Flashpoint (29 page)

Either way, her answer was yes.

When Sophia arrived, Decker was standing in the lobby of the Hospital of the Servant of the Rightly Guided—the Hospital Abdul-Rasheed.

She knew from the look on his face as she approached him, that something bad had happened.

“Murphy?” she asked.

He pulled her away from the other people waiting there. It was especially crowded because of the storm that was coming. Most people were choosing to wait it out here, in the relative comfort of the hospital lobby. “He’s gone.”

“Oh, no,” she said, sickened by the senseless loss. Poor Angelina, making wedding plans back in California. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know him that well, but—”

“No.” Decker stepped closer, lowered his voice. “He’s alive. But we got him out of here on a Red Cross helo—”

“Helo?” she asked.

“Helicopter, chopper.”

Ah. She’d seen one pass over her head just minutes ago. And she understood, instantly, why Decker had wanted her to come down here. Murphy was gone—and if she’d been here on time, she’d be gone, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I hurried. . . .”

“It was worth the try,” he told her with the same calm he’d used to reassure Khalid back in the barn. “We do the best we can—sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But now the million-dollar question is whether we should stay here to wait out the storm or—” He swore sharply.

Sophia peered from the screen of her burka, following his gaze out the front windows.

Two open trucks, each filled with a dozen members of Bashir’s patrols, were pulling up. It was clear the soldiers were intending to take shelter from the sandstorm here in the hospital lobby.

“I need to leave,” Sophia told him. “Right now.”

It was amazing how cool and collected her voice sounded to her own ears, considering the panic that was rising inside her.

Decker didn’t hesitate. He took her by the elbow and headed for the side door.

Where—no!—another truck filled with soldiers was pulling up.

“Don’t stop,” he told her. “If you stop suddenly, it’ll draw attention to us. Come on, we can do this. We’re just going to walk right on past them.”

She was safe, she was safe, she was safe. Decker would not let anything happen to her.

“Hold on to your burka,” he told her as they approached the door, and he even managed to smile, as if he thought that was funny. “I mean that literally, hon. The wind’s picking up.”

He wasn’t kidding. As they went outside, Sophia was glad for his steadying grip on her elbow. Without it, she felt as if she might’ve blown away.

But coming out that side door, she realized where they were. “The Hotel Français is only a few blocks from here.”

“Which way?” he asked.

“Left.”

Either way they had to walk right past the soldiers. Sophia kept her head down, her feet moving. . . .

“Hey, American . . .”

Don’t stop, don’t stop, whoever it was, they weren’t talking to them.

“Hey!” It was louder now, and Decker did stop. “Where are you going in this weather?”

“Is there a problem, sir?” Decker answered. It was a different dialect than the one Khalid spoke, but once again his grammar was perfect.

The soldier laughed. “The problem is crazy Americans who don’t appreciate how deadly a storm like this can be.”

“We’ve got a few more minutes before it gets bad, Lieutenant,” Decker told him, as calm as can be. “And we don’t have far to go.”

They started walking again.

“Hey!”

Sophia withdrew her arm from the spacious sleeve of her robe, reaching to take her gun from the pocket of the jeans Tess had lent to her.

Decker spoke to her in a low voice. “Easy. There’s still plenty of talking left to do.” He turned back to the lieutenant. “Yes, sir?”

“Here, crazy American,” the man said. “Catch.”

And he threw something at Decker. It was a scarf to tie around his face, to keep the blowing dust and dirt from his mouth and nose.

“It’ll be useful,” the lieutenant said, “even though you don’t have far to go.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Decker said. “You’re too kind.” He wrapped it around his face.

“Go with God,” the lieutenant told them as he followed his men into the hospital lobby.

They walked on, Decker’s hand still on her elbow, Sophia’s heart still pounding.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

“Ilived here off and on for about five years,” Sophia told Decker, “starting the summer I turned ten.”

The hotel was dark, the storm outside making the late afternoon seem more like night.

Decker shook sand and dirt from his clothes and hair. He’d need two weeks of showers to get the last of it out of his ears.

