Burn (Story of CI #3) (2 page)

Fez, Morocco

CAIL LAMONTAGNE HATED TO ADMIT IT, but she really had to pee.

According to her cell phone, it was three in the morning, and if she were in her room at CI headquarters the situation would be no big deal. She could just shuffle barefoot into one of the bathrooms at Rupert's big house in the mountains and do her business, then drop back into her cozy bed and pull up the comforter.

Sadly for her, Cail wasn't at headquarters yet. The room around her glowed pitch black, heavy with the aroma of cumin and cold grease from the bazaar food stalls just outside the barred window. At this hour, the clatter of dishes and Arabic chatter had pretty much died down, but decrepit cars still rattled by, honking their way down the narrow alleyways behind this hostel in the middle of the Fez market.

Yep, they were in Morocco.

At a seedy hostel.

Cail groaned as the spider webs cleared and she remembered she and Wara had arrived yesterday and were staying here instead of some place clean with a Jacuzzi because a guy was after Wara and had threatened to kill her.

This rather nasty hostel didn’t ask for copies of ID from foreigners. It also didn't provide towels or have private bathrooms.

Cail had been at CI headquarters when she got the call. She and Wara had a few weeks off after finishing their last assignment in Rabat, information gathering about those poor activists. Wara had gone to see her family in Montana. Cail just went back to headquarters, which had pretty much been her home for years.

When Rupert heard what Lázaro Marquez tried to do to Wara, he’d sent Cail over to Montana right away, so Wara wouldn’t have to travel alone with that bastard after her. Thankfully, after a couple days’ rest and a check up with a CI doctor over Skype, Wara seemed to be feeling peachy.

Cail squeezed her eyes shut tightly in the darkness and shifted positions on the rickety cot. She pulled the scratchy wool blanket up to her chin, really hoping she could just forget about the bathroom and drift back to sleep.

It really wasn’t very comfy here, though. At nearly six feet tall, Cail couldn’t even begin to stretch her long legs out in this little bed. Her toes kept grazing the freezing metal bed frame, shocking her even though her socks.

Ok. This wasn't going to work.

Heaving a huge sigh, Cail untangled her legs from the covers, threw a black and white striped hoodie on over her tank top and stuffed her feet into hiking boots on the floor. Wara's black sparkly flip flops were dwarfed next to Cail's size eleven shoes. Right now, Wara was curled up in their room's other single bed, sleeping in an orange tie-dyed tank top and sweat pants.

Tomorrow Rupert would pick them up here in Fez and take them out to headquarters, where they could keep Wara safe until they took care of this psycho after her. For the past four months, Cail and Wara had worked together on Wara's first assignment with CI overseas, and that kind of thing tended to bond two people together. Even though Wara was five years younger than Cail's thirty-four, they got along really well.

Cail scowled into the darkness as she thought about how Marquez had interrogated Wara in the middle of the night and then left her for dead. She flipped open her cell to shed a little light across their room

Cail really wished she had a weapon here. Of course she hadn't been able to travel with one, since airport security wasn't a fan of letting people like her, who supposedly worked with an NGO, pack guns in their luggage. Taking a pistol with her to the bathroom down the hall would probably be overkill, even though the hallway was sure to be dark as sin. Cail did decide to bring along her Swiss army knife, in case the freak who had tracked Wara made an appearance, though.

Just in case.

The guy had hunted Wara down and injected her with poison he made himself, for heaven's sake. Lázaro Marquez and Wara had dated years back, but he didn’t even remember her. Something bad had happened to seriously derange this guy, and that made Cail nervous.

She shook off a chill and crossed the room carefully in the dark. Even though her cell could light the way, there was no point in taking it and risking getting mugged. Or having the phone fall down into the recesses of the squatty potty.

