INVISIBLE DUTY (INVISIBLE RECRUITS) (5 page)

CHAPTER SIX

“What can you tell us about djinn?” Kelly asked later that evening as we were sitting around a fly-specked bar in Kigali, not even pretending to sip our tepid beers as we waited to get some news on Stone
.

Mandy was still digging in her heels about going after the Tuareg
tribesman. I didn’t blame her. He was one scary dude. Letting him waltz away wasn’t sitting too well with me either.

I racked my memory for the bits and pieces of djinn lore I knew, which wasn’t a whole lot
, in spite of Kelly checking the grimoire. But because they were a type of sorcerer my father made sure I had at least a passing acquaintance with their kind.

Rolling my hands along the half-full bottle before me like it was a fire stick, I start
ed with the basics. “Far as anyone knows, there are three types of djinn.” At least I hoped there were only three. That was the problem with myths and fairy tales. They could be vague on the details. “There are djinn who are able to fly, those who are confined to an area.”
Please let the Tuareg fall under that category.
“And the djinn who can shape shift.”

I heard Mandy groan
. Shifters and Weres were usually very bad news but that was her issue, not mine.

Kelly leaned forward. “What kind of a shifter? Or can they change into anything?”

“Good questions.” I took a slow sip of my beer that tasted like it’d started life as donkey piss. “Most djinn shift into snakes, scorpions, creeping devils or dogs, especially black dogs. The ones called devil dogs.”

“Sound like great non-humans to avoid,” Mandy mumbled.

I ignored her. “They can also become cats.”

“Any kind of a cat in particular?” Kelly asked, looking like I’d just pulled off a butterfly’s wing in front of her. Here I thought a cat image would at least be warm and fuzzy and easier to face than Were images.

“Haven’t you ever heard the old wives tale that a cat should not be chased away early in the morning or late at night lest it be a shape-shifted djinn who will take revenge?”

“I don’t know what kind of childhood you had, Alex, b
ut if those are the kind of bedtime stories you were told then you’re going to need some serious therapy.” Jaylene tipped her bottle toward me to show me she was jesting. Or mostly jesting.

“I thought cats were just pets.” Kelly didn’t catch my eye. At this rat
e Mandy was going to sway everyone to
not
go after the Tuareg without opening her mouth.

“Some cats can be,” I tried to reassure Kelly, but
it didn’t look like I was doing that great a job. How was Kelly going to survive as an agent if the thought of cats in danger was a downer?

I took a long drag of my beer and set my bottle down, a little louder than I intended to but we were getting off the subject. “From what I saw today, if that djinn had wanted to disappear he could have easily shifted and we’d probably never know what he was.”

“Which means?” Mandy threw out the challenge.

“If he didn’t shift it means he was one of the two other types of djinn.” I tried to keep the
duh
sound out of my tone but didn’t think I was doing too well by Jaylene’s grimace.

“So the guy you fought didn’t shift and didn’t fly,” Kelly mused out loud. Then looked up and speared me with her glance. “He didn’t. Did he?”

Was disappearing in a cloud of smoke flying? “Technically no.”

At the three sets of raised brows, I added, “He went poof in a cloud of smoke but I always think of flying like something pixies and a fewer of the lesser fae can do.”

“Or witches on broomsticks?” Mandy asked, her voice flat, her eyes signaling
ka-ching
, she’d scored.

“Such a comedian.”

Peacekeeper Kelly stepped in before Mandy and I could draw blood. “What I’m hearing you say is this guy is most likely one of the djinn’s who remain in a specific area. Right?”

I nodded. If the djinn was nearby it’d be easier to go after him now rather than washing our hands of him, and leaving him for later.

“You hear anything from Ling Mai?” Jaylene asked Kelly, taking me off the hot seat for a moment.

Kelly tapped her fingers softly on the table, as if she was thinking through her answer. “The director said it was our call. But not to spend too much time on bringing the djinn to ground.”

“How much time is too much time?” I asked, already mentally weighing my earlier determination to stay and finish this mission against getting to Paris to help find my brother.

“Twenty-four hours,” came Kelly’s answer.

Was she serious? Find one man, or djinn, in the wilds of Rwanda in less than a day? Talk about a needle in a field of haystacks.

“If those are the parameters, I’m in,” said Mandy, leaning back in her chair and raising her chin.

Why the sudden about-face? She’d been dragging her feet ever since finding the djinn had become a possibility. So what had changed?

Then I realized where she was coming from. I tightened my fingers along the neck of my bottle when I wanted to tighten them on someone else’s neck, but I kept my voice even, if a bit on the chilly side as I called her bluff. “You don’t expect us to be able to track him down in that time frame.”

Mandy shrugged. “You think you can?”

Game on,
chiquita
.

“Sure I can. Piece of cake.”

