Checkmate
Checkmate
Doranna Durgin
A Middle Eastern capitol building has been captured by insurgents. The prime minister, his staff and a group of visiting college students have become disposable hostages. But what the rebels don't know is that someone is still loose in the building…. FBI legal attaché Selena Jones took the foreign post when her marriage hit the rocks. Now she's narrowly escaped becoming a hostage–but she's trapped. She has just hours to find out what the rebels are up to and outsmart their compelling leader. And her lone contact to the outside world is the one man she swore never to trust again….
Only the extraordinary women of Athena Academy could create Oracle—a covert intelligence organization so secret that not even its members know who else belongs. Now it’s up to three top agents to bring down the enemies who threaten all they’ve sworn to protect….
Kim Valenti:
An NSA cryptologist by day, this analytical genius and expert code breaker is the key to stopping a deadly bomb.
COUNTDOWN by Ruth Wind
Diana Lockworth:
With only twenty-four hours until the president’s inauguration, can this army intelligence captain thwart an attempt to assassinate him?
TARGET by Cindy Dees
Selena Jones:
Used to ensuring international peace, the FBI legal attaché had her biggest assignment yet—outsmarting a rebel leader to save hostages abroad.
CHECKMATE by Doranna Durgin
ATHENA FORCE: Chosen for their talents. Trained to be the best. Expected to change the world.
Checkmate
Doranna Durgin
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
DORANNA DURGIN
spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. After obtaining a degree in wildlife illustration and environmental education, she spent many years deep in the Appalachian Mountains. When she emerged, it was as a writer who found herself irrevocably tied to the natural world and its creatures—and with a new touchstone to the rugged spirit that helped settle the area and which she instills in her characters.
Doranna’s first published fantasy novel received the 1995 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award for the best first book in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. She now has fifteen novels of eclectic genres on the shelves and more on the way. Most recently she’s leaped gleefully into the world of action-romance. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds Web pages, wanders around outside with a camera and works with horses and dogs. There’s a Lipizzan in her backyard, a mountain looming outside her office window, a pack of agility dogs romping in the house and a laptop sitting on her desk—and that’s just the way she likes it. You can find a complete list of titles at www.doranna.net along with scoops about new projects, lots of silly photos and a line to her SFF Net newsgroup.
Thanks to William Sanders and Robert Brown for wicked cool gun trivia, and to Judith Byorick for finding the inadvertently silly bits and to Evanescence for providing Selena with a theme album. And big thanks to Catherine Mann, for making sure I got the Predator details down right!
Dedicated to survivors everywhere.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 1
B erzhaan.
What a mess. Political unrest from within, political pressures from without, a country seething with unreleased social tension and unspoken dangers.
It was exactly what Selena Shaw Jones needed. Distraction.
She stood on the crest of a rubble-strewn hill in Berzhaan and knew herself for a coward. She stood amidst the revered ruins of the Temple of Ashaga and knew she should have been at home, working things out with Cole. She shouldn’t have retreated like a wounded child, unable to face the truth. It wasn’t a reaction typical of her—of the controlled, perfectionist FBI Legal Attaché who traveled the world to develop counterterrorism programs in other countries and to create team-work between those countries and the United States. Of a woman with extensive experience and training in dangerous situations, from fraught negotiations to firefights.
Emotionally, unexpectedly wounded. And no idea how to deal with it. So Selena had indeed retreated, all the way across the ocean to the brand-new legate office in Berzhaan’s capital, Suwan. So brand-new that her support staff had not yet arrived, and she spent most of her time with the U.S. ambassador, strategizing ways to build trust with a wary Berzhaani prime minister—or with the prime minister himself, attending flashy government functions to establish her presence here.
The rest of the time she spent learning the lay of the land—figuratively and literally. It was one reason she’d come to this shrine of ruins. The other…she’d heard this was a peaceful place. A contemplative place. A place where even a distressed Special Agent might sort out her thoughts.
She looked back down the steep hill she’d just ascended, a challenging obstacle course of rocks both large enough to climb over and small enough to turn an ankle. Below, the village of Oguzka looked peaceful, unchanged by its proximity to the shrine. No tourist attractions, no shacks lining the road offering trinkets to rich Europeans and Americans. Just families, going about their lives.
As it should be. One of Selena’s jobs was to keep things this way, wherever she went.
The house closest to the foot of the hill boasted a large backyard, unenclosed. A dormant garden covered nearly a third of it. Goats stood idly in a pen at the back, and the stone-walled house boasted a tidy, weed-free exterior. Peaceful. A little boy darted around the side of the house, young enough to stumble every third step and also young enough that he didn’t care. He played with a string of scrap material, letting it flutter in the wind.
Selena’s eyes burned, unexpected and startling, almost as unexpected as the sudden closing of her throat.
He was the reason she’d come.
He was also one of the reasons she’d run.
Family. Children. Plans and hopes and visions of a future with Cole that included cribs and baby mobiles and a thousand pictures of that first crawl, that first step, of a plump little mouth forming those first words…
Selena whirled away, taking a few abrupt steps toward the temple. She carefully wiped her eyes and retied her modest and respectful head scarf against the stiff winter breeze. She refocused on surroundings of ancient stone and ancient, eternal flame. Stone walls defined the courtyard, covered with moss and lichen, their once-square edges crumbled into softness. Built against those walls, low, dark religious cells waited for the return of the pilgrims who had once flocked here. Before her, a square shrine stood stolid against the years, precisely fenestrated to reveal the eternal flame within. This, the Temple of Ashaga just outside Berzhaan’s capital city of Suwan, held the muted awe of generations. A quiet place; a revered place.
Just what she’d wanted. Needed.
Then…why wasn’t it helping?
Because it definitely wasn’t helping.
Selena deliberately turned to matters more directly at hand. Distraction. Berzhaan had wedged itself between the tumultuous Middle East and acquisitive Russia, swapping between freedom and occupation too many times in the last century. The changes made for a country in turmoil, seething with unrest and jam-packed with diplomatic complications that filled Selena Shaw Jones’s hours and let her tumble into bed exhausted, knowing she was doing her best to keep terrorism away from the little boy down below as much as from those children in the States. If only Razidae would let her build the network between their countries that would allow the communication, intelligence gathering and local counter-terrorist education that it was her job to establish….
A faint noise caught the edges of her attention. Was that—?
No. She was on edge, that was all. She’d had no way to know when Cole would return, and no intention of waiting him out in their oh-so-empty condo. She’d asked for this overseas assignment to get perspective on her life. And while she’d already earned Ambassador Dante Allori’s highly relieved respect with her ability to translate the most delicate political statements and to quietly, politely persist in her efforts to woo reluctant Prime Minister Omar Razidae, she still failed miserably in her own personal goals.
There he’d been. Her husband, kissing a beautiful woman right out in Constitution Park.
Big deal, she’d told herself. He was a CIA field officer—Jason P. JOXLEITER in the CIA’s eyes, and his friends got a kick out of calling him Jox. He was a field officer down to the silly all-caps assigned surname, and that meant putting up a front—wherever he was, whomever he was with—to suit his cover.
Except he was supposed to be out of the country. And while he never told her details of an assignment, she always knew his location. Always overseas and never with the CIA’s Foreign Services Bureau that worked U.S. turf, and she always knew just where. Then if something went haywire in the world, she knew whether to worry. It was the one stable thing in their relationship, the one thing she could always count on.
Not this time.
And how many other times had he lied? How many times had he used CIA guile against her?
Another harsh sound scraped up from the small village at the bottom of the hill. Selena turned into the wind to look down upon the picturesque area, frowning at the gusty blast that obscured any additional noises from below. After a moment in which she saw nothing out of place, she turned back to the temple, walking slowly around the shrine. She put her hands up to one of the openings, feeling the mild heat through her finely stitched black leather gloves.
It wasn’t enough to warm her. The depth of her feelings frightened her, kept her from thinking clearly.
Ironically, if the sounds she’d heard had actually been gunshots, she would have felt perfectly able to deal with them—the Athena Academy had given her that much, and more: her cache of fluently spoken languages, her self-confidence, the background to excel at Harvard Law School and then as an FBI legate assigned to situations as tricky and demanding as Berzhaan’s. The accomplishments to be tapped as an Oracle agent. Selena knew how to handle herself in court, behind a translator’s smooth detachment and in the field.
What she couldn’t seem to do was stop the way her throat constricted into tight pain at the thought of that moment in the D.C. park.
A sudden report on the wind stopped her short; she looked up from the rock-strewn path to narrow her eyes at the village below. There was no mistaking it this time. Weapons fire. Automatic weapons. Behind the house nearest to Selena, the young boy darted out across the rocky, close-cropped land to crawl between the crooked slats of a goat pen a hundred yards behind the house. The four goats there parted to accept him as if used to his presence.
An abrupt burst of activity at the back of the stone-walled house followed—the quick flurry of what looked like a woman trying to exit until rough hands hauled her back in, her shriek of protest clearly audible as it rode the wind up the hill.
Trouble. Not ordinary domestic trouble, no indeed. Kemeni rebels? And if it was, was this a calculated large-scale action, or a handful of overeager rebels causing trouble?
There was no telling. Turmoil gripped this country like a lover. Kemeni rebels—supposedly backed by the U.S., although Selena knew better—increasingly threatened Prime Minister Omar Razidae’s government. Russia had become keenly interested in this territory; they, too, were wrongly convinced that the U.S. treated with Razidae with one hand and fed arms and money to the Kemenis with the other. The Q’Rajn terrorists, convinced of the same, wanted the States out of Berzhaan altogether and had taken their fight to U.S. soil to face recent defeat at the hands of two of Selena’s Athena Academy classmates.
And then there was everyone else in the world, keeping an eye on Berzhaan’s undeveloped oil resources.
All the while, the people of Berzhaan struggled to survive, caught in the middle. And down the hill from Selena, a small boy cowered behind his unconcerned goats, probably not realizing they were truly no cover at all.
Selena did a quick weapons check. Sturdy Beretta Cougar .45 DAO in her pocket holster, several slim knives secreted at ankle, waist and right collarbone—where she could dip into her sweater from the neckline and acquire steel before any threatening agent even thought to consider whether she might be anything more than the sleek, tailored American she appeared to be. Then she headed down the hill, striding firmly in spite of the footing but not drawing attention to herself by running. As she moved, she pulled a hair band from an inner pocket of the coat and reached beneath the silk scarf to gather her long, layered hair at the nape of her neck. She drew her Beretta, holding it down at her side where the folds of the coat obscured it and she could easily keep it hidden if her concerns were for nothing.
She didn’t expect to keep it hidden.
As she neared the base of the hill and angled for the stone house, the boy darted out from behind the goats and ran into her path, babbling in his native language so quickly—with a young child’s creative use of words—as to challenge even her excellent Berzhaani language skills. She put a finger to her lips and then his, startling the child, and in that moment of silence she said, “Slower, bibcha.”
His eyes widened with surprise all over again; his gaze darted over her from head to toe, taking in her attire and her head scarf, her appearance—dark blue-green eyes, razor-cut chestnut bangs emerging from the scarf and all-American features—and trying to reconcile it all with her use of his own language. She crouched before him, her gun still lost in the black leather folds of her coat. “Tell me,” she said. “Why are you frightened?”
He touched the bright red leather piping on the front edge of the coat, following it briefly with his finger as if to confirm this was indeed something out of his ken—but his round, light tea-colored little face with its pointed chin looked about to crumple.
“There, now,” Selena said, fairly brusquely, fighting her natural inclination to soothe him—it would only release those tears, and then she’d learn nothing. “When a brave young man such as yourself runs to greet me, I must listen. What have you to say?”
The boy hovered on the edge of tears for another moment—and indeed, one slipped out to track its way down the baby fat of his cheek. But he pressed his lips together and then said, “Bad men are in the house. Don’t go in there! Auntie told me to run and hide, just like we practiced.”
“I saw you.” Selena couldn’t stop herself from wiping away that single tear where it had trickled out part-way down his face. “You hid very well. Do you think you can do it again?”
“With Spotty and Eleny?”
She could only assume these were two of the goats. “Farther,” she said. “In the temple, where the pilgrims used to sleep when they stayed there.”
He shook his head, flinching at the sound of breaking pottery from within the house. “I’m not allowed—”
“This once, you are,” she told him.
“Mama said—”
She put her finger to her lips again, and gave him a slow, reassuring smile. “I’ll tell her it was my fault.”
He returned a solemn, dark-eyed look, lower lip protruding slightly with the effort of his decision. Selena all but held her breath, waiting, knowing he might well be unable to trust her, as much as he’d been willing to warn her. The Beretta felt solid and familiar in her hand, and just as suddenly as if it could not possibly belong there while she spoke to this child.
Abruptly he bit his lip and nodded. “Will you hide, too?”
“Yes.” She stood; the wind tugged at her open coat. She wished she could pull off her sweater to give him—he wore only a thin wool jacket over his own baggy, loosely knit sweater—but to do so would reveal her knives and her gun, a revelation likely to break the tenuous connection between them. “But I’m going to hide somewhere else, somewhere I can get help for your people.”
This made no sense, of course. But she hoped he would grab for the reassurance without working through the logic. She didn’t give him much time to think about it, not as a muted cry reached her from the still-cracked back door. “Go now!” She pointed up the hill. “As fast as you can! Someone will come for you when it is safe.”
This time. For this child truly to be safe, Selena would have to accomplish much more than this chance, unexpected interference with one besieged house.
After the briefest hesitation, the boy sprinted away, his barely coordinated limbs putting much effort into the action. So young…
Selena smoothed her scowl away and reached for focus. She was on the job now, albeit in a fashion never formally acknowledged. She eased up to the side of the house, up to the small window with open shutters on the outside and a film of curtains covering the glass from the inside. She winced as something else within the house broke, something wooden and splintering this time, followed by another cry of fear. The window showed her little…a gash of sunlight over the floor where the front door had been left open, a chair overturned against the wall, a bread plate smashed near the entrance to a back room. No one in sight. Great. She’d have to slink around and hope another window would reveal how many intruders had—
A stutter of automatic weapons fire sounded from down the street. More than just this one house at stake. And from within, a woman screamed, a full-bodied shriek of fear and denial. No more time. Start with this house, worry about the rest later. She moved swiftly to the front corner of the house, confirmed that no one waited out front and made it to the doorway itself. A quick peek-retreat revealed the main room of the house to be abandoned. From within the room beyond, a man shouted harsh demands for cooperation and the sharp slap of hand against flesh struck Selena’s ears. Bastard. Of course he was going to rape her. Of course. And in this society where the conservative chador was no longer required by law but still often used by custom, rural women still paid every price for rape above and beyond the violation of the act itself.
Selena did another peek-and-duck, still saw nothing, and eased into the house with silence as her shield, her coat whispering around her in swirling folds of leather. A quick glance through the doorway beyond showed her a tiny bedroom, one man in Kemeni green and tan colors pressing a diminutive woman into the corner while his loosely gripped Abakan Russian assault rifle—Abakan…strange choice—pointed at the floor, his avid gaze riveted on the bed. There a second man crouched over a wildly flailing woman, struggling to shove aside the copious material of her modest chador robes. As Selena retreated, taking a deep breath, her gun held two-handed and ready, another resounding slap marked the man’s impatience.
Selena surged around the door frame and shot him in the ass.
He cried out in shock and tumbled to the floor. The woman scrambled back against the wall at the head of the bed, frantically rearranging her clothing, and the second man, caught in flat-footed surprise, started to raise his badly positioned Abakan rifle. The woman he’d squashed into the corner let out a deliberate, ear-piercing shriek, her only remaining weapon.
It bought Selena an instant, and an instant was all she needed to drill the man twice, her finger steady on the long pull of the double-action trigger. Once in the knee, once in the right biceps, and then the woman in the corner gave a fierce cry of triumph and leaped for the rifle. Selena caught a glimpse of the look in her eye and instantly targeted the woman even as she shouted a warning—and reassurance. “Leave the rifle—I am your friend!”
The woman hesitated long enough to realize she was in Selena’s sights, but as she straightened with the Abakan carefully held by the stock alone, she leaned sideways to spit on the floor. “My friend,” she said. Unlike the other woman, she did not wear a chador, only a colorful punjabi and matching hijab scarf. Her thick, woven shawl lay crumpled on the floor in the corner. “American. If you had not been supplying the Kemenis, they would not now be in a position to act—or desperate enough to send out men like this.” She kicked the man in his bloody knee, eliciting a scream. She didn’t wait for Selena’s reply, but went to the woman on the bed, leaning the rifle against the headboard with a frightening familiarity.
Selena lowered her gun but didn’t holster it, not with the stutter of gunfire echoing in her memory. These two pathetic so-called freedom fighters weren’t the only problem this village had. Moving swiftly and not at all gently, she patted them down for weapons, glad for her gloves. Rank sweat and bad beer and gun oil stung her nose. Stepping back from them with a new collection of knives and two more handguns, she piled the stash on the foot of the bed. “Do you have rope? Can you tie them until an army unit arrives?”
The woman looked as though she wanted to spit again. “What makes you think Razidae’s army cares? What makes you think they will come?” She caressed the cheek of the other woman, a soothing gesture.
Selena reached into a pocket for the familiar feel of her cell phone. “Because I’m going to call them.”
She’d have preferred to call in American troops, but she’d already gotten a glimpse of the reception they’d endure. So she made the call, a short, concise conversation with the American Embassy, informing them of the situation. “Let Razidae’s people know,” she told the embassy warden’s assistant. “And keep me out of it—it’s the last thing any of us needs. I’ll be gone by the time they get here.”
“They’re on alert,” the man told her. “They won’t take long.”
“Neither will I,” Selena assured him.
But she didn’t leave immediately. She selected one of the knives from the bed, the one with the dullest gleam of an edge when she held it up to the light from the room’s single small, high window. The one that would hurt the most—and the one her chosen victim, the man still scrabbling around on the floor trying to find a way to clamp both hands to his bleeding buttock at once and not leave himself entirely vulnerable from the front, had been prepared to use on these women.
She crouched before him, the Beretta held in a deceptively casual grip in the hand that rested on her knee, and gave the knife a speculative look before she turned her gaze on the man.
“Woman,” he said. “American. You are nothing to me. Your people betrayed us.”
Kemeni, all right, even if his tan and green clothing hadn’t given him away. Kemeni, and convinced that the recently deceased Frank Black had been working with the States when he’d supplied the rebels with arms. Instead, Black had done so at the behest of Jonas White, a man who liked to play whole countries as if they were game pieces, and whose name popped up in connection with far too many successful black market ventures.
“My people were never behind you,” Selena told him. “And fortunately for my ego, you’re nothing to me, either.” Except a source of information. “Are you just out to curdle some cheese here, or is there some purpose behind this attack?”
“Our business is not for your ears.”
“Shouldn’t have shot you in the ass,” Selena muttered. “I scrambled your brains.” She gave a meaningful heft of the knife, eyeing various parts of his body in the most obvious way. And then she slid her eyes over to the woman who comforted her sister.
The man took note. His expression grew more stubborn.
“Well, maybe you aren’t Kemeni after all,” she said. “The Kemenis have honor and purpose—of a sort, anyway. But these women have more honor than you.”
The man’s face darkened; his lips worked. “I spit on your—”
Selena prodded him with the knife in the vicinity of his bloody butt cheek. “Don’t,” she warned him. Then she held the knife out to the woman in the punjabi. When the woman hesitated, Selena gestured with the knife, affirming her intent.
The woman’s fingers wrapped around the hilt to grow white at the knuckles, a grim determination taking over her expression. “No one need know how he died,” she said softly. “They need not know it was I.”
“Might as well pin it on me,” Selena told her. “Although if he answers my questions, perhaps you could settle for scarring him in some way that he would never admit came from a woman’s hand.”
The woman only smiled.
“You cannot expect me to take this seriously!” the wounded man shouted.
Selena had to give him credit. For a man bleeding badly from his tush, his bleeding partner offering nothing but the sullen silence of someone who hopes not to be noticed, he had courage.
Or perhaps he simply truly didn’t understand his situation.
Selena gave him a beatific smile. “I expect you to take it very seriously.” She used her gun to tick off points on the fingers of her other hand. “Point—I speak seriously kickin’ Berzhaani. Point—I’m very good from this end of a gun. Point—Did you see me sweat when I took you boys down? Now take a moment to think. Think hard. What sort of American woman are you likely to find here in the heart of Berzhaan with all these things in her favor?”
Someone to take seriously, that’s who.
He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to hold on to his self-righteous rage and scorn, glaring at her from deep-set eyes just made for the expression.