The key to Cail’s room was half the length of her hand, some dusky ancient metal, smooth under her fingers. She locked the door carefully and tiptoed down the hall, fighting the creeps. Her boots actually squished as they navigated the grimy tiles. The faintest bit of lavender moonlight filtered into the hall through a few open windows high up near the ceiling. Several men were sprawled on the unbelievably dirty floor, wrapped up in their scratchy wool djellaba robes with pointy hoods, snoring away.

There must have been a shortage of rooms tonight at this lovely establishment.

Cail again wished for her pistol.

One good thing, though, was that all this dirtiness and grime was not too much for her to handle. Yes, Cail had obsessive compulsive disorder, diagnosed when she was arrived at the ripe old age of twenty. But dirt and germs weren’t what she obsessed about, so for tonight, Cail would probably be doing just fine.

This totally wasn't the worst place she had stayed at. She just had to stay alert. But when you were jet-lagged at three a.m., staying alert was always challenging.

Cail reached the cave-like entryway to the bathrooms, which she and Wara had visited earlier. She shuddered and creaked open the wooden door to one of the stalls, a squatty potty affair coated in grime. She did what she had come for quickly and scurried back towards her room as fast as her long legs could take her.

Safely inside her room again, Cail made sure to tiptoe over to her bed. She could barely make out Wara’s shadowy figure on the bed, still sleeping like a baby. It would stink if Wara woke up only to find she also had to make a middle-of-the-night trip to the facilities.

Cail grinned and kicked off her boots. She slipped out of her hoodie and hung it on the bedpost, then climbed back into bed in her purple tank top and yoga pants.

Her shoulder collided with a warm body.

Cail shrieked, then clamped her jaw shut to cut off the sound. She was out of the bed in a second, already grabbing her knife from her pocket and flipping it open, ready to fight.

Was it him?

Marquez had found them here, at the hostel in Morocco.

A flurry of covers split the darkness while Cail went for the light switch near the doorway. From what she knew, this guy was good, and if she was going to have a chance at taking him down she needed to see. Moving towards the light switch also put her into position to defend Wara.

As Cail slapped at the light, she realized that Wara hadn't been moving when she entered the room. Would the intruder just be waiting in Cail's bed, without first having done something to Wara?

Cail felt her knees start to shake.

The dirty bulb overhead flashed three times like a strobe light, trying to get up the juice to flood their room with light. Cail saw a long guy but he wasn't coming towards her with a weapon. He was huddled against the wall on the bed, blue eyes wide with shock, mouth hanging open. He wasn't scarred like Lázaro Marquez would have been. This guy's skin was very light and his espresso hair was cropped short. He had a trendy little goatee and was wearing bright green Abercrombie sweat pants and a black long-sleeved shirt.

He looked horrified.

Cail's world stopped.

She had realized by now that the large bump on the bed where Wara should have been was just an orange hiking backpack. None of her stuff was here. She couldn't stop blinking from the sudden onrush of light and the awful realization that this place where she was standing, pointing a knife at the guy in the bed that was supposed to be hers, was not her room.

She was in the wrong room.

And she was here with Jonah.

“You can have all my money,” Jonah was babbling. "Just take it. That little dresser thing there. Top drawer. Open it and take it all. I swear everything's in there." Jonah Jones was still gawking at her from the unmade bed, one leg propped up into the air and his long fingers wrapped nervously around it. "Just please," he said, "if you could leave me the credit cards? We are all the way in Morocco, after all, and it would really suck to be stranded over here."

Cail felt the heat rush up her legs like a volcano, all the way from the frozen concrete floor to her face. The strands of her short blonde hair sizzled against her flaming cheeks.

Had she been knifed in the hall by one of those guys in the pointy hoods? Because this must be hell.

The strength left Cail's knees and she wobbled a shaky step forward, then stumbled, sending the point of her knife another inch closer to Jonah.

Jonah gasped and defensively yanked the covers up to his chin. "Ok, take the credit cards," he said. "It's fine. I'll make do."

