The Language of Secrets (37 page)

“I don't need her alive,” he said. “So think carefully.”

“Let her go.”

It wasn't Rachel or Khattak who spoke. It was Grace, her voice hard with purpose. Rachel looked back at her. Grace was holding the gun—Din's gun—in steady hands. It was aimed squarely at Ruksh's chest.

“Grace, no!” Rachel cried, bewildered. Why did Grace have the gun?

Hassan shifted Ruksh's body more fully in front of him.

“So you took the gun,” he said. “I wondered. What did you do with it?”

“You don't want to know,” she answered.

Din approached from behind Ashkouri, inching closer to Grace.

Rachel shook her head at him in despair.

“You haven't done anything yet,” she said. “You can still get out of this, Din.”

“That's what I thought,” Grace said in a monotone. “I always thought I could get him out, save him somehow. It didn't work. He left me with no other choice.”

“What are you saying, Grace?” Rachel gasped.

“They drew him into their plot. They turned him into one of them. He wasn't the Din I knew anymore. I tried to get him away, but Mo wouldn't let me near him.” Grace jerked the gun at Hassan's head. “Mo ran interference for Hassan. He made sure that the members of the cell didn't back out. So I took care of him.”

“It was you? You shot Mohsin Dar?”

Rachel couldn't catch her breath. She slid toward Grace, a little at a time. The gun was still pointed at Hassan and Ruksh. Grace used one hand to smooth her hair under the Maple Leafs toque. Then she gripped the gun tighter, letting it dip toward Rachel.

“I had to. To save Din.” Her voice cracked. “He used to love me once. He was the only person who did. I couldn't let them take him. I couldn't let them hurt him.”

“Gracie, no!” The heart-wrenching wail was Din's. “You don't know what you're saying. You couldn't have hurt Mo. You could never hurt anyone.”

“Then why do I have the gun?” Grace blinked away tears. Her voice was a whisper. “It was for you, Din. I did it for you.”

“I loved him!” Din cried. “He was my brother.”

“He ruined you,” Grace answered. “He wanted to see you dead.”

“Don't grieve for Mohsin,” Hassan told Din. “He's become
shaheed
, a martyr to the cause. He's in paradise now.”

Rage rose in Rachel's throat, choking her. She was poised on the ice between a girl with a gun and the man who held a knife to Ruksh's throat. The man who counted up lives and spent them, like so many worthless pennies.

“You're wrong,” she said to Hassan through gritted teeth. “He wasn't your martyr, and he didn't want to die. He didn't believe in your cause—he was working with us. That's how we knew about your plot. That's how we were able to stop it.”

Hassan smiled. There was nothing in his manner to suggest that Rachel's news had shaken him. Until his blade drew its first drops of blood from Ruksh's throat.

“
Did
you stop it?” he asked. “It's not yet midnight.”

“We have you,” she said. “There's nothing you can do now.”

“We've already done it.” He waved the knife at her. “Why do you think we came back here? To draw you away from the Nakba.”

Rachel gasped. She didn't know what he meant, and she didn't have time to sort it out. She was focused on the tears of blood leaking from Ruksh's throat. She needed to get the gun away from Grace.

“I'm so sorry, Grace,” she said to her, aghast at what Ashkouri's schemes had cost the girl. “I'm
so
sorry. Mohsin wasn't who you thought he was. He wasn't trying to hurt Din. He was trying to keep him safe—to get him out. You killed the wrong man.” She drew a deep breath. “Mohsin Dar was innocent.”

A gunshot whistled past Rachel's ear.

Din threw himself to the ice.

Ashkouri didn't move. The gun was trained on Rachel now.

“You're lying,” Grace said. Her eyes were two hollow smudges.

“I'm not, Grace. That's how I knew to come here to help you. That's why I was trying to get you out. Because Mohsin told us—because that's what Mohsin wanted. Please, Grace. Give me the gun.”

“You give her the gun, Grace, the first thing she does is take down your boyfriend. He's committed now. There's no way out for Din.”

Rachel turned on Ashkouri like a cornered mountain lion.

