Heatseeker (Atrati) (32 page)

They were settled on the private jet when Jamila asked, “Do you know if my father has learned of this night’s events yet?”

Rachel turned to Kadin.

“Abdul’s man reported that Dr. Massri returned to the hotel and has gone to bed. It doesn’t look like he’s going to discover anything until tomorrow, but by then all he’ll find is an empty house,” Kadin told Jamila.

“So, he will have no knowledge of what has become of Abasi or Mr. Lavigne?”

“Nothing he can confirm. Dr. Massri will probably think the worst when he realizes Giroux is gone, as well, and his cohorts don’t answer their phones.”

“But will he believe the worst in that they are dead or the worst in that they have absconded with me and left him for some nefarious reasons of their own?”

Kadin shrugged as if he didn’t think it mattered. “You’re pretty good at coming up with possible scenarios. That’s a valuable skill.”

“My father has always said I have too much imagination.”

Neil said, “Dull people often say that of the highly intelligent.”

Rachel was sure he had plenty of experience on that score.

“My father is very smart. He is a doctor, after all.”

“He doesn’t appreciate your worth—that makes him ignorant in my opinion,” Cowboy said, his satisfied glow making Rachel smile.

It was clear that the two men had reconciled and both were incredibly happy about it.

“It is good of you to say so.”

“I have a habit of speaking the truth, ma’am.”

Jamila giggled and shook her head. “You are from the South, yes?”

“Actually, sweet thing, I’m from the grand state of Texas.” Cowboy was playing up his accent and making Jamila smile.

“You Atrati are special men,” Rachel said quietly to Kadin.

“You think so?” he asked, the question carrying a heavier meaning than the words implied at first.

She could see it in those beautiful brown eyes that had mesmerized her since she was a prepubescent girl.

“I do.”

“That’s good to know.”

“I hope so.” The words came out as a whisper against his lips as he moved close enough to kiss.

He completed the move, giving her a kiss that had more promise than heat.

Jamila gasped beside her, and Rachel looked over. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have—”

“No. It is all right. You Americans are freer with your affections than we Egyptians, but there is such gentleness in this big man when he touches you. It is good to see.”

Rachel reached out and took Jamila’s hand. “A good man tempers his strength.”

“And a strong woman seeks a
good
man in her partner.”

“Yes.”

Jamila nodded. “It is as Madame Abdul said. Strength is in the decisions we make.”

“We all make mistakes.”

“Yes, it is how we respond to those mistakes that defines our character.”

“Mrs. Abdul tell you that, too?” Neil asked with warm curiosity.

“Yes. She is a very wise woman.”

Everyone nodded, though Rachel doubted any of them had realized quite how invaluable that woman would be to them.

The flight to the airstrip outside of Helwan was a little more than five hours, and they arrived in the wee hours of the morning. Rachel had tried to sleep and had managed to doze in fits and starts but didn’t feel particularly rested when the plane touched down.

Jamila had slept a lot more peacefully beside her, not waking once and barely shifting as the small Lear jet carried them to their destination.

Jayne wanted to go directly to Chuma’s house. Cowboy offered to go with her as backup.

Because they had Jamila with them, Rachel wanted Neil to come to the Massris’ house as extra protection for the young woman. He’d readily agreed. And Kadin had approved the plan.

Upon arrival, Jamila showed Neil to her father’s office, where he immediately began a dump of the man’s hard drive.

She then led Rachel upstairs to her bedroom, where she withdrew a small thin packet from between the mattress and box spring. “This is the key.”

It looked like a sheaf of papers, but Rachel didn’t doubt the other woman.

They returned to the office, which Kadin had clearly been searching. A framed Salvador Dali print hung out on a hinge from the wall.

Behind the painting was a state-of-the-art biometric-access panel.

Looking not in the least startled by what Kadin had discovered, Jamila opened the satchel she carried. She pulled out a clear sheet with a brown circle about half an inch in diameter in the center.

Jamila approached the retinal scanner and put the clear sheet in front of her own eye. Blue light flashed, and then a green indicator light flashed in the lower right corner.

