Ashley Bell: A Novel (18 page)

The shriek of the caracal in the night had worried Pax because he thought it might be the work of a mimic. When two shrieks followed and seemed to originate in a far different place from the first, his concern increased. If he and his guys were known to be in town, maybe they were being stalked by agents of some local warlord, signaling readiness to one another in the language of caracals.

There were caracals in the Middle East, though their numbers were much lower than in Africa and Asia. Iranians had once trained those cats to hunt birds. Although caracals weighed as much as forty pounds, they could leap straight up as high as seven or eight feet, biting and battering down eight or ten birds at once from a low-flying flock.

Pax and Danny had stood ready, awaiting another cat cry to judge its authenticity, MK12s in hand, wishing the guns pumped out a more damaging caliber. Yet time had passed, and the dawn had come without incident. Sometimes a caracal was nothing more than a caracal.

As the first hours of light brought no wind, only a deepening quiet, Paxton hoped for some telltale to confirm that more than one of the terrorists resided in the shuttered house. At 8:47, his satellite phone vibrated.

Perry called from his position, with Gibb, on the roof of a two-story building east of the target house. He spoke in hardly more than a murmur. “One male. Not the smoker. Backyard. Two buckets.”

“Say again—buckets?”

“Carrying buckets.” After a pause, Perry said, “Back gate. Into the street. Moving south.”

“Weapon?” Paxton asked.

“Drop-leg holster.”

If the terrorist hadn’t been armed, and if he had ventured far enough from the target house, they might have tried to capture him for interrogation. But one shot would alert the other bad guys—and, if intel was correct, bad girls.

“Probably night soil,” Perry said.

He was a fan of historical fiction, especially novels of war and seafaring set in the eighteenth century. Occasionally he used antiquated words, not pretentiously, not even consciously, but because they had become part of his vocabulary.

“Clarify—night soil,” Paxton said.

“Shit,” Perry replied, which was pretty much what Pax thought he’d meant.

Like most small- to medium-size settlements in this blighted country, the town was in some respects medieval. No sewage system. No septic tanks. No indoor plumbing except, in a few cases, a hand pump in the kitchen sink, tapping a private well. There would be an open-air communal latrine just beyond the last buildings, basically ditches and a series of baffles, where people relieved themselves or to which they carried their products. It would be situated to ensure that the prevailing winds more often than not carried the stink away from the town, which meant in this case to the south and west.

Perhaps the personal-hygiene standards of Abdullah al-Ghazali forbade the dumping of their waste in a far corner of the backyard. More likely, they periodically disposed of it in the communal latrine because the stench it produced and the cloud of flies it drew would identify their hideout as surely as if they had raised over the house one of their black-and-red flags.

Into his phone, Pax said, “One bucket for men, one for women?”

“Honorable modesty,” Perry agreed, and he terminated the call.

Short of knocking on Abdullah’s door and pretending to be from the Census Bureau, they were not going to get any better confirmation that all seven terrorists were in the house. The buckets were superb intel.

In the deep shadows, just inside the doorway of the building that faced the terrorists’ haven, Paxton and Danny began quietly to set up the Carl Gustav M4 recoilless rifle, an antitank weapon that was also effective as a bunker-buster.

Bibi was wired. Not on chardonnay. Wired on the weirdness of it all. Cranked up by a feeling of impending violence. Like the air pressure before the first lightning flash of a storm so strong that it might spawn the mother of all tornadoes.

Apparently some weird guy lurked in the parking lot, obsessing over the meaning of the vanity plates on Nancy’s sedan. And evidently a nameless presence stalked the kitchen, because the smell of rotting roses had become a stink, because the candle flames were undulating three or four inches above the lips of the cups that contained them, and because the room had suddenly grown chilly. The wall clock and her wristwatch had stopped, their sweep hands no longer wiping away the seconds, and the digital clock on the microwave had gone dark, as if something that lived outside of time had stepped into this world and brought its clockless ambience with it. Perhaps the psychic-wave detectors, a.k.a. “the wrong people”—whoever or whatever they might be—were already on their way to Bibi’s apartment to beat her to death or suck her blood, or steal her soul, whatever the hell they did to those cretins who were foolish enough to think that a little divination session over the kitchen table would be harmless, gosh, perhaps even fun.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Bibi would not have taken any of this seriously, for she had been a highly efficient, driven autodidact who had taught herself at least two college degrees’ worth of knowledge, a levelheaded realist who enjoyed fantasizing, yes, but who always knew
precisely
where the borderline was between the real world and false interpretations of it. She’d had a keen eye for the too-bright, too-fuzzy worlds of idealists and for the too-dark, too-complicated versions of reality concocted by paranoids. Now the borders seemed to have been erased or at least blurred, and for the first time in her life, she felt that among things a modern woman needed, a gun was no less essential than a smartphone.

“I need a gun,” she declared, and though the words sounded alien to her nature, she knew that she spoke the truth.

Calida’s pistol lay on the table, but she pulled it closer to her, beyond Bibi’s reach, as if she didn’t rule out the possibility that her client meant to shoot her, the messenger.

