Ward was right. Dan knew that the Red Army numbered in the tens of thousands. If the entire army was flooding into Laka, they were goners. But they could handle five hundred. Five hundred illiterate, superstitious troops, boys who’d been kidnapped from their villages so young they were sometimes shorter than the rifles they carried. Kept drunk or drugged and brainwashed into thinking that their red shirts made them magically invulnerable to bullets.
No match at all. Dan would bet on the odds of a hundred to one, no question. He and his men were elite troops, well-trained and well-armed.
“Okay. Keep watch and let me know if you think new troops are arriving.”
“Roger that.”
Dan thumbed the off button, then looked at his watch, frowning. Almost five minutes had gone by. Claire had promised to come back in a minute. Five minutes was not one. A lot of very bad things could happen in five minutes.
Protocol dictated that he remain at Post One during an emergency but the hell with it. An emergency hadn’t been officially declared. Not yet, anyway. Wherever Claire was, he wanted her back with him, right by his side where she’d be safe. As safe as he could make her, anyway. Marie Diur, too
Cracking the door open, Dan looked both ways. As always near the equator, night was falling fast. No one had bothered to turn on the hallway lights, so the big hallway was cloaked in shadows.
Dan slipped through the door, and walked quietly through the rooms. The waiting room, the consular section, the back offices. He made the rounds of the ground floor perimeter. He knew how to move with stealth and he knew how to clear rooms. Ten minutes later, he’d checked the entire ground floor and had seen . . . nothing. No other consular officers, no rebel army troops. No Marie Diur. Above all, no Claire Day.
He stopped and listened. Like most Marines, his senses were keen. His hearing was especially sharp. He held his breath in his lungs so it wouldn’t interfere and sent his senses outward.
The embassy was an old building, built by a French timber baron in the late nineteenth century. It had been built like a Paris townhouse, but in the equator wood and stucco aren’t as eternal as in the City of Lights. It required constant upkeep and on the best of days the entire building moaned and groaned and squeaked.
Right now, though, it was utterly and completely silent. The only sounds were those filtering in from the rebel soldiers carousing outside along the Avenue de la Liberté, shouts of drunken male jubilation, crazed machine gun bursts, revving engines.
Inside the embassy, silence.
Dan raced up to the second floor, cleared the rooms, then checked the third floor, essentially storage space.
Only the basement was left, with the locked armory only he and his second-in-command Ward had the code for, the secure room, which was locked and the supplies room, ditto.
No sign of Claire.
The embassy building was charming, an architectural jewel, but it was also small. Everyone worked in close proximity, everyone knew everyone else’s business. You could hear phone conversations in the room next door. As long as there were people in the building, the only places that were silent were Post One, the soundproofed situation room, the secure room where Claire worked and the armory, deep underground.
Even if Claire knew the codes, she wouldn’t have taken Marie into rooms off-limits to Foreign Service Nationals staff. It was a rule no one ever broke.
If Claire and Marie were anywhere in the building, he should be hearing them. Even whispers carried.
There were no whispers, no footfalls, no sounds at all.
Dan had spent most of his adult life training to sharpen his senses. He took a moment to put himself in hunting mode—attuning his eyes to the semi-darkness, sharpening his hearing even more, Browning out, safety off. Remington on a sling against his back. Ready for trouble.
By the time he’d finished casing the embassy, top to bottom, he was sweating.
Claire had disappeared.
Christ.
Dan didn’t know Marie Diur at all. Suppose she was secretly a supporter of the Red Army? Suppose she’d lured Claire into their hands?
The Red Army was made up of crazed scumbags, but the government army wasn’t much better. The Makongan Army had plenty of enemies. If the Diur family had suffered at the government’s hands, they might well have thrown in with the rebels.
Claire in RA hands was something he couldn’t even think about without going crazy. They were brutal beyond belief. God, how could he have let Claire go? He’d lost his head for just a second and it might have cost her her life.
She and Marie hadn’t been insane enough to go outside, had they? Or even outside the embassy compound? Did Marie know of some secret entrance? Dan glanced outside the windows at the swiftly gathering dusk. This was the moment when the duty officer switched on the powerful outside lights, illuminating every inch of ground between the walls of the embassy and the gate. Now there was only darkness.
