Burn (Story of CI #3) (32 page)

IT WAS HOT AS HELL IN HERE, and the sweat just would not stop dripping into her eye.

Cail sat on the floor against the wall in somebody’s bedroom, gripping the PSL sniper rifle and sighting the courtyard across the street through a tiny slit of window with an open shutter. The white bandana was tied over her hair, but the sweat still beaded down her temple anyway, like drops of water escaping an hourglass.

This room was little and stuffy, not containing much more than a threadbare blanket, a metal chest in the corner, and ragged stuffed animals smiling at Cail from near the window. The owners of this house were not big fans of AQIM and had happily let Cail sneak in if it would help to get rid of the radicals who used the old building across the street.

The rest of the team was around the corner from the building, preparing for entry. Alejo had shown up just in time, after losing his marbles and letting his sworn enemy Lázaro get away in the plane. With all the kids.

Wara was with Amadou.

Lalo had seen the building where Tsarnev held Jonah, even though it seemed like each time Lalo used his gift it was killing him. He’d mentally checked the building and found out there were four other bad guys in there with the curly-haired terrorist. Just the courtyard, some lean-tos along the sides, and one room at the back.

No one else who could do remote viewing could see a target in so much detail. No one.

It gave Cail chills to think about how valuable Lalo would be to anyone, from any side. People could use him to do unthinkable things.

And Tsarnev thought that person was Jonah.

Cail couldn’t see any of them through her scope. One hostile had passed through her range of vision a bit ago. Now, all she could see through the window on the building opposite her was a swatch of empty courtyard.

Lalo and his team would enter the building, clear the courtyard and the one room towards the back. If there was trouble, they needed to back any of the bad guys up into the northwest corner, where Cail could take the shot through the window with the rotting wooden shutter.

It was 920 yards from this bedroom to that northwest corner. Cail had been doing calculations since they got in here. At that distance, you had to take the shot yards to the side, over the top of the target. Trigonometry calculations.

One good thing about homeschool: it made you smart.

The radio crackled quietly at Cail’s waist.

“We’re going in,” Lalo breathed.

That boom down below would be the flashbang. They would have tossed it over the wall into the courtyard.

The crash would be the guys forcing open the gate.

The gate and earthen wall around the courtyard were two stories, the whole thing roofed with thatch. The only part of the building’s interior Cail could see was that corner through the shuttered window. She saw dirt and more dirt, a bunch of crates and metal chests that looked a thousand years old.

Wild shots rang out…that would be the hostiles. They tended to just shoot from the hip at anything that moved, hoping Allah would send the bullets in the right direction.

The more careful shots would be Lalo’s team, clearing the place. It would have been simple to clear, since there was only the one room and the courtyard itself. Cail’s eyes did not move from the scope, and she imagined Lalo and the rest moving into the building, Alejo to the right, Lalo to the left, Caspian by the gate with the other PSL to cover them. Then Johnny would go to the right, Rick to the left.

There was a lot of screaming, in Russian. It had to be Tsarnev.

Maybe the other hostiles were down.

Cail sucked in a breath as movement filled her window: dark brown clothing and black boots. Alexei Tsarnev backed into the corner, curly black hair all over the place. He thought he was going to be getting out that door at the corner, out into some back alley. But Tsarnev would have to move carefully, because obviously Lalo and his team had him in their sights.

Then Tsarnev took another heavy step backwards.

And Cail’s world became a nightmare.

Tsarnev had Jonah. As Tsarnev stepped backwards towards the door and that alleyway to freedom, he hauled a terrified Jonah Jones into Cail’s line of vision. Tsarnev had one arm around Jonah’s neck and an AK-47 rammed into the base of Jonah’s skull.

She was 920 yards away, but Cail could have sworn she heard the sick whimper Jonah made as Tsarnev swore in Russian and dragged him another step backwards towards the doorway. Through the scope, Cail could see the beads of sweat circling Jonah’s head like a crown of thorns.

She could not let Tsarnev and AQIM take Jonah. When they realized Jonah wasn't their million-dollar psychic, they would dump him out back with a bullet in the head.

No, she lied. That's not what these guys did.

Cail knew exactly what they would do to him if they got Jonah into the car. Big knife, internet execution.

They’d cut off Jonah’s head.

Four more steps backwards and Tsarnev would be outside the door.

Cail’s hands were steady on the PSL, but inside her brain was screaming.

She couldn’t see anyone through the open shutter except Jonah and Tsarnev. Her entire body was drenched in sweat. She didn’t know if anyone from Lalo’s team was down, but assumed the rest of Tsarnev’s guys were, since there was no more shooting and Tsarnev was trying to use Jonah as a shield to leave the building. No one could radio her, because if Tsarnev realized there was a sniper out there he would do something desperate.

He thought he was safe inside the building.