“I don’t need yours. I have one,” Bibi said. “Paxton insisted on it. But I keep it in a box in the closet.”

When Bibi started to get up from her chair, Calida said sharply, “Sit down. We have to finish this, and quickly.”

With her right hand, the diviner stirred the loose tiles in the silver bowl. “I bleed for answers. I cannot be denied. Attend me.” The air grew chillier. To Bibi, she said, “The name of the person you’re meant to save. How many letters?”

“I don’t know.”

“You
do
know. You just don’t know you know.
How many letters?
”

Bibi guessed, “Ten.”

After Calida plucked the tiles from the bowl, she placed them side by side in alphabetical order:
A, B, E, E, H, L, L, L, S, Y
.

Seeing names in that mess was harder than seeing words, but after a moment, the diviner spelled out
SALLY BHEEL
. “Know anyone with that name?”

“No.”

“It isn’t necessarily someone you know.”

Calida rearranged the tiles into
SHELLY ABLE
.

“This is ridiculous,” Bibi said, but she couldn’t deny the room had gone so cold that her breath and the diviner’s smoked from them.

As before, Bibi suddenly saw what Calida did not, moved the tiles around, and formed the name
ASHLEY BELL
. As she slid the last two letters into place, she heard the silver bell with the three tiny clappers that Captain had brought back from Vietnam, and although their ringing was clear and sweet and undeniable, she knew that she heard them only in memory.

As if Calida were a curious cat and Bibi were a ball of string in need of unraveling to reveal the wild secret at its center, the diviner watched her client intently, waiting for the best moment to snatch up a frayed end and run. “The name is familiar to you.”

Bibi shook her head. “No.”

“I can see it is.”

“No. But I’ll admit it resonates.”

“Resonates,” the diviner said, wanting something more specific.

“It’s so euphonic, it makes you want to know the person who goes by it, to see if she’s as pleasant as her name.”

“She or he. It could be either.”

“It’s a she,” Bibi said with immediate conviction.

“How can you be so sure?”

Bibi frowned. “I don’t know. I just am.”

“You not only have to find her. You have to save her.”

As Bibi stared at the name, it had half drawn her into a trance, as though each of the ten letters must be a syllable in a sorcerer’s spell. Now she shivered and looked up at the diviner and said, “Save her from what? Should you ask—and draw more letters?”

“No. We’re running out of time. We’ve been too long at this.”

Bibi realized that warmth had returned to the kitchen and that the clocks were working once more, as was her wristwatch. “I need to know why she’s in trouble—or will be. Where she lives. What she looks like. I have a thousand questions.”

A mewl as thin as a paper cut escaped Calida as she extracted the needle from her flesh. She pressed her bleeding thumb against the bloodstained cotton cloth. “We only get so many answers for free. And then they begin to cost us dearly, word by word. Now peel off a few three-inch strips of that adhesive tape for me.”

Producing the first strip with the dispenser’s built-in cutter, Bibi said, “Cost us what?”

Hurriedly winding the gauze around and around her thumb, keeping it tight to stanch the bleeding, Calida said, “Time. Our allotted time. Days, then weeks, then months, our lives melting away fast from the farther end—and then we pay with something worse.”

“What could be worse than losing part of your life?”

“Losing the capacity for passion and hope, being left alive but with no emotions other than bitterness and despair.” She held out her thumb so that Bibi could apply the length of tape. “No additional answers we might get would be worth the cost.”

The roses in the living room smelled sweet again. The flames had stopped leaping violently above the rims of the clear-glass cups. The fluttering reflections of candlelight on the tabletop and the walls no longer reminded her of swarming insects.

The air of impending violence should have diminished.

It had not.

While the diviner hastily used three more strips of tape to encase the gauze, Bibi came further to her senses, much as the once-cold room had returned to warmth. “I can’t do this.”

Glancing at the clock, displeased by the time, Calida said, “Can’t do what?”

“Save a life. Whoever she is. Wherever she is. It’s crazy on the face of it.”

“Of course you can do it, the kind of girl you are. Besides, you have no choice now.”

“I might end up doing more harm than good. I’m planning to marry a hero, but I’m not one myself. I mean, I don’t think I’m a coward, but I don’t have the
skills.
”

Pouring the Scrabble tiles from the bowl into the flannel sack, returning the sack and the bowl to the ostrich-skin suitcase, Calida said, “You asked why you were spared from cancer. You were told. If you’re not prepared to do it now, there’s a terrible price to pay.”

“More harm than good,” Bibi repeated. “It could end up with this Bell woman dead—and me, too.”

Getting to her feet, closing the suitcase, Calida said, “You’ve already been on a date with Death and survived. If he shows up again, kiss him and tell him he has to wait. Make it a good kiss. Put some tongue in it. Now grab your gun, girlfriend, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

“What? No.” Bibi yawned and stretched. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”

Calida regarded her as if she had just announced that she would lie down in a cauldron of boiling oil. “If you stay here ten more minutes, you’re dead. Maybe five.”

“But this is my apartment.”

“Not anymore. Not after what we just did here, which drew their attention. Now the apartment is
theirs.
And no lock will keep them out.”