Athena Force 12: Checkmate (13 page)

She used the words quite deliberately—and she saw in White’s eyes a flicker of smug reaction.

Oh God. Couldn’t it have just been my overactive imagination?

A wave of queasiness washed over her.

No, no, NO.

But White didn’t notice. He squinted at her, far too thoughtfully critical for her tastes. “Who is she, Tafiq?”

“She had no identification,” Ashurbeyli said, watching White more carefully than he did Selena. Good. Maybe he’d see that she’d actually made White uneasy.
As much as he hid it, she made him uneasy.
Ashurbeyli shrugged, the most insouciant of gestures. “We have not cared enough to find out. It matters only that she no longer interferes.”

“Oh, I think it matters more than that.” White narrowed his eyes at her. No dummy, he. He couldn’t afford to have her continue what she’d started, filling Ashurbeyli’s ears with the truth. “If you prefer to keep her as a pet, then ask the others. Someone here must know her.”

Yes. But he wouldn’t talk.

“Or take one of those sniveling kids and carve off a few inches of skin. She’ll tell us. It’s not that hard, if you really want to know.”

Her stomach did a lazy flip-flop at the thought. She wasn’t here to risk the lives of the people she’d stayed to save. Ashurbeyli cocked his head slightly; he’d read that answer on her face.

“Would you care to save us the trouble?” he asked.
“Athena?”

“Of course.” She didn’t hide her irritation. “Because it’s really not
worth
that kind of trouble. My name is Selena Shaw Jones. I work at the U.S. Embassy. If I were of any real importance, you’d have known who I was from the start, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps,” Ashurbeyli murmured. “Perhaps not. It is, of course, a pleasure to have a name for you. Selena.”

But she didn’t like the thoughtful speculation in his eye. Or that barely perceptible nod, as though he’d made a decision. A reluctant decision…and not one that was likely to bode well for her. Best to take his mind off it. She turned the conversation around. “And did you get what you came for?”

He affected surprise, but she thought she saw a smile. Appreciation. As though beneath the surface, he enjoyed their sparring—perhaps even sought it out. “My English fails me. I can’t imagine what you mean to say.”

Selena’s mouth quirked in skeptical reaction. “Mmm,” she said, making plain her disbelief. But she didn’t argue it; she gestured from herself to White and said, “This. Between us. Me pushing his buttons, exposing his lies for you.”

White’s heavy brows drew together; those formidable frown lines gathered on his forehead. But Ashurbeyli waved him off. “Please, Jonas, do not concern yourself. Do you think I can’t tell she’s trying to disturb our alliance?” He turned his near-black gaze on Selena and added in Berzhaani, “You only help me. Such suspicions have no impact on this moment, but I will see to them afterward.”

White’s scowl only grew deeper.
“Tafiq.”

Ashurbeyli turned to him with ease. “It is of no matter, Jonas. A crudity unsuited to your language.”

“Loosely translated, it means ‘don’t bend over to get the soap,’” Selena told him, smiling serenely at White’s narrow-eyed reaction.

“Ah,” Ashurbeyli dug into his pocket, a pretense of sudden memory. “There was another reason I came.” He pulled out his hand and extended it in her direction, closing the space between them until it entered that realm of
intimate
with which he seemed so comfortable. When he uncurled his fingers, he revealed a dull gold ring in the center of his palm. A wedding ring? “For you,” he said. “Because I chose him on your behalf.”

Atif’s wedding ring.

A
tif’s wedding ring.

She didn’t know why it had such a sudden, profound effect. He had been a traitor—twice a traitor, even as he’d hidden Selena’s captured terrorist cache.

And just a man, trying to survive. Not deserving to face terrorists, not at the back of the kitchen, not on the capitol steps.

Selena’s stomach flipped again, a slow, lazy roll. The blood drained from her face, leaving it tingly. Leaving it as suddenly green as she felt.