“Did the Kemenis send you?” she asked.
He didn’t answer directly—but he looked away. It was enough.
“I gather they didn’t send you to behave like this in particular.” She tapped the muzzle of the Beretta thoughtfully against her knee. The motion kept his attention on the weapon—helped him to realize that this was no lady’s pistol, but a gun of sturdy heft that fit comfortably in her equally sturdy hands. That she wielded it without a second thought. “But here you are, causing trouble in an otherwise unremarkable location. The shrine is fascinating, but not a political touchstone.” And the Kemenis, suddenly bereft of their American benefactor, were desperate. Desperate enough to make a real move on the country’s power base? Her eyes narrowed; for the first time she let a glimpse of her anger show through. “But this is close enough to Suwan to cause alarm…close enough to draw off troops in response.” And I’ve just initiated that by calling in. And now the capital would be more vulnerable to terrorist action.
Again he looked away, trying to hide the subtle retreat with an uncomfortable shift to relieve pressure on his wound.
“You’re a sacrifice,” Selena said. “Contributing to a larger goal….”
Suwan…the embassy…the capitol. One or all of them, the real targets.
He glared again, and the curl returned to his lip as he opened his mouth to say something crude.
She smacked her pistol against his shin, a casual but precise blow that struck the crucial nerves there, numbing his leg with excruciating pain and with very little effort on her part. He made a wordless noise of surprise and gaped as his eyes watered, mouth quickly pursing for more imprecations.
“Don’t,” she said sharply. “Just…don’t.” She exchanged a glance with the woman who now held the knife, saw the uncertainty rising there and straightened. “I’m not sure,” she said to the woman, “but it might well be that his humiliation is complete without any extra scarring, especially if he were cast out at your doorstep in a pretty bundle for the National troops. It’s entirely up to you, of course. I’m afraid I have to leave now.”
The woman in the chador leaned toward the other, murmuring something worried.
“A boy,” said the first woman. “Did you see—?”
Selena nodded. “I sent him up to the shrine to hide, with the promise I would take all blame for it. I’m sure he’s waiting for you there.”
“Thank you,” said the woman in the chador, sitting for that moment like a queen on her throne instead of a nearly violated woman on her thoroughly rumpled bed. But she could not hide a quivering twitch of her mouth or the tears of relief welling in her eyes.
Selena thought it was her cue to leave. That and the distant sound of helicopter blades thumping the air. She emerged from the house with caution, the automatic gunfire still clear in her memory—but either no one else had intended to come to this far end of the town, or the arriving troops had caught their attention. She made it to her Russian Moskvich sedan without incident, folding herself into the driver’s seat with the Beretta in easy reach. She hoped to swing around the village and make it into Suwan without any trouble—but if trouble came along, she’d be ready for it.
She had to reach the embassy. She had to warn the ambassador…and she had to warn Berzhaan.
The Kemenis were rising.
Chapter 2
C olin Jones slung his duffel through the door of the modest D.C. condo he shared with Selena. Modest by choice and lifestyle as opposed to financial restrictions, even here in this area of off-the-chart living expenses. But…
Maybe that would change soon, if Selena became pregnant as they hoped. Maybe their silk plants and collection of sleek sight hound statuary would make way for the real things. Green, growing things. Warm loyalty and four-legged companionship to round out a home that also held the laughter of a family.
Not that it would be easy. He and Lena had already experienced enough rocky moments to be realistic about what lay ahead and even then she hadn’t known half the things he’d kept from her in recent months. Things he wouldn’t tell her, things he couldn’t tell her. Decisions she’d never understand…some decisions he didn’t like to think about. But she hadn’t known those things, and she’d recommitted to the marriage, recommitting to each other…and immersing themselves in a few brief weeks of passion-filled nights before duty called and Cole had gone off on a long-term assignment, hoping Selena would soon find a posting nearby.
But as he took his first step into the condo, he knew Lena wasn’t here. Damn. He’d all but felt her arms around him, her hands sneaking beneath his waistband to tug up his shirt and—
Nothing but frustration at the end of those thoughts.
The silence of the apartment surrounded him. The stuffy air, scented with undisturbed spice candles. The faint layer of dust settled over the empty table next to the door where their mail tended to pile up when they were home. A glance into their small living room showed no sign of legal briefs, no sign of Lena’s latest fiction favorites. Just the cream and maroon tones of the rug, curtains and furniture—a color scheme that had been a compromise between her desire for cool and clean decor and his own need for bold.
The kitchen…not a crumb on the counter. The bedroom…neatly tidied, not so much as a stray sock or one of those hair scrunchies Lena tended to lose track of—and though Cole was much more casual about such things than she, Lena had never obsessed about tidiness, either. Not when she was relaxed and happy. A glance back at the living room revealed the very same quilt square on the wall as had been there two months earlier.
Left not long after I did, did you? For she had an entire collection, and rather than spread them out over the austere walls she rotated them on a monthly basis—while the rest of the walls remained uncluttered, a testament to their struggle to merge their styles. The casual, assertive operative who approached life in the fast and loose lane, and the FBI legate with a lawyer’s precise, compartmentalized brain.
Not for the first time, he wished he could see her in action—in real action—to get a glimpse of that side of her. The side that would expose the ferocity of her will and her ability to take whatever the situation pitched at her.
It had to be there. Somewhere. It had to be, or she wouldn’t still be alive.
He tore himself away from his thoughts to realize he’d left the door open. Cole nudged the duffel aside so he could close himself in. And with Lena out there somewhere, putting this door between them definitely left him closed in.
It’s not like this has never happened before. Time to find the note, the one they always left each other. Time to disabuse the uneasiness growing somewhere in the pit of his stomach, spreading to become tension between his shoulder blades. Lena’s notes always gave him ease, made his inward tension relax to match his outward appearance.
He knew the things people said of him; he cultivated those things. He sowed the seeds for his own reputation as the laid-back charmer who took each mission on the fly, improvising his way to last-moment success. Even Lena bought into it, not truly realizing how important she was to him, in how many ways…all the little things, like her notes. They were the one place she cast aside her lawyer persona for pure silliness—catching him up on the gossip around their condo, informing him how much their silk plants had grown since he was last home, drawing him stick figure versions of her latest adventures in D.C. living. And of course…the challenge of finding the always-hidden note in the first place.
Except…there it was, right out on the kitchen counter, one corner tucked beneath the gleaming white toaster. A sheet torn carefully from a five-by-eight pad of lined yellow paper, inscribed with a few sentences in her neatest hand.
Cole—had an unexpected call to Berzhaan. Things are pretty tense there. I’ll let you know more as I can—check your e-mail.
No stick figure. No silliness. Only a sweeping S.
Something’s wrong.
But she couldn’t possibly know—
Very wrong.
Selena blew past the clean, modern outer ring of Suwan, where the post-Soviet restoration efforts prevailed. Approaching the center of the city, she maneuvered through the now-familiar streets into ancient Berzhaan, an area full of impressive stone architecture, and of old fortress walls that came from nowhere and disappeared into nothingness, no longer anything but pieces of their former glory. The streets turned cobbled, the alleys narrowed, and the thick feel of history hung in the air. Here, some of the oldest buildings had given way to Soviet manpower, leaving in their wake impressive new buildings of state. The capitol building was one such; the American embassy a much smaller version of the same, several blocks away.
She drove the Moskvich around the back of the embassy, returning it to the motor pool with a haste that drew the curiosity of the young Berzhaani who took the keys, and entered the embassy through a back door for which few had the special high-security key card. A glance at her watch confirmed her tardiness for her two o’clock appointment with the ambassador and the prime minister. She kicked her pace into a jog, soundless over the luxuriously thick carpeting, and went straight to the ambassador’s office in spite of her appearance, pulling off her head scarf along the way. The details of the embassy—trappings both American and Berzhaani—flashed past in a familiar blur, barely noticed.
Had anything been changed, that she would have noticed.
She pulled up short outside the open door of the ambassador’s outer office. Bonita Chavez looked up from her desk with disapproval deepening the lines of features that had been generous before middle-age and now seemed entrenched in making themselves even more obvious. She glanced at the classy silver and oak clock on the wall. “You’re late.”
Stern or not, Bonita didn’t worry Selena; along with her duties as the ambassador’s civil service admin, she seemed to have taken on mother-hen duties. Beneath her current frown lived worry, not anger, and Selena already harbored affection for her.
“I ran into a little trouble.” Selena stepped into the office. “Can I go in?”
“He’s waiting for you. You can rest assured he knows you’ve arrived.” Bonita’s gaze raked her up and down, looking for telltales of Selena’s “little trouble.”
“All one piece,” Selena told her, opening her coat wide for quick inspection and, as she’d intended, causing Bonita to bite her far-too-crimson lipstick against a smile. Selena forced herself to walk across a carpet of stunning workmanship—she always had to force herself to walk on the beauty of Sekha-made carpets—and rapped her knuckles against the dark, heavy wood door of the ambassador’s inner office before pushing it open.
Ambassador Allori looked up from his computer monitor. “Do I guess correctly that you had something to do with that call that came through the embassy, requesting troops at Oguzka?”
“The Kemenis—”
“Yes, yes.” He cut her off, frowned at his monitor and tapped a key in response, and simultaneously swept a stiff sheet of paper off his desk to hold out to her. “You’ll find this of interest, I think, though you hardly have time to read it. You don’t have time to change, either—I doubt Mr. Razidae will be disposed to notice. But you’ll want to wash your face. It’s got someone’s blood on it. Not yours, I presume.”
Bonita! She’d seen it, surely. She’d let Selena go on in without alerting her to clean up, and with an admirable lack of telltale expression at that.
On the other hand, perhaps it was done as a favor. Allori could hardly refute the evidence that her delay had been for significant reasons.
“No, sir.” She took the paper, recognizing the letterhead of the embassy warden. “Not the least bit mine.”
He gave her a moment to glance at the text, which bore the header Surge in Kemeni Rebel Activity:
The Department of State advises American citizens in Berzhaan to take prudent steps to ensure their personal safety in the coming days. Remain vigilantly aware of surroundings, avoid crowds and demonstrations….
Selena could not help a soft snort. Too late. Already been there, done that.
If Allori heard, he gave no sign of it. No doubt he, too, knew the value of keeping American personnel at an official distance from such…demonstrations. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said, which was as close as he’d get to referring to the Oguzka activity. “Now…we leave in less than fifteen minutes. Can you be back here in ten?”
Selena returned the warden notice to his desk and murmured, “See you in eight, Mr. Ambassador.” She turned on her heel, using her long legs to full advantage and mounting the back stairwell in twos and threes rather than waiting for the elevator to the third floor embassy staff housing. Selena’s chosen apartment, tucked in a back corner, caught sun through two windows and offered an amazing view of the Caspian Sea. Probably a mistake, given the way it reminded her of Cole’s eyes.
Sometimes the lake shone an impossible blue, and sometimes the undercurrents turned it a murkier blue-green, but she didn’t take time to check today’s color. For that matter, she didn’t even take the time to remove her coat. She eyed the bathroom mirror, removing the faint smear of blood to which Allori had referred. She removed her knives, knowing she’d have to face a metal detector at the capitol, and then dumped a few extra clips for her Beretta into her coat pocket. The gun and clips would be left at the capitol building’s sign-in desk, but given what she’d already encountered today, she didn’t intend to go out on the street unprepared.
As for the rest of it…she brushed a damp washcloth futilely over a smudge of…something…on her khakis, and ran it over her leather and nylon mesh hiking boots to remove the dust of the day. She applied a quick, light coat of foundation and a subtle smudge of kohl around the outer edges of slightly tilted eyes, knowing it would echo the look to which the prime minister was accustomed. She tackled her hair, pulling a brush through the tangles the wind had left beneath the scarf, giving herself a critical stare. Time for a cut. If she let it grow too far below her shoulders, the strong, lean bones of her face seemed stronger, leaner…she preferred to keep it short enough to square up her jaw and soften a strong chin with its hint of a cleft.
Three minutes remaining and she counted herself ready to go, except for a quick glance at her automatically downloaded e-mail as she closed her laptop up, her briefcase already to hand.
She wished she hadn’t.
E-mail from Cole.
Finally.
She knew she’d stopped breathing. Forced herself to begin again. There was no way to look at the message now. No way to look at it until she was through with work for the day.
The next one down in the list was another matter. Delphi.
Delphi was Selena’s contact at Oracle, and Oracle…
Oracle was a name Selena never said out loud. The elite intelligence-gathering organization predated Homeland Security, and now quietly provided backup. Oracle crossed agency lines to garner intel, a cross-check system designed to prevent terrorist disasters…and then they acted on it when no one else could or would. Selena suspected her invitation to join Oracle’s clandestine efforts was another legacy of her days at the Athena Academy. The organization, its methods and goals…it tasted strongly of Athena.
Alerted by the subject header—Kemeni—as much as the sender, Selena accepted that she’d be late to the ambassador’s office and opened the e-mail. Even so, she had time for no more than a glance.
A glance was all it took.
Chapter 3
B ut the e-mail warning hadn’t stopped Allori, only delayed them a few more crucial moments while he listened to Selena’s concerns. And then he’d issued a few quick orders and they’d headed for the Berzhaan capitol.
Late, late and later.
With one careful finger, Selena rubbed the bridge of her nose, not sure if she should have had lunch or if she actually regretted having breakfast. The scene in the lobby of the Berzhaan capitol building momentarily swam in her vision—but the moment passed and then the situation was all too clear: if they’d arrived on time, they would have gotten here before this busload of excited but respectful college students. Their bright winter coats would have proclaimed them foreigners if the quick whispers in English hadn’t; Selena heard all manner of accents, from American to Canadian to British. They clustered around the reception desk, trickling through the weapons detector arch one by one.
She and Ambassador Allori weren’t the only displaced arrivals. Off to the side, two smiling Berzhaani women—modern women in neat business suits and modest heels, uncovered by either chador or hijab—watched the procession with patience, while a tall Berzhaani man in a designer casual jacket over silk had a distractedly pleased expression. He was worth a second look, sleek and groomed and all cutting edges, his dark complexion giving him the same smoldering good looks that had earned Omar Sharif a generation and more of worshippers. He caught Selena’s gaze and raised an eyebrow; the gesture revealed more than he probably ever imagined. Regardless of his trendy appearance, her directness had surprised him, and to some extent offended him—but he saw nothing wrong with letting his gaze linger on her in return, judging her too-casual dress and her edgy red-piped, black leather coat, appreciating her long legs and the way that same tailored coat revealed her figure.
She gave him the slightest of nods, turned away with an ease that probably also offended him and considered the best way to discreetly cut the line.
She didn’t have to. The uniformed man behind the standing height lobby desk glimpsed Selena through the crowd, and then spotted the slightly shorter ambassador. He raised a hand high, gesturing to the familiar guard at the security arch. With practiced ease, the guard created a break in the line and then nodded at the ambassador. Selena followed, automatically sorting through the young people they pushed past, hunting potential threats.
There weren’t any, of course. Just a slew of impressed and curious expressions. Who are they? Why are they getting special treatment? One bold young man gave her the same appreciative once-over she’d just gotten from the Berzhaani man near the entrance, albeit with none of the finesse. The visual equivalent of hey, baby.
Selena smiled at him, a knowing smile, and it startled him into a blush; he hadn’t expected to get caught. Blond hair, blue eyes; he could have been Cole a dozen years earlier. Except Cole wouldn’t have been caught.
Wrong. Cole had been caught.
A young woman poked the bold young man’s arm in silent vigor, blushing even harder than her friend…and sweetheart? Selena thought she saw a flash of jealousy in those wide-set eyes. She turned away, back to business, leaving the young woman a little space for dignity—and already methodically pulling her briefcase shoulder strap free, stripping herself of her gun and ejecting the clip to hand it over to the guard along with the extra magazines. As an afterthought she pulled the knife from the special inside sheath she’d had sewn into the coat. “Sorry,” she said. “I meant to get that one before we left.”
She thought she heard a stifled noise from her bold young admirer. Bit off more than you could chew, eh? She met the amusement in the guard’s eyes as he placed her things in a small lockbox and set them aside for retrieval upon exit, and then performed a quick scan on her black leather satchel briefcase. Within moments they’d passed through the security check, where one of the capitol’s nameless gofers met them with a smile and apologized for the delay as if Selena and Allori hadn’t been late in the first place. As the young man escorted them toward the prime minister’s office, he nodded at a hallway that led in the opposite direction. “We’re hosting a casual reception this afternoon. The college students, as you saw. And others to meet them, from the government and some of our own learning institutions.”
Selena glanced down the hall in question, finding a bustle of people in dignified dark green jackets such as their escort’s, pushing serving carts into position and pouring water into crystal glasses. A brief, loud argument between one of the capitol’s gofers and a cook took over the hallway just long enough for a woman in an exotic punjabi trouser-dress to intervene. The events coordinator. Selena had seen her before, though she’d never been in that part of the embassy herself. The chaotic nature of the event troubled her; she wished she knew more about it.
But then, she wasn’t here as the ambassador’s bodyguard.
Allori himself showed no sign of worry on his face—a round face made even more so by the extra weight he carried. He smiled at their escort. “I recall reading about the reception. Excellent idea.”
Their escort nodded. He, too, was of dark complexion, an olive cast as opposed to the rich brown tones of the Berzhaani in the lobby. Small, unimposing and unremarkable, he played his role with quiet perfection—drawing no undue attention, making or taking no easy offense. “If the young people of other countries see how forward-thinking we are…then we will have no need to change their minds when they are older.” He stopped beside an open door and gestured them in. “The prime minister begs your pardon, but was unable to avoid tending other matters. He’ll be with you as soon as possible.”
Selena didn’t need a translation. You were late, and he had to move on to other things. She nodded her thanks and followed Allori into the room—a lush room, the floor soft with a Sekha carpet over the wall-to-wall beneath, the wood accents of ceiling and trim dark and gleaming. A neat serving cart of wrought iron sat against the wall, offering everything from ice water to the finest leaf tea. Allori set his briefcase on one of the round-bottomed chairs and helped himself to some tea, fixing it in familiar ritual as Selena prowled the edges of the small room. He said, “You must have had an interesting morning. You’re as jumpy as I’ve ever seen you.”
She frowned at him. The room was undoubtedly bugged, and he was too experienced to have forgotten it.
He looked up from the steeping tea, the corners of his eyes crinkled slightly. Did she or did she not, he seemed to ask, want the prime minister to have terrorism on his mind—as well as the need to cooperate while countering it?
Selena sighed, closing her eyes in apology. The truth was, she was jumpy. And she had good reason. Following Allori’s lead, she spoke frankly. “I wish you’d taken my warning a little more seriously.”
“A warning with no specific source?” He waved her off.
“It’s my job to gather just such warnings,” she reminded him, arms crossed even with the briefcase dangling from one hand.
“Yes. Of course it is. And I’ll consider it later this afternoon, by which time you should have even more information for me.”
“You yourself showed me the warden’s notice—”
He dangled the tea egg a few times, then laid it neatly aside. “And I’ve taken it into account. Bonita’s packing her bags as we speak. We’ll make do with a skeleton staff for now.”
“Ambassador—” Selena rubbed the bridge of her nose again, right above the little bump Cole liked so much. Don’t think about Cole. Fatigue washed over her in a startling rush, turning her stomach. She closed her mouth on indiscreet words, a reiteration of the warning from Oracle—the alarming intel from the CIA, along with other military and agency listening posts with which an FBI legate such as Selena should have no direct connection. Word that the Kemeni rebels were indeed desperate in the wake of their lost faux U.S. support—that they had to grab power now, or concede it forever.
There were reports of skirmishes, of dead Berzhaani citizens and one major bombing. The Kemenis had acted as if jabbed with a cattle prod, from quiescence in the shocked wake of Frank Black’s death to powerful intent.
Selena doubted the cheerful college students had so much as a clue of Berzhaan’s suddenly increased unrest. She herself knew only through Delphi—and the luck to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time this morning. Off to the shrine to seek peace of mind, and she’d found only violence.
“Selena?” Allori set his teacup in the saucer, brow drawing together. “Are you quite all right?”
And just like that, she wasn’t. Just like that, her stomach spasmed beyond even her iron control, and she blurted “Excuse me!” and bolted from the room, briefcase clutched in her hand. She remembered the bathroom as a barely marked door down the hall and only hoped she was right as she slammed it open. Thank God. Most of the room was a blur but she honed in on an open stall door, grateful for the lavish, updated fixture—
Better than a hole in the floor. Been there, done that.