The visions attacked like razor-teethed demons, clawing at her insides, shredding her to ribbons.

She saw herself pulling the trigger and Jonah’s blood misting to the sand.

YOU ARE GOING TO KILL HIM, the voice in her head screamed. RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, YOU ARE GOING TO BLOW HIS BRAINS OUT. YOU KNOW YOU CAN DO IT.

Cail choked back a sob and the visions of blood.

Tsarnev dragged Jonah two paces backwards. Jonah’s blue eyes shone red as they darted around the room and his chest heaved with panic.

HE'S TERRIFIED OF YOU, Cail's OCD said, BECAUSE HE KNOWS WHAT YOU CAN DO, THAT YOU’VE GOT TO BE AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE. YOU'RE THE BEST SHOT OF ANYONE HERE, AND JONAH'S GOING DOWN.

Cail's aim was steady but inside she was a nuclear disaster.

She couldn't do this.

If she missed and shot Jonah, she could never live with herself.

If you let them take him, at least it won't be your fault. How much chance do you really have to make the shot, anyway?

Tsarnev gripped Jonah tighter to take the last step towards the flimsy wooden door. Cail ground her teeth together and inhaled a long, slow breath.

No matter what happened, she would rather be damned than know she had let them take Jonah into the desert to have his head chopped off on YouTube.

She had to take the T shot: across the eyes, down through the nose and into the upper lip. It would sever Tsarnev’s medulla and shut his entire body off like a switch. If she missed and Tsarnev had time to twitch, he could pull the trigger.

If Tsarnev moved, the shot would tear through Jonah’s head instead.

There was no way to save Jonah without taking Tsarnev down. Any shot that didn’t kill Tsarnev instantly would let him pull the trigger and send a bullet into Jonah’s skull.

Cail aimed, above, to the right, with the calculations she’d done here in some stranger’s bedroom, 920 yards away.

And then she took the shot.

Tsarnev folded over as if he had no spine before the shot even echoed around the courtyard.

Jonah collapsed onto his face, Tsarnev sprawled over his legs like a rag doll.

Cail repositioned the PSL on Tsarnev’s body and just sat there, pale as the grave, making sure he was not gonna get up. She did not breathe until Alejo hauled Jonah from underneath Tsarnev and she could see Jonah was not hurt.

Jonah was not hurt.

“Tsarnev’s down,” Lalo’s voice came over the radio. Alejo was squatting beside the dead man, shaking his head after finding no pulse. “He’s gone. Jonah’s fine.”

Cail lowered the PSL to the floor and couldn’t stop blinking.

She’d trained for many hours, gone through a lot of ammo.

She’d never killed a human being before.

Only in her nightmares.

But that boy from her nightmares was still alive.

Through the cracked shutter, Cail could see Alejo with one arm around Jonah’s heaving shoulders, pointing across the street to where Cail had just made sure Jonah would live.

Two months later

THE DAY JONAH JONES MADE JESS HIS wife, Cail was trying to read Mockingjay in Starbucks. She sipped at a Venti Salted Caramel Mocha with full whipped cream, frowning at the Kindle screen, trying to focus on Katniss Everdeen and war with the Capitol. It wasn’t working.

Cail wriggled herself down farther into the brown and pink striped chair she was lounging in and munched down another bite of Tripe Chocolate Brownie. She stretched her legs a little on the wood chair she had them slung up on and fought a yawn.

It was about eleven in the morning. They should be saying their vows.

Then there would be an amazing buffet lunch with tuxedoed country club waiters, and then the photos. All this was followed by dinner with a real Puerto Rican pig on a spit and a dance that would last pretty much all night. Not that Jonah had told her all this; Cail had mostly avoided talking with him since Timbuktu. No, Cail knew all the scintillating details of the wedding thanks to Jess. She had called Cail in hysterical tears several times after Jonah got back from Africa, blubbering about how she’d be eternally grateful that Cail had saved the man she loved.

Jess and Jonah moved the wedding date up, desperate to get married as soon as possible after Jonah’s near-death experience. And then Jess kept calling with updates on the wedding, assuming Cail would be fascinated with what color marzipan Jess was gonna put on the cake, and what kind of champagne they were going to use to toast the newlyweds.

Cail wondered if they would be disappointed that she hasn’t gone today. She assumed Jonah and Jess would be too in love to even notice, but she hoped neither of them would feel bad.

Cail had come a long ways, but she just wasn’t ready. She had made her peace with Jonah, but it wasn’t just him. The wedding would be populated with people Cail knew growing up, and she wasn’t ready to face them.

She’d been doing amazingly well with the OCD since Mali. She was faithfully taking the Paxil, and despite the awful things she’d seen, even though she’d had to take a kill shot inches from Jonah Jones, the obsessions were keeping a low profile.