“You willing to place a small wager on the outcome?” Mandy taunted, her eyes egging me on.

Note to mouth. Keep shut.
“Such as?”

Kelly’s gaze was ping ponging between the two of us like watching a tennis game using a live grenade. Jaylene was the smartest in the group, using her drink to
play with, keep her occupied, and out of the catfight.

Mandy glanced at her nails as if she’d never seen her cuticles before and let the seconds tick past. One potato. Two potato. Three potato. . .

“If you can’t find him and take him down in a day you resign from the team.”

Bam!

Silence stilled our table as the sound of my heart beating in my ears increased. Leaving the team meant a one-way ticket back to the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pocatello, Idaho, where Ling Mai had found and recruited me. Find a djinn or face fulfilling my sentence of life in prison?

“And if I win?” Only growing up with four shifter brothers and l
earning to play poker with them kept my tone level, no matter how erratic my pulse had become. ”If I take out this djinn, what then?”

“I’ll leave the team,” came Mandy’s reply, her bullet sharp brown eyes holding mine. I knew Mandy had come from Florida, had no family, and was a spirit-walker, but even I was in awe of her poker playing skills. Bluff? I didn’t think so.

I didn’t know for sure how or why Mandy was coerced to become a member of the agency, but I’d heard rumors involving her sister’s life. Those were big stakes, though I didn’t want to believe Ling Mai would kill an innocent to keep a team member. So maybe they were just rumors and if Mandy had to leave, she had to leave.

B
ut based on my own situation, I figured her leaving the team meant as sucky a choice as my leaving the team meant.

I knew Mandy and I hadn’t hit it off, but no way did I think she wanted me gone bad enough to jeopardize her own security.

Jaylene set her bottle on the table and reached over to place a hand along Mandy’s arm. “Think about what you’re doing,” she murmured, but Mandy didn’t bat an eyelash.

So this wasn’t a spur of the moment, stress release, exhaustion speaking instead of common sense dare. This was an opportunity sought and snared.

If I snapped at the goad, I’d leave finding my brother at the hands of someone like Mandy who couldn’t give a rat’s-tail if she found him or not. But if I backed down? A quick glance toward a waiting Kelly chewing her lip and an expectant Jaylene wearing a groove in her beer bottle she was rubbing it so damn hard, made me pause.

The bet was a bloody smoke screen. Mandy wanted to run this team and she was making her move.
If I backed down was I handing them all over to her with her own agenda 

I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t leave them to that.

But there was more. This really wasn’t about me versus chiquita-girl. This was deeper, about what I valued. Fighting for the guy who couldn’t fight for himself. Making the Tuareg djinn pay for what happened to Ghutu. Doing the right thing when it’d be a thousand times easier to take a pass.

I raised my bottle and tipped it toward her. “Challenge accepted.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.” Kelly swallowed so deeply I could hear it over the background noise of the bar. Jaylene was shaking her head. Mandy? She was eyeing me like a cat to a mouse. One ready to pounce.

Kelly was right. My Noziak temper had walked into this no-win bet with eyes open. I’d committed though, and would see it through.
It was the least I could do for Ghutu.

Kicking back my chair
I stood, throwing a few Rwandan on the table.

“Where you going?” Kelly asked, looking up at me.

“Going to find me a djinn.”

I left the bar not waiting for anyone to join me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I might be foolhardy but I wasn’t stupid. After last night’s disaster in the bar
, I headed out to the hotel to grab a few hours of shut-eye. I hadn’t slept a lot the night before on the stakeout and needed some brain cells to figure out what to do next.

Before dawn
, I rose to sit in the lobby of the hotel, if that’s what you could call the L-shaped space so stuffed with cast-offs it looked more like a garage sale than a place of business, sludge-thick coffee in one hand, a worn map of Rwanda spread before me. I was alone, which usually wasn’t acceptable for a woman in Rwanda unless I had other women around me, but the only man around to complain was the guy sleeping behind the desk, his snores loud enough to rattle windows.

I’d dressed in the outfit we’d been provided to blend as women in Kigali, a head-to-toe single piece of dark cloth called a burqa, which covered every inch except my eyes. But needs must, unless I wanted to create unwanted attention as a female. Not a smart idea as an undercover agent
. I was so focused on my low-tech way of figuring out my first steps to find a hidden djinn, I barely registered Jaylene sliding into a chair next to me.

Some deadly agent I was.

“You got a plan?” she asked, her voice still slurry with sleep.

I cast her a sideways glance. Jaylene and Mandy had been buddies since day one so I wasn’t sure how much I trusted her being here.

“You reporting back to your friend?” I asked with enough snarl to earn a palms up gesture from her.

“You’re going to need help to keep your ass out of the sling you jumped into. You don’t want me here, just say the word and I’ll back off.”