And when she leaned back against the marbleized stall wall, marveling at the sudden violence her system had wreaked upon her, the thought flashed unbidden and unexpected through her mind: we were trying to start a family.
No. Not here, not now. Not with Cole half a world away and an even bigger emotional gap between them. She knew he hid things from her; she’d thought she could live with that. Maybe not. Selena clenched down on her thoughts the same way she’d tried to clench down on her stomach and stumbled out to the pristine sink to crank the cold water on full and splash her face and rinse her mouth. She raised her head to find herself in the gilt-edged mirror, deathly pale, deep blue-green eyes bewildered—and then those eyes widened and she dashed back to the toilet.
When she lifted her head again, her trembling hand numbly reaching to flush the toilet, she didn’t have the strength to make it to the sink. She reeled a clumsy length of tissue from the dispenser and sat against the marble partition, overwhelmingly grateful for the impeccably clean nature of the capitol. She scrubbed her mouth and chin and then the thought came again: we were trying to start a family.
Maybe they had.
Selena, only remotely in touch with the members of her divorce-torn family, had never had any heartwarming chats about pregnancy. Not with friends, not with her sisters-in-law, not with her coworkers. But she’d never gotten the impression that morning sickness—whenever it came—was quite this vigorous. Violent, even.
Maybe she’d just eaten the wrong thing for breakfast. Or maybe she’d finally have to admit to herself that in spite of her cool, collected self-image, once her emotions hit a certain amount of turmoil, her digestive system often did the same.
She had to know. To know. First chance, she’d hit the little store that catered to the diplomatic staff and she’d get herself one of those little sticks and she’d pee on it. It didn’t matter that her period was a little late; that meant nothing. She was notoriously irregular when she traveled. Not until she had the little stick would she know for sure.
And then what?
She climbed to her feet, heading for the sink on wobbly legs. There she repeated the rinse-and-spit routine, unable to get the acrid taste of her sickness from the back of her throat. When she dared to look at her image again, she found that it reflected what she felt: she looked stronger, less green. This particular storm, whatever the cause, was over.
And then what?
What if she was pregnant in a strife-torn Berzhaan, her estranged husband not even knowing he was estranged? Theoretically he was still deeply undercover in wherever it was that he’d gone, unable to do more than send a sporadic e-mail or two. Theoretically.
Except she’d seen him in D.C.
Kissing someone else.
And now he’d sent her e-mail from his home address—and she hadn’t even had time to read it. But just looking at it confirmed that the one stable, steady thing they’d had between them in their four years of unspoken secrets and long absences was no longer stable or steady at all. That maybe it never had been.
No, no reason for emotional turmoil, not in the least.
Usually she and Cole managed to maintain steady communication when their jobs separated them. But this particular assignment had been a dark one, dark enough that if something happened to him, she’d learn only that he’d died in an auto accident while traveling. The dark assignments came along now and then, especially with the contract employees like Cole. With a two-year re-up on contract employees, the CIA station chiefs were willing to push them to the edge of burnout. It had damaged Cole and Selena’s marriage, in spite of their mutual understanding of the unique stresses in each of their careers. It had damaged Selena’s trust in Cole, watching him switch ably from role to role, ducking questions and hiding nightmares until she couldn’t help but wonder if their marriage was just one of the many parts he played.
Not that it surprised her. In her world, families didn’t stay together. People went their own ways when relationships became difficult, whether beset upon by emotional or logistical problems. She and Cole had overcome all manner of logistical difficulties—long-term assignments in different countries, frequent travel, the occasional international crisis. Recently she’d even thought he’d been lost…and afterward, they’d renewed their commitment to one another. Made up in a big way, celebrating the things they loved about one another, the ineffable chemistry that Selena’s ordered mind had never come close to explaining.
Even now she could feel it. Leaning against this sink with her throat burning and legs still weak, she could close her eyes and see the way he looked at her, remember the way he touched her…and yearn for him.
She just didn’t know if she could forgive him. Live with him.
And then what?
If she was pregnant…she’d have to stay here long enough to stabilize this new legate’s office, in spite of the unrest. And then she’d have to go home…she’d have to tell Cole. To decide if she trusted him, or if she’d merely contribute to the long line of broken branches in her family tree.
And if this is any taste of things to come, I’ll have to carry around a barf bag wherever I go.
The water still trickled. She scooped another handful into her mouth, held it and spit it out. Her eyes stung, sympathetic to her throat. It wasn’t until she coughed, short and sharp, that she stiffened—and realized that the uncomfortable tang wasn’t coming from her abused throat, but from the air she breathed.
Tear gas.
Trickling in from the street outside? From somewhere in the building?
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
Selena jammed used tissue into the trash, grabbed her briefcase and took a deep, steadying breath, pulling herself away from the emotional wallops of the what-ifs and dropping back into the calm, cool world of black and white—of this end of the gun versus the other.
Except she didn’t have a gun, and she didn’t have her knives.
Maybe she wouldn’t need them. Listening at the bathroom door revealed only silence, and she peeked out. The smoke hung thickly in the abandoned hallway. Selena ducked back inside, took another deep breath—this one to hold—and eased out into the hallway, running silently to the waiting room she’d left so precipitously only moments before.
Empty. Allori’s teacup lay broken on the floor, tea soaking the priceless carpet.
Son of a bitch.
The door leading to the prime minister’s office stood slightly ajar, and Selena made for it, her chest starting to ache for air. But breathing meant coughing, and coughing meant being found.
She didn’t intend to be found until she understood the situation. If then.
Razidae’s office proved to be empty, as well, the luxurious rolling office chair askew at the desk, papers on the floor, the private phone out of its sleek-lined cradle—and the air relatively clear. Selena closed the door, grateful for the old, inefficient heating system, and inhaled as slowly as she could, muffling the single cough she couldn’t avoid.
All right, then. The building was full of tear gas, the dignitaries were gone—and Selena had somehow missed it all.
They could have blown the building out from under you while you were throwing up and you wouldn’t have noticed.
Unless Allori and Razidae had simply gone to check out the tear gas and any attendant ruckus. In which case they could be caught up in it. Whatever it was.
Think, Selena. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and calmed the chaotic mess of her mind. She could call for help from here—Razidae’s private line might have an in-use indicator at his secretary’s desk, but it wouldn’t show up on any of the other phone systems, so she wouldn’t give her presence away by picking it up.
But there was no point in calling until she understood the situation. No doubt the authorities were already alerted. If she were near an outside window, she might even hear sirens—but Razidae’s office was in the protected interior, the only other exit leading to his secretary’s office. No, no point in calling. At least, not yet. But she would take this office as her possible home base, with its private phone line and its private location. Razidae was a prime minister who came prepared. All his resistance to U.S. overtures of assistance with Berzhaan’s counterterrorism program hadn’t been because of his denial that the problem existed. Rather that after years of having his country pulled this way and that, sovereignty lost, he wanted to maintain Berzhaan’s independence in all aspects of administration.
Selena couldn’t really blame him. But she wished he’d been a little more receptive. Maybe they’d have prevented this day’s events.
You still don’t know what’s going on.
Well, then, she told herself. Let’s find out.
Selena laid her briefcase on the desk, thumbed the token combination lock and flipped the leather flap open. She’d left her laptop behind in favor of her tablet PC, and the briefcase looked a little forlorn…a little empty.
Not much to work with. No Beretta, no extra clip, no knives…
Maybe she wouldn’t need them. Maybe by the time she discovered what had happened, it would actually be over.
Nonetheless, she took a quick survey: cell phone, battery iffy; she turned it off and left it behind. A handful of pens, mostly fine point. She tucked several into her back pocket. A new pad of sticky notes. A nail file, also worthy of pocket space. Her Buck pocketknife, three blades of discreet mayhem, yet not big enough to alarm the security guards. It earned a grim smile and a spot in her front pocket. A spare AC unit for her laptop, which garnered a thoughtful look and ended up stuffed into the big side pocket of her leather duster. A small roll of black electrician’s tape. A package of cheese crackers—
Selena closed her eyes, aiming willpower at her rebellious stomach. I don’t have time for you, she told it. Without looking, she set the crinkly package aside, and then surveyed the remaining contents of the briefcase. A legal pad and a folder full of confidential documents. She supposed she could inflict some pretty powerful paper cuts. A few mints and some emergency personal supplies she wasn’t likely to need if she was actually pregnant.
No flak vest, no Rambo knife, not even a convenient flare pistol.
Then again, there was no telling what she might find with a good look around the capitol. Almost anything was a weapon if you used it right.
Selena jammed the rejected items back in her briefcase, automatically locking it. She tucked it inside the foot well of Razidae’s desk and checked to see that she’d left no sign of her presence—except there were those crackers….
She made a dive for the spiffy executive wastebasket beside the desk, hunched over with dry heaves. Mercifully, they didn’t last long. And afterward, as she rose on once-again shaky legs and poured herself a glass of the ice water tucked away on a marble-topped stand in the corner, she tried to convince herself that it was over. That she could go out and assess the situation without facing the heaves during an inopportune moment. That it was over, because over meant she’d eaten something that didn’t suit her and not that she’d added pregnancy to this volatile mix of Cole’s infidelity and Berzhaan’s turmoil.
She dumped the rest of the water into a lush potted plant that probably didn’t need the attention, wiped out the glass and returned it to its spot. She very much hoped that she’d creep out to find an embarrassed guard and an accidentally discharged tear gas gun. Then she could stroll up with her pens and her pocketknife tucked away, as calm and cool as though she hadn’t been heaving in Razidae’s wastebasket moments before.
A stutter of muted automatic gunfire broke the silence.
So much for that idea. Selena’s heart, already pounding from her illness, kicked into a brief stutter of overtime that matched the rhythm of the gunfire. “All right, baby,” she said to her potential little passenger, pulling her fine wool scarf from her coat pocket and soaking it in the pitcher. “Get ready to rock and roll.”
But as she reached for the doorknob, she hesitated. She could be risking more than her own life if she ran out into the thick of things now. As far as she knew, whoever had pulled the trigger of that rifle didn’t even know she existed. She could ride things out here with her lint-filled water and her cheese crackers.
Or she could be found and killed, or the building could indeed blow up around her, or whoever’d fired those shots could succeed in their disruptive goal, and Selena and her theoretical little one could be trapped in a rioting, war-torn Berzhaan. She closed her eyes, her mind suddenly full of images of frightened students and dead capitol workers and a dead Allori. She closed her eyes hard.
It really wasn’t any choice at all.
Chapter 4
T he smoke settled toward the floor in the long hallway. Selena’s eyes watered above the damp scarf, but not so much that she couldn’t see. The hallway was all hers. She hoped it stayed that way.
If she did this right, she’d complete her prowling unseen; she’d have an idea where Ambassador Allori had ended up and how Prime Minister Razidae had fared. She’d find the college students and even the arrogant Berzhaani businessman from the lobby.
And she’d find the Kemeni rebels.
Steady there. She didn’t know the Kemenis were behind this.
Yes. I do.
On this side of the five-story capitol, the prime minister and his cabinet members generally went about their business, addressing the problems of a nation with a tumultuous past. On the other side, ceremonies and social functions filled a dining-ballroom so grandly exotic it would have suited a Russian czar—and, given the country’s past annexation, might have once done just that. The kitchens, the maintenance, even a detention area…all on that side of the building. Somewhere.
With some fervency, Selena wished that just once, she’d had a chance to glimpse a blueprint of the capitol. The CIA probably had one…but they hadn’t shared, and though she had a request in with Oracle, Delphi hadn’t yet come through. For now, Selena was on her own.
All too literally.
She decided to start with the lobby. Moving carefully through the halls, silently over the carpet on her rubber-soled lightweight hikers…she spent long moments listening before she turned corners, stifling the constant impulse to cough and keeping a firm mental control over her unhappy but quiescent stomach. She found signs of struggle—pictures knocked askew, a coffee cup shattered against the wall, stains splashed across creamy paint…even a smudge or two of blood, a hand-print where someone had reached out for support. As an undertone to the tear gas, the equally acrid smell of gunpowder grew stronger.
When she peered around the final corner and into the unfolding delta of the lobby, she winced. The faint haze of remaining tear gas couldn’t hide the aftermath of the struggle, wasn’t strong enough to cover the visceral smell of blood and death. One guard sprawled before the security arch, his face missing. Selena couldn’t see the other, though she heard noises from behind the standing desk where he’d been. Still alive?
Behind the desk…that’s where her gun had been stored, in its own lockbox. She took a step around the corner, exposing herself. She might as well be as naked as she felt; she was just as vulnerable. She eyed the semiautomatic pistol in the dead guard’s hand. Any thoughts she had of going for the weapon vanished as she saw the slide jutting back. He’d emptied it at someone.
Or maybe just at the bullet-riddled wall on his way down.
She could still grab it. She might find ammo if she could locate the security office. But she’d prefer her own familiar weapon, so she took a few more silent steps toward the counter and the rustling noises behind it, the occasional grunt. Her hand dipped into her pocket, her fingers twisting in the cords for the laptop AC adaptor. David and Goliath.
She figured she was stamped as David in this particular scenario.
As she reached for the sleek granite desk edge, fingertips hovering and ready to support her as she leaned over, a man popped up from the other side. His bearded face reflected astonishment; he dropped a handful of booty and scrambled to bring up his rifle, catching the muzzle brake on the inner structure of the desk. Selena jerked her hand from her pocket, whipped the chunky little AC adaptor over her head once to gather momentum and slung it against the man’s temple. Down he went, falling with a strangely soft landing.
Selena pushed off against the desk, levering herself up to crouch atop it, ready to follow through—to scrabble over the rifle if she had to. But the man lay awkwardly on top of the dead guard from whom he’d been pilfering, the rifle out of reach.
And David wins again. Selena didn’t let regret for the dead guard slow her down. Time to grab a weapon—the Abakan rifle, an obvious if puzzling Kemeni favorite, or the lockbox with her gun, or the guard’s gun…she didn’t care. But shouted alarm warned her; she looked up in time to see green-and-tan-clad figures rounding the corner out of the hallway opposite her own approach path. She instantly dived for escape back the way she’d come, just barely rolling into the movement as she hit the floor. Gunfire exploded into the silence; wood chips and plaster spit through the air. Selena rolled with purpose until she hit the wall and scrambled to her feet, shouting, “Grenade!” as she flung the adaptor in their direction.
They didn’t stop to think why she’d warn them; they only reacted to the word, flinching and ducking as the adaptor bounced at their feet. It only took them an instant to realize the black device was not a grenade, not even a unique new American grenade—but by then Selena had thrown herself around the corner and driven out into a long-legged sprint. On her way past a stairwell she slammed the door open hard enough to hit the wall behind it but never hesitated, retracing her steps to make the next turn before they gathered themselves to charge the hallway in her wake. In moments she found the waiting room from whence she’d come, hesitating only long enough to leave the door open just the way she’d found it the first time. She dashed through to the prime minister’s office, grabbed her briefcase against the faint possibility that they’d trace her steps this far and headed out to his admin’s office. There she quickly rifled the desk drawers, ignoring the keyboard and flat panel screen monitor that had been slung across the room as well as the tea spilled across the desk. She hoped for but didn’t expect to find a weapon and found more reasonable treasure instead: a ring of keys.
Enough time spent; the echoes of frustrated shouts came faintly through the waiting room on the other side of Razidae’s office. Selena ran out into a hall that ran parallel to the one she’d just left, heading for the set of stairs that logic told her would be opposite those on the other side and taking them two at a time when she found them. All the way to the fourth floor, where the secondary residences filled the space. Guests, dignitaries, distant family members…here they lived. A fumbling game of find-the-key finally netted her entrance, and she eased halfway into the hall, not ready to commit herself yet. She didn’t think the Kemenis would be up here just yet—they hadn’t had enough time to secure all the public space—but she took nothing for granted. She hesitated, taking her breathing back down, listening and watching.
If anyone hid here, they were—quite wisely—still hiding. Selena let the door close behind her, making sure it latched as silently as possible, and then turned in the direction that would take her back above the ballroom, moving at a more cautious and sedate pace.
She had no doubt there’d be plenty of time for more running later.
Chapter 5
“N o,” Cole said into the phone, more firmly than he should and less firmly than he wanted. “I just got back. I’ve got something going on here, and I’m not going anywhere until it’s settled.” He wrapped the damp towel around his neck, a match to the one tucked around his hips, and barely listened to the persistent voice in his ear. Given the frequency with which Selena checked e-mail, he should have heard from her by now. He should have had an answer to his simple, straightforward question.
What’s wrong?
“No,” he said again, this time with a sharp shake of his head that his caller would have known to heed had he seen it. “Even if you couldn’t do without me on this, you owe me. You’d never have uncovered that budding little problem without me—hell, you’d never even have known about it. And who else do you have who can switch-hit with the FBI so easily? So back off, Sarge.”
The man wasn’t a sergeant. But in an organization where rank was rarely assigned, the nickname served its purpose.
“Yeah, okay.” Cole pulled the towel away from his neck, idly rubbing it across his still-damp chest, and glanced into the living room where he’d left the television on. Special news flash, generic sort of logo that meant whatever had happened was either too new or too unimportant to have its own catchy headline name. “I’ll be in touch at this number. It goes where I go, right? But don’t be surprised if I answer from Berzhaan.”
That got a little snort of disbelief, a warning to watch his ass if he even looked at that part of the world, and an abrupt sign-off that left Cole looking at his phone in bemusement. Berzhaan wasn’t vacationland, but the FBI wouldn’t have sent Selena into a war zone.
Especially not now. Not when he had a marriage to fix—and needed the chance to do it.
Except he looked up from the phone to find a map of that small country on the television with a dramatic arrow pointing at Suwan; the image flipped to an imposing building with barricades all around it, emergency and military vehicles beyond that, and an ambulance speeding away from the outside edge of it all. Berzhaan was the special news flash. Berzhaan and a sudden surge of violence across the country, killing people, destroying their livelihoods. “No one knows the Kemenis’ exact goals or what drove them to this move just when their arms dried up…” And the building was the Berzhaan capitol, only a few blocks from the embassy out of which Selena worked. The embassy that had apparently been evacuated as soon as the siege of the capitol began.
Then where’s Selena?
Selena pinned her hopes on finding a master key on the stolen key ring, and sighed with relief when the fourth key she tried snicked neatly into the well-lubricated lock of the room at the end of the guest quarters hall. No one answered her quiet knock, but she found the room littered with signs of use and tried the next door down.
This room looked ready for guests—or at least, ready to be ready. There were no flowers on the table in the suite’s first room, and when she found the bedroom she didn’t see any dents on the pillow. But it was clean and ready for whatever final touches were deemed appropriate for its next occupant.
She didn’t intend to stay here long. Sooner or later the Kemenis would do a room-to-room search, rounding up anyone they might have missed the first time through. She’d give them enough time to settle down…but not so much they’d entirely have their act together. And even though her inclination to rush down and check out the situation drove at her, she forced herself to brew a cup of tea from the supplies in the kitchenette. Her stomach hadn’t been more than grumbly, but tea might well calm it further.
And then she sat cross-legged on the floor on the opposite side of a plush chair, giving herself a good view of the double-locked door while remaining discreetly tucked away, her briefcase at her side. She sipped tea and she considered the situation and how little she knew of it so far. Kemenis. They seemed to have based themselves in the public part of the capitol. The ballroom, perhaps, where the students would have been. She still needed to discover their intent. If they were holding hostages, to what purpose? What demands would they make…and how soon would they start killing people to achieve those demands?
For the Kemenis had never demonstrated a reluctance to kill people.
Quiet moments later, Selena set aside the tea, pulling her knees up to briefly rest her forehead there. Her stomach felt better…soothed. Her mind still whirled with unanswered questions—was she actually, truly pregnant? So hard to tell with her whimsical cycles…Had Cole actually, truly faked an assignment to have an affair? So hard to tell with his astonishing ability to play the moment…to play people.
But it shouldn’t have been. She should have just known. And he was sending e-mail from their home computer, returned sooner than expected. Not surprisingly—he obviously hadn’t had far to travel. Selena pulled her phone from the leather pocket on the side of her briefcase and turned it on. Its pale blue LED screen informed her she had voice mail, and that she had less than half the battery life left. She stared at it, tempted.
No. She’d wait until she had answers to her other questions—the Kemenis’ intentions, their manpower.
Answers it was just about time to find out.
In her hand, the phone vibrated. Selena jumped, chided herself for being nervy and checked the incoming number.
Cole. Of course it was Cole; the message was probably his, too. It’d been forty-five minutes, maybe even an hour since the Kemenis had made their move on the capitol. By now CNN had a live feed going. He’d be expecting to find her at the embassy…and he’d be wrong.
