Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1 (12 page)

Ben touched a hand to his temple in farewell,
a small smile upon his lips. But his eyes were not smiling. His
eyes were drinking in the sight of me, as if it would be his last,
and even as the door opened and he walked through it, I knew panic
that I could not tamp down. This could not be happening. Surely
there were other people who could face Yuri. Why couldn’t someone
else murder the bastard? Why did it have to be the man I loved? And
why did he let me have the last word?

Chapter Twelve --

“Are you okay?” I heard the bathroom door
open and the other bed creaked as she sat down. My face was buried
in my pillow as I tried to control the attack of nerves that
threatened to undo me. What if Ben didn’t come back? What if he
wasn’t fast enough? Why was he doing this on his own? It was just
so wrong. I should be with him. Mavis should help him. After all,
Ben said she was an experienced intelligence officer. What good
were we doing here in this motel room, when Ben was heading into
danger? I thought about that poor mama bear, with her hungry cubs.
Yuri was a heartless, cold-blooded killer, and I had no doubt he
would find a way to kill Ben. What if Ben was just a second too
slow? What if he made the mistake of giving Yuri the benefit of the
doubt? “Bea?”

“Why?” It came out as a sob. “Why did he have
to go?”

“Someone has to do it, Bea. There are a lot
of lives on the line.”

I sat up, wiping my eyes, pushing the wayward
locks off my face. As I turned to Mavis, I let out a scream. “What
the hell....”

“Oh, it’s me. I just got out of my travel
clothes,” said the forty-something woman with short brown hair, now
wearing a pair of blue shorts and a Florida Marlins tee shirt. Her
feet were bare and I noticed her nails were sporting a cheerful
pink polish. A quick glance at the tiny hands showed she had also
done her fingernails in the bathroom.

“You look so...so....”

“Feminine? Adorable? What is it you’re trying
to say, Bea? Spit it out, girl,” Mavis grinned. Never in a million
years would I have expected such a transformation.

“But the way you walked, your posture,” I
insisted, “that all looked so real. I don’t understand.”

“There’s a lot I can’t tell you, but here’s
what you should know. The young woman, Fatima, was lured to the inn
by Philippe Grapon.”

“I
knew
it! I told Ben Philippe would
be trouble for us! I should have banned that sleazy bastard from
our establishment. I should have....”

“Bea, are you going to listen to me or rant
about what should have been?” Mavis asked, very matter-of-factly. I
probably would have liked her, had I met her in another place, at
another time, but for the moment, I was overly aware of the fact
that she, like my husband, was an intelligence officer. Ben was
supposedly retired from the CIA, but I was beginning to have my
doubts about that. That sense of foreboding was clinging to me like
stink on a skunk, and if Mavis was explaining things, it meant the
CIA needed me in the loop. The last time this kind of guano hit the
fan, I lost my pride and joy, Marbury Books.

“Fine,” I retorted with little grace. “Brief
me.”

“The CIA had a leak in a very important
mission. We were trying to establish relations with the emerging
Syrian resistance. Fatima’s father, Jamil, was ensconced in the
regime, but became one of the first to join the resistance. We were
told by the French that Jamil was pretending to support the group,
but we couldn’t back that up, because our informants insisted he
was legitimate. Jamil’s brother is still with the regime and
extremely disappointed with him for turning against the Syrian
president. He put a bounty on Jamil’s head, so Jamil asked the
United States for help. In exchange for keeping his children safe,
he would provide the CIA with intelligence on the ground in real
time, using our equipment.”

“Fatima was murdered by Yuri,” I told
Mavis.

“We know. He killed her because he was being
paid by the Syrian government to monkey-wrench Jamil’s resistance
group. Grapon was also being paid by the Syrian government. He’s
double-dipping, working for the French, too. The DGSE originally
offered to help smuggle Fatima’s sister, Wardah, out of Syria after
Hashim’s men arrested Jamil’s wife. Fatima was studying in at a
prep school in London. The plan was to bring her to the US, to take
care of her little sister. In the meantime, we would try to get
Azeeza out of Damascus and reunite her with her children, so that
Jamil could take a greater role in the resistance.”

“Why did Fatima have those tattoos?” I wanted
to know. “Was it a secret message?”

