Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint Read online

  “Download everything that Tom Paoletti sends,” he told her as if she were his new mentally challenged secretary, “regardless of whether or not you think we need it. And let either Decker or me know the moment it comes in.”

  Tess had had only a limited amount of time on a tenuous connection, so downloading an extensive autopsy report had seemed frivolous. But she didn’t attempt to explain. She knew that if she opened her mouth, the demons of hell would come flying out, cackling and screaming. She just clenched her teeth and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Nash’s reaction to that may or may not have been disgusted exasperation.

  “Right now we’re only guessing how far Sayid could have traveled to that hospital,” Decker explained to Tess. “The autopsy report will tell us the extent of his injuries and we’ll be able to guess a whole lot more accurately. Getting that info’s a priority.”

  Oh, God. “I didn’t realize . . .” Tess stood up. “I can go and—”

  “As soon as we’re done here,” Decker said, and she slowly sat back down on the overturned pail she’d claimed as a seat when they’d first come into the barn.

  “If Sayid was with Bashir during the quake,” Dave said, “and his laptop is somewhere under the rubble at the palace—”

  Decker interrupted him. “I spoke to a woman last night who claimed to be with Bashir when the quake hit. Alone with Bashir. She told me that he was dead. Anyone hear any rumors about—”

  “No way.” Dave was absolute. “Padsha Bashir’s not dead. I was outside his palace this morning, and I saw him. He’d been injured, supposedly in the quake, but he was already up and around, surveying the damage, overseeing the recovery effort.”

  “You’re certain it was Bashir and not one of his nephews?” Decker sat forward to ask.

  “Yes, sir,” Dave said. “He was leaning on a cane, but it was definitely him. At one point, I was only about three feet from him.”

  “You got that close to Padsha Bashir?” Murphy started to laugh. “Man, if he saw you—”

  “He didn’t see me.”

  “He’d have your head, just for being American.”

  “He didn’t see me,” Dave repeated.

  “You said he was supposedly injured in the quake?” Decker asked Dave.

  “That’s the story they’re spinning, sir,” Dave replied. “But you know the way the staff always knows what’s really going on in a household?”

  “You actually have a connection to someone on Bashir’s staff?” Murphy said. “Quick, call Tom Paoletti, because this man needs a serious raise.”

  But Dave shook his head. “I wish I had that kind of connection. I overhead a conversation. Someone who knew someone who worked in the palace laundry. Granted, it’s just a rumor, but it fits with some other information I picked up about how Bashir’s put a huge price on the head of a palace cleaning woman.”

  “Hey, I heard that one, too.” Murphy sat up. “Yay, me. A mysterious blue-eyed vixen, right? She used the chaos of the quake to steal some heirloom necklace. It’s got to be one major necklace though, ’cause the reward’s rumored to be a fifty thousand dollars. U.S.”

  “That’s no rumor,” Dave told them with complete authority. “It’s fifty thousand, but she has to be brought back alive. If she’s dead, her body’s worth only five.”

  “A mysterious, blue-eyed cleaning woman?” Tess repeated skeptically.

  “You can pretty much translate that as concubine,” Nash informed her. “Padsha Bashir is one of those pious types with lots of rules about how to live—rules that don’t apply to him.”

  “Except, no, see, he marries them,” Murphy said. “That makes it okay in his eyes. Of course, he has dozens of quote unquote wives.”

  “The news that one of his wives stole from him and ran away from the palace would be just as potentially embarrassing to him as calling her what she really is,” Dave pointed out.

  “You’re sure it was a necklace that was stolen?” Decker asked. “Not a ring?”

  “I definitely heard necklace,” Dave said.

  “Did this woman have a name?” Nash asked. “Perhaps . . . Sophia?”

  As Tess watched, Decker looked up and briefly met Jimmy Nash’s gaze. She knew they’d spent a lot of time in K-stan back when they worked for the Agency. Could this woman be someone they both knew?

  “I wasn’t paying much attention,” Murphy admitted. “Since it didn’t seem to pertain to Sayid—”

  “Sophia, yes. No last name, though,” Dave reported. “Although she was also referred to as Soleil or ‘the Frenchwoman.’ I did pay attention, Murph, because of the size of the price on her head, and because she was Western,” he added, almost as if he were apologizing for being so thorough. “It occurred to me, from the size of that reward, that she might not have stolen jewelry from the palace as reported, but that instead she’d taken Sayid’s infamous laptop. If Sayid was injured when the roof collapsed at the palace, Bashir would care more about saving that laptop. It’s no secret that he’d love to get his hands on it—any one of the warlords in K-stan would. I thought maybe he had, only to have it taken from him. But then I overheard that conversation about how Bashir didn’t get injured in the quake after all, but that he—”

  “Was stabbed with his own sword by one of his new wives?” Decker finished for him.

  “That’s right,” Dave said, pleased. “You heard that, too?”