She went back to her little cache, pulled out a flattened rubber glove, and then very carefully pulled it on over her own hand. She then pressed the index finger against the finger pad. A second green light flashed.

A whirring sound came, and then part of the wall simply swung outward, revealing a room no more than four feet deep that ran the entire length of Dr. Massri’s office.

“How did you figure out how to do that?” Rachel asked, more than a little impressed.

“I have a friend on Facebook. He has odd ideas about alien conspiracies but tremendous knowledge about security features.”

“Why did you even look for the hidden room?” Kadin wanted to know.

“I came into my father’s office once when he was in there. That door in the wall was open, and I could hear him moving about. I am not allowed in his office, but I thought he was out of the house. He had not even locked the door.”

The man had been too sure of his daughter’s obedience.

Neil whistled appreciatively. “But you liked your bits of silent defiance, didn’t you? Just coming in here to prove that you could.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t let him know you’d seen him in the secret room,” Rachel guessed.

“Naturally not. He would have beaten me for being in his office to begin with. How much worse would the beating have been if he thought I had discovered something he hid from everyone else?”

“You are going to make one hell of an agent when you finish university,” Neil said, his voice laced with an appreciation echoed in Rachel’s own heart and clearly in Kadin as well, judging from the look he gave the younger woman.

“I believe I will enjoy the challenge of it.”

“Have you gone through the files in here?”

“I only discovered the room a few weeks ago. It took me some time to get both a high-quality image of my father’s eye and his fingerprint. And I do not have a great deal of time in the house alone.”

Neil picked the lock on a filing cabinet but did not open the drawer when the lock popped. Rachel looked at him inquiringly.

“I make it a rule not to underestimate the wariness of my quarry.”

“You think he set a snare on the cabinet?” Jamila asked. “My father is very arrogant. He will have assumed that this room is sacrosanct.”

Neil shrugged, examining the cabinet closely. “It’s always better to be safe than sorry.”

Jamila seemed to consider that, and then she nodded. “Let me look, if you will.”

Neil could have refused. Jamila was not trained, and she was barely twenty, but she’d proven she had a keen intellect and understood her father’s mind.

“He likes Chinese puzzle boxes. I give him a new one each year for his birthday.” She examined the solid wooden filing cabinet. “I never told him, but I always did the puzzles before giving them to him.”

More silent rebellion.

“You are so much stronger than I gave you credit for,” Rachel said, her voice tinged with awe and remorse for her own assumptions.

She still didn’t regret refusing to flip the young woman. If Jamila had been caught trying to spy on him by Dr. Massri, what had happened to his daughter earlier tonight would seem like a walk in the park by comparison.

“I spend so much of my time keeping up the obedient and meek-mannered façade, I do not drop it for casual friendship.”

Rachel would bet the other woman didn’t drop it for good friends, either. “Does anyone in your life know the real you?”

“Abasi. He said he liked my spirit and understood why I hid it from my father. It gave him some kind of satisfaction to know my father was unaware. Now I understand that Abasi looked forward to breaking me. But he did not.”

“No, he didn’t.”

Jamila pressed what looked like a solid piece on the cabinet, and it slid inward. Then she pressed against the side opposite, and another piece popped out. She frowned in concentration at the cabinet and then smiled. “It is modeled after the box I gave him five years ago.”

Jamila dropped to a squat and pressed one of the decorative carvings at the base, and the second drawer down popped open two inches.

“Step back, honey. If he went to the trouble of making the cabinet like a puzzle box, it’s definitely linked to a nasty surprise for anyone who doesn’t know the secret.”

Jamila’s brow furrowed. “But it is open.”

“Let’s not take a chance on faulty wiring.” Neil patted her shoulder. “Great job, by the way. You’ve got an amazing memory.”

Jamila’s smile said she was proud of herself, too.

Five minutes later, Kadin and Neil had removed a small bomb wired to the top drawer. It was set up so that it would have gone off if they’d opened that drawer instead of the second one down first. And the access drawer had been designed not to open from the outside. Only the series of moves Jamila had made would pop it open from the inside.