“I need—” she said, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

Ashurbeyli, stranger and terrorist, understood immediately. It mattered not that he reacted to keep this room clean—for some of his men were forced to pray here so the hostages weren’t left unattended in the next room, and her illness would defile it. It mattered not that the apparent kindness had nothing to do with Selena’s comfort at all. All that mattered was that he reacted in the first place. Even as Selena bent double, clamping down on a gag, Ashurbeyli swiftly produced the key to her cuffs, released her from the chair, and gestured at the door. She didn’t know if he meant for her to go all the way to the bathroom or simply as far as the hallway. She didn’t care. He’d stop her if she went too far.

She staggered out toward the hallway, hesitated on another gag right beside the pile of phones—and then let herself fall so she could scoop one up, her mind caught in a surreal place of lightning thought and total disconnect from her roiling stomach. She didn’t know if she’d been seen and she didn’t wait to find out, not with bile eating at the back of her throat. She flung herself down the hall the short distance to the bathroom. The main facilities for the ballroom, its anteroom surrounded her with equal opulence. She barely saw it; barely heard the Kemenis who followed her as far as that anteroom while she went through the second swinging door to the bathroom itself.

But by then she found the spell passing. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, waiting. Only the faintest unease from her stomach remained, giving her no clue as to the origin.

Except the obvious. She’d fought, she’d killed, she’d been captured, she’d spent many tense hours fearing for her safety—and possibly her child’s—and preparing for an assault she considered inevitable. The ring was a final insult, a reminder of Atif’s death and Ashurbeyli’s all-too-casual attitude about it. Such evoked revulsion would make anyone ill, pregnant or not.

From outside the door came a brief spate of conversation, Berzhaani too muffled for her to catch. Standing in the stall door, eyes darting around the room, Selena responded to sudden impulse. She produced a truly outstanding series of visceral noises, flushing the toilet even as she ran out of the stall to examine the room—prowling under the enclosed sink counters, running her hands over everything she found. Hunting for sharp or pointy or anything else that inspired her imagination. As her eye fell on the demure tampon dispenser, the toilet ceased its noise and she went back for another round of Oscar-worthy retching, her heart pounding just as fast as if she’d actually ended up sick.

Because she thought she’d seen…

She flushed the toilet and went straight to the tampon dispenser, her fingers scrabbling at the bottom flap—the thin aluminum that kept people from reaching up inside to grab the product, yet flipped aside so the purchases could descend. It was askew, all right. Crooked and damaged, as though someone
had
tried to reach up in there. Someone caught unaware at a fancy dinner, and without the proper Berzhaani coin…Selena could well imagine it.

But she tugged to no avail. Desperate, watching the door, she wiggled the flap back and forth, felt the weakness, felt her injured arm fail her—and knew she could never rip it loose by hand.
Nice, thin aluminum…probably jagged at that.
She ran back to the stall and flushed again, engaging in a quick tug-of-war when the loose handcuff tangled with the toilet handle.

Ah.

Back to the dispenser, she scrabbled at it, hunting a handhold and gouging her fingers, but finally getting enough purchase so she could cram the end of the open cuff into the small space she’d created between flap and body of the dispenser. She wiggled the cuff fiercely, working it toward the secure end of the flap, and—

“Are you done?” A harsh demand, not Ashurbeyli—though she thought she heard him in the background.

“Please,” she said, and keeping her voice weak and breathless came without any effort at all. “Please, give me a few more minutes.” She couldn’t believe they’d left her alone this long. After all she’d done to them, they still couldn’t take a woman as a serious threat?

Don’t look a gift horse, eh?

“Hurry!” the man demanded.

She thought it was his pride speaking. Not great duty, lurking outside the bathroom door. Worse if he had to come in. “Please,” she said, adding a tremulous note to her voice. And then, “Oh, no, I—” and back to the retching noises it was, only this time she couldn’t reach the toilet for the convincing sound of flushing. She stretched out a leg and reached the closest sink, batting the faucet on with her pointed foot. And never, during all of it, hesitating in her efforts with the handcuff-turned-prybar.