This might be hell, but Cail was slowly realizing that this was a hell that was very real. She felt the oxygen working its way back into her brain like sludge. If she tried really hard, she would be able to breathe again.

Fighting the urge to collapse on the floor and puke her guts out, Cail closed and opened her eyes slowly, then clicked the army knife closed, slid it back in her pocket.

And that's when he recognized her.

"Oh my gosh." Jonah's blue eyes popped even wider and he dropped the thick covers, reached slowly for glasses on the table by his bed. He placed the black trendy glasses on his nose, still gawking. "Cail?"

Cail tried to open her mouth, heard her tongue make a sucking noise as it separated from the bone-dry roof of her mouth. She forced herself to swallow, to try to speak.

She was here.

This was really happening.

And she had to say something.

"I am so sorry," she said. Stupidest explanation ever. "I...I must have gone in the wrong room. I think mine is next door." She went for the key in her pocket, ignoring how the guy on the bed flinched.

Jonah still thought she was going to knife him.

Cail wanted to cry. After fourteen years, she ran into Jonah again. She barged into his room in the night and climbed into bed next to him and then pulled a knife on him.

She fought back the tears and examined the little number on her key. It was mostly rubbed away, but she remembered it said six. Or had it been eight?

Oh God, she had really gone into the wrong room.

"I…don't know how this key could even open the wrong door." Cail forced herself to meet Jonah's eyes with a little dignity. "I got messed up. Mine is supposed to be eight. This is six, huh?"

"Yeah." Jonah bobbed his head, still quite weirded out. "I…you're staying here? You’re Cail Lamontagne, right?"

Still lightheaded, Cail shoved the key back in the pocket of her yoga pants, realizing that Jonah still recognized her after so many years. An image shimmered through her mind of her and Jonah in the days when they used to be friends. Cail would have been wearing a roomy button-down blouse with a floor-length jean skirt and tennis shoes with socks. Her hair was down to her butt. There was a little gold cross necklace on a delicate chain, and Cail never went anywhere without it.

She had checked up on Jonah secretly over the years, through social networking places like Facebook. She knew it was probably stalking, but she had to know how badly she had messed him up. So she knew what Jonah looked like these days, and he hadn’t really changed that much. He had the goatee and the cooler glasses going on, along with an always-stylish wardrobe.

But now Jonah recognized
her,
standing here in Morocco, wearing a tank top and hot pink sweat pants. Her hair was spiky and short, she sported a very obvious rose tattoo on the back of her neck, and she was holding him up at knifepoint.

Well, maybe the knife was what clued him in.

Maybe he dreamed about her every night, and maybe this was what happened in his dreams. Maybe Jonah Jones' worst nightmares were about Cail.

The emotions of years ago threatened to crush her, but she couldn't let them. She was a different Cail now, and she was not going to let the past steal her dignity.

Again.

"Yeah, it's me," she said, and even allowed herself the smallest hint of a smile. A sad smile, but she threw it his way and crossed her arms across her chest, really wishing her tank top was a little more substantial. "I'm staying here for work. I am so sorry…I really just got mixed up with the room numbers. This is so weird."

Jonah relaxed his shoulders and scooted forward to the edge of his bed, finally seeming to realize he wasn't about to die.

"It is totally weird," he grinned. "Of all the coincidences! I'm here for work too." And then Jonah did something that cut across the past fourteen years, tied them up in a neat little package and hurled them out the window.

Jonah Jones stood up from the bed, grinned, and folded Cail into his arms for a hug. One of those loose, back-patting hugs that said, "Hey, good to see you!" Cail just hung there, slack with disbelief.

Jonah Jones was hugging her?

Jonah Jones was hugging her.

She was not going to cry. She leaned into his bony shoulder and swallowed compulsively. Cail was only a few inches shorter than Jonah's six foot two, and when he let her go she was looking right into his eyes behind those cool black glasses. He was smiling at her like some kind of long-lost friend and Cail's universe bucked and wrinkled in violent upheaval.