Chapter One
The man seated across the table was thin with a nervous tic in one bloodshot eye. His clothes were dusty, and though he had a thick mustache, it had obviously been a long time since he had given it any attention. One finger tapped on the scarred wood of the little table, drawing Laurel's eye as he struggled to find the right words.
Laurel did her best to keep her gaze calm and neutral. It was one of her gifts, but she wasn't sure that she could do it. Still, she had to do her best, because this could be one of the most important stories of her career.
The man had forbidden her any recording devices, so there was a pad of paper in front of her covered in a scrawl that would only be decipherable to a few people in the world. Plenty of people would simply take a quick look at it and dismiss it as idle doodles, never suspecting that the combination of shorthand and personal symbols allowed her to keep track of everything the man was saying.
“You are doing very well,” she said in Arabic, her voice soft and smooth. “Can you tell me what happened next?”
His eye twitched again, and he looked around wildly. He had only given her one name, Amir, and Laurel would have bet money that it was not his real name at all. That was fine. He was a man who needed to tell a story, and right now, she was the woman who would listen.
“You know what happened next,” he said, his voice low and agitated. “You know that, why would you ask me such a thing?”
“I know what the news told me,” Laurel said smoothly. “I know what the government said about it. I know what people are afraid of. I don't know what your story is, however. I don't know what you went through. I don't need to hear the rest. What I want to hear is what you did and what you saw.”
It was a question that she had answered many times in many different places. Laurel still felt a cool breeze of relief go over her spirit when he relaxed, his hands loosening. She was exquisitely aware of the gun that was holstered by his side, and she knew better than most that he had used it before.
“Then we returned to the mountains,” he said, his voice little more than a mumble. “The guns that we had taken, they were split up and packed into anonymous crates. They were sent off with runners from other cells. There was a celebration that night. It was considered a coup.”
“But you were not pleased with things,” she said softly. “That's what you told me when you met my contact.”
Amir nodded miserably, and in the chamber of her heart, a room that she kept locked up as tight as Fort Knox, she felt some sympathy for him. He was a young man underneath the mustache and the rest of it. If you shaved him, gave him a haircut and some halfway decent clothing, he would likely fit in on any street in New York or London or Dubai. Instead, he was on the edge of nowhere in a small town on the border of Shajae. At the age of twenty-five, a full fifteen years younger than Laurel herself, he had done things that would have made a devil ashamed, but it was hard not to look at his lost eyes and wonder who he might have been otherwise.
“No,” he said, hanging his head. “There were women that had been taken in the raid as well. We were moving fast, so most were released. We could not afford to be slowed down, you see. The word from above was that there were to be no prisoners taken and no lives lost...”
“But that was not the case, was it?” she asked, her voice soft and mild. When Laurel did it right, she could blend into the background even as she sat across from her subject. It was like they were talking to themselves.
Laurel was unsurprised when she saw tears glittering in Amir's eyes. Despite what he had done, despite what he had seen, there was still a human being underneath it, and it was her job to make sure that was what the world saw. Her pen never stilled. She recorded everything she could from this meeting. She had an excellent memory, but she wanted to be sure she forgot nothing at all. It was a story that needed to be told, and there was enough professional self-interest in her to make sure that when she told it, it would be told right.
“No,” he said, slumping low in his chair. “No. There were young women pulled out of the darkness. Some had been beaten already, and they were all silent. That was what I remember in that moment. They were silent as if they already knew what was to come, and they were waiting.”
Laurel had to swallow hard. She had heard reports of what came next, but they were still rumors. This would be the first real report coming out of Elsiin about what had happened there. She expected brutality and grief and horror.
What she did not expect was for the door of the sleepy little cafe to be kicked down. In the space of a heartbeat, the room was filled with large men in tactical clothes, guns unholstered but thankfully held at their sides. Someone, Laurel thought the waitress, shrieked, and the trio of men playing a dice game in the corner dove for the rear of the room.
The armed men who stampeded into the room were not interested in them, however. Later, when Laurel put it all together, she realized that there was no doubt who they had come searching for. They came right to the table where she sat with Amir, and suddenly all of those guns were pointed at him.
At least, that was the way the raid should have gone.
Amir, despite being so young, was quick and hardened after his time with the insurrectionists, and without a moment of hesitation, he thrust the table out of his way. Laurel only snatched up her notes out of instinct, and then she was being grabbed and spun around.
She gagged as Amir's arm looped around her throat, holding her hard to his wiry body, and she bit her tongue when she could feel the cold barrel of a gun pointed straight at her temple.
“Not another move!” he shouted. “Let me leave, or the American dies!”
The men who had surrounded them were well trained at least. They froze the moment they realized their quarry had a hostage, and their guns dropped, their fingers laid alongside the triggers.
