“Yes?”
“I was going to take them to wash.”
“In a backpack?”
Stupid fucking idiot. “Yes.”
“To the washing machine downstairs?”
She closed her eyes as she nodded. She knew he didn’t believe her. He wasn’t a fool.
“Is there something wrong with the laundry basket?”
Maybe he’ll buy that baby brain syndrome thing my sisters talked about. “I got a little confused. Couldn’t remember where it was. Hormones or something.”
“You couldn’t remember that the laundry basket was in the laundry hamper? In the bathroom? Where you put your clothes every night?”
She sat on the edge of the bed and let the tears of frustration fall.
“Your mother warned me about this, you know.”
Hazaar looked up, shocked that her mother had been speaking to Yasar about such intimate things as pregnancy, but she was grateful. She smiled, wishing she would see her mother again to thank her. “She did?”
He nodded and sat next to her. “Yes. She called me on Wednesday. While your father was bringing you home.”
“That was nice of her. It must have been an awkward conversation.” She remembered the uncomfortable conversation just before her wedding when her mother had tried to discuss the events of the wedding night. She could scarcely imagine her mother talking to him about her pregnancy and what to expect from her throughout it.
“Yes, it was. But I am very pleased that she had the courage to do so. It takes a strong person to do the right thing for one’s family, no matter how awkward you may feel about it. Don’t you think?”
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. “Yes, she’s a very good mother.”
He nodded and took hold of her hand. “Yes, you were blessed when Allah granted you Nisrin as your mother.”
“Yes.”
“She talked to me for a long time on Wednesday. Told me many things. She is a very…knowledgeable woman, your mother.”
There was a strange look in his eye as he said it and something registered in Hazaar’s mind. She remembered the noise outside the garage door on Wednesday afternoon and her pulse rocketed. “And exactly how knowledgeable is my mother, Yasar?”
His grip on her hand tightened. “She was knowledgeable enough to tell me that you were planning to take my child from me, Hazaar.”
Fuck.
“She was knowledgeable enough to know what a poor decision this would be for you.” He squeezed her hand tighter. “And that your father was planning to help you.” He pushed the sleeve of her blouse up her arm. “She knows how much shame you were going to bring to the family, Hazaar.”
“No, Yasar, she’s wrong.”
“You call your own mother a liar?” He pulled a syringe from his pocket and pulled the needle cap off with his teeth.
“No, never. She must have misunderstood.” She tried to pull her arm away, but his grip on her wrist was too strong.
He shook his head sadly. “I don’t think so.” He shook the syringe and she watched in morbid curiosity as the bubbles rose to the top. “She told me that today is the day you planned to leave this house, my darling, and not return.”
“It must have been some kind of mistake. My father and I talked about the baby crib he’s making. We were going to look at paint for it today. That’s where we’re going. That’s what we were talking about.” She sprang to her feet and tried to pull her arm from his grasp.
“If you keep still, I can make this less painful for you.”
She twisted and turned in his grasp, and hoped that every movement prevented him from being able to inject whatever was in the syringe into her body. She didn’t know what it was. She didn’t want to; she didn’t need to. All she knew was that whatever it was would render her unable to escape, and that was all the motivation she needed to utilize everything at her disposal to ensure she got away from him.
She couldn’t pull free of his grip, so she tried to run, hoping that the momentum would shock him enough to loosen his grasp. Instead, he allowed it to haul him to his feet and then he caged her against the wall.
“Don’t hurt the baby, please.”
“I have no intention of hurting my child. Hold still and I won’t hurt you either.”
“No.” She landed a knee to his groin. She curled her fingers and gouged at his face.
Yasar howled, wrapped his arms around her waist, and pushed her onto the bed. She lay trapped beneath his body weight, her wrists pinned above her head in one of his large hands, while he cupped himself with the other. His eyes watered and his face was scarlet as she struggled beneath him. She kicked at his shins, twisted her body trying to buck him off, and even tried to bite his shoulder in desperation, but he didn’t move. He kept her pinned to the bed and let her wear herself out. There was no escape.
He leaned in close and whispered, “You are mine. You are my wife. You are carrying my baby, and I will look after you.” He lifted up enough that she could see his face clearly. “I vowed to protect you and to take responsibility for you for the rest of our lives. And I will do that. No matter what.” He stretched over to the nightstand and grabbed the syringe. She hadn’t seen him put it there before, but it didn’t matter. “I wanted to love you, Hazaar.” He held the syringe up and squirted out the bubbles. “We could have been happy. I cared for you. I would have given you everything you could have wanted in a husband.” He gripped the syringe barrel between his teeth and ripped the blouse sleeve to expose her upper arm. “We could have lived here and been happy, and perhaps in time you could have taught your music. Maybe you could have learned to love me. Was I not good to you?”
“Yes, you were, Yasar.”
“Did I not try to please you?”
“Yes, you did. You tried very hard.”
“Then why could you not give us a chance? Why must you betray me like this? I would have given you the world.” His gaze shifted from her face to her arm. He looked genuinely puzzled.