Listening carefully, Dan cracked open the door that led from the back office used by the consular staff to the motor pool. A huge modern garage housing embassy cars had been added to the big back garden, with a concrete shed attached to the back. The garage was modular and had been recently extended to house shipments of AIDS drugs donated by one of those rich-guy foundations.
There was a big truck there now, full of drugs.
The heat was still intense, the coming of night was bringing no freshness at all. If anything, the heat became more oppressive. He took a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes.
Dan unslung his rifle and brought it up to his shoulder, starting to slow his breathing and his heartbeat in case he needed to shoot. He kicked the door of the shed open and quartered the room. Nothing. After a minute, he lowered the rifle, frowning, and closed the door of the shed.
A whisper! Definitely the sound of a woman’s voice. Soldiers are taught not to whisper in the field. A whisper carries much farther than a low murmur. A woman’s voice, with its higher pitch, carried even farther than a man’s.
And now . . . another woman answering.
Claire
. That was Claire’s voice. He’d recognize it anywhere. She was outside when she should be back in the embassy where he could protect her.
He moved forward and . . . never completed the step toward Claire because a giant fist raised him ten feet off the ground and slammed him back against the concrete wall of the shed at a hundred miles an hour.
In the split second before he lost consciousness, while a fireball of light and heat filled the universe, he thought—
Claire.
Claire was in the middle of the conflagration and was already dead.
He’d lost her the moment he’d found her.
And then the world went black.
Because of her.
She’d just spent a long couple of hours at the cemetery, bringing him flowers. It was her closest human contact since her father had died three months ago—talking to his headstone.
She told him of her grief, how much she missed him, how sorry she was that the fact she’d nearly died in the embassy bombing in Laka had broken his heart.
He listened, she was sure of that. Wherever he was, he was listening to her. He always had. He’d been a strong, loving presence in her life while her mother was alive and he’d been a frightened, loving presence afterward.
Maybe he even forgave her.
It had been cold and windy in the cemetery and she was chilled to the bone. Luckily she kept the heat on in the house, day and night, unusual in these sunny parts.
Her heating bills were atrocious, but it was the only way she could stay warm. She was always cold these days, her hands and feet pale and bloodless.
She blew into her hands and rubbed them. It was what her mother had done when she was a child, coming in from playing in the snow in Boston. A motherly ritual that she’d taken for granted as a well-loved little girl—a sweater kept warm on the radiator, hot chocolate ready for the microwave and a brisk rub of her hands. Her mother had been a gifted amateur pianist and her hands had been beautiful—long and delicate.
If Claire closed her eyes, she could still see her chubby child’s hands being chafed by her mother’s warm, elegant, womanly ones.
There was no one to rub Claire’s hands now. No one in the entire world. No one to rub her hands, put an arm around her shoulders, give her a hug.
She couldn’t remember the last human being who had touched her. Maybe the Gramercys at her father’s funeral. They’d hugged her, briefly. But then Mr. Gramercy had managed to insinuate that she’d killed her father by willfully going off on her adventures.
Her knees had nearly buckled at the venom in his voice and at the stab of guilt that had penetrated straight to her heart.
He might be right. If she hadn’t wanted to spread her wings and fly, she would probably be somewhere teaching French literature, perhaps translating novels from French in her spare time, an intact human being.
No memory loss, no dizzy spells, no screaming nightmares.
No dead father.
Wiped out, Claire sat down on the couch, hugging herself for warmth, too tired to make it up to her bedroom on the second floor and change into warm, comfortable house clothes.
She was always exhausted after she went out. The outside world was simply too much for her. She planned her outings carefully, going out only when necessary to do some shopping or to take care of some errand or to visit her father’s grave. Inevitably she’d come home shaking and spent.
That was her life now, and had been since she’d come out of her coma nine months ago. Physical and mental weakness, a constant feeling of sliding into a deep, black hole, a huge wall of glass between her and the rest of humanity. Those were her daily companions.
The nightmares were her nightly companions.
Claire rested her head against the back of the couch, suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and weakness. Making it upstairs to change felt like a huge challenge, Hilary conquering Mt. Everest.
