When she saw Storm, she stood and gave him a smile that nearly stopped his heart. Maybe it was that the rational part of his brain — the part that reminded him how poisonous they sometimes were together — was temporarily disabled, but he forgot how much he missed her.
“Derrick!” she said.
She came near and brushed her lips against his cheek, bringing the full effect of her perfume on his olfactory nerves. It was enough to make him light-headed. She drew back to look at him, then laughed. She had left a lipstick smudge on his cheek, which she wiped off with her thumb.
“God, you look good, Storm,” she said. “It’s great to see you.”
She sat back in her chair, then crossed her legs. There were no more than a half-dozen other men in the room. With that one movement, she had captivated all of them. Storm selected a seat across from her. There was an antique chessboard between them.
“I didn’t tell Jones this, but I was thrilled when he told me you were heading out here,” she said. “We never really got the chance to catch up after Bayonne. I had really thought I was going to get some time after that, and maybe we could disappear for a little bit. I’ve been dying to go back to your place in Seychelles. Or another one of those weeks in Manhattan or, hell, anywhere. But then, you know, one thing led to another…”
He just nodded, unsure of what to say. How did he tell her that a week with her was the thing he most wanted and also the thing he most feared? The greatest love he had known had “Clara Strike” written on it, but so did the greatest heartbreak. She had died in his arms. It had been his fault. And she had let him live with that pain and guilt for years, never telling him that she was really alive and that it was all just Jedediah Jones’s fakery. He could never fully forgive her for letting him go through that. And yet he also understood it as being a kind of bizarre occupational hazard: the emotional collateral damage that seemed to be a part of every big job.
“I heard about that thing with you and the plane over Pennsylvania. Crazy. If you had waited, what, five minutes longer, that death spiral would have been terminal. Those are some lucky passengers. I know Jones had your identity withheld from the press. Still, I feel like someone ought to throw a ticker tape parade for you or something.”
A waiter appeared with a bottle of Château Carbonnieux Blanc, poured two glasses, then set the bottle in an ice bucket.
“I hope white is okay,” she said. “It was just so hot and I spent the day…well, in the heat. It felt so good to get back here and have a shower. I swear, I must have knocked off about thirty pounds of dirt and sand. I found this little dress in the bottom of my suitcase, and it was like, yes, something that isn’t either tactical clothing or a pantsuit. Between that and the air-conditioning, I feel like a new person.”
Storm hadn’t touched his wine. He hadn’t moved. It was all so much: Strike being here, so close. Her looking so good. Him wondering what it was all about. Things were seldom unambiguous with Strike. Even when she seemed like she was coming straight on, that was usually just to hide the part that was coming from an angle. And yet — contradiction alert — that was part of what made her so damn good at her job, which was one of the things he admired about her.
He realized she was staring at him. “Storm, are you going to say anything, or are you just going to sit there like a big, gorgeous idiot?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Storm said. “I just…I think the only sleep I’ve gotten in the last few days has been aboard something that was moving.”
“Isn’t it a little early in the evening to start trying to get me in bed with you?” she teased. “Jeez. At least get me a little tipsy first.”
He reached toward the chessboard in front of them, picked up the white pawn, and studied it. It was intricately carved ivory. An antique. Egypt had banned the ivory trade long ago. He placed it down two spaces ahead of where it had started, then raised an eyebrow at Strike.
“We haven’t played chess since that time in Istanbul,” she said.
“I’ve studied since then.”
“I hope so,” she said, selecting a black pawn one row over from Storm’s and moving it out two spaces.
“So I assume Jones has given you the coordinates?” he asked, making his next move.
“I’m fully briefed, yes.”
“So what do you say we have Jones airlift us a Humvee and head on out there tonight?” he asked, taking her pawn with his.
“Too good a chance we’d miss something at night,” she said, beginning the first in a series of moves whose strategy Storm did not immediately recognize. “Whatever we’re looking for — if, in fact, there’s even anything to find — might be very small. We already know it’s something that can’t be seen from satellite, which means it might be some kind of subtle geological feature. Or it could be something that someone has camouflaged from the satellites. We know that the Medina Society is aware Uncle Sam has eyes in the sky that are always on them and they are known to take countermeasures.
“Besides,” she finished, “the desert isn’t safe at night. Local intel says that outlaw activity has been out of control lately.”
“What are you afraid of? You’ve got big, strong me at your side.”
“‘Big strong you’ isn’t impervious to bullets last time I checked. Do I need to remind you that there’s no place to hide in a desert? Besides, we’re not here to shoot up the countryside. This is a touchy time for the red, white, and blue in these parts.”
She was the first to move her knight out and was using it to decimate some of his early defenses until he finally knocked it out with a bishop. Then, two turns later, she turned around and captured it with her queen.
“I’m not here to hide,” Storm said.
“Then you need to change your thinking. If the guns-blazing approach worked with the Medina Society, we would have already wiped them out. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill, towel-head wack jobs, Derrick. They’re smart.”
“So how are you proposing we move in on this?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
He was maneuvering one of her rooks into a trap. She was going to lose it for sure. One, maybe two moves from now. “I’m a big boy. I can handle it.”
“Camels,” she said.
His face fell. His left arm dropped to his side. “Aww, come on, seriously?”
“We have to go quietly. We go out there in whatever kind of big, fancy toy you want, and if anyone is out there, they’ll be able to see us coming from nine miles away. We have to maintain the façade of being poor nomads. And poor nomads in this part of the world still use camels.”
He looked down at the board. It turned out, while he thought he was trapping one of her rooks, she was really ensnaring one of his. He had to sacrifice it to save his queen.
“You know how I feel about those…things. They stink.”
“So do you sometimes. Look, there’s no choice. It’s already set up. We’re going to be meeting a truck with the camels just outside visual distance of the target zone. But once we’re inside, it’s camels.”
Storm made a face and a noise that was only slightly more mature, under the circumstances, than what a second-grader might have done.
“Okay, but at least tell me we get to have real weapons,” he said, watching as one of his knights fell to her queen.
“Oh, yeah. We’re fully outfitted. I don’t have a death wish, Storm. I’m just talking about exercising some caution in how we approach. We need to look like nomads from afar. What we keep hidden in our gear is a different matter.”
“Good. Because other than Dirty Harry, I’ve got nothing on me.”
“You and that gun,” she said, shaking her head. “Oh, by the way, checkmate.”