The back of Nicole"s neck began to tingle. She knew nothing about Danielle"s father. Danielle had always avoided talking about her family, changing the subject whenever she brought it up.
"So if I tell you that this colonel was one of the last people your father was seen with before that car bomb took his life, you"d agree that that"s an awfully strange coincidence, wouldn"t you, Nicole?"
The question sent Nicole reeling backward on the figurative heels inside her head, grasping for something mentally solid to keep her from falling and crashing, but her brain went blank. She was at a loss, empty inside and bereft for an answer.
"That"s impossible," she claimed, stumbling back to the chair, unconsciously clinging tightly to her necklace.
"It is. And just what are the chances that twelve years after your father was killed, you end up sharing an apartment with the daughter of the very man we believe your father was about to turn evidence against? Danielle"s father is Rhyse Taylor. Colonel Rhyse Taylor."
It was all too much. Reliving her father"s death, the hijacking, the time changes, the fever, the realization she had no idea what she was going to do with her life, the attraction to a woman who was being downright hateful to her, and now these insinuating allegations involving Danielle. The next thing she knew she was buckled forward on her knees, face in her hands, trying to stem the sudden flow of tears that would not be denied.
Chapter Eight.
"I"m sorry if I was a little rough," Kira said, her voice gentle and sincere as she plopped down into the other plastic chair next to her.
"Do ya think?" Nicole asked. She rubbed her palms against her eyelids but stopped when a warm hand pressed against the small of her back. Upset and disturbed as she was, she was conscious of Kira"s body so close to her own and the light scent of soap and jasmine. Part of her wanted to relish the physical connection, while another part wanted to flee in panic, while still another part was suspicious of this sudden concern. "So why the third degree?" She wiped away the last of the tears from her eyes.
"I had to be certain you weren"t somehow involved with Danielle." Kira retrieved a box of tissues from a metal shelf and handed them to her. "You"re not, are you?"
Nicole"s sniffled into one of the tissues. "If what you"re saying is true, I had no idea about Danielle."
She pictured Danielle, with her wheat-colored hair, large hazel eyes, and the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her tilted nose. "My G.o.d, are you absolutely sure?"
Kira nodded solemnly. "Danielle"s father killed your father, Nicole. And there"s no way you two coincidentally crossed paths one day and became best friends. Your meeting and friendship was planned."
Making friends with other girls had always been difficult for shy, introverted Nicole. But that hadn"t been the case with Danielle. Danielle had pursued her, she now realized.
"During the short time you two lived together, Danielle never mentioned her father?"
Nicole shook her head. "She was reluctant to talk about her family. No one ever came to visit either."
"I was worried she might have told you a bunch of lies, tried to win you over. But I see I was wrong." Her eyes held Nicole"s for a long moment. "And you"re positive she never mentioned anything about her father?"
"You seemed to know what books I"ve read and what courses I"ve taken, so I"m sure you already know all the details of our conversations. And you must also know I haven"t spoken to her since December."
"Sometimes we miss things. Not all discussions occur within range of our equipment."
"You mean the bugs you hid in my apartment," she snapped. Thank you very much, George Bush, for your Gestapo politics. "So if Danielle wasn"t trying to recruit me to the dark side, what did she hope to gain by pretending to be my friend?"
"She was looking for something."
Nicole frowned, her tone dubious. "What would I have? And why now? It"s been over a decade since my father died."
Nicole watched Kira pace back and forth in front of the desk before finally returning to sit next to her. "Look, Nicole, we both lost people we love at a very young age. Just as I"m seeking justice for my parents" murders, I"d like to help you do the same. Your father"s death was no random act of terrorism by some religious zealot. It was a premeditated and deliberate homicide. And we know Colonel Rhyse Taylor was behind it-we just need to prove it."
Nicole tried to sit back, but the plastic wings of the chair jabbing at her reminded her she couldn"t. A memory flashed in her head. On the mantel in her mother"s living room was a picture of Luke Kennedy holding a baby. A three-year-old Liz was standing at his side in a cardboard crown from some fast food promotion accompanied by a gaudy pink boa around her neck. She"d never forget her father"s expression as he looked down into Nicole"s baby face in that picture. She had always been the apple of his eye. They "got" each other. He"d understood her need to climb trees and build forts in the backyard. Or use her mother"s makeup to paint a mural on the back of the house. And he"d been the one to introduce her to French as she sat on his lap in the den and they listened to the Pimsleur ca.s.settes over and over. He"d even glued a giant map of the world on her bedroom wall, and together they would point at countries they were going to visit together when she was older. He always made it seem like the biggest cause for celebration was her birthday, making the twenty-third of April the most spectacular day on the calendar.