“Please don’t do this.”
“I didn’t do this, Hazaar. You did. All you had to do was be a good wife, a good mother, and I would have taken care of everything else for you. I would have shared my world with you.”
“I didn’t want you to take care of everything for me, Yasar.”
“You wanted to do it for yourself, is that it? That is why you were going to betray me? To steal my child? To be independent?”
“No.” She tried to pull her arms free again. “I wanted to be away from you for our child. To save my baby from all this.”
“I don’t understand, Hazaar, from all what? A father who will love the very ground they walk upon? Who will give them everything they could ever desire? Who will teach them to be strong, good Muslims—”
“And drug smugglers or bartering tools to grow your business for yourself and your sons.”
He stared at her, his head cocked to one side. “You think I’m not good enough for you? For our children? That our culture, our religion, is beneath you and your Westernized bastardized idea of Islam?” He sneered at her. “You have no idea what it is to be a good Muslim wife. You have no idea what we have come from, my family and I.” He jabbed the syringe into her upper arm and she cried out. “But you will learn. Intramuscular injection, my darling.” He spat the words in her face. “I didn’t need a vein.” He pushed the plunger. “Just bare skin.”
“The baby…” Her arm felt heavy and a warm feeling spread from the injection site.
“Will be just fine.” He pulled the needle from her arm and dropped it back on the bedside table. “I will be here to protect my baby. Always.”
The heavy feeling in her arm spread on the wings of the soothing warmth that suffused her body. She felt like she’d been submerged in warm water, floating peacefully along the current as he moved her and dressed her.
She knew she was drifting in and out of consciousness, for each time she opened her eyes the landscape was something new and une
xpected. Her bedroom morphed to Yasar’s car in the blink of an eye, and in the next she was at the airport. Her brain felt sluggish, unable to keep up with the way events were changing around her, and she knew it was the drug. She just hoped that he would have to let it wear off a little so that she could walk through the security gates. Even just a little less of the drug in her system and she would call for help, scream, anything to call attention to herself.
She hadn’t realized that she was in a wheelchair until he pushed her toward the check in desk and the woman stood up to look at her, rather than expecting her to stand so she could check her passport. Yasar was smiling at the woman as he handed her a piece of paper.
“The doctor has said that she is fit to fly, as you can see.” He pointed at the page as she read it. “Unfortunately, the pain of her condition means she isn’t always very communicative due to the amount of painkillers she has to take.”
“And what is her condition, sir?”
Very good question, lady. I don’t have a medical condition. It’s a fake. Call the practice. Call the doctor. She wanted to shout. In her head, she was screaming every word, but nothing came out. Her mouth refused to move, and her arms were too heavy to lift.
“She has cancer.” He smiled sadly. “She wants to go home for her final days.”
Home? Where the fuck is he taking me?
“That’s so beautiful.” Hazaar could hear her fingers flying over the keyboard and a printer spitting out boarding cards and luggage tags.
Check the passport, you stupid woman. You’ll see I’m from England.
“Here are your tickets, sir. Flight PKA96 to Islamabad will be departing at two p.m. from gate number twelve. If you try to get there about one o’clock, the girls on the door will get you and your wife on before the rush.”
“That’s wonderful. Thank you for your help.”
“No problem, sir. If you keep that letter handy when you’re going through security, they’ll help you there.”
“Excellent. You’ve been most helpful.” He put his bag over his shoulder and wheeled her away from the desk and toward the security gate. He leaned over her as if to adjust her clothing and whispered in her ear. “It didn’t have to be like this, Hazaar. If you hadn’t betrayed me, it could have been so different.” She felt the sting of another needle in her upper arm and she couldn’t believe his audacity. “I know what you’re thinking. That anyone could see me do that to you here, right?” He squatted and tucked a blanket around her legs. He slid a small box behind her back. “It’s an insulin pen filled with my own special mixture. Even if they saw, no one would question me giving my sick wife her medicine. I have the doctor’s note to prove it.” He patted his pocket. “It’s good to have connections in my business. You never know when you might need a new passport.” He waved a new Pakistani passport in front of her face, her picture showing clearly. “A new birth certificate.” Another piece of paper. “And a doctor’s medical notice.” He smiled and slipped them all back in his pocket.
Her eyelids grew heavy as she looked at him, and she could feel her head sinking onto her chest.
“Sleep, my darling. When you wake, you’ll be at your new home.”
Her eyelids closed and the heavy slumber claimed her before the tears had dried on her cheeks.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Pakistan, today
Charlie jumped and turned as a hand touched her shoulder.
“Sorry. You stopped responding, so Al sent me to come and see what’s wrong.” Kenzie sat on the bench beside her, the spot where Yasar had sat only a few minutes earlier.
“I didn’t hear him.”
Kenzie pointed at the earpiece on her lap. “Well, I know his voice carries, but you’ll still need that to hear him while you’re in here.”
“Damn it, is he pissed?”
“A bit.”
“Shit.” She started to push up off the bench, but Kenzie took hold of her shoulder.