“The first thing I'll do is take off your head. Let go of Ruksh, now!”

Her eyes beseeched Ruksh. Ruksh had to find a way to help herself.

Ashkouri closed the distance between himself and Rachel, dragging Ruksh with him.

The ice shifted underneath Rachel's feet. She heard the ominous wheeze again. She'd been on the ice all her life. She knew what it meant. There were too many of them gathered at the weakest point on the surface.

“Grace,” she said, holding out her hand for the gun.

From her peripheral vision, she could see that Khattak had reached the creek bed. His gun was drawn, but he didn't have a clear line of sight.

Grace raised the gun. She pointed it at Rachel. The ice shifted again. Grace lost her balance, but recovered quickly, the gun still aimed at Rachel's heart.

“Too many people have lied to me,” she said, her eyes wet. “Including you.”

There was a terrible sense of shock in her face. Her mouth gaped at Rachel, the tattoo on her neck stretched tight with pain. She didn't want to believe Rachel because of what it would mean. She had killed Mohsin for nothing, for all the wrong reasons.

“Do it,” Ashkouri said. “Be one of us. Help me.”

Rachel shifted farther away from Ashkouri, drawing the gun with her. She'd opened up a field between herself and Ruksh, giving Khattak the clear line of sight he needed. But he had only a few seconds before Ashkouri clued in to his approach.

And in those seconds, Khattak would need to decide.

His sister or Rachel.

There was no choice, really. Khattak couldn't cover them both.

And she realized she didn't want to be a witness to his painful decision.

She made her words flat and no-nonsense.

“If you wanted to save Din, it was Hassan you should have killed.”

She leapt at Grace, wrestling the girl for Din Abdi's gun.

The gun went off, a crack that shattered the immaculate silence. Then a second shot, followed by a muffled thud on the ice. Stars splintered and wheeled above Rachel's head. Grace butted Rachel's forehead, her piercings stabbing into Rachel's skin.

“Gracie!” Din called, scrambling to his feet.

“Don't come any closer!” Rachel shouted at him.

He didn't listen.

Rachel wrested the gun from Grace's hand. It fired again, this time straight down into the ice. The plates of thinned ice jerked against each other, once, twice, then separated under Grace's feet. She plunged into the depths of the creek, a startled expression on her face. She vanished under the surface in a heartbeat.

“Grace!” Din's voice was petrified.

Rachel threw herself flat on the ice, grabbed the ice screw from her pocket, and drove it into the heaving surface of the creek.

“Get off the ice,” she shouted back to Din. “Let me get her!”

“No!” he screamed. He slid past Rachel on his belly and threw himself into the hole where Grace had disappeared.

He dived once, twice, three times—the minutes between his ragged attempts at surfacing stretching out longer and longer.

On the third try, Rachel grabbed at his scarf. She staked it down with the ice screw, reaching for his shoulders.

He was shivering wildly.

An inch at a time, Rachel propelled his body from the hole, slinging it along the length of the ice, moving toward the banks of the creek.

“No, no, no,” he kept crying.

Rachel shoved his trembling body away to safety, then swung out again, creeping back toward the hole, using the screw as a safety measure, the same way a mountain climber would use a spike.

“Rachel, no!”

It was Khattak's desperate cry.

She didn't listen. She spared a moment to reassure herself that it was Ashkouri who had fallen, and that Ruksh was safe in her brother's arms. Then she kicked off her boots to dive into the hole.

She was a better swimmer than Din, but the cold bit into her body at once, a shock to her arms and legs. The puffy coat weighed her down. All around her was blackness, and the dragging pull of the water.

She couldn't see Grace. She couldn't see the way up.

She kicked out, searching for Grace's body, scrabbling for a break in the surface of the creek.

Nothing.

Ice-cold pressure squeezed her lungs.

She spun around with difficulty, struggling back in the opposite direction. Something soft brushed against her hands. She grabbed it.

A light bobbed against the blackness above her head. She scissor-kicked her feet, propelling her body toward the light. She was weighted down, heavy with cold and fatigue.

Two strong arms reached down to grab her shoulders, hefting her from the water. Coughing up brackish liquid, she was dragged off the creek to the side.