"It doesn"t make any sense." She shook her head. "My father was a geologist for Davenport Petroleum. He gathered sand and soil specimens for possible oil exploration. Why would someone from the military have wanted him dead?"
"I"ll start at the beginning and tell you all I know. And then maybe you can help me?"
"I"ll try," she replied.
"About a year and half ago, I was part of a team reviewing car bomb attacks before 9/11. We were hoping to find some overlooked detail that would lead us to bin Laden. As you already know, an unknown anti-American religious group not linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bomb that took your father"s life, but we wanted to be thorough. In the past decade, technology has become a lot more sophisticated. And we"ve also become much more knowledgeable about terrorist groups. So when we reexamined all the evidence, we were quite surprised to find that this incident didn"t fit the paradigm of a terrorist act-the area in Yemen where the explosion occurred was vacant. Most take place in highly populated areas. The more victims, the better. The type of explosive used in the detonation wouldn"t have been available on the black market at that time. And the parts used to construct the bomb were extremely high quality. Then we took a closer look at the group that claimed responsibility for the bomb and discovered no trace of such an organization before or after this attack. When I began digging into the victim"s background, I grew even more intrigued. Your father"s name surfaced as an informant in a case involving the sale of the army"s own weaponry to terrorist groups in North Africa. In the report I read, Rhyse Taylor was investigated, but they didn"t have enough evidence to indict. After the car bomb killed your father, the illegal trafficking of the weapons and ammunition immediately ceased. The trail was cold and the case suspended."
The air inside the small office s.p.a.ce felt thick and oppressive. Nicole inhaled a deep breath, trying to take it all in.
"This is difficult, Nicole, but..." She paused and looked away. Her voice, usually so sure and confident, was small and hesitant: "We think your father may have been working with Rhyse Taylor." Kira held up a hand as if to say hear me out. "Your father spent a lot of time in the Mideast. Working for the oil company, he made many connections. He would have been the perfect candidate to act as the conduit between Taylor and those who wanted to buy illegal weapons."
"You didn"t know my father," Nicole replied, setting her jaw stubbornly. "There"s no way he"d commit treason."
"You"re right," Kira soothed. "I didn"t know him. I"m only reading old files and making calculated a.s.sumptions. Either way, it doesn"t matter because your father eventually did do the right thing. We believe he was collecting evidence to incriminate Taylor. And somehow, he was found out."
Nicole felt queasy. "Dead men can"t testify, right?"
"Yes, but now we believe your father hid that evidence before he was killed. You were a child, barely ten when your father was taken from you. But you two were extremely close. Did he perhaps give you any papers or CDs or tell you to keep something for safe keeping before his death? I need your help, Nicole."
Nicole needed a chance to think. Kira was obviously not going to give her that courtesy.
"c.r.a.p, my head. It"s killing me." Nicole bent forward, grasping her skull between her hands. "I feel sick."
She sensed Kira"s skeptical eyes glaring at her. But after an awkward minute, Kira finally said in a resigned tone, "Let me get you some water."
"Aspirin too," Nicole mewed, her voice barely an octave above a whisper.
As soon as the door shut behind Kira, Nicole was up and pulling open desk drawers that had been left unlocked. She fumbled through dozens of army green office folders with a nervous haste, looking for anything that might provide her with a missing piece to this strange puzzle.
"Hurry!" she chastised herself. "There has to be something in here!"
But every folder she opened was either empty or filled with pages written in Russian. Nevertheless, she managed to discern a small blurb in English written in blue ink at the top of one of the memos stuffed within a thin folder hanging in the very front of the drawer.
United Airlines flight 423 arrives 10:00 a.m. Attack to take place at-followed by and the longitude and lat.i.tude numbers, which had to lead to a barren road just outside of Muranga. Win her trust. Get to it before they do, was scribbled alongside the flight info.
She could hear Kira"s voice again, in her head.
"And still in other scenarios, we"ll manipulate our target psychologically in order to acquire the information we need, and then we"ll disappear from their life without anyone being the wiser."
"You torture people?"