The phone gave another hopeful vibration, and this time Selena thumbed the on button, resolutely putting the phone to her ear. “Hello, Cole.”
“Selena!”
She’d never thought to hear Cole frightened. Of anything. But the fear tinged his voice even through this staticky satellite connection. Cole’s voice. It was a wonderful, smooth low voice that triggered a flush of the very emotions she’d been trying to avoid—along with the usual warmth she felt in his presence.
The very reason she had to run so far away in order to sort out her feelings.
She’d always responded to him that way—the first day she met him, the day they’d gotten married, and each and every time he turned that smile on her. With effort, she managed to avoid blurting out her suspicions about being pregnant—because he really didn’t need to know it. Not now, when she was trapped in a building under Kemeni siege. For whatever he’d done, whatever potential affairs he might have conducted, she knew he cared. Right there in his voice, she could hear how much he cared. She just wasn’t sure if he cared in the way that she needed—or if he even could. He was so good at filling so many roles…maybe he simply couldn’t limit himself to one relationship role.
You believed he could when you married him. That he had.
“Lena?”
Selena blinked. Battery time. Don’t waste it. “Listen,” she told him, moving up to her knees so she could react more quickly if anyone came to the door during this time she couldn’t hear them as well. “I’ve got to save this battery, so I only have a moment. I’m in the Berzhaani capitol building.”
He swore a blistering oath, but cut it short. “What’s your situation?”
“At liberty. As far as I know, I’m the only one. I’m about to go down and scope it out, but I think Allori, Razidae, the staff and a whole busload of college students all picked the wrong day to be here.”
“Fits what I’ve heard.” Cole swore again, more softly this time. “Any chance you can get out?”
“I don’t know yet. I doubt it. They know I’m here.” Selena hesitated, hunting the best words. Businesslike words. Orderly words. “What have you heard? What do the Kemenis want?”
“Razidae’s resignation,” Cole said promptly. “Along with all his advisors, support staff, any capitol employee who ever touched the hand of an American in peace and all dogs who’ve wagged their tails at Americans. The cats can stay, because everyone knows they’re notoriously fickle anyway.”
Selena closed her eyes, touching the bridge of her nose. “And the threat? When do they start killing people?”
“That part’s not clear. At least, not as it’s coming over CNN. The truth is, no one out here knows what’s really going on in there. They issued that short statement of demand, and—”
“Then I’ll find out,” Selena said. What the hell were the Kemenis up to? The other members of Razidae’s government would never step down, not even to save Razidae’s life. Those were the prime minister’s own well-known instructions, leaving the Kemenis very little to gain even if they survived. From the tone of Cole’s voice, he felt very much the same. She told him, “I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Stay off the landline.” It was more secure…he’d understand that.
“I’ll be here.” Cole hesitated. Even through her own unexpected relief at this reassurance—she’d rather have no one else handling details on the other end of the phone with her life at stake—Selena could practically see him wrestling with himself. She wasn’t sure if he lost or won when he spoke again. “Lena, I know you’re upset about something—”
At home, he meant. At him. What had given her away? How unfair that he could be so certain of her when she couldn’t manage the same in return.
“—and I know we can’t go into that right now. But don’t forget…” He hesitated, trailing off in a way that meant he was hunting for better words. “Just don’t forget how much I love you.”
She hadn’t expected it. She didn’t know what to say. She let noisy static fill the air between them—wasting time, wasting battery power, but too surprised at the way her heart snatched those words to do anything else.
“I mean it,” Cole said, growing fierce. If he’d been there, he’d have pulled her close by now. He’d be looking down at her, arctic-blue eyes intense with the meaning behind his words, close enough for her to see that quirky dark blue spot on his left iris. “Whatever upset you, whatever goes on there, don’t you dare forget how damn much I love you!”
She couldn’t get her voice above a murmur. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Good,” he growled. “Now go save the day, will you? I’ll be waiting by the phone.” And he cut the connection before she could.
Selena flipped the phone closed, turning it off; her movements came automatically, and she gave them no thought at all. Instead she dropped her forehead back down on her knees.
…how damn much I love you!
It was a lifeline. He knew she’d run, if not why. He knew the peril she faced—if the Kemenis found her, they weren’t likely to escort her to captivity. She’d already caused too much trouble. Come back to me, that’s what he meant. What he wanted.
She gave herself the moment…let herself feel what his voice did to her—what his emotions did for her. Selena, orderly and logical and everything in its place…unless she was with Cole. Unless he sparked the unpredictable in her as he so often did. In the outside world, she wore her precision like a shield; in their apartment, she was just as likely to strip in one room so she could surprise him in another. Like the evening the week before he’d left, when she’d walked into the bedroom during his workout, bare as bare came, and straddled him on the exercise bench.
He lost all the air in his lungs in a surprised gust of exhalation, both arms dropping away in mid butterfly-curl, his chest beautifully exposed and ripe for touching. She moved against him, sighing happily, and by then he was hissing through his teeth, his hands fumbling free of the weights and only making it as far as the bench press bars, which he clutched in helpless reaction.
They’d only been gym shorts. They hadn’t lasted long.
Selena ached to think of the moment, in her heart as well as her body. For as physically sweet as it had been, the memory only hammered home what he meant to her. What he gave to her.
Spontaneity. Unpredictability. Outrageous daring. And right now, if she was going to survive, she needed to find it all within herself, too.
Chapter 6
S elena took her outrageous daring back into the fray, leaving her briefcase under the bed and rinsing her teacup so as to leave as few signs as possible that she’d been here. She found a service elevator and tucked herself against the front wall beside the door. When the old doors clunked open on the first floor, she eased a hand over the open door button and held it there, giving any curious terrorist passing by plenty of time to check out the conveyance.
But no one approached. No one so much as grunted out a demanding question. Selena edged around the opening to find an empty hallway with a decidedly more utilitarian look than the other areas of the capitol she’d seen so far. The painted walls needed a new coat of their flat eggshell color, and the carpets needed cleaning—or better yet, replacement. A rolling cloth laundry bin sat at a haphazard angle against the wall, and the thick, steamy smell of food permeated the air. Roast lamb overlaid by all the spices of baharat—cloves and cinnamon and cumin and the sting of curry powder.
She held her breath, waiting to see how her stomach might react to the invasion of odors, but either the tea had done the trick or she’d gotten the problem out of her system. It was undoubtedly coincidence that as she held her coat closed with one hand, it rested low over her flat belly. Flat for now?
Stop that.
She stepped out into the hallway, moving swiftly to the first inset door to consider what she’d seen along the way. A door at the end of the hall with a mop and bucket sitting outside it. Double swinging doors not far from her current position, which seemed to be—she peeked inside to be sure—a linen closet, full of napkins and silky-fine linen tablecloths. Not of any particular interest. The maintenance closet and the kitchen, on the other hand…
She listened, heard nothing but the ping of a water pipe, and headed for the swinging doors, quickly scanning the interior through the small windows before she invited herself in.
Fancy. Lots of gleaming stainless steel, a bank of gas stoves against the wall, a column of ovens butted up against them. Cutlery, pots and pans and obscure devices whose purpose Selena could only guess.
Bullets riddled it all. Blood smeared the floor, thick trails leading to a walk-in freezer. Food sat half-prepared, congealing over cold burners.
Selena raised a critical eyebrow. If she were going to stage a government takeover, she’d want to make sure her people had food available—not to mention a place to prepare it. As it was, she hoped the Kemenis had brought MREs along, because otherwise everyone would get pretty hungry before this incident was over. And a hungry terrorist was a cranky terrorist.
Still, no assumptions. Perhaps whoever ran this show wasn’t all that stupid after all, but had merely encountered a minor rebellion he’d had no choice but to quell.
Selena walked the kitchen, stepping over the blood trails…walking through them would only betray her presence here when someone inevitably came back to see just what could be done about the food situation. She helped herself to a lovely little paring knife, something she could stick through her belt without worrying about inadvertent stab wounds. By all means, no inadvertent stab wounds.
Ice pick. Oh yeah. No easy place to put it; with regret Selena jabbed it through the bottom of her coat pocket, leaving the knobby handle within easy reach. Corkscrew? Too bulky. For now.
Besides, she could always come back. A good iron frying pan upside the head did as much harm to a terrorist as to anyone.
A scuffle of sound alerted her, sending her up against the wall beside the double doors. When it came again she pinpointed it to the freezer, and immediately realized that not everyone thrown in that convenient storage had been as dead as assumed. She opened the door with much caution, ready for any survivors who might assume she was Kemeni.
In the glare of a naked lightbulb, a man stood tottering on his feet, his whites splashed with the blood of others and liberally soaked with his own. The impressive fillet knife he clutched wouldn’t have done him much good against Kemeni rifles, but he held it with much determination regardless. The equally determined look on his face faded to confusion as he took in the sight of Selena in the doorway, all her borrowed weaponry in concealment, an American woman in informal clothing who should be screaming at the sight of the grotesquely piled dead before her. Men in kitchen whites, men in green jackets.
Selena didn’t scream. She said in Berzhaani, “You’d best sit before you fall. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“The Kemenis have already done that,” the man said. Short, stout enough to fill out his whites without slopping over the edges, he carried a cynical air and a nose generous enough to have provided for two men. He eyed her, taking hold of a shelf to steady himself. Before him, the pile of dead; around him, shelves of the highest quality food products, arranged in meticulous sections. “Are you a crazy woman, coming here? If they don’t have you, why don’t you run?”
“They know of me,” she said, letting her voice take on an absent tone. “They just don’t know where I am. I’d rather they not find out—just as I’m sure you’d rather they not know you still survive.”
He made an emphatic gesture with his free hand. “I do believe we are allies, whoever you are—the enemy of my enemy.”
“That last part’s accurate enough,” she murmured. “Are you badly hurt? There’s not much I can do for you…tablecloths, maybe.”
“I know only that I’m not dead.” He glanced at the others from the kitchen, and sorrow flickered across his features, settling in at the flare of his substantial nostrils and the press of his lips. “I have been shot in the arm, which does not work very well. Otherwise, I am only cold.”
“Tablecloths should help with that. We could raise the temperature—”
“And sit here in the middle of rotting food and the decomposing bodies of my friends?” He shook his head, sharply. “They brought their weapons in through the kitchen, you know. Mutaa turned out to be one of them. They came running in here and he handed out rifles like kitchen treats. And who are you again?”
“Someone who wants to get us out of this mess.” Selena knew he wouldn’t quite be able to understand, and he didn’t. She left him with a baffled and wary expression. “I’ll be right back.”
Retrieving a pile of tablecloths from the linen closet took only moments. She brought him as many as she could carry, and used several to cover the dead. The others she draped carefully over the man’s shoulders, and then she found a plastic crate full of cabbage and flipped it upside down, disregarding the rolling cabbages. “Here. Sit.” And as he complied, looking more bemused than ever, she asked, “Have they been here since they did this? Have you heard them checking out this area at all? Did you overhear them say anything about their purpose?”
He raised a hand, along with both eyebrows. “Ai, ai,” he said, the Berzhaani equivalent of hold your horses. “They came, they killed, they left. I’ve been in here with the others since then. I’ve heard nothing. And they did not take the time to explain themselves before they killed.”
Selena tucked her lower lip in her teeth for a thoughtful chew. Not helpful. Not helpful at all. She’d gained a few useful little defensive weapons here, but no information to speak of. She knew from Cole that the Kemenis were demanding Razidae’s resignation, but she still had no idea what the terrorists truly wanted. Oftentimes the public demand and the private intent didn’t match very neatly…and until she knew the Kemenis’ true goals, she couldn’t assess the situation properly. Act on it properly.
She found the man watching her with some curiosity, and saw his dawning realization that she wasn’t merely calculating her best options for escape.
Not yet, anyway. Someone had to stop this. And just like this morning at the shrine village, Selena didn’t see anyone else around with the means. Just me.
She’d jammed several spotless linen napkins into the cargo pocket of her coat, where they cohabited with the ice pick handle. Now she pulled them out and crouched beside him. “This’ll hurt.”
He grunted as she took his arm from beneath his tablecloth cloak and propped it against her leg, shaking a napkin out and efficiently rolling it into a tube. “It already hurts.” But he winced as she tied the tube around his wound, not taking the time to remove the white chef’s uniform shirt that showed the blood so well, and admitted, “That hurt more.”
She grinned at him, finding herself drawn in by his cranky charm. “My name is Selena.” She knotted the ends of the napkin, barely long enough as they were. “I’m a pushy American from the embassy and I’m going to do something about this situation. Would you like to help?”
He eyed the bandage as she released his arm, opened and closed his fist with enough vigor to make himself wince and carefully tucked the limb away beneath the tablecloth. “I am Atif. How do you think I might help you?”
“Who knows this section of the building better than you do?” Selena shrugged. “My guess would be no one.”
“And in that you would be right.” He gave his coworkers a pensive look and closed his eyes in resignation—an acceptance that his part in this crisis wasn’t yet over. “What is it you need to know?”
“I think the Kemenis probably have everyone gathered in the ballroom, or at least one of the function rooms nearby. I need to check them out. Quietly.”
He smiled. Partly it looked gleeful, as though he had just the right answers for her. And partly the expression looked…predatory.
And so Selena found herself in a small, barely lit corridor sandwiched between the ballroom—currently in dining-room setup, Atif explained—and the hallway behind it. The corridor ran the length of the function rooms, providing discreet entry for maintenance, food service and even the occasional escaping Berzhaani diplomat who’d had enough of Western arrogance. The divider between the corridor and function rooms was a flimsy one, but it was enough. Selena counted the function rooms by the seams where outside light leaked through, just as Atif had instructed. And she kept an alert ear out for any indication that she wasn’t the only one inhabiting the narrow warren. It took no key to enter this place, only the knowledge that it existed.
Not far from the kitchen, Selena herself had merely opened the door Atif had identified for her, discovering what looked like a linen closet but what was in truth an exchange area. On one side, used dishes, burned-out table lights, candle stubs…some of them still waited for cleanup. On the other, shelves for supplies and trays and pitchers. And out the back, beyond the thick black curtain…this lovely little corridor.
Atif’s brow had wrinkled slightly as he told her of the hidden access, and now that she was here, Selena had no doubt why. Each room had a number of tiny spy holes, no doubt so the servers could keep an eye on the needs of the diplomats and functionaries without intruding into their events. Selena peered through one into a small empty room meant for one-on-one discussions, and considered how easy it would be to observe such proceedings—or better yet, to observe the private discussion between two officials from another country who thought themselves alone. Was there a similar arrangement in the room where she and Ambassador Allori had habitually waited for the prime minister? Selena routinely and discreetly swept such waiting rooms for recording and listening devices…but she couldn’t check for warm bodies lurking in narrow passages.
From ahead, a voice rose in sudden but short-lived fright, muffled enough to come from outside her little personal hallway. Selena moved quickly toward it and found the peephole by its light. With her own breath loud and revealing in her ears, she put her eye to it.
Bingo. A function room crammed with people. She found Allori; she found Prime Minister Razidae and his deputy prime minister, Amar bin Kuwaji—all under the careful eye of a tan and olive green dressed guard. The Kemenis must want the entire government to step aside, or they’d just kill Razidae. Regardless, she doubted Razidae would survive. He was the most significant unifying leader this country had had for generations, and as long as he lived, the people would rally around him. Any Kemeni government would hold only temporary rule.
The others, they’d keep as leverage. As a way to induce Western and European countries to pressure Razidae’s people into stepping aside.
The others.
As if those lives could be summed up so simply. There they were—the two chaperones who’d accompanied the students. The woman Selena had seen in the lobby, but not the man. A handful of diplomats who’d been unlucky enough to choose this day to conduct their business. The glamorous but modest events coordinator. Three young women in green jackets.
And the students.
Terrified, pale…they huddled together against the walls and around the few small round tables available. One girl had her legs crossed so hard Selena was sure she’d wet her pants before she had a chance at a bathroom. Two other girls comforted a third who cried softly, and when they looked across their friend’s bowed shoulders, their expressions turned grim. And there, in the corner—the young man who’d given Selena such an openly appraising look and the girlfriend he’d annoyed, holding each other with a desperate affection.
The hostages had none of the small comforts this opulent room was meant to provide—no water, no finger sandwiches, no veggie plates with exotic dips arranged on expensive glass and silver serving ware. They weren’t being attended, feted, or even being fed the propaganda they’d come to hear. Their lives, in an instant, had turned into terror.
Dammit. It wasn’t right. These were young people; they hadn’t even started their lives. They had nothing to do with Berzhaan’s problems; they had done nothing to offend the Kemenis. They were here to broaden their horizons, to learn acceptance of this very culture. They had not, like Selena, willingly accepted a career that on occasion turned her into a target and at the least kept her in restless countries with high incidents of terrorism. They hadn’t made those choices at all.
Like Selena, pregnant though she might be. Or like Cole. God, she wished he were here. And she realized the sudden irony of it, that she would trust him with her life but not with her heart.
As these young men and women were now counting on Selena.
They just didn’t know it yet.
She wished she could give them some reassurance, some sign…you’re not alone. But it wasn’t time for that…far from it. By the time they knew she was here—working for them, fighting for them—things would probably be over one way or the other.
Selena closed her eyes against the sight of them, fighting a terrible wash of anger. She’d get nowhere with a paring knife and an ice pick if she didn’t use her anger wisely—drawing on it for strength when she needed it, leaving it behind when her thinking had to be crystal-clear. Her entire purpose as an FBI legate was to fight terrorism. It was why she was here.
She’d just never faced it on such a visceral level before.
Surprise. Get over it. Move on.
And that’s exactly what she did. She’d found the hostages; she’d seen that Allori looked as composed as ever and Razidae remained alive. For the moment there was nothing she could do for them. Now she had to find the terrorists.
She didn’t have far to go. The next little peephole showed her just what she was up against. Just who. And as startled as she was to find the American fugitive, Jonas White, in deep discussion with a small grouping of the men sprawled around the room—cleaning weapons, holding weapons, staring fiercely at nothing in particular, and even in a few instances bleeding—her gaze skipped over the aging international player and settled on none other than the man from the lobby. The one who’d stepped from the cover of GQ, handsome and finished and sleek. Dark hair, sharp aquiline lines to his face and a broad-shouldered body made obvious now that he’d discarded his jacket and wore only the silk T-shirt; it followed every plane and long line of muscle, highlighting the elegance of his carriage. And his eyes…they flashed at Jonas White’s words, a dark and simmering glower. Eyes to die for.
Except Selena didn’t intend to.
She did step back a moment, taking a deep breath. Jonas White was one thing. He was a player, a man who liked to wield power and who liked to win—but a man whose most important considerations were his own skin and his own interests. His presence here no doubt represented some last-ditch effort to rescue his faltering influence and rebuild the empire that his adopted daughter, Lynn, had destroyed when she learned the true nature of his activities. And though Jonas was not to be underestimated…
It was the Berzhaani man who worried her. The one who’d been in the lobby…the one who’d probably started this whole mess, killing the guards so his people could storm the building. Unlike Jonas, this Kemeni leader burned with purpose. He’d see this crisis through to the end, and Kemeni interests would come before his own. Selena wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been looking at the reclusive Tafiq Ashurbeyli himself. It would take a man such as this to drive the Kemenis to such risky action when they were in fact close to defeat in the wake of Frank Black’s death and Jonas White’s financial collapse.
What had White told Ashurbeyli? Not the truth—not that he’d been behind Frank Black all along. But somehow he’d tied their fates together.
Just call me fate. Selena smiled grimly in the dimness of the corridor. Because I’m the one you’re about to meet. Together.
Having absorbed the implications of the room’s occupants, she returned to the peephole. She found the door leading to the function room that held the hostages. Guarded, of course. She had no doubt the main exit from that room was guarded, as well, and she’d already seen the interior guard. The hostages had nowhere to go unless she could cause enough diversion to get them out through this corridor. The ceilings were high and original; the heating ducts primitive and usually merely grates between the rooms. The same factors meant there would be little opportunity to beard the terrorists in their chosen den. She had no intention of revealing she’d discovered this passage until she had no choice.
Well, then. Perhaps she’d have to nibble at them from the edges. They might know she was here, but they wouldn’t know about her Athena Academy background. They wouldn’t know she hadn’t run to the darkest, most distant corner of the building to tremble and wait out the crisis.