“In a way. She was accompanied to New York by
one of our couriers, carrying the family Qur’an, which her father
gave to her for safekeeping. Philippe intercepted Fatima on the
British Airways flight and saw it in her possession. He assumed it
was being used as a means of communicating a secret message to
Langley, so he drugged her. But she didn’t know anything. When he
saw the rose and the bee tattoos, he thought they referenced the
cipher. He killed her accidentally with an overdose of sodium
pentathol, which he tried to reverse with an injection of liquid
cocaine, to jolt her system back to life. What he didn’t know was
that the drugs, which Yuri provided to him, weren’t meant to get
answers. Yuri needed Fatima dead. She was part of a plan to draw
Ben into this mess. You were supposed to be the next victim.”

“To force Ben to go after the CIA station
chief for Syria?” Mavis looked at me with something akin to
admiration. I shrugged. “Yuri talked a lot when he thought there
was no one to overhear his phone conversations.”

“Ah,” she nodded. “People get sloppy and
forget that loose lips sink ships.”

“So, all of this was part of a Russian
operation to assist the Assad regime and to thwart the CIA?”

“And the DGSE. They used Grapon because he is
being put out to pasture in six months and he’s angry about it. He
wanted a million for his retirement fund and the Syrians agreed.
You see, Assad wants to prevent NATO from assisting the rebel
forces. Having Grapon onboard was supposed to be his trump card.
Grapon was supposed to carry that Qu’ran back to Syria and then
brief the Syrians on NATO efforts, identify intelligence people
across the NATO alliance, and so on.”

“I knew he was a creep, but that really takes
the cake.” I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and sat up.
“Wait a minute. Where is Wardah? And who will take care of her, now
that her poor sister is dead?”

Mavis said nothing. She merely cast her eyes
upon me and waited.

“Hold on there, lady!” I put up my hands as
if to fend off the unspoken request. “You can’t be serious!”

“Bea, Wardah needs a temporary home,” said
the seasoned intelligence professional. “She has to be mainstreamed
into an American school. Edward speaks Arabic, as does his friend,
Mrs. Gillman.”

“You people already had it set up, didn’t
you? You were going to dump the kid on me as a done deal!” Of all
the bloody nerve. This was such a typical CIA move.

“You’re forgetting one thing, Bea. Fatima was
going to take care of Wardah, at least until Azeezah was brought
from Syria. We were going to relocate Fatima in an American
university with a new name. Now, if we cannot spring Azeezah, that
little girl is on her own. What better place for her than the
Bard’s Bed & Breakfast? She has plenty of places to play,
adults to keep an eye on her, and surely you can’t begrudge the
child a temporary home. She’s already lost her sister. She may lose
her mother. And all because her father had the courage to stand up
to Assad’s regime.”

I sat there on the edge of the bed,
contemplating the contrived scheme, thinking all the while how much
like a Shakespeare play this all was. And then it hit me.

“Let me guess. You people called her sister
Celia Duquesne. Does that mean Wardah would play the role of
Roselind?”

“Of course. What else would you call a child
whose Arabic name means Rose?”

I thought about the tattoos Fatima wore, how
Ben had said they were part of the cipher for the code.

“Ben doesn’t know?” I asked.

“Know what?” Mavis was watching me with great
care.

“That the CIA wanted the girls to stay at the
Bard’s?”

“No,” she admitted. “I was going to set all
that up as ‘Mr. Williams’ when I got here.”

“I understand the reason for the rose tattoo.
It was for Fatimah’s benefit, because she was the caretaker for her
little sister, whose name means rose. But the bee,” I said, my eyes
studying her face for the slightest twitch, “that was a symbol for
me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. We were counting on you to be her
temporary guardian, until her mother arrives. It was a way to help
Fatima feel safe coming to America. We expected her to figure it
out. Edward and Mrs. Gillman were going to teach both girls.”

“What was Ben supposed to do?” There was more
than a hint of suspicion in my voice as I suddenly realized what
was staring me right in the face. “You deliberately sent him to
Syria to get Azeezah?”

“There was no other way,” Mavis tried to
explain, but even as her words poured forth, all I could think of
was the look on Ben’s face as he was leaving. As if it were the
last time he would ever see my face. As if he were saying goodbye.
“He knows the country, Bea. He has a lot of contacts there. He can
work with the resistance. And he’s no longer a CIA officer.”