The big ormolu clock on the hearth mantelpiece struck seven. Way too early to go to bed.
She knew, from bitter experience, that if she gave in to her desire for oblivion too early, she’d just wake up in a nest of sweaty sheets and blankets around midnight, unable to sleep until morning, when she’d get up exhausted and dizzy and unready to face the day. And she also knew from bitter experience that sleeping pills weren’t the way to go. They only made the situation worse, befogging her mind without letting her rest.
No, better to stay awake until, say, ten and then hope for sleep.
Sleep.
She nearly laughed at the longing coursing through her body. God, a full night’s sleep. Once, she’d longed for travel and adventure, intellectual excitement. Meeting new people from different cultures. A sense of successfully making her way in this world.
Now she longed for one night’s sleep. Without nightmares.
The horrors visited her almost nightly. The nightmares all had the same flavor, which as far as she knew was highly unusual. Claire had read more or less every book Amazon could deliver to her doorstep on sleep disorders and had started thinking of ordering the ones on mental disorders to see if she could find her particular one.
Her nightmares were constant. Sticky heat, the sound of gunshots, evil men coming after her. She’d try to run but find herself unable to move her limbs, which was a classic. There would be whispers, just out of hearing range. Whispers she couldn’t understand, whispers of something terrible. A sense of heart-pounding danger, imminent menace.
A shot, a woman on the ground in a pool of her own blood.
Sometimes, though, rarely, in the middle of the nightmares, when she felt her entire body encased in an iron maiden of fear about an unstoppable evil, there would be someone else.
A man. His face was sometimes nebulous, sometimes clear, but only for a second. Not too tall but with immensely broad shoulders, brown hair, vigilant and tough.
She could never make out the color of his eyes, though that didn’t matter. What mattered was that when he was in her head during the nightmare, the sharp-edged terror she felt abated a little. In the midst of monsters, he provided a sense of safety.
He wasn’t always there, though. It was a sign of her lunacy that she longed for a nonexistent man to save her from her nonexistent enemies in her dreams.
To add to her horror, lately her dreams came to her in the middle of the day, in the form of delusions. She would suddenly zone out and hear voices. Men’s voices, indistinct, yet filled with menace. Gunshots and bombs going off. Oppressive heat and fear.
She would suddenly find herself standing stock-still, heart pounding with terror, her mind completely taken over by jolting, horrifying images that were always just at the edge of comprehension.
It was somehow worse than the nightmares, because she could be anywhere. In a supermarket, walking to the library, pottering around the house. There would be no warning. She would simply plunge into a deep hole of horror and have to climb out on her own, shaking and sweaty and terrified.
Claire rubbed her forehead. The Headache was starting. Headache One, thank God. She had a whole classification system of headaches, from One to Five. One was a throbbing pain behind her eyes that at times made her dizzy. Dizzier. She always felt dizzy.
But Headache One was something she could live with, even function with, after a fashion. She’d done her shopping, cleaned the house and even worked on a translation with a One. Twos, Threes and Fours were headaches in increasing scales of pain and by the time a Four came around, her life stopped.
A Five . . . she shuddered. She hadn’t had a Five in months and hoped desperately her Five days were behind her. A Five made her long for the peace of death.
Don’t think of it
. Her little mantra.
Ommm-don’t-think-of-it-ommm
. A refrain that ran through her days. Don’t think of the headaches, don’t think of the months lost to a coma, don’t think of her beloved friend Marie, not even a heap of mildewed bones buried in the jungle because they’d never found her body. Not even her DNA. She’d just gone missing and had never been found again.
Above all, don’t think of her father. Dead of heartbreak.
One of the many horrifying things about her situation was that she couldn’t remember a thing about the blast that had taken her life away.
Her last clear memory was of a reception at the French Embassy where she’d had a lot of fun fending off the French Chargé d’Affaires’s amorous advances. He’d been charming and erudite and handsome, though of course married. He’d taken his defeat with immense good grace and she felt she might even have made a friend.
After that, nothing. The reception had been on the eighteenth of November. The blast had been on the twenty-fifth, Thanksgiving.