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Doranna Durgin
A Middle Eastern capitol building has been captured by insurgents. The prime minister, his staff and a group of visiting college students have become disposable hostages. But what the rebels don't know is that someone is still loose in the building…. FBI legal attaché Selena Jones took the foreign post when her marriage hit the rocks. Now she's narrowly escaped becoming a hostage–but she's trapped. She has just hours to find out what the rebels are up to and outsmart their compelling leader. And her lone contact to the outside world is the one man she swore never to trust again….
Only the extraordinary women of Athena Academy could create Oracle—a covert intelligence organization so secret that not even its members know who else belongs. Now it’s up to three top agents to bring down the enemies who threaten all they’ve sworn to protect….
Kim Valenti:
An NSA cryptologist by day, this analytical genius and expert code breaker is the key to stopping a deadly bomb.
COUNTDOWN by Ruth Wind
Diana Lockworth:
With only twenty-four hours until the president’s inauguration, can this army intelligence captain thwart an attempt to assassinate him?
TARGET by Cindy Dees
Selena Jones:
Used to ensuring international peace, the FBI legal attaché had her biggest assignment yet—outsmarting a rebel leader to save hostages abroad.
CHECKMATE by Doranna Durgin
ATHENA FORCE: Chosen for their talents. Trained to be the best. Expected to change the world.
Checkmate
Doranna Durgin
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
DORANNA DURGIN
spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. After obtaining a degree in wildlife illustration and environmental education, she spent many years deep in the Appalachian Mountains. When she emerged, it was as a writer who found herself irrevocably tied to the natural world and its creatures—and with a new touchstone to the rugged spirit that helped settle the area and which she instills in her characters.
Doranna’s first published fantasy novel received the 1995 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award for the best first book in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. She now has fifteen novels of eclectic genres on the shelves and more on the way. Most recently she’s leaped gleefully into the world of action-romance. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds Web pages, wanders around outside with a camera and works with horses and dogs. There’s a Lipizzan in her backyard, a mountain looming outside her office window, a pack of agility dogs romping in the house and a laptop sitting on her desk—and that’s just the way she likes it. You can find a complete list of titles at www.doranna.net along with scoops about new projects, lots of silly photos and a line to her SFF Net newsgroup.
Thanks to William Sanders and Robert Brown for wicked cool gun trivia, and to Judith Byorick for finding the inadvertently silly bits and to Evanescence for providing Selena with a theme album. And big thanks to Catherine Mann, for making sure I got the Predator details down right!
Dedicated to survivors everywhere.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 1
B erzhaan.
What a mess. Political unrest from within, political pressures from without, a country seething with unreleased social tension and unspoken dangers.
It was exactly what Selena Shaw Jones needed. Distraction.
She stood on the crest of a rubble-strewn hill in Berzhaan and knew herself for a coward. She stood amidst the revered ruins of the Temple of Ashaga and knew she should have been at home, working things out with Cole. She shouldn’t have retreated like a wounded child, unable to face the truth. It wasn’t a reaction typical of her—of the controlled, perfectionist FBI Legal Attaché who traveled the world to develop counterterrorism programs in other countries and to create team-work between those countries and the United States. Of a woman with extensive experience and training in dangerous situations, from fraught negotiations to firefights.
Emotionally, unexpectedly wounded. And no idea how to deal with it. So Selena had indeed retreated, all the way across the ocean to the brand-new legate office in Berzhaan’s capital, Suwan. So brand-new that her support staff had not yet arrived, and she spent most of her time with the U.S. ambassador, strategizing ways to build trust with a wary Berzhaani prime minister—or with the prime minister himself, attending flashy government functions to establish her presence here.
The rest of the time she spent learning the lay of the land—figuratively and literally. It was one reason she’d come to this shrine of ruins. The other…she’d heard this was a peaceful place. A contemplative place. A place where even a distressed Special Agent might sort out her thoughts.
She looked back down the steep hill she’d just ascended, a challenging obstacle course of rocks both large enough to climb over and small enough to turn an ankle. Below, the village of Oguzka looked peaceful, unchanged by its proximity to the shrine. No tourist attractions, no shacks lining the road offering trinkets to rich Europeans and Americans. Just families, going about their lives.
As it should be. One of Selena’s jobs was to keep things this way, wherever she went.
The house closest to the foot of the hill boasted a large backyard, unenclosed. A dormant garden covered nearly a third of it. Goats stood idly in a pen at the back, and the stone-walled house boasted a tidy, weed-free exterior. Peaceful. A little boy darted around the side of the house, young enough to stumble every third step and also young enough that he didn’t care. He played with a string of scrap material, letting it flutter in the wind.
Selena’s eyes burned, unexpected and startling, almost as unexpected as the sudden closing of her throat.
He was the reason she’d come.
He was also one of the reasons she’d run.
Family. Children. Plans and hopes and visions of a future with Cole that included cribs and baby mobiles and a thousand pictures of that first crawl, that first step, of a plump little mouth forming those first words…
Selena whirled away, taking a few abrupt steps toward the temple. She carefully wiped her eyes and retied her modest and respectful head scarf against the stiff winter breeze. She refocused on surroundings of ancient stone and ancient, eternal flame. Stone walls defined the courtyard, covered with moss and lichen, their once-square edges crumbled into softness. Built against those walls, low, dark religious cells waited for the return of the pilgrims who had once flocked here. Before her, a square shrine stood stolid against the years, precisely fenestrated to reveal the eternal flame within. This, the Temple of Ashaga just outside Berzhaan’s capital city of Suwan, held the muted awe of generations. A quiet place; a revered place.
Just what she’d wanted. Needed.
Then…why wasn’t it helping?
Because it definitely wasn’t helping.
Selena deliberately turned to matters more directly at hand. Distraction. Berzhaan had wedged itself between the tumultuous Middle East and acquisitive Russia, swapping between freedom and occupation too many times in the last century. The changes made for a country in turmoil, seething with unrest and jam-packed with diplomatic complications that filled Selena Shaw Jones’s hours and let her tumble into bed exhausted, knowing she was doing her best to keep terrorism away from the little boy down below as much as from those children in the States. If only Razidae would let her build the network between their countries that would allow the communication, intelligence gathering and local counter-terrorist education that it was her job to establish….
A faint noise caught the edges of her attention. Was that—?
No. She was on edge, that was all. She’d had no way to know when Cole would return, and no intention of waiting him out in their oh-so-empty condo. She’d asked for this overseas assignment to get perspective on her life. And while she’d already earned Ambassador Dante Allori’s highly relieved respect with her ability to translate the most delicate political statements and to quietly, politely persist in her efforts to woo reluctant Prime Minister Omar Razidae, she still failed miserably in her own personal goals.
There he’d been. Her husband, kissing a beautiful woman right out in Constitution Park.
Big deal, she’d told herself. He was a CIA field officer—Jason P. JOXLEITER in the CIA’s eyes, and his friends got a kick out of calling him Jox. He was a field officer down to the silly all-caps assigned surname, and that meant putting up a front—wherever he was, whomever he was with—to suit his cover.
Except he was supposed to be out of the country. And while he never told her details of an assignment, she always knew his location. Always overseas and never with the CIA’s Foreign Services Bureau that worked U.S. turf, and she always knew just where. Then if something went haywire in the world, she knew whether to worry. It was the one stable thing in their relationship, the one thing she could always count on.
Not this time.
And how many other times had he lied? How many times had he used CIA guile against her?
Another harsh sound scraped up from the small village at the bottom of the hill. Selena turned into the wind to look down upon the picturesque area, frowning at the gusty blast that obscured any additional noises from below. After a moment in which she saw nothing out of place, she turned back to the temple, walking slowly around the shrine. She put her hands up to one of the openings, feeling the mild heat through her finely stitched black leather gloves.
It wasn’t enough to warm her. The depth of her feelings frightened her, kept her from thinking clearly.
Ironically, if the sounds she’d heard had actually been gunshots, she would have felt perfectly able to deal with them—the Athena Academy had given her that much, and more: her cache of fluently spoken languages, her self-confidence, the background to excel at Harvard Law School and then as an FBI legate assigned to situations as tricky and demanding as Berzhaan’s. The accomplishments to be tapped as an Oracle agent. Selena knew how to handle herself in court, behind a translator’s smooth detachment and in the field.
What she couldn’t seem to do was stop the way her throat constricted into tight pain at the thought of that moment in the D.C. park.
A sudden report on the wind stopped her short; she looked up from the rock-strewn path to narrow her eyes at the village below. There was no mistaking it this time. Weapons fire. Automatic weapons. Behind the house nearest to Selena, the young boy darted out across the rocky, close-cropped land to crawl between the crooked slats of a goat pen a hundred yards behind the house. The four goats there parted to accept him as if used to his presence.
An abrupt burst of activity at the back of the stone-walled house followed—the quick flurry of what looked like a woman trying to exit until rough hands hauled her back in, her shriek of protest clearly audible as it rode the wind up the hill.
Trouble. Not ordinary domestic trouble, no indeed. Kemeni rebels? And if it was, was this a calculated large-scale action, or a handful of overeager rebels causing trouble?
There was no telling. Turmoil gripped this country like a lover. Kemeni rebels—supposedly backed by the U.S., although Selena knew better—increasingly threatened Prime Minister Omar Razidae’s government. Russia had become keenly interested in this territory; they, too, were wrongly convinced that the U.S. treated with Razidae with one hand and fed arms and money to the Kemenis with the other. The Q’Rajn terrorists, convinced of the same, wanted the States out of Berzhaan altogether and had taken their fight to U.S. soil to face recent defeat at the hands of two of Selena’s Athena Academy classmates.
And then there was everyone else in the world, keeping an eye on Berzhaan’s undeveloped oil resources.
All the while, the people of Berzhaan struggled to survive, caught in the middle. And down the hill from Selena, a small boy cowered behind his unconcerned goats, probably not realizing they were truly no cover at all.
Selena did a quick weapons check. Sturdy Beretta Cougar .45 DAO in her pocket holster, several slim knives secreted at ankle, waist and right collarbone—where she could dip into her sweater from the neckline and acquire steel before any threatening agent even thought to consider whether she might be anything more than the sleek, tailored American she appeared to be. Then she headed down the hill, striding firmly in spite of the footing but not drawing attention to herself by running. As she moved, she pulled a hair band from an inner pocket of the coat and reached beneath the silk scarf to gather her long, layered hair at the nape of her neck. She drew her Beretta, holding it down at her side where the folds of the coat obscured it and she could easily keep it hidden if her concerns were for nothing.
She didn’t expect to keep it hidden.
As she neared the base of the hill and angled for the stone house, the boy darted out from behind the goats and ran into her path, babbling in his native language so quickly—with a young child’s creative use of words—as to challenge even her excellent Berzhaani language skills. She put a finger to her lips and then his, startling the child, and in that moment of silence she said, “Slower, bibcha.”
His eyes widened with surprise all over again; his gaze darted over her from head to toe, taking in her attire and her head scarf, her appearance—dark blue-green eyes, razor-cut chestnut bangs emerging from the scarf and all-American features—and trying to reconcile it all with her use of his own language. She crouched before him, her gun still lost in the black leather folds of her coat. “Tell me,” she said. “Why are you frightened?”
He touched the bright red leather piping on the front edge of the coat, following it briefly with his finger as if to confirm this was indeed something out of his ken—but his round, light tea-colored little face with its pointed chin looked about to crumple.
“There, now,” Selena said, fairly brusquely, fighting her natural inclination to soothe him—it would only release those tears, and then she’d learn nothing. “When a brave young man such as yourself runs to greet me, I must listen. What have you to say?”
The boy hovered on the edge of tears for another moment—and indeed, one slipped out to track its way down the baby fat of his cheek. But he pressed his lips together and then said, “Bad men are in the house. Don’t go in there! Auntie told me to run and hide, just like we practiced.”
“I saw you.” Selena couldn’t stop herself from wiping away that single tear where it had trickled out part-way down his face. “You hid very well. Do you think you can do it again?”
“With Spotty and Eleny?”
She could only assume these were two of the goats. “Farther,” she said. “In the temple, where the pilgrims used to sleep when they stayed there.”
He shook his head, flinching at the sound of breaking pottery from within the house. “I’m not allowed—”
“This once, you are,” she told him.
“Mama said—”
She put her finger to her lips again, and gave him a slow, reassuring smile. “I’ll tell her it was my fault.”
He returned a solemn, dark-eyed look, lower lip protruding slightly with the effort of his decision. Selena all but held her breath, waiting, knowing he might well be unable to trust her, as much as he’d been willing to warn her. The Beretta felt solid and familiar in her hand, and just as suddenly as if it could not possibly belong there while she spoke to this child.
Abruptly he bit his lip and nodded. “Will you hide, too?”
“Yes.” She stood; the wind tugged at her open coat. She wished she could pull off her sweater to give him—he wore only a thin wool jacket over his own baggy, loosely knit sweater—but to do so would reveal her knives and her gun, a revelation likely to break the tenuous connection between them. “But I’m going to hide somewhere else, somewhere I can get help for your people.”
This made no sense, of course. But she hoped he would grab for the reassurance without working through the logic. She didn’t give him much time to think about it, not as a muted cry reached her from the still-cracked back door. “Go now!” She pointed up the hill. “As fast as you can! Someone will come for you when it is safe.”
This time. For this child truly to be safe, Selena would have to accomplish much more than this chance, unexpected interference with one besieged house.
After the briefest hesitation, the boy sprinted away, his barely coordinated limbs putting much effort into the action. So young…
Selena smoothed her scowl away and reached for focus. She was on the job now, albeit in a fashion never formally acknowledged. She eased up to the side of the house, up to the small window with open shutters on the outside and a film of curtains covering the glass from the inside. She winced as something else within the house broke, something wooden and splintering this time, followed by another cry of fear. The window showed her little…a gash of sunlight over the floor where the front door had been left open, a chair overturned against the wall, a bread plate smashed near the entrance to a back room. No one in sight. Great. She’d have to slink around and hope another window would reveal how many intruders had—
A stutter of automatic weapons fire sounded from down the street. More than just this one house at stake. And from within, a woman screamed, a full-bodied shriek of fear and denial. No more time. Start with this house, worry about the rest later. She moved swiftly to the front corner of the house, confirmed that no one waited out front and made it to the doorway itself. A quick peek-retreat revealed the main room of the house to be abandoned. From within the room beyond, a man shouted harsh demands for cooperation and the sharp slap of hand against flesh struck Selena’s ears. Bastard. Of course he was going to rape her. Of course. And in this society where the conservative chador was no longer required by law but still often used by custom, rural women still paid every price for rape above and beyond the violation of the act itself.
Selena did another peek-and-duck, still saw nothing, and eased into the house with silence as her shield, her coat whispering around her in swirling folds of leather. A quick glance through the doorway beyond showed her a tiny bedroom, one man in Kemeni green and tan colors pressing a diminutive woman into the corner while his loosely gripped Abakan Russian assault rifle—Abakan…strange choice—pointed at the floor, his avid gaze riveted on the bed. There a second man crouched over a wildly flailing woman, struggling to shove aside the copious material of her modest chador robes. As Selena retreated, taking a deep breath, her gun held two-handed and ready, another resounding slap marked the man’s impatience.
Selena surged around the door frame and shot him in the ass.
He cried out in shock and tumbled to the floor. The woman scrambled back against the wall at the head of the bed, frantically rearranging her clothing, and the second man, caught in flat-footed surprise, started to raise his badly positioned Abakan rifle. The woman he’d squashed into the corner let out a deliberate, ear-piercing shriek, her only remaining weapon.
It bought Selena an instant, and an instant was all she needed to drill the man twice, her finger steady on the long pull of the double-action trigger. Once in the knee, once in the right biceps, and then the woman in the corner gave a fierce cry of triumph and leaped for the rifle. Selena caught a glimpse of the look in her eye and instantly targeted the woman even as she shouted a warning—and reassurance. “Leave the rifle—I am your friend!”
The woman hesitated long enough to realize she was in Selena’s sights, but as she straightened with the Abakan carefully held by the stock alone, she leaned sideways to spit on the floor. “My friend,” she said. Unlike the other woman, she did not wear a chador, only a colorful punjabi and matching hijab scarf. Her thick, woven shawl lay crumpled on the floor in the corner. “American. If you had not been supplying the Kemenis, they would not now be in a position to act—or desperate enough to send out men like this.” She kicked the man in his bloody knee, eliciting a scream. She didn’t wait for Selena’s reply, but went to the woman on the bed, leaning the rifle against the headboard with a frightening familiarity.
Selena lowered her gun but didn’t holster it, not with the stutter of gunfire echoing in her memory. These two pathetic so-called freedom fighters weren’t the only problem this village had. Moving swiftly and not at all gently, she patted them down for weapons, glad for her gloves. Rank sweat and bad beer and gun oil stung her nose. Stepping back from them with a new collection of knives and two more handguns, she piled the stash on the foot of the bed. “Do you have rope? Can you tie them until an army unit arrives?”
The woman looked as though she wanted to spit again. “What makes you think Razidae’s army cares? What makes you think they will come?” She caressed the cheek of the other woman, a soothing gesture.
Selena reached into a pocket for the familiar feel of her cell phone. “Because I’m going to call them.”
She’d have preferred to call in American troops, but she’d already gotten a glimpse of the reception they’d endure. So she made the call, a short, concise conversation with the American Embassy, informing them of the situation. “Let Razidae’s people know,” she told the embassy warden’s assistant. “And keep me out of it—it’s the last thing any of us needs. I’ll be gone by the time they get here.”
“They’re on alert,” the man told her. “They won’t take long.”
“Neither will I,” Selena assured him.
But she didn’t leave immediately. She selected one of the knives from the bed, the one with the dullest gleam of an edge when she held it up to the light from the room’s single small, high window. The one that would hurt the most—and the one her chosen victim, the man still scrabbling around on the floor trying to find a way to clamp both hands to his bleeding buttock at once and not leave himself entirely vulnerable from the front, had been prepared to use on these women.
She crouched before him, the Beretta held in a deceptively casual grip in the hand that rested on her knee, and gave the knife a speculative look before she turned her gaze on the man.
“Woman,” he said. “American. You are nothing to me. Your people betrayed us.”
Kemeni, all right, even if his tan and green clothing hadn’t given him away. Kemeni, and convinced that the recently deceased Frank Black had been working with the States when he’d supplied the rebels with arms. Instead, Black had done so at the behest of Jonas White, a man who liked to play whole countries as if they were game pieces, and whose name popped up in connection with far too many successful black market ventures.
“My people were never behind you,” Selena told him. “And fortunately for my ego, you’re nothing to me, either.” Except a source of information. “Are you just out to curdle some cheese here, or is there some purpose behind this attack?”
“Our business is not for your ears.”
“Shouldn’t have shot you in the ass,” Selena muttered. “I scrambled your brains.” She gave a meaningful heft of the knife, eyeing various parts of his body in the most obvious way. And then she slid her eyes over to the woman who comforted her sister.
The man took note. His expression grew more stubborn.
“Well, maybe you aren’t Kemeni after all,” she said. “The Kemenis have honor and purpose—of a sort, anyway. But these women have more honor than you.”
The man’s face darkened; his lips worked. “I spit on your—”
Selena prodded him with the knife in the vicinity of his bloody butt cheek. “Don’t,” she warned him. Then she held the knife out to the woman in the punjabi. When the woman hesitated, Selena gestured with the knife, affirming her intent.
The woman’s fingers wrapped around the hilt to grow white at the knuckles, a grim determination taking over her expression. “No one need know how he died,” she said softly. “They need not know it was I.”
“Might as well pin it on me,” Selena told her. “Although if he answers my questions, perhaps you could settle for scarring him in some way that he would never admit came from a woman’s hand.”
The woman only smiled.
“You cannot expect me to take this seriously!” the wounded man shouted.
Selena had to give him credit. For a man bleeding badly from his tush, his bleeding partner offering nothing but the sullen silence of someone who hopes not to be noticed, he had courage.
Or perhaps he simply truly didn’t understand his situation.
Selena gave him a beatific smile. “I expect you to take it very seriously.” She used her gun to tick off points on the fingers of her other hand. “Point—I speak seriously kickin’ Berzhaani. Point—I’m very good from this end of a gun. Point—Did you see me sweat when I took you boys down? Now take a moment to think. Think hard. What sort of American woman are you likely to find here in the heart of Berzhaan with all these things in her favor?”
Someone to take seriously, that’s who.
He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to hold on to his self-righteous rage and scorn, glaring at her from deep-set eyes just made for the expression.
“Did the Kemenis send you?” she asked.
He didn’t answer directly—but he looked away. It was enough.