Quite suddenly, the metal flap came loose. Selena grunted with surprise, almost losing her balance, and barely took the time to examine her prize. Eight inches long, two inches wide, and a satisfactory edge of partly sheared metal—and now it had to be hidden.

She yanked up her shirttails with one hand, flipped the cell phone open with the other, and headed for the toilet stall to once again flush the toilet. Even then she left the water running, and went to spit in the sink a few times. She knew Cole’s number so well she barely had to look to dial it, and then tucked the phone under her chin—not an easy task with today’s slick little phones and her arm crying protest over all the activity—as she went to work securing the strip of metal at her waistband, tucked between her turtleneck and the borrowed shirt.

Above the running water and the rustle of material and her own quick breathing, Selena could barely hear the ring of Cole’s cell. But ring it did, and by God he picked it up. His greeting came across as wary—he’d seen the caller ID. But Selena rushed right in. “Cole! It’s me.” What to say, as fast as possible, the most crucial information?

“Selena! Are you—”

“No!” she said, giving him no more than that, checking herself in the mirror for signs of the hard-won tool. A tampon tool. It would scandalize Ashurbeyli even to think about it. “Listen! Check what you can see of the building, I think they’re going to—”

The bathroom door slammed open. Not the guard, but Ashurbeyli, suspicion on his face turning to fury. He slammed her against the edge of the sink; she felt the metal strip slice her skin
but oh, please, not too deep
and the phone went spinning away over the tile. Ashurbeyli backhanded her hard enough to bounce her off the sink, hard enough to send her sprawling after the phone, her arm in agony and her vision a swirl of image and darkness. She sprang back to her feet in an instinctive, animalistic survival reaction right down to the snarl in her throat—a snarl that died as she heard the unmistakable clatter of rifles coming to bear, shoulder sling hardware clinking against metal, safeties going off—

Selena froze. She checked herself and she froze, only slowly taking in the full view of three Kemenis in the ladies’ room, ready to shoot her down. In the center spot stood Ashurbeyli, his face a study in tight fury—and, she realized with astonishment, betrayal. He hadn’t expected that she’d try to pull anything over on him, not in the one moment of compassion he’d offered her—offered
anyone
—since this started. She felt an absurd impulse to apologize, but instead she pressed careful fingers to her heavy, burning cheek—the other one this time—and gestured at the other two. “Hey,” she said, hoping against hope that the warm blood seeping against her side didn’t soak through the shirt or her waistband. “Blame
them.
The gagging was real, but they still should have seen me grab that phone.”

Astonishingly, he did not have her shot on the spot. More astonishingly, he actually nodded, taking a visible breath to regain his control. “They will regret that they didn’t.”

I might live past this moment after all.

Or not, for anger still tightened his features. He gestured at the phone. “And who, may I ask?”

Ah, back to being civilized. Or at least a veneer thereof. “Same as last time. My husband.”

“Such devotion.” His words came mockingly. He spoke sharply to one of the other men, who retrieved the phone from the stall in which it had come to rest. Selena gave a heartfelt prayer that it would be broken, but from the look on his face, it was not. From the look on his face, it worked perfectly fine as he instructed it to redial the last call.

Cole’s relief upon answering came audibly enough that Ashurbeyli moved the phone away from his ear in reaction. “Selena!”

“No.” Ashurbeyli smiled tightly, his eyes holding Selena’s gaze as she started to tremble in reaction—to the danger, to the pain. Her arm throbbed so hard she thought she’d be better off if it exploded; at this rate, blood clots from deep bruising were as much a danger as the rifles still pointed her way. She tried to hide her puzzlement—what the hell was Ashurbeyli up to?

In another moment, as he moved closer to her and tipped the phone so she might hear, his face so near hers as to once again seem intimate, she understood.
Control.
He was regaining the control she’d lost, and Cole would pay the emotional price. She already heard it in his voice—the strain in his words, the great effort it took to keep his voice calm. “Who is this?”

“Exactly who you’re afraid it is.” Ashurbeyli reached over to smooth Selena’s crooked collar; he ran a finger—oh so gentle—over her bruised cheek, along the line of dried blood left over from her initial capture.