  “Yeah,” Decker said. “That was . . . Sophia’s story. Although she was under the impression that she’d managed to kill Bashir.”

  “Whoa, boss, you know this woman?” Murphy asked. His eyes were dancing with amusement. He was enjoying this meeting immensely. “Man, you guys are both way better at this spooky stuff than I am. I was out almost all night, and I barely managed to rendezvous with my own ass.”

  “She didn’t.” Dave brought the discussion back on track. “Kill Bashir.”

  “I met her last night,” Decker told them. “Or at least I met someone with blue eyes who claimed to be Sophia. She said that she was in Bashir’s chamber with him when the quake hit.”

  “So who is she?” Murphy asked. “Where’d she come from, and what was she doing with Bashir?”

  And how was it that Nash—who’d been with Tess instead of out collecting local rumors last night—knew her name?

  “I mean, in the bigger sense,” Murphy added. “I can guess what she was probably doing with Bashir at that exact moment, but—”

  “All that time, she might have been in possession of that laptop.” Decker was completely distracted. It was as if he didn’t even hear Murphy, as if he were talking to himself. “It never even occurred to me.”

  “Yes, well, I’m not so sure about that particular theory anymore, sir,” Dave told him. “I mean, about her having the laptop. If she really did try to kill Bashir, that explains the price on her head. She didn’t have to take anything from the palace to warrant the size of that reward.”

  “Is it possible she’s working for someone?” Murphy asked.

  Tess looked over at Nash as he shook his head, as if, whoever this Sophia was, he knew her well enough to be certain that she wasn’t working for the Agency, or even the CIA.

  It shouldn’t have surprised her one bit that Diego Nash should be on a first-name basis with a concubine. As she watched, he pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket.

  “Whoever she’s working for—if she’s working for anyone—it’s not us,” Dave said with finality. “I was one of the last agents pulled out of K-stan three years ago.”

  “Maybe she’s with the French government,” Murphy suggested.

  “She’s American.” Nash finally finished unfolding that paper—it was a grainy news photo, from Tess’s portable printer. He handed it to Decker. “Sophia Ghaffari. She’s married to a man who’s part Greek, part French.”

  Deck stared at the picture with absolutely no change of expression.

  “So maybe she is working for France,” Murphy pointed out
cheerfully. “Or Greece. Or maybe even Israel or the U.K.—”

  “Ghaffari,” Dave repeated. “Ghaffari . . .”

  “Is that the woman you met last night?” Nash asked Decker.

  He nodded, and when he looked up at Nash, there was a flash of something in his eyes. Anger. Maybe. Or . . . remorse? “It’s her,” he said.

  “It’s got to be hard for a woman that strikingly beautiful to hide,” Nash said. “I mean, unless she keeps a burka on at all times. Which, apparently, she didn’t do when she was talking to you. . . .”

  Another glance up from Decker.

  “You don’t really think an agent would willingly go undercover as one of Padsha Bashir’s wives, do you?” Tess asked Murphy as she sat on her hands to keep from reaching for that picture. She was dying to see Nash’s definition of strikingly beautiful. “Reality check, guys—I mean, even if he didn’t have a reputation for randomly slicing and dicing his friends and family along with his mortal enemies, there aren’t many women on this planet who would be up for that assignment.”

  “Actually, I know one or two,” Nash murmured.

  Decker looked up at Nash as he passed the picture . . . in the other direction from Tess. To Murphy. “What else did you find out?”

  “Not much,” Nash replied. “I lucked out with this picture before I got bounced off-line. I was actually hoping to find an engagement or wedding photo that would provide Sophia’s maiden name. This caption reads, ‘Dimitri Ghaffari and his American wife, Sophia,’ ” he told Murphy, who still held the printout.

  “You should have asked me for help.” Tess looked from Nash to Decker. Especially since research like this was her job. Especially since this was why she was here.

  “You have other things to handle—and this woman probably has nothing to do with the missing laptop,” Decker told her.

  “Yes, but if Padsha Bashir’s looking for her, if she did try to kill him . . .” Tess looked from Decker to Murphy to Dave to Nash. “She’s in some serious trouble. And there’s no embassy here to help her.”

  “You know, there was a local merchant named Ghaffari.” Dave was thinking aloud as he leaned over to get a look at that photograph. “I remember he was doing extremely well. Importing American products—pop culture. T-shirts, blue jeans, videos, books, CDs. Of course, this was a few years back. I never met him. Or his wife. Yes, I definitely would’ve remembered her.”

  Murph passed the picture to Tess. The caption was in Arabic, but the photo showed a tall man stiffly posed next to a petite woman. The man was nearly as handsome as Jimmy Nash, with fashion-model high cheekbones and an action-hero jawline, dark hair swept back from his forehead. He was dressed in a tuxedo and smiling down into the eyes of the woman, who was wearing a long-sleeved, high-necked gown.