Without following that sequence, the C–4 would have exploded and destroyed the files, as well as most likely killing whoever opened the drawer.

The idea that Jamila might easily have been that person made Rachel go cold inside.

But she couldn’t dwell on what-ifs. It was time to do her job. “We’ll take the files and go over them later.”

“This is not legal, is it?” Jamila asked, not sounding particularly bothered by the fact.

“It’s not protocol search-and-seizure, no, but considering the imminent threat to our national security your father poses, our methods will not be held against us,” Rachel said. “Besides, you gave us permission to come into your home, and, as a resident, you opened the locked entries.”

“I like that.”

“Working at this level has its perks,” Rachel agreed.

“Along with its dangers,” Kadin cautioned. “Those pictures Chuma showed you of Rachel were from when your father’s men had her incarcerated and were torturing her with a car battery.”

Jamila looked at Rachel, her expression concerned. “They hurt you.”

“Yes.” Rachel wasn’t going to deny it. Jamila deserved the truth.

“That kind of torture, it brings great trauma to your mind and body.”

“It does,” Rachel admitted, for the first time making no effort to hide how bad it had been.

She didn’t want Jamila thinking the job she wanted when she graduated from college came without its costs.

“But you survived.”

“Only because Kadin and his team got me out. My plan was to tip sideways into the urine-and-water mixture on the floor when they were shocking me and fry my own brain.” Not to mention her nervous system and heart. “Before I gave up my cover.”

Kadin jerked. She’d told him this, but hearing it again wasn’t sitting well with him.

She understood that. He loved her.

Funny that she would realize it before acknowledging her own feelings, but the certainty had been growing since he’d arrived at Terne Lavigne’s mansion to help her rescue Jamila. He had never once tried to tell her she couldn’t or shouldn’t get the other woman out.

He’d only pointed out the potential cost of doing so.

And he’d never refused to help her. He’d put his own career on the line just as she’d done for Jamila.

Rachel had come to accept that he was motivated not by a fantasy but by a love that had never died. She could believe in it because hers hadn’t, either. Despite everything.

It never would. She loved Kadin Marks today. She’d loved him ten years ago. And she would love him ten years from now.

She honestly didn’t know what was going to happen between them, but that tiny spark of hope she’d thought snuffed out was burning brighter and brighter with every passing moment.

Chapter Twenty-two

“Y
ou would have died rather than betray your government,” Jamila said with deep respect.

“Or you. They wanted me to confirm I wasn’t just a tourist.”

“But you would not expose me to harm.”

“No.”

“You are a strong woman with great moral character.” Jamila smiled at Rachel, a genuine smile Rachel wasn’t sure she would have been capable of in the circumstances. The Egyptian woman’s own strength shone in her dark brown eyes.

Rachel didn’t see herself that way. “I am what I need to be.”

“And we are never going to get out of here if you don’t start packing these files.” Kadin’s tone was indulgent, his hand once again reaching out to touch her.

To remind her that he was there. And maybe to remind himself that she was, too.

When they finished, they put the physical evidence into the trunk of the car their contacts had provided. Rachel appreciated a criminal who didn’t trust computers completely and therefore kept a paper trail. It would make their job that much easier.

Jamila had packed some clothes and a few items of sentimental value while the mercenaries and Rachel emptied the filing drawers in Massri’s secret room, as well as combing it for any other possible physical evidence.

“He will not even notice I have taken these things. He knows so little about me and shows even less interest,” Jamila said as she and Neil carried her single suitcase and a medium-size box out to the car.

They collected Jayne and Cowboy, who seemed pretty pleased with what they had found in Chuma’s office and the safe in his bedroom, and headed back to the landing strip where their private jet waited.

Once the plane was airborne, Rachel immediately started going through Massri’s files while Jayne dug into Chuma’s hard drive with Neil’s help. Their plane landed in Morocco nearly five hours later, but only to refuel before taking off again for the U.S.A.