He followed Sophia up the stairs, thinking,
Shit
. This was the perfect end to one total goatfuck of a day. Murphy injured, Tess locked up . . . And now here he was, back at the scene of the crime, so to speak, where he’d let Sophia . . .

Oh, yeah. This boarded-up hotel could be made into a memorial to Deck’s bad judgment.

He should have known that Sophia wouldn’t be able to make it over to the hospital in time. Instead he’d risked it, which resulted in her being in danger of being discovered by Bashir’s men, which resulted in the two of them—tah dah da dah, sound the official Fuckup’s Fanfare!—right back here. Thank you
very
much. Alone together until the storm ended.

Which could easily be until morning.

Decker opened his phone. Nothing happening there. Not that he’d expected it. With this wind, their sat-dish was in Pakistan.

“Nash called me,” Sophia said as she led him down the hall. “On Murphy’s phone. He said he was on his way to Tess. He seemed to know where she was.”

“Yeah,” Decker said. “I’m sure he arranged for her release. He was, uh, pretty upset.”

“I know that they’re not really married,” she told him.

“No, actually, they are.”

She gave him such a disbelieving look that he couldn’t help it, he laughed. “Okay,” he admitted. “They aren’t. Who gave it away?”

“You did,” she told him.

Now it was his turn to look at her quizzically.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious that you’re in love with her.”

Decker stopped short. “You’re wrong. I’m not.”

“My mistake.” Sophia opened a pair of French doors into an enormous room with big windows. There was slightly more light in there, and Decker slowly followed her in. “This was my favorite room in the hotel. The grand ballroom. This was where Yousef, the eldest son of Prince Zevket, first met Madeleine Lewis. Do you know that story?”

“No.” The windows looked out on the hotel’s center courtyard. It was dusty and neglected, with a center fountain that had broken in two. Did Sophia really think he was in love with Tess?

But she had gone into tour guide mode, ultrasmooth and extra fake. She sure could tap dance when she thought she needed to. He wished she didn’t think she needed to when she was around him.

They’d been on the verge of some kind of breakthrough this morning, before Khalid had burst in. She’d actually started to cry—real tears, not those crocodile ones she did so well.

“It was June 1920,” she was telling him now, as if he gave a good goddamn about Prince Whosis and Madeleine . . . Albright? No, that wasn’t right.

“Madeleine was the daughter of a famous nature photographer—Reginald Lewis.”

Lewis, that was the name.

“Yousef gave up his kingdom to be with her, and Madeleine, well, her father disowned her, too,” Sophia continued. “But they didn’t care. They went to America together and lived happily ever after. Until Hitler invaded Poland and started World War Two. Madeleine lost her husband and both of her sons in the war.” She sighed dramatically. “I used to wonder, what if, when she stood in this room, at the very moment that she fell in love with Prince Yousef, what if she had the power to know what was to come? All that heartache and loss . . . Would she have taken that same path anyway?”

She fell silent, staring out the window, down at the courtyard, at a dried piece of brush that was being tossed about in the wind.

“I used to think no. If she knew, how could she bear to . . . ,” she said softly as Decker held his breath, as the real Sophia peeked out. “But now . . . I don’t know.”

She looked up and laughed much too brightly—an attempt to slam the door shut that didn’t quite work. “I mean, twenty-two years of happiness—that’s more than most people get, don’t you think?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Decker answered it anyway. “I think life is hard,” he told her. “I think sometimes some people get lucky, and then it’s less hard for them, for a while. I think twenty-two years of happiness is a gift. If that’s really what they shared. And you’re assuming a lot there, because a lot can happen in twenty-two years.”

She turned again to look at him. “She’s really nice, you know—Tess. Sometimes you can say that about people and it’s not meant to be a compliment, like nice is something bad, but I don’t mean it that way. Tess really
is
genuinely nice. Except she’s in love with Nash. That must be fun, huh?” She laughed again, more fake merriment. Being here with him like this must really be making her nervous. He didn’t blame her. He was on edge, too. “Although she’ll get over
that
soon enough.”

