None of that was visible now. He was shaking. And then Nasir saw what his brother had been searching for in the dresser drawer. A small, snub-nosed revolver laying there on the carpet, worn blue steel gleaming in the pale light. No…
“What is going on, Jamal?” he asked, palming the switchblade and laying it on the bed. “If something is wrong…if you are in trouble, I will do whatever I can.”
He expected a cocky dismissal, but none was forthcoming. His brother was too shaken, too afraid. A cold fear gripped Nasir’s heart. For his brother to be this frightened…
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Jamal stammered. He paced over to the window, running his fingers through his short hair. “They weren’t supposed to die, not here — not in this way. Their work wasn’t done. I saw the police there…it’s only a matter of time.”
“What happened?” He felt like shaking his brother, but took him by the shoulder instead, guiding him to a seat on the bed.
It would take two hours to get the full story — and even then Nasir wondered if his pious brother had been drinking. Nerve gas? Here?
After all that they had seen in Lebanon, how could he…
“I will go with you,” he said finally, his mind struggling to absorb all that he had been told.
This wasn’t betrayal, he told himself. He would never betray his brother, his faith. It wasn’t that.
The lie didn’t even sound convincing to his ears. He dropped the revolver into a pocket of his cargo pants, along with the small box of .38 Special cartridges that Jamal had secreted in the drawer. Then together — his arm wrapped around his older brother’s shoulders — they left the apartment, melting into the darkness of the Dearborn night.
The door had scarce closed behind him before the cellphone stuffed under his threadbare mattress began to buzz insistently. Unheard and forgotten, the cellphone’s screen read NUMBER WITHHELD…
“He’s not answering his phone.” Altmann swore softly under her breath, gazing off into space. She closed her phone, tucking it back into a pocket of her vest.
“Maybe to do so would compromise himself.” She looked up at the words, into the eyes of William Russell Cole. She’d drafted him to accompany her to Michigan — there was no telling when you might need a good hostage negotiator. Particularly when there were terrorists involved. And he had worked in Pakistan with the JTTF, knew the Islamic culture better than she did.
“Maybe.” Altmann stared out the window of the Gulfstream, into the night. “Maybe his cover has already been blown. Could be dead.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Marika,” the negotiator said calmly. “There’s any number of answers — you’ve run enough CIs to know, it’s not like having an actual agent undercover. They don’t have the training, and their loyalties are at best divided. For all we know Nasir abu Rashid may have done a runner on us.”
Altmann shot him a glare. “Isn’t that a comforting thought, Russ?”
“Never said it was supposed to be. Simply a possibility we must consider.” He paused. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“Why?” The question didn’t come out the way she’d meant it to, an icy chill to her voice.
The negotiator never seemed to notice. “You lost your partner, Marika. There’s been no time for you to grieve.”
“There’s never time, Russ. Vic wasn’t the first agent I’ve lost through the years — nothing to do but keep moving, keep fighting. No time for grief.”
There was a long pause as he held her gaze, seeming to stare into her very soul. “And that…that is the most dangerous thing of all.”
The sound of running water brought her awake slowly, the aftereffects of the anesthesia still dulling her senses.
Carol opened her eyes, blinking back sleep. A narrow shaft of light pierced the darkness, streaming from the half-open door of the adjoining bathroom.
It took a moment for her to place where she was, what had happened. Then it all came flooding back.
Her vision cleared and her eyes focused in on the light. She could see Harry standing in front of the sink, stripped to the waist, running water over his hands.
She’d seen pictures of torture. They’d been part of her training at Camp Peary. But nothing had prepared her for this.
His back and shoulders were a mass of old scars, purplish and discolored in the pale light — crisscrossing and overlapping each other as if he had been beaten to within an inch of his life.
He had. She could remember reading the after-action report in his dossier, the story of his capture by the Taliban in 2008. They’d nearly killed him. That he had ever been able to go back out into the field at all was testament to a sheer force of will.
Carol pushed back the blankets, reaching for the robe folded neatly on the nightstand. She didn’t remember undressing the previous night and a flush spread across her face as she realized that she hadn’t.
Water dripped down Harry’s face, droplets catching in the rough black stubble of his beard as he ran the steaming cloth over his shoulders, feeling the warmth seep into his skin. Scars.
There was no pain, not anymore, but the scars were never going away.
The cloth moved lower, pausing briefly near a scar on his upper right chest, a pockmarked, discolored indentation in his flesh. The relic of a dark night in Basra, 2005.
They’d been meeting with an informant — been ambushed by Shiite militants loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. He’d been shot with an AK-47, the jacketed 7.62mm round passing straight through, missing his lung by inches. It would have been enough to qualify him for the Purple Heart if he’d been military — but he wasn’t and it didn’t.
He didn’t exist.
Harry felt her standing there before he saw her, half-hidden by shadows. “Hideous, isn’t it?” he asked, a wry smile crossing his face as he looked back to catch her eye.
He’d grown accustomed to the stares — but the look on her face was something different.
Pain — his pain — was reflected in those blue eyes, pain not unmixed with sympathy. It was the first time he had ever seen her with her defenses down, stripped of that look of determination that reminded him so much of her father.
“It was Afghanistan, wasn’t it?” she asked, her voice low and tender.
Harry nodded, feeling suddenly vulnerable. It wasn’t something he was used to. He laid down the washcloth and reached for his shirt, drawing it on over his arms. “Ancient history.”
He started to leave the bathroom, moving past her, but she put out a hand, catching him by the arm. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what?” he asked, pausing there in the doorway. She was so beautiful, standing there in the half-light, hair still askew from a night’s sleep. Close enough to take her into his arms, but something held him back.
There were so many things he could have said, but he’d said them all before, to others through the years. Lies.
And he couldn’t say the words now, even though he meant them with all his heart. Even though they were true.
Carol didn’t look at him. “You’ve risked your life to protect me. Sacrificed your career. Why?”
He hadn’t been expecting that question.
What is truth? That he cared for her? That she had roused feelings he’d long thought dead?