She had read all about it, when she could read again. The first time she could read without getting dizzy, however, had been in late March.
Way before that, in December, had been the phone call from Marie’s sister, Aba. Her father had taken the call while she was in a coma, but he hadn’t told her about it. She’d found out on her own, while checking and eliminating phone messages. Her father had been hopeless about electronics and the message tape had been full.
Claire could remember it exactly as if it had happened yesterday. A sunny day in March, sunny enough to make her want to get up out of the wheelchair and walk into the garden, just for a moment. She hadn’t though, because the recorded message had knocked the breath right out of her.
She could remember the light falling onto her father’s desk in a bright elongated yellow rectangle. Her finger pressing the replay button over and over, listening to the messages then deleting them. Straightening up as she recognized Aba’s voice.
She’d liked Aba, Marie’s sister, a well-known physician, almost as much as she’d liked Marie and she’d been invited several times to the home Aba shared with her journalist husband.
She’d never heard that tone from Aba before, though. Low and hostile, filled with anger.
Claire, I’m sure you’re now safe and sound after your father came to take you back home to the States. Marie didn’t make it, though. We buried her last week. Or rather, we held a funeral ceremony, because we never found the body. I lost my sister because of you and I will never forgive and never forget. She insisted on going back for you. I tried to talk her out of it—why risk her life for yours? But I couldn’t stop her and now her blood is on your head. I hope you choke on it.
Claire had never heard such venom, such hatred directed her way. What made it so awful was that she had no idea what Aba was talking about. She didn’t remember anything about that day, nothing at all. How had she put Marie in danger? How had she got her killed?
Claire had tracked down Aba’s home number. She must have left a hundred messages, but Aba never called back.
Claire knew the bare facts. The rebel Red Army had invaded Laka on Thanksgiving Day and had blown the embassy up, causing immense damage, but taking no lives except, perhaps, for Foreign National Marie Diur’s.
And, of course, leaving her with only a shell of a life.
The embassy staff had been at the ambassador’s residence and the Marines at Marine House. Claire had no idea at all why she hadn’t been celebrating Thanksgiving at the ambassador’s residence, though she intensely disliked him and his vicious wife.
She’d probably had a report to write, though it was now lost in the blast and in the traumatized corridors of her brain.
Blowing up the US Embassy had been a really stupid thing for the Red Army to do, because the US government then poured billions into shoring up the Makongan government—which in her opinion wasn’t much better than the Red Army itself—turning it into both a US protectorate and an enormous marshaling yard for military and medical aid funneled into West Africa.
Claire had read about the bombing and the aftermath as if reading any other mission report of a colleague’s posting. She remembered nothing. That day and the week before the bombing was a complete blank. Not to mention the three months of coma afterward.
There was a huge, gaping hole in her life and sometimes she felt it was going to suck her right down into it until she fell to the bottom and disappeared into the dark, dank depths.
Restless, Claire stood and paced the living room. It took her a while to cross it, it was so big. The entire house was big, much too big for a single woman.
Not for the first time, she thought of selling it, buying a condo somewhere . . . but where? It would be stupid to sell in Safety Harbor just to buy again here. Boston? She hadn’t lived there since she was fifteen years old. There was nothing there for her. Washington DC? It might make some sense. Most of her translation clients lived in Washington, though being close to her employers wouldn’t make much difference. She did all her work by email.
Living in Washington would remind her of all that she’d lost in the blast. Her father, her friend, her job, her
life
. She’d loved her job as a DIA analyst. She’d delighted in her analytical skills, meeting the challenges head-on, knowing that every time she solved a puzzle, however minor, it was one more brick in the wall keeping her country safe. She’d felt part of something big and important. Hard and necessary.
Those days were gone, forever. Who wanted an analyst who sometimes couldn’t tell up from down? Who got dizzy spells and was visited nightly in her sleep by monsters?
She was lucky she had a knack for translating and was slowly building up a clientele. She worked from home. Her clients didn’t have to know that dizzy spells rendered her useless several hours a day, or that sometimes she had to go lie down with a headache that made her nauseous.
All they cared about was that she deliver accurate translations by deadline, and she did. They didn’t see her and they didn’t have to know that she was a barely functioning being.