“What can I do for you?” Desperately trying to keep it impersonal, to hide that he was her husband. Selena listened to his struggle with a sudden awe at how much this man loved her. Whatever he’d done in D.C., he loved her. She tried to turn her face away from Ashurbeyli, to hide the sudden sting of tears.

Firmly, he took her chin and restored her former position, inches away. He couldn’t miss the shine of her eye; he certainly wouldn’t miss that sudden emotional tremble in her chin. She just damn well hoped he somehow missed her complete resolve to live through this, to destroy the Kemenis and their hopes of a takeover in Berzhaan. To see Cole again and figure out what had happened…to fix whatever had gone wrong. Somehow.

Whatever he saw, he smiled again. Just for her. “If you want to see your lovely wife again, you can accomplish an immediate capitulation to my demands.” But it wasn’t why he’d called. Not really.

“I’m not in a position to do that,” Cole said. There was a spate of rustling; Selena thought Ashurbeyli wasn’t the only one who had an audience listening in. “But I’d be glad to pass that word along.”

“You do that.” Ashurbeyli paused, as much for drama as anything else. “But don’t worry overmuch about it. We both know Berzhaan’s ministers are too blind to do what’s best for their country, and the interfering Western world is too cowardly to stand behind the support it once gave us—or even to interfere with us now.”

“Then—” Cole broke off his own words, puzzled.

“I called because I wanted to talk to the man who commands such devotion from such a fierce warrior as your wife. Quite remarkable, isn’t she? She could almost be one of us.” Selena jerked in reaction; he raised an eyebrow of warning. “I wondered if you could possibly deserve such a woman. Where are you now? What do you do with yourself? Are you as strong as she is? Those are the questions that run through my mind as I watch her this moment, under gunpoint at the hands of my men. But most of all I wanted to make sure you know that you no longer have her. I do.”

Selena barely heard Cole’s tight whisper, coming through in a moment of ironic perfect cell phone clarity. “You
bastard.
” But she heard the pain of the words, and she made a sudden snatch for the phone.

Ashurbeyli expected it, of course. He shoved her back, gave an imperious gesture. The Kemenis swooped in and grabbed her up, snatching her arm so roughly she cried out at the explosion of agony, her knees giving way, her vision gone black as her world narrowed down to that single point of pain. Ashurbeyli said something she couldn’t make out, a satisfied sound, and snapped the cell phone shut.

When they dragged her away, she quite gratefully passed out.

“Selena?
Selena!
” Cole’s fingers clenched around his phone, his mind so full of tumult he couldn’t think, could barely breathe. He fought the hands which tried to take the phone away even as her pained cry echoed in his mind, over and over and—

“Cole!” An unfamiliar voice, but one full of understanding along with the command. Diego Morel. “You’ll break it, man—we need to get that number!”

Numbly, Cole tried to release the device; by then his fingers were cramped into place. The hand in question gently removed them as Josie Lockworth said, “Besides, she might try to call again. That’s the only contact number she’s got.”

True.
He blinked, floundering for coherent thought, and heard only Selena’s cry.
Get it together. You can’t help her like this.

Already, the others were thinking ahead. “Did she say anything the first time? Anything we can use? The damn building’s so stout we can’t get reliable infrared…even the SEALs are blind right now.”

Which he knew. It was just a reminder, a way to pull him back to sensibility. He blinked, looked around…reoriented himself to the interior of the Quonset hut where Tory had dropped him off, staying only for quick introductions before heading back out to do her job. Cold, stark…one end of it filled with bunks, a single bathroom sans shower the only permanent structure other than the shabby office beside it. Beside that, a big chunk of Quonset wall was obscured by a ground control system set within a 30-foot trailer—a bank of machinery with pilot and sensor operator stations that might have been taken for an early
Star Trek
set. From there, Air Force Captain Josie Lockworth and independent contractor Diego Morel flew Josie’s newly modified Predator UAV, an unmanned surveillance craft with big bite in the form of Hellfire missiles.