Flashpoint (12 page)

The little one was definitely one of the relief workers. A do-gooder with no money. Although he probably had something in his wallet. He’d been looking at her as if he were considering taking her along when he left here tonight. That sort of purchase had to cost, didn’t it?

She watched as the American invited Lartet to join him. The barkeep had just barely sat down when her messenger, a street kid named Asif, finally came in the door.

She’d started to think he wasn’t going to show. She’d given him the note for Lartet and told him that Lartet would pay him to take an answering note back to her. She’d made a plan to meet Asif in the chaos of the Saboor Square market in the morning.

It seemed the logical place to connect, considering she found herself going back there, morning, noon, and night. Foolishly hoping that she’d be rescued.

But knowing that she was going to have to rescue herself.

She’d given young Asif a burka and robe to wear. He’d protested, of course, as any teenage boy would when told to dress as a woman. She’d informed him he wouldn’t be paid if he didn’t wear it, if he didn’t speak in a disguised, high-pitched whisper.

The promise of money made him consent.

Asif now handed Lartet the note. “Forgive me, sir,” he hissed from beneath his veil. “It’s urgent.”

“Excuse me,” Lartet said to the little American, and Sophia watched as he sat back in his chair and unfolded the piece of brown paper bag she’d written on. He held it up so it caught the light.

Lartet looked up from her note and over at Asif, his eyes narrowed. “Where did you get this?”

“From a stranger,” Asif said, sotto voce and falsetto, as Sophia had instructed. “She told me to wait to deliver your reply—that you would give me a fifty.”

Actually, she’d said Lartet would pay him twenty. Trust Asif to be greedy. That was money she would end up owing the Frenchman. With interest.

Lartet laughed. “A stranger? Surely you can make up a better story than that, Sophia.” And then, moving faster than she’d dreamed a man of his size could move, he pulled off Asif’s veil, revealing the boy’s face.

Asif made all kinds of noises of outrage.

Sophia.

Lartet stared in genuine surprise at the boy’s dark curls, at his straggly, teenaged beginnings of a beard. He’d expected her to be under that burka. He was not going to help her. On the contrary, if she had delivered her own message, which she’d actually considered doing, she would be held at gunpoint right now, about to be shipped across town to Bashir’s nephews.

And suddenly it made perfect sense. The reason Lartet’s club had been so easy to find, the reason he was no longer forced to hide his location.

Lartet was already working for Padsha Bashir.

He carefully folded the brown paper and put it into the front pocket of his shirt. He took out a pen and wrote her an answer on a cocktail napkin. What a fool. Even if she hadn’t been here to see his attempted betrayal for herself, she would have known not to trust him just from that.

If he’d truly wanted to help her, he would have written right on her note, sending it back to her, making sure she knew he was being careful not to let proof that she was still in Kazabek fall into the wrong hands.

As Sophia now watched, he folded the napkin and handed it to Asif. Then he took out his wallet and gave the boy not a fifty note, but a full hundred.

“Tell her I’ve been worried about her,” he instructed Asif. “Tell her I’m glad she’s safe. Don’t tell her I took off your veil, and there’ll be more where that came from.”

Asif pocketed both the napkin and the money and went back out into the night as Sophia tried not to clench her fists.

Sit still. Stay calm. Don’t lose it—if she did, she could lose her head.

“Excuse me for just another moment,” Lartet said to the little American, who’d watched the entire exchange without a single change in his emotionless expression.

Lartet then crossed the room, toward one of the two K-stani men at the bar. He leaned close, giving the young man in the blue shirt some kind of instruction.

And Sophia’s note.

The man nodded, pocketed it. And went out the back door with a sense of purpose.

Sophia sat in silence.

But she wanted to scream. She wanted to stand up and run out of the club. She wanted to turn to the other women who were sitting at the tables near her and ask just how long Michel Lartet’s club had been here, at this very same location.

Had it been two months?

Had he started working for Bashir two months ago?