  Tess had been expecting a Lara Croft type, a modern-day Mata Hari—a strikingly beautiful woman who had the guts and smarts to skewer Bashir and escape from the palace during the chaos of the earthquake. But Sophia Ghaffari was one of those ridiculously tiny blond little girls, complete with a porcelain complexion and a face that was fairylike in its ethereal, delicately featured perfection.

  She was the kind of woman whom men fell in love with at first sight—the kind of woman men killed to possess. Forget about the fact that she was probably a bitch and a half, spoiled rotten and selfish as all get-out from years of being treated like a little princess.

  “She told me Bashir killed her husband—some deal went bad,” Decker told them. “She said Ghaffari tried to save himself by giving her to Bashir.”

  Tess winced. Not even a triple-bitch deserved that.

  “Now there’s a thoughtful gift that keeps on giving,” Nash quipped.

  Tess looked up at him in outrage.

  “Hey, I was kidding,” he told her.

  “Yeah, well . . . Not funny.”

  “Not much in this country is,” he countered. “You’ve got to work with whatever you can find.”

  “There is nothing even remotely laughable about—”

  “I don’t know how much of what she told me was true,” Decker interrupted them. “She was definitely trying to win my, uh, sympathies, so . . .”

  Tess studied the picture again. This woman, Sophia, had been through hell—married to a man who looked like Prince Charming, but who, as soon as trouble made the scene, had proven to be a total invertebrate.

  It must have been beyond awful, living in Bashir’s palace as one of his “wives.” And then to escape with no papers, no passport, only to have a huge reward placed on her head—to become the most hunted person in K-stan. . . .

  There was one thing that didn’t quite make sense. Tess couldn’t imagine that this woman, once having had the good luck to meet up with Decker, would have willingly let him out of her sight.

  And yet, apparently, she had.

  “Why didn’t you bring her back here with you?” Tess asked him now.

  “Because she came closer to putting a bullet into my head than anyone’s ever done.” Delivered in Decker’s trademark matter-of-fact manner, it took her a moment to make sense of his words. But across the room, Nash straightened up.

  “It was my own fault,” Deck continued. “But it seemed like a bad idea to spend any additional time in her company after that.”

  “Oh, my God, Deck, are you all right?” Tess breathed. He’d nearly been murdered, while she and Nash had been . . .

  Decker stood up, as if he were embarrassed by her concern. “I’m going to go back to her hiding place, see if I can find her.”

  Tess stood, too. “But—”

  “I don’t think I will,” he added. “She was definitely—” He stopped. Ran one hand down his face. “She was scared to death that I was going to turn her over to Bashir. Jesus, I’m an asshole for not seeing that.” He was extremely upset, and for once he wasn’t trying to hide it—or maybe he simply couldn’t hold it inside anymore.

  It was actually frightening to see someone like Deck—so solid, so unflappable—looking so totally flapped. Even Dave was wide-eyed.

  Deck started to leave, but then turned back. “Tess, get Nash that autopsy report ASAP,” he ordered, the team leader to the bitter end.

  “Maybe I should go with you instead.” Nash had dropped his Mr. Cool act, concern for Decker on his face, in his voice, in the way he was standing there, ready to assist.

  But Decker shook his head. “No. I need you here. Figure out a more exact radius around that hospital. Take Tess and walk it.”

  “Dave can read that report. Probably better than I—”

  Deck cut Nash off. “I want Dave out there.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t argue with me!” Even Deck seemed surprised by the vehemence in his own voice. He turned to Murphy. “I want you out there, too,” he ordered. “Sayid was here—and someone knows something. Someone knows why he was here and someone knows where he was staying. Let’s find that person, find what we’re looking for, and get the hell home.”

  With that, he turned and slammed the door shut behind him.

  “Is it just me,” Murphy asked in the silence that followed, “or did anyone else miss the part that explains why Dr. Decker suddenly turned into Mr. Hyde?”

  Tess looked at Jimmy Nash. Wasn’t he going to follow Deck?

  But he just met her eyes and shook his head as he answered Murphy. “You know how you’re either really funny or completely silent?” he said as they all started toward the door—all but Tess, who stood there in the middle of the barn with her heart in her throat. “Well, now would be the right time for you to do your silent thing.”

  “Roger that,” Murphy said as he followed Dave out of the barn.

  Jimmy stopped at the door. “Come on, Tess,” he said quietly. “We’ve been given our orders.”

  She had to laugh. “For the first time in your life, you’re going to follow orders?”

  “Deck’s not in danger,” Jimmy reassured her. “He was right—wherever this Sophia was
hiding, she’s not going to be there now. We can help him best by getting you to your computer. After you download that report, I need you to find out everything you possibly can about Dimitri and Sophia Ghaffari.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tess went through the door he was holding for her, and headed swiftly for the house.

  Sophia was gone.

  Of course she was gone.

  Decker hadn’t really expected her to still be here, waiting for him to change his mind and return and drag her to Padsha Bashir’s palace, where she’d be hideously tortured and executed.