This morning at Starbucks, Cail had other things tugging at her mind, much more interesting than obsessions.

She wondered how the Malian school kids were doing, there at the hospital in Italy. Lázaro had delivered them to Europe, as promised.

And then he disappeared.

Alejo had contacted the Italian authorities so they could take Lázaro Marquez into custody as soon as he landed. But when they entered the aircraft, they only found the nurse and the kids, mostly sedated and sleeping to escape the pain of their injuries.

The authorities counted the children as they got off the plane and transferred them into the airport. Later, when they opened up the pack of documents to process the kids, one was missing. One officer said he thought it was one of the older girls, a teenager. There had been several of them sleeping inside the plane.

The CI consensus was that Lázaro had done it again, disguised himself somehow as one of the bigger kids in girls’ clothes, a veil, and makeup, then snuck off into thin air. The guy was kind of scrawny, after all, only about five seven.

Alejo had let the authorities know they were looking for a guy with burn scars all over his body.

“Everyone on that plane had scars,” the Italians replied rather testily.

Of course, they didn’t want to admit it was their fault the bad guy got away.

The nurse must have gotten a nice little bribe. Cail wondered what Lázaro had said to convince her. He hadn’t had any money on him, so Lázaro Marquez must be quite the sweet talker.

Sometime while on the plane, Lázaro must have let AQIM know that their big plans for owning a powerful tracking device were not going to pan out. Obviously he’d waited until the plane was well out of the range of AQIM’s antiaircraft missiles. Two hours after the plane left the runway, the troops filtered away from the city and went off in search of a more lucrative target.

Rupert said the word in the underworld now was that the million-dollar psychic no longer lived. Lázaro must have spread the news that he had searched for the man and found out he was dead. It appeared no bad guys would be looking for Lalo, or Jonah.

Of course Lázaro could have just got everyone to believe this so he could show up and try to capture the world’s best remote viewer for himself, still try to make some money.

She couldn’t really explain why, but Cail didn’t think so.

Cail also wondered about Tsarnev, buried there in Timbuktu by the local police in some kind of shallow grave. She’d seen Alejo standing out there in the cemetery, hands in his pockets, eyes on the faraway dunes. Cail wondered if Alexei had a mother somewhere who would weep when she heard the news. She wondered if anyone would ever come to put flowers on that grave in a wild land far from home.

The combination of bad memories and excess sugar in the mocha was starting to make Cail feel queasy. She smiled a bit, though, anyway and took another bite of her brownie.

Jonah was getting married, right now. And she was making herself sick with chocolate and whipped cream.

This was so not how it was supposed to be, according to the dreams she had back when God spoke to her and she and Jonah were gonna be the ones saying their vows in that church, promising to love each other forever.

But yet, somehow, all was well with the universe.

Things got even better when Lalo came back from taking a call outside and plopped down in the chair right beside her. Lalo always drank weird things at coffee shops, and today he’d already downed something new called a Curry Spice Latte, then a Venti-sized chamomile and anise seed tea, like an old lady. He also finished one of those stale-looking croissant sandwiches, ham and goat cheese with avocado.

Lalo reached across the glossy wood of the armrest and grabbed Cail’s hand, squeezed it hard. Her heart did a little flip but Lalo didn’t notice. His hooded eyes were fixed on the glassy plate window.

“I guess we should go,” Cail sighed. “I told her I’d come over in the morning. It’s already after 11.” She punched the power switch on her Kindle and licked the last of the cream from her mocha off a plastic spoon.

Lalo smiled at her and gave her hand another squeeze. “We can’t be far away.”

Cail bared her teeth in a smile. “Uh…no. Nothing in this town is more than ten minutes away from anything else.”

She brushed chocolate crumbs off the legs of her Ed Hardy jeans, stamped her black leather clogs to send the rest of the brownie to the industrial Starbucks carpet. She had sworn to herself that it didn’t matter what the hell anybody else thought of her, but the anxiety flashed across her chest anyway. Cail’s mom and dad were not gonna approve of these jeans with a heart and dagger in sequins all across her butt. And her white shirt had transparent sleeves, which really did nothing to hide the tattoo.

They had seen her spiky blond hair before, and really did not like it.

Cail felt herself walking robotically towards the door of the coffee shop. Lalo was next to her and he grabbed her arm, made her look into his eyes.

“Cail,” he told her. “You look hot.”

She almost choked. But Cail felt her lips curling into a grin. He knew exactly what she was thinking, freaking out about going home and all that implied.

“I’m sure you were beautiful how you dressed before, too, when you were growing up. But this is more my style. You are my style,” he said.

He was kinda grinning too. Cail threw her pride out the window and herself into Lalo’s arms. She hugged him so tight the guy was probably trying to catch his breath.

“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go meet Mom and Dad.”

Then she let him go and they walked together out to the car.