Had Lartet been the one who had betrayed her? Had he been the one who had told Bashir that she and Dimitri had been working to reinstate a democracy in this country, working to put the warlords like Bashir out of business for good?

Had Lartet traded Dimitri’s life and her freedom, her body, her heart, her very
soul
, for Bashir’s protection?

Sophia closed her eyes to banish the image of Dimitri’s head rolling across Bashir’s palace floor. She opened her eyes against the memory of Bashir’s stinking breath in her face as he grunted and pushed himself inside of her, against the too vivid picture of him using his razor-sharp sword to violate her mind just as thoroughly as he and his horrible friends had violated her body.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, staring at her hands clenched in front of her on that table.

Lartet had gone back to sit with the little American. They were talking about the relentless heat, about the quake, about a betting pool that someone had started sometime in the past few days.

“For a hundred dollars American you can pick a date and a time,” Lartet said. “And if the Kazabek Grande Hotel falls on your date and time, you win the pot.”

Sophia’s legs finally worked well enough for her to think about standing up.

“And if it never falls?” the American asked.

Lartet laughed his big booming laugh—the way he used to laugh with Dimitri. “I suppose you could bet that, if you want. Although then you’d have to wait for never to collect the pot, wouldn’t you?”

Sophia pushed back her chair, knowing without a doubt that Lartet had killed Dimitri as surely as if he’d taken Padsha Bashir’s sword and beheaded him himself.

“What’s that pot up to?” the American asked, his voice like his face. Bland and unremarkable. Nothing special, nothing too noticeable. He glanced in her direction, though, noting her movement.

“Five thousand dollars,” Lartet said. “And growing.”

Sophia rose to her feet. Again, another flicker of the American’s eyes in her direction.

But the American’s attention was quickly back on Lartet. He smiled. “I’ll think about it.”

Lartet shrugged. “Okay. But don’t wait too long.”

“You know, I’m wondering if maybe you could help me out,” the American said as Sophia headed toward the door. “I’m looking for a man name of Dimitri Ghaffari.”

Sophia tried not to react. She didn’t trip over her burka, she didn’t falter. She hardly hesitated, yet the American’s eyes were on her again.

She slowed down. Changed her route. Headed toward the back, toward the ladies’ water closet.

Lartet was shaking his head, frowning and making a “don’t know” face as she went past them. “I haven’t seen Ghaffari in . . . gee, it must be months since he was in here last.” He leaned in closer to the American and asked the question she was dying to have answered. “How do you know him?”

Sophia knew everyone Dimitri knew because he had been her front. Their business, although it bore his name, had been all hers. He’d merely followed her script at business meetings with the men who wouldn’t deign to make deals with a mere female. She would sit off to the side, in a burka much like this one she was wearing now, and laugh at them—all the way to the bank.

“He’s a friend of a friend,” the American said vaguely, “who owed Ghaffari some money. When he heard I was coming to Kazabek, he asked me to get in touch with him. He feels badly about not paying the loan back sooner, but he hasn’t been able to make it past the K-stani border for close to three years now.”

Lartet stood up. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

The American looked up at him. “If you see Ghaffari, let him know I’m looking for him. I’ll try to stop back in, in a couple of nights.”

Sophia pushed open the water closet door, then closed and locked it behind her. How long did it usually take a woman in a long robe to pee? She counted, as slowly as she could, to a hundred, then unlocked the door.

Just in time to see the little American climbing the stairs that led out of the club.

And to see Lartet pulling his second helper aside and speaking to him, much in the same way he’d spoken to the other young man.

This one nodded and headed out the door after the American.

Sophia tried not to hurry as she crossed the room, as she went up those stairs, too.

She pushed open the door that led out into the night. In the moonlight she could see the American heading south on the boulevard, Lartet’s man trailing about a half a block behind. She waited until there was space between them. And then she followed.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

Jimmy couldn’t get comfortable.

After he and Tess had returned to Rivka’s, they’d first gone into the barn to check on Dave, who was sleeping with one hand touch ing his bucket, as if making sure it stayed within reach.