“No, she won’t.”

“Trust me, she will.”

Decker smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Time will tell.”

“Yes, it will,” he agreed.

“You could just kind of hang out, you know, underneath the basket, ready for the rebound. . . .”

“You play basketball?” he asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Yeah, right.” She laughed, far too gaily. He wished she would cut that out. “I’m the star center of the Kazabek women’s basketball league. Can’t you just see us running down the court, burkas on?” Her smile weakened, but then came back, brighter than ever. “Seriously though, Dimitri was a big Lakers fan. He lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and got hooked. Thank goodness for satellite TV.”

Maybe she’d begin to relax if he wasn’t looming over her. Decker didn’t often loom—he just wasn’t that tall—but she was on the short side of average. He sat down on the floor, leaning back against the wall beneath the windows.

“I know I make you nervous,” he said, figuring why the fuck not simply grab the proverbial bull by the horns. “I hope you’re not afraid of me.”

He’d managed to surprise her. “No,” she said. “I’m not.”

She slowly sat down, not quite beside him, but not on the other side of the room either. And he could see in the dim light from the windows that she’d stopped with the fake smiles.

“What happened between us—,” he started.

“I don’t want to talk about that.” Damn it, now she was on her feet again.

“What
do
you want to talk about?” he asked, looking up at her. “Dimitri?”

It was obvious that was the last thing she’d expected him to suggest. “
You
want to talk about Tess?”

“Okay,” he said, because he knew an affirmative reply would keep her off balance. He didn’t particularly want to share his feelings about Tess with her, but what the hell. He’d already shared physical intimacies with this woman, and being honest about this might do him good. “I’ll tell you this—you’re partly right. I probably could love her—it wouldn’t take a lot. You said it yourself—she’s genuine all the time, and I like that about her. I like her—I admire her—very much.”

The expression on Sophia’s face made him keep going.

“I’m also attracted to her,” Decker confessed. “She’s, uh . . .” How should he say this? “She’s got a body type that I happen to appreciate. I mean, I like women with women’s bodies and she’s got one of those.
And
a brain to match. Smart women do it for me. I just don’t get why some women think they need to pretend they’re stupid to be attractive to men.” He laughed. “Maybe so they’re attractive to the stupid men, but . . . I also happen to think that Tess is the best thing that ever happened to Nash, if you’ll excuse the clichéd expression. I’m okay with that—really—because to be honest, I don’t know if I could handle two years of happiness, let alone twenty-two.”

Sophia slowly sat down next to him. “Why not?” she asked softly.

She was finally here with him. The real Sophia. The strangely shy Sophia, who didn’t quite know what to say to him without putting on her big fake act. The one who’d been forced, for months, to give sexual favors to strangers. The one who’d probably seen her husband murdered right in front of her eyes.

“Because, like I said, life is hard,” Decker said slowly. “And sometimes it can be brutally harsh. I’ve seen some terrible things that . . .” He shook his head. “It’s hard to explain, Sophia. I’m not keeping secrets from you, I just can’t . . . Maybe what I feel is like survivor’s guilt. How can I let myself be that happy when . . . I had friends on the
Cole
, and in Khobar Towers. Friends who died on 9/11. They don’t get even one more day of happiness, you know?”

She nodded, her face pale in the fading light.

“But then I come to places like Kazabek, and I think what the hell am I doing here? I’m fighting terrorism, but I’m only fighting the symptoms. I’m not getting anywhere close to the cause.” Decker was silent for a moment. “In the end, I just do the best I can. That’s all I can do. That’s all anyone can do, I guess.”

They sat for many long minutes in silence, as it got darker and darker in the room, as the wind howled outside.

“I can’t talk about Dimitri,” Sophia finally whispered. “I . . .”

“That’s okay,” Decker said quietly.

He could barely see her in the dimness. She was sitting with her back against the wall, knees up, arms folded around them. As he watched, she rested her forehead on her arms.