"No, Nicole, nothing as medieval as torture in our line of work. We"re very modern in our methodology, and I"ll just leave it at that."
She pictured the pa.s.sengers of the bus during the hijacking. Calm and quiet. No mad stampede down the aisle to get the h.e.l.l off the bus and far away from the guys with the guns. The only hysterical screams ringing through the tinny interior of the bus had come from her because everyone else had been antic.i.p.ating the crash, bracing for it. She recalled the bus driver-climbing on board the bus almost an hour late.
And, of course, Stella"s frantic announcement about the children in one of the villages being in peril.
"G.o.dd.a.m.n," she whispered to herself. "That"s downright diabolical."
Everything that had happened, every last bit of it, had been a crock. Nothing more than a well-orchestrated theatrical production designed to convince her that she was in danger; that bogeymen were after her and closing in fast. But the question that remained was why?
Why the need to manipulate her?
"Evidence, my a.s.s," she whispered out loud. Whatever they were after was much more valuable than her father"s notes about some military wacko selling guns to nut-jobs in Libya.
Or wherever.
The sound of Kira"s boots clacking on the concrete drew nearer.
She shoved the paper back into the drawer.
"Shouldn"t you should be sitting?"
Nicole looked up, composing her features carefully.
"Actually, I"d just like to go back to my room and rest for a while," Nicole managed to mutter through dry lips, her heart pounding.
Kira scanned the desktop. "Sure," she replied coolly, peering toward the desk"s drawers and then back to Nicole"s face.
Do not crack! Breathe normally!
Despite her own admonitions, Nicole"s last intake of breath seemed to solidify into a ma.s.sive lump in her throat.
"No aspirin, but I found some ibuprofen."
Their fingers touched during the exchange of the small white packet. A tremor of awareness shot up Nicole"s arm, straight down her spinal cord and into her soul.
"You"ve had a lot thrown at you. We"ll talk more later. Can you make it back to your room by yourself?"
Nicole nodded.
"Nicole." Kira"s voice was low, but it sounded like a roar in Nicole"s ears. Reluctantly, she turned, certain guilt was written all over her face. "Don"t you want something to wash down the pills with?"
Kira stood casually against the wall, holding a bottle of water in an outstretched hand. She grabbed the water, avoiding Kira"s eyes.
Chapter Nine.
Nicole bolted upright with a start, afraid she"d slept through the night and blown her chances of escape. She glanced at the time on her Timex. The tension left her at once. Not quite eleven at night.
She pulled the long string cord dangling from the ceiling light while reaching for the Ziploc bag Stella had dropped off for her earlier. The trusting Ukrainian seemed to have bought her tale about not feeling well-"maybe a relapse, Stella"-and left Nicole alone, urging her to rest. Under the guise of illness, Nicole had been able to spend the rest of the day in bed so she"d be fresh for tonight. Her sleep had been broken and restless, remembering her times with Danielle and her father as she tried to reconcile their memories with their new personas: spy and traitor.
She couldn"t.
She also was afraid that at any moment Kira would come bursting through the unlocked steel door demanding to know where her father"s hiding place was. But she stayed away, and Nicole did finally manage to get some sleep.
Famished, she pulled the soft sandwich from its protective plastic. As she ate a very American peanut b.u.t.ter with grape jelly on wheat bread, she pulled her duffel bag from the closet and shoved only the essentials she would need into it. The rest of her belongings she would have to leave behind. She tested the bag"s weight. Good. Light enough to carry without becoming an immediate strain on her shoulders. She had a long walk ahead of her.
With some trepidation, she slipped her feet into her hiking boots. Her toes and heel were still a little sore, but she"d manage. At the bathroom sink, she drank greedily from the faucet. It might be a while before she found water, so she filled up the now empty bottle Kira had given her that afternoon. When she was done, she wondered if the water supply might not be safe to drink. Maybe they only used it for bathing. All of the water she"d been given to drink had been in sealed plastic bottles. She shrugged her shoulders. If she should become ill from any invisible organisms swimming about her gut, hopefully it wouldn"t happen until she was far, far away from here.
If all went as planned, she"d be on her way back home by this time tomorrow.
Opening the bedroom door, she peered down the corridor to make sure the coast was clear. Somewhere in the darkness ahead was another windowless chamber where Kira lay sleeping. At least Nicole hoped she was sleeping. Kira had worked the late shift the previous night and should be dead tired.