Murphy had returned and gone back out again, leaving behind a brief note: “No need for exterminators—Rivka’s house is exceptionally clean of pests.”

Meaning he’d procured an electronic sweeper from somewhere—damn, he was good at doing that—and checked the house for listening devices.

The place was clean—they were free to talk openly.

Still, Tess had been silent as she’d disinfected the cut on the back of his head. After that, she went behind the curtain into her little pantry, to set up her computer and try to get online.

Jimmy stretched out on top of his bedroll on the kitchen floor and tried not to remember the way her eyes had sparkled, up in the tower of the nearby boarded-up Church of the Saints, after they’d gotten that portable sat-dish in place, after she’d opened her phone and discovered that the freaking thing actually worked.

“We’re not going to be able to use our phones outside of a certain radius of this dish,” she’d informed him, forgetting for a moment that she was angry with him. “This building’s just not high enough.”

Tess had actually been serious about getting up onto the roof of the much taller, twenty-eight-story Grande Hotel, down in Kazabek’s business district. While Jimmy would go into the condemned building if he absolutely had to, he’d sweat bullets the entire time. And this didn’t count as an absolutely have-to situation.

Especially since Tess had told him she’d need to go back to the sat-dish regularly to change the power pack.

He closed his eyes, praying for the miracle of sleep.

But his shoulder hurt where part of the roof of that school had fallen in on him today. And his head hurt where that chunk of shingle tile had hit him while he and Tess were in that alley. And his brain hurt from having to be on super high awareness whenever he was around Tess, which was turning out to be every freaking minute of every flipping hour.

And every little noise that Tess made behind that curtain was completely driving him crazy. Reminding him that she was there, mere meters from him. Reminding him that he was still just as attracted to her as he’d been that night she’d invited him into her apartment.

Which was stupid.

Been there, done that.

He knew, when he’d left Tess’s apartment that night—that amazing, incredible, terrifying night—that she wasn’t the type to mess with. She wouldn’t realize that, even if he stuck around for a week or two, what they had going was only a one-night stand.

She would have thought it was something more.

Something special.

Something enormous that scared the crap out of him, and . . .

Shit.

Tess had gotten really quiet tonight after Jimmy had told her that Decker was interested in her. The look in her eyes had been one he couldn’t read.

Shit.

The thought of Deck with Tess should have been a good one. Two people he really liked, together and happy. That was a good thing, right?

But instead he was feeling this . . . Christ, was it jealousy? It was. He wasn’t just jealous, he was teeth-grittingly jealous.

And he didn’t know why.

Okay. He was a lying sack of crap. He knew why. It was because he’d broken his number one rule. He’d slept with a woman—Tess—who actually liked him. Really, honestly liked him. She liked him before, during, and after he slept with her. She also liked him before, during, and even after that conversation in which he’d told her . . . He still couldn’t believe the things he told her.

And he was jealous because—and surely this was another sign of the coming apocalypse—he really liked her, too.

In fact, he “liked” her so much, he’d completely lost control when they got it on.

Twenty-five seconds.

Jesus God.

Jimmy still couldn’t believe that he’d lasted for only twenty-five seconds that first time.

Tess had been breathing hard beneath him. He could feel her heart pounding.

“Did you really come?” he’d asked, unable to believe that she’d had enough time. “Or were you just being polite?”

Tess had laughed and held him even more tightly, wrapping her legs around him, too. “That was very real,” she said. “It was amazing.”

Jimmy had lifted his head to look down at her. She was serious. “You mean I don’t need to bother with that four-page apology I was drafting in my head?”

Tess pushed his hair off his face, running her fingers back through it. He had to close his eyes at the sensation—it felt unbelievably good.

“If you’re not in a hurry,” she said softly, “maybe you could stick around. We could do that again.”

Jimmy opened his eyes. “Yeah, and maybe—who knows?—next time I’ll take a full thirty seconds. That is, if you can bear it.”