Her soaking coat was stripped from her body. She was gathered close against Khattak's chest, his hands pounding her back.

“Rachel,” he said. “Rachel, come on.”

She forced her eyes open, coughing harder.

“I'm fine, I'm all right. What about Grace?”

He shook his head.

She struggled against him. “I have to find her! There's still time!”

He held her until her struggles subsided, then he said, “Rachel.”

He closed one hand over hers.

She looked down at it.

Grace's Maple Leafs toque was in her hand.

 

28

It was Rachel's first time meeting Superintendent Martine Killiam of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. One look at the other woman's strong, square face and her instinctive habit of command, and Rachel could see how the superintendent had risen to her rank in the RCMP.

Rachel made her handshake as firm as she could, given that her wrist had been fractured in the struggle for Din Abdi's gun. The cold from her dousing in the creek had prevented her from feeling the pain at the time. And since then, she hadn't felt much of anything at all.

She'd skated in her all-star game on New Year's Day because she hadn't felt she could let her team down. Her heart wasn't in it. Her wrist heavily bandaged inside her glove, she'd watched as one of her teammates—a good friend—had won the MVP trophy for scoring five times. Rachel hadn't even managed an assist.

Khattak and Nate had come to cheer Rachel on from the stands. They had met Zach at the game, and there had been nothing in that meeting for Rachel to dread. She was coming to accept that the people who mattered to her could get to know each other, and it wouldn't cause her world to collapse. As she had feared with her father, Don Getty.

Rachel's mother hadn't come to the game.

She also hadn't called to ask Rachel about her injury.

It didn't matter, Rachel thought. She had failed to save a teenage girl from a terrible death, so what did any of it matter?

Martine Killiam was reading from a folder.

“You disobeyed a direct order from the ranking officer, Sergeant Getty.”

Rachel nodded. She had nothing to say to this.

Khattak spoke for her, somber and formally dressed at her side.

“She knew civilians were in danger from Ashkouri and his cell. Sergeant Getty put her own life at risk to save them. Inspector Coale should have listened to her. Just as he should have listened to me. Perhaps then a teenage girl wouldn't be dead.”

The superintendent consulted the file again, before closing it.

“Grace Kaspernak. The girl who murdered Mohsin Dar.”

“Yes.”

“And we have six people who witnessed her confession. One of them is dead. Din is under the protection of a lawyer. Still, the confession will stand. A good day's work. And we took Ashkouri's strike team before they got to Nathan Phillips Square. Thanks to your work, we averted the New Year's plot.”

Khattak had attended the press conference, watched Martine Killiam lay out the operation in clear, concise phrases. She had taken particular care to recognize the role of Community Policing, and to enter a commendation into Rachel's personnel file.

“May I ask, ma'am, what will happen to Dinaase Abdi? What his role was?”

Killiam studied him gravely.

“Inspector Coale should have taken a different approach. He should have let you know about the gun; he should have told you more about the operation. Perhaps then the outcome would have been different. Din Abdi was a courier—he transported the cassettes, and he transported the weapon. He knew every detail of the plot. He's been charged, and he will be tried. And if there's any justice, he'll serve a maximum sentence.”

Rachel flinched at the news. It didn't sound like the RCMP intended to take into account Din's age, any more than their youthfulness would shield Zakaria or Sami. Din was a kid, a stupid kid, snared by Ashkouri's rhetoric, caught up in the make-believe world of the Rose of Darkness website. The world that had just become real for him. He'd lost Mohsin, he'd lost Grace—both of whom had risked everything to save him—and now, he would lose his freedom.

Could anything be worth that? Any dream of paradise?

She couldn't block that night from her mind, Din's lament reverberating through the black branches of the forest.

Gracie, Gracie—she can't be gone. Tell me she's all right. Tell me she'll be okay.

His body had heaved convulsively, until the tactical team had arrived to take him away.

Din hadn't looked back for Ashkouri, cold and dead on the ice, brought down by Khattak's gun.

And Khattak himself, his face after he had pulled Rachel from the water. Pale with terror.