Patting her thigh, she felt the securing comfort of the small lump hidden in the loose pocket of her jeans. That afternoon, as she lay awake wondering why now, all these years later, these people wanted whatever it was her father had hidden away somewhere, and what it was-because it certainly had to be something far more important than evidence incriminating a man who"s been walking around free for the last twelve years-she"d remembered her pocketknife and started searching through her duffel bag for it. Last night, Bogie had warned her about the nearby marijuana farms. The dull, rusty four-inch blade wasn"t much to defend herself with should she cross paths with a hungry lion or one of those plantation workers, but it was all she had and it was certainly better than nothing. Pulling her knife from its sheath, she gripped the weapon"s handle tightly and cautiously made her break for freedom.
Creeping stealthily and hugging the wall, she propelled herself forward. She kept peering back, certain at any moment Bogie was going to rush from the inky shadows to tackle and drug her before locking her up for the rest of her life in this cement vault. A light emanated from the kitchen. She had to go past it. Hopefully no one was awake, indulging in a late-night craving for one of those boxed meals or tins of cookies.
As she drew closer, she dropped to her knees and crawled. When she reached the kitchen door, she paused to listen. All was quiet except for the steady swish of the air blowing through the ceiling ducts. With some hesitation, she poked her head into the room and did a quick scan. There was an open bag of chips on the table and an empty plate near the sink but not a soul in sight. Breathing a sigh of relief, she moved onward, her hiking boots occasionally squeaking as the rubber sc.r.a.ped against the hard stone. Every time they made the loud screeching noise, she"d cringe and stop, waiting for the discovery she felt was inevitable.
The fabric of her jeans provided a decent barrier between her skin and the cement, but there wasn"t any padding to protect her kneecaps, which began to ache and grow sore from the impact with the hard concrete. Holding the knife in her right fist while she inched along on all fours was also irksome and uncomfortable. Minuscule granules of sand had become embedded in the sensitive surface of her fingers between the knuckle and the fingernail, and the pressure of her weight pressing down made it feel like she was crushing the small pebbles into her bones.
But those were just little things, inconveniences she could endure as she remained completely focused on getting to where the labyrinth of tunnels converged as fast as she could. From there, all she"d have to do was figure out which one of the tunnels would take her back to the narrow shaft with the ladder and then she"d be free.
Up ahead now, maybe only ten more feet to go. She crawled faster now, ignoring the pain in her knees and the cramping. Five more feet...
"Where do you think you"re going?"
Nicole froze. Kira.
"Did you really think it would be as simple as walking out of here in the middle of the night, Nicole?"
She didn"t have to turn around to know that Kira was amused. There was no telling how long Kira had been behind her, watching her with a smirk on her face before saying something. This infuriated her even more than being snuck up upon from behind and having her escape thwarted. She stood up, brushing the dust from her jeans and the fragments of cement from her hands.
"At least tell me how you were going to get through the steel doors?" Kira went on, a trace of laughter in her voice. "They"re bolted shut and can only be opened with a code." She emerged from the shadows, her lips twisted in a mocking smirk. "A code, I might add, that"s exceptionally intricate and hard to decipher."
Her hair was pinned up in a comb-like clip at the back of her head, long silky tendrils hanging loose around her face and neck in s.e.xy dishevelment. Other women spent hours striving to perfect that fashionably careless look, but Nicole had no doubt Kira hadn"t given her appearance more than a second"s attention.
"I figured it all out, Kira. Not your imaginary code, but your game."
Kira said nothing. There was just enough light for Nicole to see one dark shapely brow rising in mute inquiry.
"The gadget around your wrist is just as much of a charade as every other thing that"s happened to me since boarding my bus back in Nairobi. There are no bolts and codes. There are no sinister madmen with machine guns after me. The only thing keeping me here is my own delusional thinking-aided by you and your friends every step of the way. I gotta admit, it was a pretty good plan-waiting to strike while my stress level was at its highest and my body was weak from sickness and fever. Did you study theater at college? Because you"re a great actress. Just like those people on my bus. They were all in on it, weren"t they?"
"I suspected you"d been snooping when I left you alone in the office. You"re very easy to read, Nicole. Although your daring impresses me, I"m more disappointed by your lack of planning. What would you have done if you"d managed to escape from here? It"s pitch black outside and something tells me even if you did have a compa.s.s, you wouldn"t know your north from your south."