“Just give it a second. I can see how pale you are.”
“We don’t have time. We only have nine hours until sunset and—”
“And rushing a man like Yasar won’t get him to agree to your position.”
“It’s all the time we have. You heard that phone call. He said just after sunset. That’s seven p.m., Kenzie.”
“I know. But nine hours may not be long enough to get him to agree to let her go. You know that, don’t you?”
Charlie didn’t want to admit it, but she couldn’t deny it either.
“What’s your backup plan?”
“Backup?”
“Yes. You know, the one you try when the other one fails.” Kenzie smiled the crooked little sarcastic smile she had.
“I know what you mean, but we don’t have time to form another negotiation strategy. We agreed this was the only way that we could make it work.”
“True. If this fails, there is no other negotiation. So what are you planning to do next?”
Charlie closed her eyes and leaned against the bench. She knew what Kenzie was hinting at, but what she didn’t know was whether Al had sent her in to find out if she would go in to try to save Hazaar without sanction and have her taken off the case. She sighed heavily and decided there was only one way to find out.
“Did Al send you in to try to profile me, Kenzie?”
She laughed. “Nope.” She dropped a small bag on her lap. “He sent me in to tell you that he’s working on plan B.”
“What’s this?” She pointed to the bag.
“New earpiece.” She took the old one and deactivated it. “Luke was concerned that Yasar may have been able to get a reverse trace on your line. He did explain it, but it sounded like mumbo jumbo to me so I chose to forget it all. He’ll enjoy being able to explain it all to you himself later.”
Charlie laughed. “You have a way with people, Kenzie.”
“I know.” She sighed. “It’s a curse.”
She followed Kenzie out of the museum and across the road to the van. Al was in the back, pointing to a map on one of the terminals as Luke watched him intently.
“We need to switch this van for a couple of Jeeps. If he goes off-road, we’re gonna need to be able to follow him. This thing can’t handle that terrain.” He flipped to another screen. “Luke, can you get two equipped and ready to follow a GPS tracker? We’ll find a way to get them on the van.”
“No problem. If you can get me the Jeeps, I’ll need an hour, tops.”
“You’re going to follow the van and try to get her from Tazim?” Charlie stared at him. “That’s your plan B?”
“No. That’s plan C.” Luke grinned.
“Plan B is where we try to get into the house while Yasar and Tazim are out and then we can make sure that we have all of them safe, Amira included,” Al said.
“Is there a safe house for her?”
“I’ve got Hillary looking for one.” He pointed to another screen. “This is a satellite image of the house. And the overlay is the layout, as far as we can tell.”
The two-story building was centred around a courtyard. The kitchen and bathrooms were easy to see on the schematic, but the layout of the other rooms was open to suggestion.
“Where’d you get all this?”
“Between Hillary and the boy wonder over there, all I had to do was ask.” He shrugged. “Seems they already had it waiting for me to say the word.”
“JJ sanctioned this?”
Al laughed. “JJ’s exact words were, ‘I don’t know anything about you going in the house to help those women, or failing that, heading out toward the mountains to help anyone stranded when the tires on their van blow out.’”
Charlie laughed. “It’s his plan?”
“This isn’t official, Charlie. We have no jurisdiction and no government backup. We can try the old diplomatic immunity, but honestly,” he said, “if this goes wrong, we could all go to a Pakistani prison.”
Charlie shuddered and shook her head. “No. I can’t let you take tha
t chance.”
“You aren’t letting us, Charlie. You aren’t asking. We’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “I can’t speak for everyone else’s reason in this, kiddo, but I can tell you that there have been too many times I’ve had to sit back and let too many women suffer when I could have done more.”
“It’s not as simple as that, Al.” They were her friends, and together they had saved lives and given hope to so many. Now they were offering the same to her, and to Hazaar.
“No, it isn’t. But maybe it should be.” She didn’t realize she was crying until he wiped his thumbs across her cheeks. “This one time, it can be.”
“You’re risking your lives.”
“Only if we get caught, and Wonder Woman over there assures me she could do this on her own, in her sleep, and still get away with it. So we should be laughing.”
“Al, I’ve got that thermal imaging layer you wanted,” Luke said.
“Nice. Can you overlay it on the schematic?”
“Your wish is my command, Master.” The screen flickered, and the new image came up. The house now had five multicoloured blobs of differing sizes in varying parts of the house, moving at different speeds and in different directions. There was one that didn’t move at all, and the colours were more subdued than the others, varying shades of blue, green, and yellow.
“How can we tell who’s who?”
“We can take a couple of educated guesses based on what we know of the family unit living in this place.” Al pointed to the smallest spot. “This is likely to be the little girl. We know she’s about two and would need to be cared for, so the heat signature with her is most likely to be Amira, and these other two are probably Yasar and Tazim.” He pointed to the blue-green shape. “Based on what Amira said about Hazaar being kept in the cellar, her feet being burned, and the other injuries, it’s very likely that this is her. This person hasn’t moved, and the fact that she’s below ground level could account for the lower thermal reading.”
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