“I loved him,” she admitted. “And he loved me. I lied about that . . . the other day.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I pretty much knew that.”

“We were working—
I
was working—with this group that was trying to restore democracy to Kazbekistan,” she said softly. “It was so stupid. I should have known Bashir would find out that we were involved. It was a death sentence if we were caught, but I never thought . . . We’d done business with him in the past, gone right into the palace. A lunchtime meeting didn’t seem out of the ordinary. But I trusted the wrong people. Michel Lartet—he was Dimitri’s friend, and . . . I trusted him because it was so obvious that we’d all make more money with Bashir out of power. It never occurred to me that Lartet would sell us out.”

“You helped your husband run his business?” Decker asked her.

“It was my business,” she told him, lifting her head to look in his direction. But Decker knew she couldn’t see his face any more clearly than he could see hers, and hers was a pale blur. “My company. Dimitri only pretended to run it. He wanted to go to France, to safety, when the government fell. But I thought we’d turn a bigger profit by sticking around. So we stayed.”

They sat in silence again, and Decker knew from the sound of her breathing that she was holding back her tears.

He waited, but she wasn’t going to say it.

So Decker said it for her. “You think he died because of you.”

That did the trick. She finally started to cry. “I know he did. And then I . . . I betrayed him.”

“No,” he said. “You survived. I think he’d be glad about that.”

Decker didn’t touch her. He didn’t dare. He just sat beside Sophia Ghaffari as she let herself grieve.

Jimmy had been out in the barn with Tess, getting an updated situation report about Ma’awiya Talal Sayid from Dave. They still didn’t know what medical condition he’d had, or what kind of treatment he’d needed, but Dave
had
found out that there were no records of any shipments of medical equipment from the Cantara Hospital to Bashir’s palace during the week immediately preceding the earthquake.

There were, however, records of deliveries to the palace that corresponded with Sayid’s previous visits.

Dave was in the process of telling them that he was working on getting an exact list of the medical equipment when Guldana had come in, shutting down their conversation.

The Kazbekistani woman had informed them that due to the bad weather, the party she and Rivka had planned to celebrate Jimmy and Tess’s recent wedding was canceled.

What a shame. Jimmy had tried to look disappointed.

However. She was not going to let her good meal go to waste. Dinner would be in an hour. In her best public defender’s voice, Guldana ordered Jimmy to wash up and change before coming inside. And then, refusing to hear Tess’s arguments—helped by the fact that Tess didn’t speak K-stani and Guldana didn’t speak English—Guldana took Tess with her back into the house.

Tess had met Jimmy’s gaze before Guldana wrapped a blanket around her as protection against the wind and sand. Her unspoken message was clear. Sooner or later they had to talk.

About the fact that they’d had sex.

Again.

Despite his resolve to stay away from her.

Damn it, he’d come freaking close to doing her right there in an alleyway. Engaging in a public act of lasciviousness was an offense that was punishable by death.

Hers, not his.

And, just to put the icing on the cake, there was the Decker thing. Decker pretended it didn’t matter, but Jimmy knew better. In a perfect world, Tess should have been Deck’s girlfriend. So okay. The world was less than perfect, and accidents happened.

But nailing Tess to the wall in some strangers’ basement could not be passed off as an accident.

Although it had been there, in the aftermath, that Jimmy had had a eureka moment.

This was how he was going to do it. It was a win-win situation. He was going to have the instant gratification of a sexual relationship with Tess, which would, in turn, be the impetus of his split from Decker.

Deck would be so disgusted with him that he’d be glad when Jimmy made some lame excuse not to be part of the next assignment he got from Tom Paoletti. And without Jimmy around, weighing him down, making people eye him suspiciously, Decker would have the career he deserved.

“Tough day,” Dave commented as the door closed behind Tess.

“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. He’d’ve thought that figuring out a win-win plan would make him feel less like a giant loser.

Although the day had not been without good news. Murphy had made it onto that chopper and gotten out before the sandstorm hit. Khalid had ridden Marge back to the barn to share that information with them.