throw the man off his stride, so she ventured, "So it would be only fair that we get a warning, right?" But she figured she was just stalling the inevitable.

  When the man gave her a sneer of a grin, she was sure of it. "You should have stayed in your United States. So arrogant, to think you were in Betzer's league."

  Crammed into the corner of the narrow back seat, Dobry stiffened; his hand tightened on her arm. "If you've got something going with Betzer, that's not our problem."

  And Selena saw a glimmer of opportunity. Grabbed it. "I told you he was trouble," she snapped at Dobry. "We should never have gone to that bar in the first place!" Never mind that it had been her suggestion, making the unfairness of her words reflect in Dobry's astonishment. She didn't give him time to think it through, but roughly shook off his hand. "Now look where you've gotten us!"

  One of the oldest tricks in the book, but she hoped their cultural conditioning meant her behavior would take them aback—her volume, her assertiveness, her disrespect…

  To drive the last bit home, she twisted as much as she could within her confining coat and slapped Dobry with the hand that had been trapped between herself and their intruder. Left hand, now free…Dobry's astonishment turned to shock. C'mon, c'mon, what do you think I'm doing? Get with it!

  And maybe he did, for as the driver slowed to look back at them, driving erratically enough to take up the road, and as the backseat invader shouted an annoyed curse over stupid American women, Dobry grabbed Selena for a quick shake. "You bitch!" he roared, and that gravelly voice filled the car, completing the satisfying chaos. The gun slid down, over her ear—ow!—and jammed to a stop in her shoulder just off her neck. Selena let Dobry's rough hands shove her away, gaining just a little room to move.

  Enough room to turn, snatching the ashtray from its precarious perch to fling the ashes in the man's eyes. Taz, on the loose.

  And then she dropped down, crouching in the limited space to reach her backpack, clearing the room for Dobry to wrestle with the gun as the man bellowed in incoherent fury, clawing at his eyes. She dipped a hand into the backpack, closed it around the familiar knife hilt within, and thumbed off the clip sheath. But she withdrew the knife only enough to clear the sheath before driving up right through the backpack, into the man's soft belly all the way to the hilt. Dammit, you should have left us alone.

  He was so mad he didn't realize what she'd done, not until the jostling of the car hitting the curb twisted the knife within him. By then the shock of it had weakened his fingers and Dobry had the gun…by then Selena had jerked the knife free and twisted to lay it alongside the driver's neck even as he fought to control the car while he fumbled in the ma
gazines piled beside him.

  His own movement drove the blade into his skin; he abruptly stopped hunting for the gun now visible beneath the skewed magazines. And when the man in the backseat—she was almost sitting in his lap by now—snarled his fury and grabbed her from behind, Dobry shoved the gun in his face as Selena snapped to the driver, "Tell your buddy you'll end up dead if this knife slips."

  "Stop!" the driver instantly cried, and in that moment the car hit the curb again, hard enough to jar them to a stop—for him to feel the cut of the knife again. "No, no, don't—!"

  "Calm down," she told him crossly. "It's only a scratch. And it'll stay that way if you get out of the car. Get your buddy, too."

  The driver fumbled for his seat belt, excruciatingly careful to keep his neck still. "Parvaiz?" he asked, his voice pitched high.

  His partner muttered something angry and unintelligible, clutching his belly. "Wait," Dobry said as the driver reached for the door handle. "Here's your chance to deliver your little warning. Who sent you?"

  Silence. Both men froze.

  "Look," Dobry said. "I don't care who you're afraid of. If you'd done your homework you would have known this woman was left-handed, and paid more attention. Now you're screwed." He said the last word in English, then looked to Selena.

  "Sikim," she offered.

  "Sikim," the driver repeated under his breath, in full agreement.

  "Your problem," she told him. "Because all we have to do is stall, and your pal probably won't make it." The part of her that hadn't meant to twist the knife winced in guilt. And the rest of her knew she'd been fighting for her life, and had only turned the tables. "You comfortable, Goff? Because I could stay like this for a while." Not at all the truth, not with a cramp already starting in her thigh and her arm about to get unsteady from the awkward angle at which she held the knife.

  But it didn't matter, not as long as they believed her.

  And the man with blood seeping out of his belly believed her. "Arachne," he said hoarsely, and then cleared his throat to try again. "Arachne."