“I gather they didn’t send you to behave like this in particular.” She tapped the muzzle of the Beretta thoughtfully against her knee. The motion kept his attention on the weapon—helped him to realize that this was no lady’s pistol, but a gun of sturdy heft that fit comfortably in her equally sturdy hands. That she wielded it without a second thought. “But here you are, causing trouble in an otherwise unremarkable location. The shrine is fascinating, but not a political touchstone.” And the Kemenis, suddenly bereft of their American benefactor, were desperate. Desperate enough to make a real move on the country’s power base? Her eyes narrowed; for the first time she let a glimpse of her anger show through. “But this is close enough to Suwan to cause alarm…close enough to draw off troops in response.” And I’ve just initiated that by calling in. And now the capital would be more vulnerable to terrorist action.
Again he looked away, trying to hide the subtle retreat with an uncomfortable shift to relieve pressure on his wound.
“You’re a sacrifice,” Selena said. “Contributing to a larger goal….”
Suwan…the embassy…the capitol. One or all of them, the real targets.
He glared again, and the curl returned to his lip as he opened his mouth to say something crude.
She smacked her pistol against his shin, a casual but precise blow that struck the crucial nerves there, numbing his leg with excruciating pain and with very little effort on her part. He made a wordless noise of surprise and gaped as his eyes watered, mouth quickly pursing for more imprecations.
“Don’t,” she said sharply. “Just…don’t.” She exchanged a glance with the woman who now held the knife, saw the uncertainty rising there and straightened. “I’m not sure,” she said to the woman, “but it might well be that his humiliation is complete without any extra scarring, especially if he were cast out at your doorstep in a pretty bundle for the National troops. It’s entirely up to you, of course. I’m afraid I have to leave now.”
The woman in the chador leaned toward the other, murmuring something worried.
“A boy,” said the first woman. “Did you see—?”
Selena nodded. “I sent him up to the shrine to hide, with the promise I would take all blame for it. I’m sure he’s waiting for you there.”
“Thank you,” said the woman in the chador, sitting for that moment like a queen on her throne instead of a nearly violated woman on her thoroughly rumpled bed. But she could not hide a quivering twitch of her mouth or the tears of relief welling in her eyes.
Selena thought it was her cue to leave. That and the distant sound of helicopter blades thumping the air. She emerged from the house with caution, the automatic gunfire still clear in her memory—but either no one else had intended to come to this far end of the town, or the arriving troops had caught their attention. She made it to her Russian Moskvich sedan without incident, folding herself into the driver’s seat with the Beretta in easy reach. She hoped to swing around the village and make it into Suwan without any trouble—but if trouble came along, she’d be ready for it.
She had to reach the embassy. She had to warn the ambassador…and she had to warn Berzhaan.
The Kemenis were rising.
Chapter 2
C olin Jones slung his duffel through the door of the modest D.C. condo he shared with Selena. Modest by choice and lifestyle as opposed to financial restrictions, even here in this area of off-the-chart living expenses. But…
Maybe that would change soon, if Selena became pregnant as they hoped. Maybe their silk plants and collection of sleek sight hound statuary would make way for the real things. Green, growing things. Warm loyalty and four-legged companionship to round out a home that also held the laughter of a family.
Not that it would be easy. He and Lena had already experienced enough rocky moments to be realistic about what lay ahead and even then she hadn’t known half the things he’d kept from her in recent months. Things he wouldn’t tell her, things he couldn’t tell her. Decisions she’d never understand…some decisions he didn’t like to think about. But she hadn’t known those things, and she’d recommitted to the marriage, recommitting to each other…and immersing themselves in a few brief weeks of passion-filled nights before duty called and Cole had gone off on a long-term assignment, hoping Selena would soon find a posting nearby.
But as he took his first step into the condo, he knew Lena wasn’t here. Damn. He’d all but felt her arms around him, her hands sneaking beneath his waistband to tug up his shirt and—
Nothing but frustration at the end of those thoughts.
The silence of the apartment surrounded him. The stuffy air, scented with undisturbed spice candles. The faint layer of dust settled over the empty table next to the door where their mail tended to pile up when they were home. A glance into their small living room showed no sign of legal briefs, no sign of Lena’s latest fiction favorites. Just the cream and maroon tones of the rug, curtains and furniture—a color scheme that had been a compromise between her desire for cool and clean decor and his own need for bold.
The kitchen…not a crumb on the counter. The bedroom…neatly tidied, not so much as a stray sock or one of those hair scrunchies Lena tended to lose track of—and though Cole was much more casual about such things than she, Lena had never obsessed about tidiness, either. Not when she was relaxed and happy. A glance back at the living room revealed the very same quilt square on the wall as had been there two months earlier.
Left not long after I did, did you? For she had an entire collection, and rather than spread them out over the austere walls she rotated them on a monthly basis—while the rest of the walls remained uncluttered, a testament to their struggle to merge their styles. The casual, assertive operative who approached life in the fast and loose lane, and the FBI legate with a lawyer’s precise, compartmentalized brain.
Not for the first time, he wished he could see her in action—in real action—to get a glimpse of that side of her. The side that would expose the ferocity of her will and her ability to take whatever the situation pitched at her.
It had to be there. Somewhere. It had to be, or she wouldn’t still be alive.
He tore himself away from his thoughts to realize he’d left the door open. Cole nudged the duffel aside so he could close himself in. And with Lena out there somewhere, putting this door between them definitely left him closed in.
It’s not like this has never happened before. Time to find the note, the one they always left each other. Time to disabuse the uneasiness growing somewhere in the pit of his stomach, spreading to become tension between his shoulder blades. Lena’s notes always gave him ease, made his inward tension relax to match his outward appearance.
He knew the things people said of him; he cultivated those things. He sowed the seeds for his own reputation as the laid-back charmer who took each mission on the fly, improvising his way to last-moment success. Even Lena bought into it, not truly realizing how important she was to him, in how many ways…all the little things, like her notes. They were the one place she cast aside her lawyer persona for pure silliness—catching him up on the gossip around their condo, informing him how much their silk plants had grown since he was last home, drawing him stick figure versions of her latest adventures in D.C. living. And of course…the challenge of finding the always-hidden note in the first place.
Except…there it was, right out on the kitchen counter, one corner tucked beneath the gleaming white toaster. A sheet torn carefully from a five-by-eight pad of lined yellow paper, inscribed with a few sentences in her neatest hand.
Cole—had an unexpected call to Berzhaan. Things are pretty tense there. I’ll let you know more as I can—check your e-mail.
No stick figure. No silliness. Only a sweeping S.
Something’s wrong.
But she couldn’t possibly know—
Very wrong.
Selena blew past the clean, modern outer ring of Suwan, where the post-Soviet restoration efforts prevailed. Approaching the center of the city, she maneuvered through the now-familiar streets into ancient Berzhaan, an area full of impressive stone architecture, and of old fortress walls that came from nowhere and disappeared into nothingness, no longer anything but pieces of their former glory. The streets turned cobbled, the alleys narrowed, and the thick feel of history hung in the air. Here, some of the oldest buildings had given way to Soviet manpower, leaving in their wake impressive new buildings of state. The capitol building was one such; the American embassy a much smaller version of the same, several blocks away.
She drove the Moskvich around the back of the embassy, returning it to the motor pool with a haste that drew the curiosity of the young Berzhaani who took the keys, and entered the embassy through a back door for which few had the special high-security key card. A glance at her watch confirmed her tardiness for her two o’clock appointment with the ambassador and the prime minister. She kicked her pace into a jog, soundless over the luxuriously thick carpeting, and went straight to the ambassador’s office in spite of her appearance, pulling off her head scarf along the way. The details of the embassy—trappings both American and Berzhaani—flashed past in a familiar blur, barely noticed.
Had anything been changed, that she would have noticed.
She pulled up short outside the open door of the ambassador’s outer office. Bonita Chavez looked up from her desk with disapproval deepening the lines of features that had been generous before middle-age and now seemed entrenched in making themselves even more obvious. She glanced at the classy silver and oak clock on the wall. “You’re late.”
Stern or not, Bonita didn’t worry Selena; along with her duties as the ambassador’s civil service admin, she seemed to have taken on mother-hen duties. Beneath her current frown lived worry, not anger, and Selena already harbored affection for her.
“I ran into a little trouble.” Selena stepped into the office. “Can I go in?”
“He’s waiting for you. You can rest assured he knows you’ve arrived.” Bonita’s gaze raked her up and down, looking for telltales of Selena’s “little trouble.”
“All one piece,” Selena told her, opening her coat wide for quick inspection and, as she’d intended, causing Bonita to bite her far-too-crimson lipstick against a smile. Selena forced herself to walk across a carpet of stunning workmanship—she always had to force herself to walk on the beauty of Sekha-made carpets—and rapped her knuckles against the dark, heavy wood door of the ambassador’s inner office before pushing it open.
Ambassador Allori looked up from his computer monitor. “Do I guess correctly that you had something to do with that call that came through the embassy, requesting troops at Oguzka?”
“The Kemenis—”
“Yes, yes.” He cut her off, frowned at his monitor and tapped a key in response, and simultaneously swept a stiff sheet of paper off his desk to hold out to her. “You’ll find this of interest, I think, though you hardly have time to read it. You don’t have time to change, either—I doubt Mr. Razidae will be disposed to notice. But you’ll want to wash your face. It’s got someone’s blood on it. Not yours, I presume.”
Bonita! She’d seen it, surely. She’d let Selena go on in without alerting her to clean up, and with an admirable lack of telltale expression at that.
On the other hand, perhaps it was done as a favor. Allori could hardly refute the evidence that her delay had been for significant reasons.
“No, sir.” She took the paper, recognizing the letterhead of the embassy warden. “Not the least bit mine.”
He gave her a moment to glance at the text, which bore the header Surge in Kemeni Rebel Activity:
The Department of State advises American citizens in Berzhaan to take prudent steps to ensure their personal safety in the coming days. Remain vigilantly aware of surroundings, avoid crowds and demonstrations….
Selena could not help a soft snort. Too late. Already been there, done that.
If Allori heard, he gave no sign of it. No doubt he, too, knew the value of keeping American personnel at an official distance from such…demonstrations. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said, which was as close as he’d get to referring to the Oguzka activity. “Now…we leave in less than fifteen minutes. Can you be back here in ten?”
Selena returned the warden notice to his desk and murmured, “See you in eight, Mr. Ambassador.” She turned on her heel, using her long legs to full advantage and mounting the back stairwell in twos and threes rather than waiting for the elevator to the third floor embassy staff housing. Selena’s chosen apartment, tucked in a back corner, caught sun through two windows and offered an amazing view of the Caspian Sea. Probably a mistake, given the way it reminded her of Cole’s eyes.
Sometimes the lake shone an impossible blue, and sometimes the undercurrents turned it a murkier blue-green, but she didn’t take time to check today’s color. For that matter, she didn’t even take the time to remove her coat. She eyed the bathroom mirror, removing the faint smear of blood to which Allori had referred. She removed her knives, knowing she’d have to face a metal detector at the capitol, and then dumped a few extra clips for her Beretta into her coat pocket. The gun and clips would be left at the capitol building’s sign-in desk, but given what she’d already encountered today, she didn’t intend to go out on the street unprepared.
As for the rest of it…she brushed a damp washcloth futilely over a smudge of…something…on her khakis, and ran it over her leather and nylon mesh hiking boots to remove the dust of the day. She applied a quick, light coat of foundation and a subtle smudge of kohl around the outer edges of slightly tilted eyes, knowing it would echo the look to which the prime minister was accustomed. She tackled her hair, pulling a brush through the tangles the wind had left beneath the scarf, giving herself a critical stare. Time for a cut. If she let it grow too far below her shoulders, the strong, lean bones of her face seemed stronger, leaner…she preferred to keep it short enough to square up her jaw and soften a strong chin with its hint of a cleft.
Three minutes remaining and she counted herself ready to go, except for a quick glance at her automatically downloaded e-mail as she closed her laptop up, her briefcase already to hand.
She wished she hadn’t.
E-mail from Cole.
Finally.
She knew she’d stopped breathing. Forced herself to begin again. There was no way to look at the message now. No way to look at it until she was through with work for the day.
The next one down in the list was another matter. Delphi.
Delphi was Selena’s contact at Oracle, and Oracle…
Oracle was a name Selena never said out loud. The elite intelligence-gathering organization predated Homeland Security, and now quietly provided backup. Oracle crossed agency lines to garner intel, a cross-check system designed to prevent terrorist disasters…and then they acted on it when no one else could or would. Selena suspected her invitation to join Oracle’s clandestine efforts was another legacy of her days at the Athena Academy. The organization, its methods and goals…it tasted strongly of Athena.
Alerted by the subject header—Kemeni—as much as the sender, Selena accepted that she’d be late to the ambassador’s office and opened the e-mail. Even so, she had time for no more than a glance.
A glance was all it took.
Chapter 3
B ut the e-mail warning hadn’t stopped Allori, only delayed them a few more crucial moments while he listened to Selena’s concerns. And then he’d issued a few quick orders and they’d headed for the Berzhaan capitol.
Late, late and later.
With one careful finger, Selena rubbed the bridge of her nose, not sure if she should have had lunch or if she actually regretted having breakfast. The scene in the lobby of the Berzhaan capitol building momentarily swam in her vision—but the moment passed and then the situation was all too clear: if they’d arrived on time, they would have gotten here before this busload of excited but respectful college students. Their bright winter coats would have proclaimed them foreigners if the quick whispers in English hadn’t; Selena heard all manner of accents, from American to Canadian to British. They clustered around the reception desk, trickling through the weapons detector arch one by one.
She and Ambassador Allori weren’t the only displaced arrivals. Off to the side, two smiling Berzhaani women—modern women in neat business suits and modest heels, uncovered by either chador or hijab—watched the procession with patience, while a tall Berzhaani man in a designer casual jacket over silk had a distractedly pleased expression. He was worth a second look, sleek and groomed and all cutting edges, his dark complexion giving him the same smoldering good looks that had earned Omar Sharif a generation and more of worshippers. He caught Selena’s gaze and raised an eyebrow; the gesture revealed more than he probably ever imagined. Regardless of his trendy appearance, her directness had surprised him, and to some extent offended him—but he saw nothing wrong with letting his gaze linger on her in return, judging her too-casual dress and her edgy red-piped, black leather coat, appreciating her long legs and the way that same tailored coat revealed her figure.
She gave him the slightest of nods, turned away with an ease that probably also offended him and considered the best way to discreetly cut the line.
She didn’t have to. The uniformed man behind the standing height lobby desk glimpsed Selena through the crowd, and then spotted the slightly shorter ambassador. He raised a hand high, gesturing to the familiar guard at the security arch. With practiced ease, the guard created a break in the line and then nodded at the ambassador. Selena followed, automatically sorting through the young people they pushed past, hunting potential threats.
There weren’t any, of course. Just a slew of impressed and curious expressions. Who are they? Why are they getting special treatment? One bold young man gave her the same appreciative once-over she’d just gotten from the Berzhaani man near the entrance, albeit with none of the finesse. The visual equivalent of hey, baby.
Selena smiled at him, a knowing smile, and it startled him into a blush; he hadn’t expected to get caught. Blond hair, blue eyes; he could have been Cole a dozen years earlier. Except Cole wouldn’t have been caught.
Wrong. Cole had been caught.
A young woman poked the bold young man’s arm in silent vigor, blushing even harder than her friend…and sweetheart? Selena thought she saw a flash of jealousy in those wide-set eyes. She turned away, back to business, leaving the young woman a little space for dignity—and already methodically pulling her briefcase shoulder strap free, stripping herself of her gun and ejecting the clip to hand it over to the guard along with the extra magazines. As an afterthought she pulled the knife from the special inside sheath she’d had sewn into the coat. “Sorry,” she said. “I meant to get that one before we left.”
She thought she heard a stifled noise from her bold young admirer. Bit off more than you could chew, eh? She met the amusement in the guard’s eyes as he placed her things in a small lockbox and set them aside for retrieval upon exit, and then performed a quick scan on her black leather satchel briefcase. Within moments they’d passed through the security check, where one of the capitol’s nameless gofers met them with a smile and apologized for the delay as if Selena and Allori hadn’t been late in the first place. As the young man escorted them toward the prime minister’s office, he nodded at a hallway that led in the opposite direction. “We’re hosting a casual reception this afternoon. The college students, as you saw. And others to meet them, from the government and some of our own learning institutions.”
Selena glanced down the hall in question, finding a bustle of people in dignified dark green jackets such as their escort’s, pushing serving carts into position and pouring water into crystal glasses. A brief, loud argument between one of the capitol’s gofers and a cook took over the hallway just long enough for a woman in an exotic punjabi trouser-dress to intervene. The events coordinator. Selena had seen her before, though she’d never been in that part of the embassy herself. The chaotic nature of the event troubled her; she wished she knew more about it.
But then, she wasn’t here as the ambassador’s bodyguard.
Allori himself showed no sign of worry on his face—a round face made even more so by the extra weight he carried. He smiled at their escort. “I recall reading about the reception. Excellent idea.”
Their escort nodded. He, too, was of dark complexion, an olive cast as opposed to the rich brown tones of the Berzhaani in the lobby. Small, unimposing and unremarkable, he played his role with quiet perfection—drawing no undue attention, making or taking no easy offense. “If the young people of other countries see how forward-thinking we are…then we will have no need to change their minds when they are older.” He stopped beside an open door and gestured them in. “The prime minister begs your pardon, but was unable to avoid tending other matters. He’ll be with you as soon as possible.”
Selena didn’t need a translation. You were late, and he had to move on to other things. She nodded her thanks and followed Allori into the room—a lush room, the floor soft with a Sekha carpet over the wall-to-wall beneath, the wood accents of ceiling and trim dark and gleaming. A neat serving cart of wrought iron sat against the wall, offering everything from ice water to the finest leaf tea. Allori set his briefcase on one of the round-bottomed chairs and helped himself to some tea, fixing it in familiar ritual as Selena prowled the edges of the small room. He said, “You must have had an interesting morning. You’re as jumpy as I’ve ever seen you.”
She frowned at him. The room was undoubtedly bugged, and he was too experienced to have forgotten it.
He looked up from the steeping tea, the corners of his eyes crinkled slightly. Did she or did she not, he seemed to ask, want the prime minister to have terrorism on his mind—as well as the need to cooperate while countering it?
Selena sighed, closing her eyes in apology. The truth was, she was jumpy. And she had good reason. Following Allori’s lead, she spoke frankly. “I wish you’d taken my warning a little more seriously.”
“A warning with no specific source?” He waved her off.
“It’s my job to gather just such warnings,” she reminded him, arms crossed even with the briefcase dangling from one hand.
“Yes. Of course it is. And I’ll consider it later this afternoon, by which time you should have even more information for me.”
“You yourself showed me the warden’s notice—”
He dangled the tea egg a few times, then laid it neatly aside. “And I’ve taken it into account. Bonita’s packing her bags as we speak. We’ll make do with a skeleton staff for now.”
“Ambassador—” Selena rubbed the bridge of her nose again, right above the little bump Cole liked so much. Don’t think about Cole. Fatigue washed over her in a startling rush, turning her stomach. She closed her mouth on indiscreet words, a reiteration of the warning from Oracle—the alarming intel from the CIA, along with other military and agency listening posts with which an FBI legate such as Selena should have no direct connection. Word that the Kemeni rebels were indeed desperate in the wake of their lost faux U.S. support—that they had to grab power now, or concede it forever.
There were reports of skirmishes, of dead Berzhaani citizens and one major bombing. The Kemenis had acted as if jabbed with a cattle prod, from quiescence in the shocked wake of Frank Black’s death to powerful intent.
Selena doubted the cheerful college students had so much as a clue of Berzhaan’s suddenly increased unrest. She herself knew only through Delphi—and the luck to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time this morning. Off to the shrine to seek peace of mind, and she’d found only violence.
“Selena?” Allori set his teacup in the saucer, brow drawing together. “Are you quite all right?”
And just like that, she wasn’t. Just like that, her stomach spasmed beyond even her iron control, and she blurted “Excuse me!” and bolted from the room, briefcase clutched in her hand. She remembered the bathroom as a barely marked door down the hall and only hoped she was right as she slammed it open. Thank God. Most of the room was a blur but she honed in on an open stall door, grateful for the lavish, updated fixture—
Better than a hole in the floor. Been there, done that.
And when she leaned back against the marbleized stall wall, marveling at the sudden violence her system had wreaked upon her, the thought flashed unbidden and unexpected through her mind: we were trying to start a family.