I didn’t respond immediately because I was taken off guard. Family covering my backside I was used too, but not near-strangers, even if we were part of the same team. A team that also included Mandy, so I wasn’t being wary out of being persnickety. Before I could say anything Kelly came walking across the room, wearing the butt-ugly burqa too while not hiding her yawn. If anyone noticed the way she moved, loose and owning the space around her like most American women comfortable in their skin did, they’d know in a heartbeat she wasn’t from Rwanda.

“You don’t think this place has any green tea do you?”
Kelly said, looking around.

I doubted this dive would rate even a one-star and I’d have bet there was not even hot water available, much less tea.

Jaylene groaned as I shook my head. Kelly just shrugged and slid into the rickety chair next to Jaylene.

“So what do we do first?”
Kelly asked, as if we were planning a picnic or church social instead of tracking down a djinn. But I appreciated the fact that two of my had teammates offered help. My daddy didn’t raise stupid. I knew I needed help as the clock ticked past.

I pointed toward the map and the circle I’d drawn there. “This is where we were yesterday,” I said, though it was hardly necessary, until I leaned forward and traced the faint line of a larger circle I’d sketched in around the smaller one. “And this is what I’m guessing should be the most likely area inhabited by the djinn.”

“Guessing?” Jaylene arched her brows. “How precise is this guess? Probability wise.”

“It’s not rocket science.”  Yeah, I sounded defensive, which I was. But that was better than sounding unsure, which is what I was, as I rubbed the back of my neck. “I based my calculations on the amount of territory the average man could walk within a three day time period.”

“Why that calculation?” Kelly asked, examining the map as if it hid more clues.

“Djinn aren’t great walkers?” Jaylene snorted.

“No, I’m thinking about human patterns more than djinn patterns.” That had both their attention so I continued. “Up to the Industrial Revolution in Europe most people were born, lived, married, and died within the same ten mile radius.”

“Which correlates to about the distance a person could walk in three days,” Kelly said, the awe in her voice helping massage my ego a smidge. “But that also includes Kigali. With over a million people here that’s still a lot of territory to search.”

Ego deflate. “Yeah, it is, but only the central and western areas.” I tried a rah-rah team smile feeling wobbly around the corners. “Besides djinn have a few telltale preferences when they go to ground.”

“Such as?” Jaylene asked.

“They can live anywhere but prefer deserts, ruins, and places like graveyards, garbage dumps, bathrooms, or camel pastures.”

Jaylene sniffed. “Seriously? You want us to check out every bathroom in Kigali?”

I hoped it wouldn’t come down to that. Dig deeper Noziak. If I were a djinn, where would I hide out?

There was one detail my dad had shared years ago that might help
. “The stories indicate they love to sit in places between the shade and the sunlight, choosing to move around the most when dark first falls, or as dawn gives way to first light.”

Kelly squinted through the woven dusty blinds of the hotel. “It’s almost dawn now.”

I thumped a finger down on the map. “Which is why I think we should check here or here first.”

Jaylene leaned closer. ”I’m assuming those crosses mean a cemetery.”

Duh. But I bit my tongue, maybe not everyone was as comfortable walking among the dead as I was.

“Yup.” I was grabbing my backpack off the floor as I stood. “With your help we can cover two
of the largest within Kigali and the map circle I’ve drawn.”

“So Kelly and I take one and you the other?”

“That’s what I was thinking.
”



“If we aske
d Mandy to help you’d have back-up.” That was Kelly, always the one who wanted everyone to play nice.

“If
Mandy wanted to be here she’d be here,” I said on my moral high horse.

“And I am,” came a voice behind me.

Damn. Problem with horses was you could just as easy fall off them.

I turned around slowly. Not wanting any assistance from the woman who was looking for a way to oust me from the team. In fact I was pretty sure that’d be a really stupid move.

“And I’d trust your help why?” I didn’t beat around the bush as I faced my nemesis who looked as wary as I felt.

“Because I’m part of the team.”

“The team you want me to leave,” I pointed out with enough saccharine in my tone to send someone into diabetic shock. “Why should I trust that you won’t screw me over?”

She looked me in the eye. “I don’t fight dirty. Do you?”

Jaylene jumped to her feet, acting as a barrier to my step forward and clenching of my hands. “No one calls a Noziak crooked.”

“Says you,” Mandy
replied with a razor-sharp smile. Oh yeah,
chiquita
was looking for a brusin’.

Jaylene rolled her eyes and grabbed Mandy’s arm, talking to me as she tugged Mandy toward the front door. “We’ll take the closest cemetery. You and Kel the other.”

She was almost at the door as she called over her shoulder. “What if we find the you-know-what?”

I unclenched my fists, offered a slow smile, and shrugged. “Hope for the best.”

The statement was only half-facetious. I might know what a djinn was and some of the lore around them, but I had no idea how to stop them.

I guess this was what would be called on-the-job training.