The Lamontagne house had remained frozen in time since Cail was here five years ago. It sat all motherly and plump and beer-bottle brown on the corner of Birch and 5
th
, seven blocks from the Jones’ house, ten blocks from the little white clapboard church her parents had pastored for thirty years. The leaves on the haven of trees were starting to turn orange and rust. A cheery scarecrow wreath hung a little crooked on the front door. The scarecrow wore a grin bigger than Santa Claus and held a ripe pumpkin that said God Is Good.

Cail rang the doorbell, feeling more than a little odd.

This was kind of her house, right? She’d grown up here, and her mom and dad were right inside. But it wasn’t home anymore, either, and hadn’t been for a long time.

At the murder trial fourteen years ago, Cail hadn’t been found guilty. But she did have to enter a mental health program for an entire year, and there was a five-year restraining order against her, to protect Jonah. After getting out of the mental health program, Cail went to live with Uncle Rupert, who had recently been divorced and was living with his daughter Annie, exactly the same age as Cail. The psychologist thought it would be healthier for Cail to not go back into the environment where she grew up, and Cail had totally agreed with him.

Cail had been back to Nebraska a few times since then, and to saw it was hard on her was an understatement.

Now she was here at her parents’ house, rocking back and forth on the low wood heels of her clogs, shivering a little inside the black pea coat she’d thrown on over the too-thin white shirt. An icy Nebraska wind rattled the wreath against the front door, ruffled Cail’s hair. Lalo was huddled inside a navy wool coat, hands stuffed in his sleeves. The temperature here after Mali was still shocking him and he wore a tan and green striped stocking hat over his super-short hair.

And then the oak front door swung open and Cail was saying hi to her mom and dad and being swept inside. Everything was so familiar, yet updated: new sage floral rugs on the floor, some new beige sofas instead of the sagging plaid ones where the Lamontagne family had done homeschool for years.

Cail’s two youngest sisters were there, too, still living at home because they didn’t believe in going to college and hadn’t gotten married yet.

Everyone was smiling, even though the smiles thrown Lalo’s way were a little bit plastic. Cail hadn’t told her family she was bringing a friend when she came to visit. She knew her parents didn’t believe in male friends. But standing there, still shivering in the open doorway, Cail felt nothing but relief for Lalo’s warm body at her elbow. This would have been a cold, cold day without him.

She introduced her friend Lalo as they were all moving towards the couches. Cail’s mom brought lemonade and a big thermos with weak black coffee, the kind Lalo, as a Latino, liked to call gringo coffee. Cail noticed her mom looked old, but then she was sixty-three and had given birth to sixteen children, including the two who were stillborn. Brenda Lamontagne was wearing a cornflower blue denim skirt with a row of snaps down the seam at the front. Her top was crisp and white with embroidered pink flowers. Mom still wore the long braid that fell all the way down to her butt.

Just like Cail used to wear, until she went crazy.

They all talked while the little sisters fussed in the kitchen with something that smelled amazing. Maybe chili and probably at least four homemade apple pies.

Cail’s dad was sitting across from Lalo, hands folded over his pot belly, eyeing the guy who had shown up with his daughter. Dad had this puffy, steel-wool beard thing going on, kind of like a character from that show a few years back, Duck Dynasty. He was wearing a red plaid flannel and very dated jeans.

Lalo was calm and friendly, all relaxed and sinking back into the beige microfiber, close enough to Cail that she felt herself actually not having a horrible time. By the time they all sat around the battered oak table that used to hold sixteen people, Cail was practically drooling. Yeah, she could cook and make bread but there hadn’t exactly been time for that lately. There was a pile of shredded cheddar, organic sour cream, a steaming wreath of whole wheat bread and a big vat of chili. Cail caught Lalo practically ogling everything. The guy’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he breathed in the scent of good cooking.

It all tasted just as delicious as it looked. Cail and Lalo ate like starving concentration camp victims. Cail’s sisters told funny stories about what all the brothers and sisters had been up to, and somehow no one mentioned church.

After the apple pie with cinnamon ice cream, however, it appeared it was time to get down to business. Pastor Henry cleared his throat and glanced at Cail’s mom, then got out his big black Bible and read the family after-lunch devotions. Cail felt like she was ten again, but that was ok. She could handle listening to five minutes of Proverbs while the food digested. Lalo was serving himself more pie.

The Proverb the family was supposed to meditate on that day had something to do with fornication.

Oh joy.

Cail just let the verse slide over her brain, as usual. If she tried to really think about it, she’d never think about it well enough and a big chain of obsessions would start. And today, she just did not have the patience for that.

Dad had been thinking about it, though. “Cail,” he drew her name out. “It’s so good to see you. After so long. We have your old bedroom ready upstairs. For you.”

Ooo. That didn’t sound fun.