She has just passed under a canopy at the front of a closed café. She backtracks until she’s in the canopy’s shadow again. She gets out her reading glasses, huddles over the tablet to hide the screen from the view of security cameras, and studies two images. Both were taken from an awkward angle, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to read the tags to identify the team filing in through the hotel’s front entrance. Lincoln’s face is the one she registers first, his scars enhanced by shadows. He’s looking up, almost directly at the camera, like he knows it’s there, or suspects.
What in hell is he doing here so soon?
He should have gone home, dealt with the aftermath of the bombing. But he didn’t go home. He couldn’t have. To reach Rabat only hours after her own arrival, he must have booked a seat during the trans-Pacific flight and flown straight out of Los Angeles.
Just to stop me from finding Shaw?
She casts her gaze across the rest of the team and thinks that his presence here could be vendetta, and not an official ReqOps mission. He’s brought Rohan with him, and Felice. That’s understandable. Both are skilled and aggressive—and single. But he’s got Khalid too—a respected soldier of course, but also ReqOps’ newest recruit. If Lincoln is planning an operation against Shaw Walker, Khalid should not be part of it, not without months of training.
The fifth face in the picture worries her even more. Miles Dushane. What is he doing here? He’s an ex-Ranger, sure, but he’s no part of ReqOps and he’s not to be trusted, not after what he’s been through as Hussam’s prisoner. True refuses to believe that Lincoln recruited him.
She blanks the screen, straightens up, takes off her glasses. At least there’s no indication that Alex came with them. Thank you, God, for that.
She considers going back to the hotel, confronting Lincoln—but dismisses the idea. Like Shaw said, she’s not Lincoln’s girl anymore. She has her own agenda and she’s in deep. Deeper, after tonight, and she’s not done yet.
She calls Shaw. Again he doesn’t answer. His nonresponse provokes her. She wonders: Am I being toyed with or betrayed?
Out of spiteful insistence she tries the call again, whispering, “Answer, damn you. We are not done.”
He doesn’t answer.
She texts: We have unfinished business. You promised not to disappear.
Nothing.
She reconsiders the address where the cab was meant to take her. She tells herself that in all likelihood it’s a random address. Still, it’s her only lead. She slips her glasses back on and uses the tablet to find it on a map.
From above, it’s a rectangular building, the roof open to a central courtyard. She shifts to street view. From this angle, she sees a private home in the Moroccan style, a riad, with its focus turned inward to the open court. Two enclosed stories are topped by a low-walled terrace on the roof, with no windows facing the street. The riad shares its side walls with the neighbors. All of the houses on the block are riads, looking exactly the same, which tells her this is a modern build. Cars on both sides of the street are parked so as not to block the large, arched doors of each residence.
Is this his home? she wonders. Or a random address?
Is he there?
She puts the tablet away, swapping it for her MARC.
It’s not the time to be thinking about free will, but she thinks about it anyway as she sets out on a path projected by her visor, a path she needs to follow. It’s not a choice, really. It’s the gravity of what happened in Nungsan that has locked her on this course, leaving the concept of free will as nothing more than an abstract academic exercise.
An Intervention
We’re already too late, Lincoln thinks.
It’s 0130 in Rabat. He’s standing in True’s empty hotel room in the company of a foreign liaison officer named Nadim Zaman, who ordered the hotel staff to issue him a key card after True failed to respond to a knock on the door.
“She was here,” Zaman proclaims, gesturing at empty air. “The towels and the toiletries have been used. But she has gone out. Perhaps she found another hotel guest with whom to pass the night.”
Rohan is in the doorway. He’s dressed like a civilian in khaki cargo pants and a brown silk shirt with rolled-up sleeves, but his arms are crossed, muscles showing, and he’s got a belligerent look. “That is not what happened,” he says.
Nadim’s eyes narrow. “When a woman disappears in the night, refusing to answer her phone, this is most often what is happening.”
Nadim has made it no secret that he resents their presence here, resents the Warrant of Capture and Rendition that provides legal authority for them to pursue and detain Jon Helm, and resents that he’s been assigned as their liaison. He insisted on a full inspection of their equipment and the leased vehicle they picked up at the airport—an exercise that took over an hour—before finally agreeing to look up the hotel name True had entered on her customs document.
Lincoln works to keep his voice low and his temper in check as he explains the obvious to Nadim. “Our concern is that she may be unable to answer her phone. She would have begun seeking leads on the location of Jon Helm the moment she arrived. It’s possible she asked the wrong questions in the wrong place.”
The story he told Nadim was mostly correct. They’ve come seeking Jon Helm, True arrived before them, they expected to meet up with her. He did not mention that True came on her own or that she may not wish to be found. He did not mention that State granted the warrant only as a least-worst option, to avoid the accusation of prior knowledge of Jon Helm’s identity and the truth of what happened at Nungsan.
“You believe she has already encountered this Jon Helm?” Nadim asks.
“I don’t know,” Lincoln answers.
There’s too much that he doesn’t know; there’s been too little time to prepare.
Only forty-five minutes after they lifted off from Manila, Alex came down the aisle, grim-faced, to tell him what she’d done. There was no outlet for the fury that came boiling up in his throat, not in the packed cabin of a long-haul jet less than an hour into a trans-Pacific crossing, so he clamped his teeth together and he held it down like the worst meal he’d ever eaten. If she sank a knife in his chest, it would have hurt less.
But fuck, he earned it.
He’d learned early who Shaw Walker really was: a self-righteous man, a man of absolutes, a natural leader who possessed a dangerous charisma that made him easy to love and easy to forgive, even when you’d seen his dark side. Shaw demanded everything of his soldiers—but he would do anything for them, too.
True sensed that. She knew Shaw as the last man to stand by Diego, the man who begged to stand in Diego’s place. He was a bridge to her son, and maybe she saw some ghost of Diego within him.
Lincoln failed to respect that, blinded by his own sense of responsibility for what he knew Shaw had done since—his alliance with Al-Furat, the atrocities Miles had witnessed, Renata’s murder. He allowed those things to happen when he’d failed to make a full report on their last action in Kunar Province. Add True’s defection to that list of harmful consequences—but it stops now.
Lincoln engineered this mission, assembling his equipment and his team, from the cramped seats of commercial airliners as he worked his way to North Africa. Chris fought him on the action in a rapid-fire exchange of emails bounced off of satellites.
Chris:
We cannot undertake another mission now. We don’t have the funds, we don’t have the staff, and you are needed here. The FBI is here. They’re waiting to interview you.