She laughed, her eyes dancing.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. She was back. Tess the angel.

But she rolled her eyes. “Honesty, Nash. Remember?”

He kissed her because he didn’t want to argue. He could’ve kept on kissing her for an hour or even a solid year, but she pulled back.

“Is your leg all right?” she asked, and at first he didn’t have a clue as to why she would ask that. His leg?

But when she moved out from under him, he saw blood.

He’d bled on her sheets. On
her
.

Jimmy pulled her up and into the bathroom. “Wash,” he ordered, turning on the shower and gently pushing her in. He saw her face before he drew the shower curtain shut and added, “I’m negative. I’m tested regularly. But I have no idea where that knife that stuck me has been.”

She pulled back the shower curtain to look at him, her eyes wide. “Knife?”

He pulled it closed again, put down the cover to the john, and sat, bringing his leg up so he could get a closer look at his damaged calf. “I get dinged up pretty often. And most people don’t give their switchblades a super-sanitary cleaning.”

It wasn’t long before Tess shut off the water. She opened the curtain, pulled a towel off the rack on the wall, and dried herself. When she got her first good look at his leg, she stopped short. “Oh my God.”

“It looks worse than it is,” Jimmy said, pushing himself to his feet both to hide it from her and to take a quick turn in the shower.

“I have a first aid kit in the hall closet.” She went out of the bathroom, towel around her. But he heard her come back in almost immediately. “I can’t believe you call getting stabbed ‘dinged up.’ ”

Jimmy washed all of himself, not just his leg—which definitely looked less awful without all the drying blood.

“Stabbed is stabbed,” he told her through the shower curtain as he used some of her sweet-smelling shampoo. “Dinged happens when a knife is pulled, but you
don’t
get stabbed. If a blade is brought into a fight, chances are someone’s going to bleed. But believe me, there’s a big difference between dinged and stabbed.”

He finished rinsing himself, turned off the water, and opened the curtain. Tess had put a clean towel on the rack, and he used it.

She’d also set what looked like a tackle box on the sink counter and was rummaging through it. She’d put on a bathrobe, too—one of those thick terry cloth ones, in a deep shade of green.

His leg was oozing, just a little, but he was careful of the towel as he dried around it. “Sorry about your sheets.”

Tess threw him a look over her shoulder. “Yeah, that’s what
I’m
most concerned about.”

He had to laugh. “It’s really not that bad.”

She found what she was looking for—some kind of antibiotic cleaner. “Sit,” she ordered, then got down on the floor in front of him.

It was a double turn-on—being ordered around by a woman who was on her knees.

“This is going to sting,” she warned him.

“It’ll sting less if you lose the robe—and let me do it.” He took the washcloth from her, pressing it against his broken skin. Shit, she wasn’t kidding. But it was unmanly to whimper. Besides, she was actually slipping out of that robe.

Oh, yeah. Not a chance of him whimpering now. At least not about his leg.

Still, he scrubbed at it, making sure it was clean, making it really hurt in the process. The pain was hot and sharp and sweet.

“Are you sure you aren’t going to need stitches?” Tess asked.

He lifted the washcloth to look underneath. She looked, too.

“You were too stabbed,” she accused. “That’s definitely a stab.”

“No, it’s not,” he scoffed. “It’s a nick. That blade was at least four inches long. He was just swinging wildly. He barely even cut me before I took him—” Out. Christ, what was he saying?

Tess was looking up at him, her eyes wide again as she knelt on the floor, her robe a pool of emerald green behind her.

Jimmy forced his mouth up into a smile. “Hey, you know, we left our beer in the kitchen.”

But she didn’t move. “You ‘cleared the roof,’ ” she said, and he could see that she finally realized what that meant.

“Yeah.” He couldn’t hold her gaze, afraid of what he’d see there, deep in her eyes. Afraid of what she might see in
his
eyes—as if the reflection of that last shooter’s face still lingered, a face filled with sheer panic as he finally realized just how deadly this game was that he was playing, as he realized instead of killing tonight, he was going to be killed.