“Meaning you’ve hung him out to dry!”

“No. That’s not the case at all. He has
cover. He knows Azeezah. We couldn’t risk being fooled by Yuri,
Philippe, or anyone else. We couldn’t risk having them substitute
another woman. He volunteered. He owes Jamil. He was his handler
back in the day.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” I insisted.
“How come he didn’t recognize Fatima?”

“The last time he saw her was in 2000, when
she was only eight years old.”

“Oh,” I sighed. “He knew he was going back?
He didn’t protest?”

“He understood our predicament. We must let
Yuri and Philippe believe they have succeeded in sending Ben to
destroy the CIA station chief. He will deliver a Qur’an to
Damascus, but it will not be the one that belongs to Jamil’s
family. We’ve filled it with disinformation we want the Assad
regime to act upon. We are deliberately pulling the Syrian station
chief, but making it look suspicious. It kills two birds for us. We
get the chance to replace our guy in Damascus with fresh blood, and
we get Yuri to convince the Russians they made a brilliant tactical
move.”

“Very Shakespearean indeed,” I groaned. “Does
it never end?”

Chapter Thirteen --

It was three days before I moved back to the
Bard’s Bed & Breakfast. It took nearly that long to flush
Alexi, Serge, Petra, and Boris out of the woods, one by one. Petra
left first, heading into town for a food run. She was picked up for
speeding, and when she couldn’t identify herself properly, she was
accused of being Doris Heffenberg, wanted for killing her elderly
mother up in Keene, New York. Petra had little choice but to call
the Russians for help. She was expelled as a spy, but she didn’t
give up her boys. Alexi fell down a ravine and had to be rescued
when he broke his leg. He apparently never saw the trip line
stretched across his path and went head over heels. Serge was
caught when he thought he was capturing me in the woods -- it
turned out to be a female state trooper that he assaulted. Within
minutes, he was surrounded by a group of S.W.A.T. members who just
happened to be practicing their tactics in the forest. Since the
state police had announced their planned exercises publicly on the
morning of their excursion, Serge never suspected that it was a
planned effort to flush him out. As for Boris, he held out the
longest, spending three days crisscrossing the far end of the woods
in his effort to hunt me down. He was picked up when he returned to
Yuri’s station wagon. By then, Nizar’s body was apparently quite
well along in its decomposition, and the state police had staked
out the area, expecting the car’s owner to return for it. Yuri had
charged Boris with getting the flat tires fixed, handed him the
keys, his weapons, and left the woods to follow Ben to Damascus, so
Boris was left holding the proverbial bag. The bullets in one of
the guns matched the bullets in Nizar’s corpse, and since Boris had
gunpowder residue clinging to his shooting hand after he fired
shots at something moving in the bushes that turned out to be a
raccoon, there wasn’t a credible explanation. He was carted off to
await trial for murdering Nizar. With all four out of the picture
for very different reasons, they looked incompetent to their Moscow
handlers. Since Petra and Boris had both been identified as Russian
spies, the heat was on and there was little the Russians would gain
in sending in another team or two to kill me. After all, Ben had
gone to Syria on the promise that Yuri would release me once he had
done his bidding. Yuri had never had the opportunity to carry out
his plan, and now it was too late.

I was on pins and needles as Ben’s absence
dragged on. The first week had me biting my nails to the skin.
Uncle Edward and Mrs. Gillman tried to keep up a cheerful front,
but I wasn’t having any. Even Puck did his best to comfort me on
the long evenings I sat in the library, curling up beside me on the
chair, seeking a tickle now and then. Mr. Darcy occasionally joined
us.

Titania, the tabby, and Oberon, the calico,
both got used to sharing my bed. It was a great relief not to sleep
alone. After all the years that I had spent watching Ben come and
go on assignment, this was the first time in our marriage that I
had grown used to his constant presence, not to mention the regular
lovemaking, and now I found it nearly impossible to function
without him. I tried to convince myself that I was still the same
independent woman I had been in Washington, when I had forged a
life for myself that allowed me to thrive in Ben’s absence. The
truth was I didn’t want to do without my husband. I missed the feel
of his hands on my body as he loved me, the sound of his laughter
as he teased me, even the glower on his face as we argued. Whatever
would I do without Ben?