“I am leaving now,” Amir said, his voice high with fury and fear. “I am going to my car, and if one of you makes a move against me...”
He pushed the barrel of the gun even harder against her temple, and Laurel held her breath. Her heart was beating faster than a jackrabbit’s, but she kept her hands in plain view. The world narrowed down to the moment, slowed down so that everything seemed distant and far away. Right now, she needed to seize every opportunity that came by, no matter how small, to free herself. She couldn't think of anything else, not the men around her, not Ben at the hotel room, no one and nothing.
A man, his face covered by the heavy-duty visor that protected it, stepped to the front. He was large, his shoulders broad and his stance powerful. His gun was down, but it occurred to Laurel that there was something unyielding about him, something that would not back down. This was the kind of man who made things happen, and Laurel could feel her hackles rise. Something was going to happen.
“Let the woman go. It will go better for you if you do that willingly,” the man said, and even in the leashed panic and fear, something about his voice made Laurel narrow her eyes. She was thinking a dozen things at once, trying to work every angle, but still there was this man who seemed familiar...
Amir sneered.
“Better for you to shoot me, better for you—” he started to say, and then there was a sound that made Laurel think of the Civil War reenactment cannons that she had heard go off once. It wasn't a crack, like the gunshots she had heard at a distance. Instead it was a boom, and it was a noise that sucked all of the air out of the room, momentarily deafening her.
For a brief moment, the world froze, and then when it started again, all was frenzy. Amir bellowed with pain, dropping his gun as his hand went up to clasp his shoulder. Bright red blood flowed between his fingers, and then the men were mobbing him.
Released, Laurel reeled back, hitting the wall behind her hard enough that she thought she would be bruised there the next day. She only had a moment to think that, however, because a man was taking her arm and dragging her away from the shouting Amir. Somehow, she had managed to grab her notebook in the middle of all of the mayhem, and she stuffed it into her jacket hurriedly.
“Let me go,” she demanded. “I am an American journalist, and I was conducting an interview with—”
“You are coming with me right now, no matter who you are,” the man said. “Chief's orders.”
“Well, I am certainly going to have a word with your chief,” she growled, and she wondered if he snorted at her.
The man pulled her across the street to a feed store where a wide-eyed family huddled near the back. Despite what had gone on, the soldier seemed entirely at ease, conferring with the strike team across the way occasionally through his earpiece.
“I am an American journalist, and you have no right to detain me,” she tried again, and the man removed his face mask to glare at her.
“I don't care,” he said with a shrug. “You are not going anywhere until the chief okays it. You can wait like the rest of us.”
She thought about fighting, but Laurel also knew when she needed to conserve her energy and save the information that she had managed to get. She couldn't lose her head, or she could lose everything she had worked so hard to gain.
With ill-grace, she leaned against the counter, crossing her arms over her chest to let the soldier know that she was in no way intimated. Her medium height wouldn't impress much of anyone, however, and her wavy chestnut hair, though it had been stuffed into a bun earlier, was losing flyaway wisps at a rather alarming rate. In jeans, a slightly grubby white button-down and a man's tweed jacket, she looked more like she was on her way to a library shift rather than someone who was questioning a possible terrorist, but Laurel supposed she would have to do the best that she could with what she had.
They waited for what seemed like hours, but in truth could not have been more than forty minutes or so. Finally, the soldier who had been watching her snapped to attention at something he heard on his earpiece. Just a few minutes later, the door to the feed shop swung open, and the man in charge of the raid—she realized it was the same one who had shot Amir—walked in.
In the enclosed space of the feed store, the man looked even larger, and she quickly took in the details. The uniform and rank bars marked him as a major in the Shajae military, and some of the more esoteric markings she didn't recognize at all. Laurel realized almost immediately that this was likely the highest-ranking officer on the operation, and she drew herself up to her full height.
The best defense is a good offense, someone very important to her had once said.
Laurel opened her mouth to start demanding her rights as a member of the press, but then the man turned to face her. This was the first time she had seen him without his protective headgear, and he was almost astonishingly handsome. He was as big as he had appeared in the cafe, but now she could also see that his features were strong but sensual, with deep-set black eyes that were as fierce as a desert hawk's.
The fact that he was so good-looking would have given her pause, but it would not have rendered her speechless the way he did now. No, she had dealt with men of all ranks and attitudes during her career. Laurel found that the best way to go about things was to be completely unimpressed by them unless she wanted something from them, but right now, she was not impressed. She was simply staggered.
For his own part, Bassam al Ganim, the lord sheikh of Shajae, scowled at her before coming to stand close. When he spoke, his voice was quiet enough that no one else could hear them.
“I was very much afraid that it was you, Laurel Garibaldi,” he growled, and she knew that things had just gotten a great deal more complicated.