“Slow down,” Naomi said. She looked back down at her map.
“Take a right here.”
Ryan turned onto the next street. They were moving away from the bustling center of the commercial district and into the industrial area. The change was subtle at first, marked only by the diminishing number of people on the streets. It wasn’t long, though, before towering warehouses of red brick and cracked gray cement completely replaced the exclusive restaurants and boutiques of the commercial sector.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
She consulted her map once more and nodded slightly toward one of many identical structures. “That,” she said. Parked outside of the warehouse was a silver late-model E class Mercedes.
“Kind of telling, isn’t it?” Ryan said. “There can’t be too many of those around.” He looked for guards secreted in the alleys bordering each side of the warehouse, but none was visible. “Do you see anything?” he asked her.
Naomi shook her head, and Ryan accelerated down the street.
“What do you—”
“Hold on a second, I’m thinking,” he said. Although the street was well behind them now, the shapes and orientations of the buildings were held perfectly in his mind as he thought about what he would need to begin a loose surveillance . . . It was some time before he realized he still had an audience.
“Sorry, Naomi. What were you saying?”
“It’s not important,” she said. “I’m more interested in what you were just thinking.”
He sighed heavily as they moved back through the streets bordering Table Bay. “I was thinking that it can’t be that simple. For a known arms dealer, he doesn’t seem to take a lot of precautions. That’s not realistic, though; he has to have protection, and that means an unknown number of armed guards inside the warehouse, plus some kind of alarm system. The best way is to hit him in transit, but that would never fly with Harper—we’re supposed to do this without making a lot of noise.”
Naomi didn’t respond for a while, the darkening waters of the bay holding her attention as Ryan drove back into the commercial district, the well-lit storefronts passing by on the right, with an impressive view of the water on the left. She absently watched navigation lights move up and down as a number of ships bobbed on the gentle swells of the Atlantic. “Maybe it is that simple,” she said on reflection.
“What do you mean?”
“Gray beat the government at their own game—he was caught red-handed and still managed to stay out of jail. Now he’s even richer than before. He might just be arrogant enough to think that he’s beyond their reach.”
“It’s a thought,” he said. “But we have to be sure.” His eyes involuntarily moved to Naomi’s throat, and he suppressed a shudder at what might have been. “I think we’ve already taken enough chances.”
She didn’t respond as Ryan pulled their rented Nissan into the Victoria and Albert Hotel’s parking lot. They checked in and opted for a light meal on the patio overlooking the bay. Although both were exhausted, they did not refuse when the waiter brought out a wine list along with the menu.
The meal was excellent, and made all the more so by the sweeping view of the bay below. It seemed as though the water would have gone on forever were it not contained by the fiery red of the sky and the flat tableau of Mount Table held in silhouette against the fading sun.
Conversation was uneasy at first, but after a while Ryan began to overcome his initial distaste for Naomi Kharmai. He knew that it was partly her looks and partly the wine, but he found himself gradually warming to her as the night wore on. When he thought about the smirk on her face outside the Kennedy-Warren, he considered her lightning reflexes in the bar in Norfolk. When he recalled her lack of gratitude, the memory was quickly followed by an image of salt-stained cheeks and a hurried swipe at warm tears in a brightly lit hotel room. Despite the contradictions running through his mind, he couldn’t help but hold her liquid green eyes when they met his across the table.
Long after the meal was done, the waiter brought them a second bottle of Bordeaux. Naomi drank one glass very fast, then savored another. They spoke about the flight over, and their first impressions of the African continent. As the light receded over the warm stones of the patio, they found themselves talking about their early years in the Agency, although Ryan was more interested in her years in general.
“I know it’s impolite to ask,” he said with a boyish grin, “but how old are you, anyway?”
“You don’t have any cards to play,” she responded with a smile of her own. “I already know how old you are.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “You seem to know a lot.”
“That’s why I’m here instead of my little cubicle at Tyson’s Corner,” she said, her eyebrows arching wickedly. “The director thought one of us should know something.”
He laughed as he lifted the bottle to pour them both another glass.
“And how old is your fiancée?”
“Her age for yours.”
An amused expression came over her face as she set down her glass and considered. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll just have to trust you on this one. I’m twenty-nine. Your turn.”
“Twenty-nine?”
Her smile faltered. “Thirty. But, God, twenty-nine sounds so much younger, doesn’t it?”
He laughed again and held up his end of the bargain. “Katie’s twenty-four. I know that makes me sound bad, but—well, I don’t really have anything to say in my defense. She was my student, which only makes it worse, I guess.”
“You were a professor?” she asked with some surprise. “Aren’t you a bit young for that?”
“I’m only a lowly associate professor. I probably still have a job if I say all the right things and grovel a little. Why? I don’t seem the type, right?”
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “My father taught at Cambridge. He was really well known, a leader in his field. Most people wouldn’t have thought he was the type either.”
“Is that why you moved to the States, because of his teaching?”
She nodded, and Ryan watched an unhappy look come over her face as she stared down at the table. “He was offered a position at Harvard when I was eighteen. He did really well . . . wrote a few books, secured his tenure. When they offered me a full ride and I turned it down, he was so angry that he didn’t speak to me for a month.” She hesitated before speaking again. “He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, I guess. He was even more disappointed when I joined the Agency.”
“Why did you turn it down?” he asked gently. She finally looked up to meet his gaze.
“I had to earn it, you know? I didn’t want my future handed to me.
It seems stupid now, but I really felt strongly about it at the time. He could be stubborn, too, so we didn’t get along too well. It wasn’t like I wanted much. I mean, if he would have talked about me just one time the way he talked about my brothers—”
She stopped in midsentence, pushing back from the table and standing up quickly, her chair tipping back and over in the process.
Ryan rose to his feet almost as fast.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
She was shaking her head, clearly amazed and angry with herself.