Jimmy tried to bring Tess’s focus back to his leg. “You know, I think I could use one of those butterfly Band-Aids. Oh, and a disposable razor if you have one.”

His request successfully distracted her.

So he kept that particular tangent alive. “Don’t tell Decker, but I’m a total baby when it comes to Band-Aids—you know, the way the adhesive sticks to hair when you try to pull it off?”

Tess laughed and Jimmy knew that she now understood what the razor was for. She didn’t even have to get to her feet as she opened the cabinet under the sink and dug one out of its packaging.

He took it from her, took off the little protective cover, and . . . Crap, his hands were shaking again. What was wrong with him?

Tess didn’t seem to notice. She was up on her feet, looking for that Band-Aid. Except, damn it, she found it before he was done using both hands to shave two little patches on either side of the wound.

She didn’t say anything, not even when he dropped the freaking razor. But she unwrapped the bandage herself instead of handing it to him in the paper package.

“How many were up there?” she asked as casually as she might’ve asked how many apples he’d bought at the grocery store.

But it was not a casual question. It was very carefully worded. She didn’t say
people
. How many
people
were up there? How many
people
had Jimmy sent to the morgue tonight?

“Three,” he said as she put the bandage on his leg, her fingers gentle and warm. What was wrong with him? Three was nothing. A mere blip on the body count scale. He knew that. And what was he doing even answering her? This wasn’t something he ever talked about.

You don’t talk about it, because you don’t think about it.
He could still hear Vic’s voice, playing in his head. It had been almost twenty years, but it was still there, loud and clear.
You do the job, you wash your hands, you go have a good meal, get laid if you’re lucky enough. And you get a good night’s rest because tomorrow’s coming.

“They were there to kill Decker.” Tess didn’t ask it as a question.

Because you don’t know what new shit’s coming at you, with the dawn of that new day. All you know is that it’s not
your
shit. It’s not your loose ends. It’s not your mistake for saying something that you shouldn’t have said to someone you shouldn’t have said it to.
Capisce?

Jimmy answered it anyway. “Yeah.” They were there to kill Deck.

He was clean, he was bandaged, but she was still touching him, her hands solid against his leg, her interest just as palpable.

“You kept them from doing that, you know,” she said quietly.

“Doing that and a crapload of other things.” Like waking up tomorrow morning.

“You saved Decker’s life,” she told him. “You got us safely out of there. We all could have been killed.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Not really. It wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, yeah, if Deck had gone out the front door without knowing they were there. . . . The shooters I took down had training, but not enough. They put one guard at the door to the roof, then assumed they were safe, that they didn’t have to watch their backs. They didn’t have a clue that I was up there.”

He wondered, with a tiny part of his brain that stood off to the side and watched this exchange dispassionately, if she knew that he was talking more about this than he ever had before, with anyone.

Why?

Yes, she was impossibly beautiful in a certain light, at certain times. Like right now. Her eyes took his breath away.

But big fucking deal. He’d taken a whole parade of beautiful women to bed, although never quite like tonight. He’d gotten it on with them and then he’d made his excuses—“Whoops, I’m getting a call from HQ, gotta go save the world”—and left.

So what was he doing, still here?

He didn’t have to look far to find an obvious answer. He wanted to make sure she knew that he normally lasted significantly longer than twenty-five seconds. That was freaking embarrassing. He was still here because he had to make it up to her. He had to take her to bed again, to make it good this time.

Had to? What a liar. He
wanted
to.

But that was a lie, too, because, really, sex was just a good excuse to stick around. But it wasn’t the real reason he was here.

“I can’t imagine what it feels like, to . . .” Tess couldn’t even say it.

“It feels too easy.” Whoa, where did
that
come from? What does it
feel
like to take another man’s life? It feels like nothing. Like just another day that started when the sun rose, and ended the way most of his days ended, with a good night’s rest after getting laid.