No. Not here, not now. Not with Cole half a world away and an even bigger emotional gap between them. She knew he hid things from her; she’d thought she could live with that. Maybe not. Selena clenched down on her thoughts the same way she’d tried to clench down on her stomach and stumbled out to the pristine sink to crank the cold water on full and splash her face and rinse her mouth. She raised her head to find herself in the gilt-edged mirror, deathly pale, deep blue-green eyes bewildered—and then those eyes widened and she dashed back to the toilet.
When she lifted her head again, her trembling hand numbly reaching to flush the toilet, she didn’t have the strength to make it to the sink. She reeled a clumsy length of tissue from the dispenser and sat against the marble partition, overwhelmingly grateful for the impeccably clean nature of the capitol. She scrubbed her mouth and chin and then the thought came again: we were trying to start a family.
Maybe they had.
Selena, only remotely in touch with the members of her divorce-torn family, had never had any heartwarming chats about pregnancy. Not with friends, not with her sisters-in-law, not with her coworkers. But she’d never gotten the impression that morning sickness—whenever it came—was quite this vigorous. Violent, even.
Maybe she’d just eaten the wrong thing for breakfast. Or maybe she’d finally have to admit to herself that in spite of her cool, collected self-image, once her emotions hit a certain amount of turmoil, her digestive system often did the same.
She had to know. To know. First chance, she’d hit the little store that catered to the diplomatic staff and she’d get herself one of those little sticks and she’d pee on it. It didn’t matter that her period was a little late; that meant nothing. She was notoriously irregular when she traveled. Not until she had the little stick would she know for sure.
And then what?
She climbed to her feet, heading for the sink on wobbly legs. There she repeated the rinse-and-spit routine, unable to get the acrid taste of her sickness from the back of her throat. When she dared to look at her image again, she found that it reflected what she felt: she looked stronger, less green. This particular storm, whatever the cause, was over.
And then what?
What if she was pregnant in a strife-torn Berzhaan, her estranged husband not even knowing he was estranged? Theoretically he was still deeply undercover in wherever it was that he’d gone, unable to do more than send a sporadic e-mail or two. Theoretically.
Except she’d seen him in D.C.
Kissing someone else.
And now he’d sent her e-mail from his home address—and she hadn’t even had time to read it. But just looking at it confirmed that the one stable, steady thing they’d had between them in their four years of unspoken secrets and long absences was no longer stable or steady at all. That maybe it never had been.
No, no reason for emotional turmoil, not in the least.
Usually she and Cole managed to maintain steady communication when their jobs separated them. But this particular assignment had been a dark one, dark enough that if something happened to him, she’d learn only that he’d died in an auto accident while traveling. The dark assignments came along now and then, especially with the contract employees like Cole. With a two-year re-up on contract employees, the CIA station chiefs were willing to push them to the edge of burnout. It had damaged Cole and Selena’s marriage, in spite of their mutual understanding of the unique stresses in each of their careers. It had damaged Selena’s trust in Cole, watching him switch ably from role to role, ducking questions and hiding nightmares until she couldn’t help but wonder if their marriage was just one of the many parts he played.
Not that it surprised her. In her world, families didn’t stay together. People went their own ways when relationships became difficult, whether beset upon by emotional or logistical problems. She and Cole had overcome all manner of logistical difficulties—long-term assignments in different countries, frequent travel, the occasional international crisis. Recently she’d even thought he’d been lost…and afterward, they’d renewed their commitment to one another. Made up in a big way, celebrating the things they loved about one another, the ineffable chemistry that Selena’s ordered mind had never come close to explaining.
Even now she could feel it. Leaning against this sink with her throat burning and legs still weak, she could close her eyes and see the way he looked at her, remember the way he touched her…and yearn for him.
She just didn’t know if she could forgive him. Live with him.
And then what?
If she was pregnant…she’d have to stay here long enough to stabilize this new legate’s office, in spite of the unrest. And then she’d have to go home…she’d have to tell Cole. To decide if she trusted him, or if she’d merely contribute to the long line of broken branches in her family tree.
And if this is any taste of things to come, I’ll have to carry around a barf bag wherever I go.
The water still trickled. She scooped another handful into her mouth, held it and spit it out. Her eyes stung, sympathetic to her throat. It wasn’t until she coughed, short and sharp, that she stiffened—and realized that the uncomfortable tang wasn’t coming from her abused throat, but from the air she breathed.
Tear gas.
Trickling in from the street outside? From somewhere in the building?
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
Selena jammed used tissue into the trash, grabbed her briefcase and took a deep, steadying breath, pulling herself away from the emotional wallops of the what-ifs and dropping back into the calm, cool world of black and white—of this end of the gun versus the other.
Except she didn’t have a gun, and she didn’t have her knives.
Maybe she wouldn’t need them. Listening at the bathroom door revealed only silence, and she peeked out. The smoke hung thickly in the abandoned hallway. Selena ducked back inside, took another deep breath—this one to hold—and eased out into the hallway, running silently to the waiting room she’d left so precipitously only moments before.
Empty. Allori’s teacup lay broken on the floor, tea soaking the priceless carpet.
Son of a bitch.
The door leading to the prime minister’s office stood slightly ajar, and Selena made for it, her chest starting to ache for air. But breathing meant coughing, and coughing meant being found.
She didn’t intend to be found until she understood the situation. If then.
Razidae’s office proved to be empty, as well, the luxurious rolling office chair askew at the desk, papers on the floor, the private phone out of its sleek-lined cradle—and the air relatively clear. Selena closed the door, grateful for the old, inefficient heating system, and inhaled as slowly as she could, muffling the single cough she couldn’t avoid.
All right, then. The building was full of tear gas, the dignitaries were gone—and Selena had somehow missed it all.
They could have blown the building out from under you while you were throwing up and you wouldn’t have noticed.
Unless Allori and Razidae had simply gone to check out the tear gas and any attendant ruckus. In which case they could be caught up in it. Whatever it was.
Think, Selena. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and calmed the chaotic mess of her mind. She could call for help from here—Razidae’s private line might have an in-use indicator at his secretary’s desk, but it wouldn’t show up on any of the other phone systems, so she wouldn’t give her presence away by picking it up.
But there was no point in calling until she understood the situation. No doubt the authorities were already alerted. If she were near an outside window, she might even hear sirens—but Razidae’s office was in the protected interior, the only other exit leading to his secretary’s office. No, no point in calling. At least, not yet. But she would take this office as her possible home base, with its private phone line and its private location. Razidae was a prime minister who came prepared. All his resistance to U.S. overtures of assistance with Berzhaan’s counterterrorism program hadn’t been because of his denial that the problem existed. Rather that after years of having his country pulled this way and that, sovereignty lost, he wanted to maintain Berzhaan’s independence in all aspects of administration.
Selena couldn’t really blame him. But she wished he’d been a little more receptive. Maybe they’d have prevented this day’s events.
You still don’t know what’s going on.
Well, then, she told herself. Let’s find out.
Selena laid her briefcase on the desk, thumbed the token combination lock and flipped the leather flap open. She’d left her laptop behind in favor of her tablet PC, and the briefcase looked a little forlorn…a little empty.
Not much to work with. No Beretta, no extra clip, no knives…
Maybe she wouldn’t need them. Maybe by the time she discovered what had happened, it would actually be over.
Nonetheless, she took a quick survey: cell phone, battery iffy; she turned it off and left it behind. A handful of pens, mostly fine point. She tucked several into her back pocket. A new pad of sticky notes. A nail file, also worthy of pocket space. Her Buck pocketknife, three blades of discreet mayhem, yet not big enough to alarm the security guards. It earned a grim smile and a spot in her front pocket. A spare AC unit for her laptop, which garnered a thoughtful look and ended up stuffed into the big side pocket of her leather duster. A small roll of black electrician’s tape. A package of cheese crackers—
Selena closed her eyes, aiming willpower at her rebellious stomach. I don’t have time for you, she told it. Without looking, she set the crinkly package aside, and then surveyed the remaining contents of the briefcase. A legal pad and a folder full of confidential documents. She supposed she could inflict some pretty powerful paper cuts. A few mints and some emergency personal supplies she wasn’t likely to need if she was actually pregnant.
No flak vest, no Rambo knife, not even a convenient flare pistol.
Then again, there was no telling what she might find with a good look around the capitol. Almost anything was a weapon if you used it right.
Selena jammed the rejected items back in her briefcase, automatically locking it. She tucked it inside the foot well of Razidae’s desk and checked to see that she’d left no sign of her presence—except there were those crackers….
She made a dive for the spiffy executive wastebasket beside the desk, hunched over with dry heaves. Mercifully, they didn’t last long. And afterward, as she rose on once-again shaky legs and poured herself a glass of the ice water tucked away on a marble-topped stand in the corner, she tried to convince herself that it was over. That she could go out and assess the situation without facing the heaves during an inopportune moment. That it was over, because over meant she’d eaten something that didn’t suit her and not that she’d added pregnancy to this volatile mix of Cole’s infidelity and Berzhaan’s turmoil.
She dumped the rest of the water into a lush potted plant that probably didn’t need the attention, wiped out the glass and returned it to its spot. She very much hoped that she’d creep out to find an embarrassed guard and an accidentally discharged tear gas gun. Then she could stroll up with her pens and her pocketknife tucked away, as calm and cool as though she hadn’t been heaving in Razidae’s wastebasket moments before.
A stutter of muted automatic gunfire broke the silence.
So much for that idea. Selena’s heart, already pounding from her illness, kicked into a brief stutter of overtime that matched the rhythm of the gunfire. “All right, baby,” she said to her potential little passenger, pulling her fine wool scarf from her coat pocket and soaking it in the pitcher. “Get ready to rock and roll.”
But as she reached for the doorknob, she hesitated. She could be risking more than her own life if she ran out into the thick of things now. As far as she knew, whoever had pulled the trigger of that rifle didn’t even know she existed. She could ride things out here with her lint-filled water and her cheese crackers.
Or she could be found and killed, or the building could indeed blow up around her, or whoever’d fired those shots could succeed in their disruptive goal, and Selena and her theoretical little one could be trapped in a rioting, war-torn Berzhaan. She closed her eyes, her mind suddenly full of images of frightened students and dead capitol workers and a dead Allori. She closed her eyes hard.
It really wasn’t any choice at all.
Chapter 4
T he smoke settled toward the floor in the long hallway. Selena’s eyes watered above the damp scarf, but not so much that she couldn’t see. The hallway was all hers. She hoped it stayed that way.
If she did this right, she’d complete her prowling unseen; she’d have an idea where Ambassador Allori had ended up and how Prime Minister Razidae had fared. She’d find the college students and even the arrogant Berzhaani businessman from the lobby.
And she’d find the Kemeni rebels.
Steady there. She didn’t know the Kemenis were behind this.
Yes. I do.
On this side of the five-story capitol, the prime minister and his cabinet members generally went about their business, addressing the problems of a nation with a tumultuous past. On the other side, ceremonies and social functions filled a dining-ballroom so grandly exotic it would have suited a Russian czar—and, given the country’s past annexation, might have once done just that. The kitchens, the maintenance, even a detention area…all on that side of the building. Somewhere.
With some fervency, Selena wished that just once, she’d had a chance to glimpse a blueprint of the capitol. The CIA probably had one…but they hadn’t shared, and though she had a request in with Oracle, Delphi hadn’t yet come through. For now, Selena was on her own.
All too literally.
She decided to start with the lobby. Moving carefully through the halls, silently over the carpet on her rubber-soled lightweight hikers…she spent long moments listening before she turned corners, stifling the constant impulse to cough and keeping a firm mental control over her unhappy but quiescent stomach. She found signs of struggle—pictures knocked askew, a coffee cup shattered against the wall, stains splashed across creamy paint…even a smudge or two of blood, a hand-print where someone had reached out for support. As an undertone to the tear gas, the equally acrid smell of gunpowder grew stronger.
When she peered around the final corner and into the unfolding delta of the lobby, she winced. The faint haze of remaining tear gas couldn’t hide the aftermath of the struggle, wasn’t strong enough to cover the visceral smell of blood and death. One guard sprawled before the security arch, his face missing. Selena couldn’t see the other, though she heard noises from behind the standing desk where he’d been. Still alive?
Behind the desk…that’s where her gun had been stored, in its own lockbox. She took a step around the corner, exposing herself. She might as well be as naked as she felt; she was just as vulnerable. She eyed the semiautomatic pistol in the dead guard’s hand. Any thoughts she had of going for the weapon vanished as she saw the slide jutting back. He’d emptied it at someone.
Or maybe just at the bullet-riddled wall on his way down.
She could still grab it. She might find ammo if she could locate the security office. But she’d prefer her own familiar weapon, so she took a few more silent steps toward the counter and the rustling noises behind it, the occasional grunt. Her hand dipped into her pocket, her fingers twisting in the cords for the laptop AC adaptor. David and Goliath.
She figured she was stamped as David in this particular scenario.
As she reached for the sleek granite desk edge, fingertips hovering and ready to support her as she leaned over, a man popped up from the other side. His bearded face reflected astonishment; he dropped a handful of booty and scrambled to bring up his rifle, catching the muzzle brake on the inner structure of the desk. Selena jerked her hand from her pocket, whipped the chunky little AC adaptor over her head once to gather momentum and slung it against the man’s temple. Down he went, falling with a strangely soft landing.
Selena pushed off against the desk, levering herself up to crouch atop it, ready to follow through—to scrabble over the rifle if she had to. But the man lay awkwardly on top of the dead guard from whom he’d been pilfering, the rifle out of reach.
And David wins again. Selena didn’t let regret for the dead guard slow her down. Time to grab a weapon—the Abakan rifle, an obvious if puzzling Kemeni favorite, or the lockbox with her gun, or the guard’s gun…she didn’t care. But shouted alarm warned her; she looked up in time to see green-and-tan-clad figures rounding the corner out of the hallway opposite her own approach path. She instantly dived for escape back the way she’d come, just barely rolling into the movement as she hit the floor. Gunfire exploded into the silence; wood chips and plaster spit through the air. Selena rolled with purpose until she hit the wall and scrambled to her feet, shouting, “Grenade!” as she flung the adaptor in their direction.
They didn’t stop to think why she’d warn them; they only reacted to the word, flinching and ducking as the adaptor bounced at their feet. It only took them an instant to realize the black device was not a grenade, not even a unique new American grenade—but by then Selena had thrown herself around the corner and driven out into a long-legged sprint. On her way past a stairwell she slammed the door open hard enough to hit the wall behind it but never hesitated, retracing her steps to make the next turn before they gathered themselves to charge the hallway in her wake. In moments she found the waiting room from whence she’d come, hesitating only long enough to leave the door open just the way she’d found it the first time. She dashed through to the prime minister’s office, grabbed her briefcase against the faint possibility that they’d trace her steps this far and headed out to his admin’s office. There she quickly rifled the desk drawers, ignoring the keyboard and flat panel screen monitor that had been slung across the room as well as the tea spilled across the desk. She hoped for but didn’t expect to find a weapon and found more reasonable treasure instead: a ring of keys.
Enough time spent; the echoes of frustrated shouts came faintly through the waiting room on the other side of Razidae’s office. Selena ran out into a hall that ran parallel to the one she’d just left, heading for the set of stairs that logic told her would be opposite those on the other side and taking them two at a time when she found them. All the way to the fourth floor, where the secondary residences filled the space. Guests, dignitaries, distant family members…here they lived. A fumbling game of find-the-key finally netted her entrance, and she eased halfway into the hall, not ready to commit herself yet. She didn’t think the Kemenis would be up here just yet—they hadn’t had enough time to secure all the public space—but she took nothing for granted. She hesitated, taking her breathing back down, listening and watching.
If anyone hid here, they were—quite wisely—still hiding. Selena let the door close behind her, making sure it latched as silently as possible, and then turned in the direction that would take her back above the ballroom, moving at a more cautious and sedate pace.
She had no doubt there’d be plenty of time for more running later.
Chapter 5
“N o,” Cole said into the phone, more firmly than he should and less firmly than he wanted. “I just got back. I’ve got something going on here, and I’m not going anywhere until it’s settled.” He wrapped the damp towel around his neck, a match to the one tucked around his hips, and barely listened to the persistent voice in his ear. Given the frequency with which Selena checked e-mail, he should have heard from her by now. He should have had an answer to his simple, straightforward question.
What’s wrong?
“No,” he said again, this time with a sharp shake of his head that his caller would have known to heed had he seen it. “Even if you couldn’t do without me on this, you owe me. You’d never have uncovered that budding little problem without me—hell, you’d never even have known about it. And who else do you have who can switch-hit with the FBI so easily? So back off, Sarge.”
The man wasn’t a sergeant. But in an organization where rank was rarely assigned, the nickname served its purpose.
“Yeah, okay.” Cole pulled the towel away from his neck, idly rubbing it across his still-damp chest, and glanced into the living room where he’d left the television on. Special news flash, generic sort of logo that meant whatever had happened was either too new or too unimportant to have its own catchy headline name. “I’ll be in touch at this number. It goes where I go, right? But don’t be surprised if I answer from Berzhaan.”
That got a little snort of disbelief, a warning to watch his ass if he even looked at that part of the world, and an abrupt sign-off that left Cole looking at his phone in bemusement. Berzhaan wasn’t vacationland, but the FBI wouldn’t have sent Selena into a war zone.
Especially not now. Not when he had a marriage to fix—and needed the chance to do it.
Except he looked up from the phone to find a map of that small country on the television with a dramatic arrow pointing at Suwan; the image flipped to an imposing building with barricades all around it, emergency and military vehicles beyond that, and an ambulance speeding away from the outside edge of it all. Berzhaan was the special news flash. Berzhaan and a sudden surge of violence across the country, killing people, destroying their livelihoods. “No one knows the Kemenis’ exact goals or what drove them to this move just when their arms dried up…” And the building was the Berzhaan capitol, only a few blocks from the embassy out of which Selena worked. The embassy that had apparently been evacuated as soon as the siege of the capitol began.
Then where’s Selena?
Selena pinned her hopes on finding a master key on the stolen key ring, and sighed with relief when the fourth key she tried snicked neatly into the well-lubricated lock of the room at the end of the guest quarters hall. No one answered her quiet knock, but she found the room littered with signs of use and tried the next door down.
This room looked ready for guests—or at least, ready to be ready. There were no flowers on the table in the suite’s first room, and when she found the bedroom she didn’t see any dents on the pillow. But it was clean and ready for whatever final touches were deemed appropriate for its next occupant.
She didn’t intend to stay here long. Sooner or later the Kemenis would do a room-to-room search, rounding up anyone they might have missed the first time through. She’d give them enough time to settle down…but not so much they’d entirely have their act together. And even though her inclination to rush down and check out the situation drove at her, she forced herself to brew a cup of tea from the supplies in the kitchenette. Her stomach hadn’t been more than grumbly, but tea might well calm it further.
And then she sat cross-legged on the floor on the opposite side of a plush chair, giving herself a good view of the double-locked door while remaining discreetly tucked away, her briefcase at her side. She sipped tea and she considered the situation and how little she knew of it so far. Kemenis. They seemed to have based themselves in the public part of the capitol. The ballroom, perhaps, where the students would have been. She still needed to discover their intent. If they were holding hostages, to what purpose? What demands would they make…and how soon would they start killing people to achieve those demands?
For the Kemenis had never demonstrated a reluctance to kill people.
Quiet moments later, Selena set aside the tea, pulling her knees up to briefly rest her forehead there. Her stomach felt better…soothed. Her mind still whirled with unanswered questions—was she actually, truly pregnant? So hard to tell with her whimsical cycles…Had Cole actually, truly faked an assignment to have an affair? So hard to tell with his astonishing ability to play the moment…to play people.
But it shouldn’t have been. She should have just known. And he was sending e-mail from their home computer, returned sooner than expected. Not surprisingly—he obviously hadn’t had far to travel. Selena pulled her phone from the leather pocket on the side of her briefcase and turned it on. Its pale blue LED screen informed her she had voice mail, and that she had less than half the battery life left. She stared at it, tempted.
No. She’d wait until she had answers to her other questions—the Kemenis’ intentions, their manpower.
Answers it was just about time to find out.
In her hand, the phone vibrated. Selena jumped, chided herself for being nervy and checked the incoming number.
Cole. Of course it was Cole; the message was probably his, too. It’d been forty-five minutes, maybe even an hour since the Kemenis had made their move on the capitol. By now CNN had a live feed going. He’d be expecting to find her at the embassy…and he’d be wrong.
The phone gave another hopeful vibration, and this time Selena thumbed the on button, resolutely putting the phone to her ear. “Hello, Cole.”
“Selena!”
She’d never thought to hear Cole frightened. Of anything. But the fear tinged his voice even through this staticky satellite connection. Cole’s voice. It was a wonderful, smooth low voice that triggered a flush of the very emotions she’d been trying to avoid—along with the usual warmth she felt in his presence.
The very reason she had to run so far away in order to sort out her feelings.
She’d always responded to him that way—the first day she met him, the day they’d gotten married, and each and every time he turned that smile on her. With effort, she managed to avoid blurting out her suspicions about being pregnant—because he really didn’t need to know it. Not now, when she was trapped in a building under Kemeni siege. For whatever he’d done, whatever potential affairs he might have conducted, she knew he cared. Right there in his voice, she could hear how much he cared. She just wasn’t sure if he cared in the way that she needed—or if he even could. He was so good at filling so many roles…maybe he simply couldn’t limit himself to one relationship role.
You believed he could when you married him. That he had.
“Lena?”
Selena blinked. Battery time. Don’t waste it. “Listen,” she told him, moving up to her knees so she could react more quickly if anyone came to the door during this time she couldn’t hear them as well. “I’ve got to save this battery, so I only have a moment. I’m in the Berzhaani capitol building.”
He swore a blistering oath, but cut it short. “What’s your situation?”
“At liberty. As far as I know, I’m the only one. I’m about to go down and scope it out, but I think Allori, Razidae, the staff and a whole busload of college students all picked the wrong day to be here.”
“Fits what I’ve heard.” Cole swore again, more softly this time. “Any chance you can get out?”
“I don’t know yet. I doubt it. They know I’m here.” Selena hesitated, hunting the best words. Businesslike words. Orderly words. “What have you heard? What do the Kemenis want?”
“Razidae’s resignation,” Cole said promptly. “Along with all his advisors, support staff, any capitol employee who ever touched the hand of an American in peace and all dogs who’ve wagged their tails at Americans. The cats can stay, because everyone knows they’re notoriously fickle anyway.”
Selena closed her eyes, touching the bridge of her nose. “And the threat? When do they start killing people?”
“That part’s not clear. At least, not as it’s coming over CNN. The truth is, no one out here knows what’s really going on in there. They issued that short statement of demand, and—”
“Then I’ll find out,” Selena said. What the hell were the Kemenis up to? The other members of Razidae’s government would never step down, not even to save Razidae’s life. Those were the prime minister’s own well-known instructions, leaving the Kemenis very little to gain even if they survived. From the tone of Cole’s voice, he felt very much the same. She told him, “I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Stay off the landline.” It was more secure…he’d understand that.
“I’ll be here.” Cole hesitated. Even through her own unexpected relief at this reassurance—she’d rather have no one else handling details on the other end of the phone with her life at stake—Selena could practically see him wrestling with himself. She wasn’t sure if he lost or won when he spoke again. “Lena, I know you’re upset about something—”
At home, he meant. At him. What had given her away? How unfair that he could be so certain of her when she couldn’t manage the same in return.
“—and I know we can’t go into that right now. But don’t forget…” He hesitated, trailing off in a way that meant he was hunting for better words. “Just don’t forget how much I love you.”
She hadn’t expected it. She didn’t know what to say. She let noisy static fill the air between them—wasting time, wasting battery power, but too surprised at the way her heart snatched those words to do anything else.
“I mean it,” Cole said, growing fierce. If he’d been there, he’d have pulled her close by now. He’d be looking down at her, arctic-blue eyes intense with the meaning behind his words, close enough for her to see that quirky dark blue spot on his left iris. “Whatever upset you, whatever goes on there, don’t you dare forget how damn much I love you!”
She couldn’t get her voice above a murmur. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Good,” he growled. “Now go save the day, will you? I’ll be waiting by the phone.” And he cut the connection before she could.
Selena flipped the phone closed, turning it off; her movements came automatically, and she gave them no thought at all. Instead she dropped her forehead back down on her knees.
…how damn much I love you!
It was a lifeline. He knew she’d run, if not why. He knew the peril she faced—if the Kemenis found her, they weren’t likely to escort her to captivity. She’d already caused too much trouble. Come back to me, that’s what he meant. What he wanted.
She gave herself the moment…let herself feel what his voice did to her—what his emotions did for her. Selena, orderly and logical and everything in its place…unless she was with Cole. Unless he sparked the unpredictable in her as he so often did. In the outside world, she wore her precision like a shield; in their apartment, she was just as likely to strip in one room so she could surprise him in another. Like the evening the week before he’d left, when she’d walked into the bedroom during his workout, bare as bare came, and straddled him on the exercise bench.
He lost all the air in his lungs in a surprised gust of exhalation, both arms dropping away in mid butterfly-curl, his chest beautifully exposed and ripe for touching. She moved against him, sighing happily, and by then he was hissing through his teeth, his hands fumbling free of the weights and only making it as far as the bench press bars, which he clutched in helpless reaction.
They’d only been gym shorts. They hadn’t lasted long.
Selena ached to think of the moment, in her heart as well as her body. For as physically sweet as it had been, the memory only hammered home what he meant to her. What he gave to her.
Spontaneity. Unpredictability. Outrageous daring. And right now, if she was going to survive, she needed to find it all within herself, too.
Chapter 6
S elena took her outrageous daring back into the fray, leaving her briefcase under the bed and rinsing her teacup so as to leave as few signs as possible that she’d been here. She found a service elevator and tucked herself against the front wall beside the door. When the old doors clunked open on the first floor, she eased a hand over the open door button and held it there, giving any curious terrorist passing by plenty of time to check out the conveyance.
But no one approached. No one so much as grunted out a demanding question. Selena edged around the opening to find an empty hallway with a decidedly more utilitarian look than the other areas of the capitol she’d seen so far. The painted walls needed a new coat of their flat eggshell color, and the carpets needed cleaning—or better yet, replacement. A rolling cloth laundry bin sat at a haphazard angle against the wall, and the thick, steamy smell of food permeated the air. Roast lamb overlaid by all the spices of baharat—cloves and cinnamon and cumin and the sting of curry powder.
She held her breath, waiting to see how her stomach might react to the invasion of odors, but either the tea had done the trick or she’d gotten the problem out of her system. It was undoubtedly coincidence that as she held her coat closed with one hand, it rested low over her flat belly. Flat for now?
Stop that.
She stepped out into the hallway, moving swiftly to the first inset door to consider what she’d seen along the way. A door at the end of the hall with a mop and bucket sitting outside it. Double swinging doors not far from her current position, which seemed to be—she peeked inside to be sure—a linen closet, full of napkins and silky-fine linen tablecloths. Not of any particular interest. The maintenance closet and the kitchen, on the other hand…
She listened, heard nothing but the ping of a water pipe, and headed for the swinging doors, quickly scanning the interior through the small windows before she invited herself in.
Fancy. Lots of gleaming stainless steel, a bank of gas stoves against the wall, a column of ovens butted up against them. Cutlery, pots and pans and obscure devices whose purpose Selena could only guess.
Bullets riddled it all. Blood smeared the floor, thick trails leading to a walk-in freezer. Food sat half-prepared, congealing over cold burners.
Selena raised a critical eyebrow. If she were going to stage a government takeover, she’d want to make sure her people had food available—not to mention a place to prepare it. As it was, she hoped the Kemenis had brought MREs along, because otherwise everyone would get pretty hungry before this incident was over. And a hungry terrorist was a cranky terrorist.
Still, no assumptions. Perhaps whoever ran this show wasn’t all that stupid after all, but had merely encountered a minor rebellion he’d had no choice but to quell.
Selena walked the kitchen, stepping over the blood trails…walking through them would only betray her presence here when someone inevitably came back to see just what could be done about the food situation. She helped herself to a lovely little paring knife, something she could stick through her belt without worrying about inadvertent stab wounds. By all means, no inadvertent stab wounds.
Ice pick. Oh yeah. No easy place to put it; with regret Selena jabbed it through the bottom of her coat pocket, leaving the knobby handle within easy reach. Corkscrew? Too bulky. For now.
Besides, she could always come back. A good iron frying pan upside the head did as much harm to a terrorist as to anyone.
A scuffle of sound alerted her, sending her up against the wall beside the double doors. When it came again she pinpointed it to the freezer, and immediately realized that not everyone thrown in that convenient storage had been as dead as assumed. She opened the door with much caution, ready for any survivors who might assume she was Kemeni.
In the glare of a naked lightbulb, a man stood tottering on his feet, his whites splashed with the blood of others and liberally soaked with his own. The impressive fillet knife he clutched wouldn’t have done him much good against Kemeni rifles, but he held it with much determination regardless. The equally determined look on his face faded to confusion as he took in the sight of Selena in the doorway, all her borrowed weaponry in concealment, an American woman in informal clothing who should be screaming at the sight of the grotesquely piled dead before her. Men in kitchen whites, men in green jackets.
Selena didn’t scream. She said in Berzhaani, “You’d best sit before you fall. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“The Kemenis have already done that,” the man said. Short, stout enough to fill out his whites without slopping over the edges, he carried a cynical air and a nose generous enough to have provided for two men. He eyed her, taking hold of a shelf to steady himself. Before him, the pile of dead; around him, shelves of the highest quality food products, arranged in meticulous sections. “Are you a crazy woman, coming here? If they don’t have you, why don’t you run?”
“They know of me,” she said, letting her voice take on an absent tone. “They just don’t know where I am. I’d rather they not find out—just as I’m sure you’d rather they not know you still survive.”
He made an emphatic gesture with his free hand. “I do believe we are allies, whoever you are—the enemy of my enemy.”
“That last part’s accurate enough,” she murmured. “Are you badly hurt? There’s not much I can do for you…tablecloths, maybe.”
“I know only that I’m not dead.” He glanced at the others from the kitchen, and sorrow flickered across his features, settling in at the flare of his substantial nostrils and the press of his lips. “I have been shot in the arm, which does not work very well. Otherwise, I am only cold.”
“Tablecloths should help with that. We could raise the temperature—”
“And sit here in the middle of rotting food and the decomposing bodies of my friends?” He shook his head, sharply. “They brought their weapons in through the kitchen, you know. Mutaa turned out to be one of them. They came running in here and he handed out rifles like kitchen treats. And who are you again?”
“Someone who wants to get us out of this mess.” Selena knew he wouldn’t quite be able to understand, and he didn’t. She left him with a baffled and wary expression. “I’ll be right back.”
Retrieving a pile of tablecloths from the linen closet took only moments. She brought him as many as she could carry, and used several to cover the dead. The others she draped carefully over the man’s shoulders, and then she found a plastic crate full of cabbage and flipped it upside down, disregarding the rolling cabbages. “Here. Sit.” And as he complied, looking more bemused than ever, she asked, “Have they been here since they did this? Have you heard them checking out this area at all? Did you overhear them say anything about their purpose?”
He raised a hand, along with both eyebrows. “Ai, ai,” he said, the Berzhaani equivalent of hold your horses. “They came, they killed, they left. I’ve been in here with the others since then. I’ve heard nothing. And they did not take the time to explain themselves before they killed.”
Selena tucked her lower lip in her teeth for a thoughtful chew. Not helpful. Not helpful at all. She’d gained a few useful little defensive weapons here, but no information to speak of. She knew from Cole that the Kemenis were demanding Razidae’s resignation, but she still had no idea what the terrorists truly wanted. Oftentimes the public demand and the private intent didn’t match very neatly…and until she knew the Kemenis’ true goals, she couldn’t assess the situation properly. Act on it properly.
She found the man watching her with some curiosity, and saw his dawning realization that she wasn’t merely calculating her best options for escape.
Not yet, anyway. Someone had to stop this. And just like this morning at the shrine village, Selena didn’t see anyone else around with the means. Just me.
She’d jammed several spotless linen napkins into the cargo pocket of her coat, where they cohabited with the ice pick handle. Now she pulled them out and crouched beside him. “This’ll hurt.”
He grunted as she took his arm from beneath his tablecloth cloak and propped it against her leg, shaking a napkin out and efficiently rolling it into a tube. “It already hurts.” But he winced as she tied the tube around his wound, not taking the time to remove the white chef’s uniform shirt that showed the blood so well, and admitted, “That hurt more.”
She grinned at him, finding herself drawn in by his cranky charm. “My name is Selena.” She knotted the ends of the napkin, barely long enough as they were. “I’m a pushy American from the embassy and I’m going to do something about this situation. Would you like to help?”
He eyed the bandage as she released his arm, opened and closed his fist with enough vigor to make himself wince and carefully tucked the limb away beneath the tablecloth. “I am Atif. How do you think I might help you?”
“Who knows this section of the building better than you do?” Selena shrugged. “My guess would be no one.”
“And in that you would be right.” He gave his coworkers a pensive look and closed his eyes in resignation—an acceptance that his part in this crisis wasn’t yet over. “What is it you need to know?”
“I think the Kemenis probably have everyone gathered in the ballroom, or at least one of the function rooms nearby. I need to check them out. Quietly.”
He smiled. Partly it looked gleeful, as though he had just the right answers for her. And partly the expression looked…predatory.
And so Selena found herself in a small, barely lit corridor sandwiched between the ballroom—currently in dining-room setup, Atif explained—and the hallway behind it. The corridor ran the length of the function rooms, providing discreet entry for maintenance, food service and even the occasional escaping Berzhaani diplomat who’d had enough of Western arrogance. The divider between the corridor and function rooms was a flimsy one, but it was enough. Selena counted the function rooms by the seams where outside light leaked through, just as Atif had instructed. And she kept an alert ear out for any indication that she wasn’t the only one inhabiting the narrow warren. It took no key to enter this place, only the knowledge that it existed.
Not far from the kitchen, Selena herself had merely opened the door Atif had identified for her, discovering what looked like a linen closet but what was in truth an exchange area. On one side, used dishes, burned-out table lights, candle stubs…some of them still waited for cleanup. On the other, shelves for supplies and trays and pitchers. And out the back, beyond the thick black curtain…this lovely little corridor.
Atif’s brow had wrinkled slightly as he told her of the hidden access, and now that she was here, Selena had no doubt why. Each room had a number of tiny spy holes, no doubt so the servers could keep an eye on the needs of the diplomats and functionaries without intruding into their events. Selena peered through one into a small empty room meant for one-on-one discussions, and considered how easy it would be to observe such proceedings—or better yet, to observe the private discussion between two officials from another country who thought themselves alone. Was there a similar arrangement in the room where she and Ambassador Allori had habitually waited for the prime minister? Selena routinely and discreetly swept such waiting rooms for recording and listening devices…but she couldn’t check for warm bodies lurking in narrow passages.
From ahead, a voice rose in sudden but short-lived fright, muffled enough to come from outside her little personal hallway. Selena moved quickly toward it and found the peephole by its light. With her own breath loud and revealing in her ears, she put her eye to it.
Bingo. A function room crammed with people. She found Allori; she found Prime Minister Razidae and his deputy prime minister, Amar bin Kuwaji—all under the careful eye of a tan and olive green dressed guard. The Kemenis must want the entire government to step aside, or they’d just kill Razidae. Regardless, she doubted Razidae would survive. He was the most significant unifying leader this country had had for generations, and as long as he lived, the people would rally around him. Any Kemeni government would hold only temporary rule.
The others, they’d keep as leverage. As a way to induce Western and European countries to pressure Razidae’s people into stepping aside.
The others.
As if those lives could be summed up so simply. There they were—the two chaperones who’d accompanied the students. The woman Selena had seen in the lobby, but not the man. A handful of diplomats who’d been unlucky enough to choose this day to conduct their business. The glamorous but modest events coordinator. Three young women in green jackets.
And the students.
Terrified, pale…they huddled together against the walls and around the few small round tables available. One girl had her legs crossed so hard Selena was sure she’d wet her pants before she had a chance at a bathroom. Two other girls comforted a third who cried softly, and when they looked across their friend’s bowed shoulders, their expressions turned grim. And there, in the corner—the young man who’d given Selena such an openly appraising look and the girlfriend he’d annoyed, holding each other with a desperate affection.
The hostages had none of the small comforts this opulent room was meant to provide—no water, no finger sandwiches, no veggie plates with exotic dips arranged on expensive glass and silver serving ware. They weren’t being attended, feted, or even being fed the propaganda they’d come to hear. Their lives, in an instant, had turned into terror.
Dammit. It wasn’t right. These were young people; they hadn’t even started their lives. They had nothing to do with Berzhaan’s problems; they had done nothing to offend the Kemenis. They were here to broaden their horizons, to learn acceptance of this very culture. They had not, like Selena, willingly accepted a career that on occasion turned her into a target and at the least kept her in restless countries with high incidents of terrorism. They hadn’t made those choices at all.
Like Selena, pregnant though she might be. Or like Cole. God, she wished he were here. And she realized the sudden irony of it, that she would trust him with her life but not with her heart.
As these young men and women were now counting on Selena.
They just didn’t know it yet.
She wished she could give them some reassurance, some sign…you’re not alone. But it wasn’t time for that…far from it. By the time they knew she was here—working for them, fighting for them—things would probably be over one way or the other.
Selena closed her eyes against the sight of them, fighting a terrible wash of anger. She’d get nowhere with a paring knife and an ice pick if she didn’t use her anger wisely—drawing on it for strength when she needed it, leaving it behind when her thinking had to be crystal-clear. Her entire purpose as an FBI legate was to fight terrorism. It was why she was here.
She’d just never faced it on such a visceral level before.
Surprise. Get over it. Move on.
And that’s exactly what she did. She’d found the hostages; she’d seen that Allori looked as composed as ever and Razidae remained alive. For the moment there was nothing she could do for them. Now she had to find the terrorists.
She didn’t have far to go. The next little peephole showed her just what she was up against. Just who. And as startled as she was to find the American fugitive, Jonas White, in deep discussion with a small grouping of the men sprawled around the room—cleaning weapons, holding weapons, staring fiercely at nothing in particular, and even in a few instances bleeding—her gaze skipped over the aging international player and settled on none other than the man from the lobby. The one who’d stepped from the cover of GQ, handsome and finished and sleek. Dark hair, sharp aquiline lines to his face and a broad-shouldered body made obvious now that he’d discarded his jacket and wore only the silk T-shirt; it followed every plane and long line of muscle, highlighting the elegance of his carriage. And his eyes…they flashed at Jonas White’s words, a dark and simmering glower. Eyes to die for.
Except Selena didn’t intend to.
She did step back a moment, taking a deep breath. Jonas White was one thing. He was a player, a man who liked to wield power and who liked to win—but a man whose most important considerations were his own skin and his own interests. His presence here no doubt represented some last-ditch effort to rescue his faltering influence and rebuild the empire that his adopted daughter, Lynn, had destroyed when she learned the true nature of his activities. And though Jonas was not to be underestimated…
It was the Berzhaani man who worried her. The one who’d been in the lobby…the one who’d probably started this whole mess, killing the guards so his people could storm the building. Unlike Jonas, this Kemeni leader burned with purpose. He’d see this crisis through to the end, and Kemeni interests would come before his own. Selena wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been looking at the reclusive Tafiq Ashurbeyli himself. It would take a man such as this to drive the Kemenis to such risky action when they were in fact close to defeat in the wake of Frank Black’s death and Jonas White’s financial collapse.
What had White told Ashurbeyli? Not the truth—not that he’d been behind Frank Black all along. But somehow he’d tied their fates together.
Just call me fate. Selena smiled grimly in the dimness of the corridor. Because I’m the one you’re about to meet. Together.
Having absorbed the implications of the room’s occupants, she returned to the peephole. She found the door leading to the function room that held the hostages. Guarded, of course. She had no doubt the main exit from that room was guarded, as well, and she’d already seen the interior guard. The hostages had nowhere to go unless she could cause enough diversion to get them out through this corridor. The ceilings were high and original; the heating ducts primitive and usually merely grates between the rooms. The same factors meant there would be little opportunity to beard the terrorists in their chosen den. She had no intention of revealing she’d discovered this passage until she had no choice.
Well, then. Perhaps she’d have to nibble at them from the edges. They might know she was here, but they wouldn’t know about her Athena Academy background. They wouldn’t know she hadn’t run to the darkest, most distant corner of the building to tremble and wait out the crisis.
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Doranna Durgin
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A Middle Eastern capitol building has been captured by insurgents. The prime minister, his staff and a group of visiting college students have become disposable hostages. But what the rebels don′t know is that someone is still loose in the building…. FBI legal attaché Selena Jones took the foreign post when her marriage hit the rocks. Now she′s narrowly escaped becoming a hostage–but she′s trapped. She has just hours to find out what the rebels are up to and outsmart their compelling leader. And her lone contact to the outside world is the one man she swore never to trust again….