Burn (Story of CI #3) (25 page)

“They’ve come back!” he yelled. Amadou skidded to a stop in front of the group outside the hospital, panting heavily. Sweat streamed past his golden glasses and ran down his neck. “The troops! AQIM. They’ve moved back into position. There are more than ever, maybe three times as many! And they’ve surrounded the city!”

This was not good news at all.

“Damn it!” Alejo smashed a fist into the side of the mud building.

She so wanted to remain calm for Lalo, but Cail felt fear flash across her gut, bubbling and acid. Lalo was staring right through Amadou, out across the city to the desert where the AQIM troops were setting up camp three times stronger than when they had left.

Amadou had said the city was surrounded.

If Alejo wanted to go save Wara, it was too late.

Rupert couldn’t move Lalo out of the city.

“They know their weapon’s here,” Lalo said hollowly, eyes far, far away. “They’re coming for me.”

LÁZARO MADE HER GET INTO THE CAR way too early. The sun had barely come up when he banged on the door of the bedroom and told Wara to get dressed. He was way too bright and cheerful for this time of the morning.

Wara literally rolled out of bed onto the rug and pulled on the red Converse tennis shoes. She was still wearing the yoga pants and jade green shirt from last night. She yanked the hood over her hair and grabbed onto the bedpost to make it to standing.

When Wara creaked open the door and faced Lázaro, she felt that her eyes must be bloodshot and about a thousand years old.

He marched her out to an olive-green Land Cruiser in the garden that said Sunny Sahara Tours and featured a big orange sand dune that shone in the sun like a wedge of cheddar. A plump tan camel was cresting the dune, grinning with bug eyes like the Cheshire cat.

“Nice cover,” she croaked. “A tour agency.” She didn’t even bother clearing her throat. Lázaro raised an eyebrow at her and set a big wicker picnic basket in between the two front seats of the vehicle that supposedly belonged to a tour agency.

“Lots of tour agencies driving around the desert,” he said. “But I don’t really need a cover. AQIM knows who I am. But just in case…if we are attacked out there, I have a weapon for you, locked in a safe in the back. If I have to give it to you, you’d better use it to help me. You’re a smart girl, so you know you’re a thousand times better off with me than with them.”

He was right. For all the things Lázaro was, being captured by Al-Qaeda was a far worse option. And that was saying a lot.

Numbly, Wara climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door, crossed her arms in front of her chest. No seat belts out here in the Sahara.

It would totally be ok if they crashed and rolled down one of those big orange sand dunes and put her out of her misery.

Her heart was aching so much she could hardly stand it.

Lázaro had already secured all the doors in his high-tech mansion and he locked the heavy garage door behind them with a remote as they pulled out onto the street. Wara thought about making a break for it here, because it seemed like there were shops nearby on this quiet side street, somewhere she could try to call and warn the CI team about the kids and the bomb already in the hospital. But what was to stop Lázaro from blowing the place up before she got to the phone?

It had been a long night, and she was feeling really, really tired.

Again, she deserved to be here.

There had to be some way to fix this. Didn’t there?

She just had to keep letting things play out.

Everything was going so well already.

She didn’t say anything to Lázaro for the first two hours. He put on some kind of forties jazz music and munched on stuff from his picnic basket. When he told her to go ahead and eat, she reluctantly dug through the food stash and ate a handful of prunes, mostly out of boredom.

Lázaro said it was a twenty-four hour drive to Timbuktu.

Worst road trip ever.

“I did ask Tsarnev to give us a plane,” Lázaro said at about hour three. “It would have been a bit more convenient, you know, to fly instead of do this overland.” Wara shifted her eyes over to him. Around them, a lady was crooning “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

“I would have voted for that,” she finally said. “Wouldn’t we just get shot down, though?”

Lázaro waved a hand in the air and scoffed. The sun had gotten bright and he’d slid on coppery aviator sunglasses. Today Lázaro was wearing a long sleeve black dress shirt and coffee-colored pin stripe pants. Black, military-looking hiking boots. The shirt was untucked and roomy, surely hiding that nasty-looking Skorpion.

“We wouldn’t get shot down,” Lázaro said. “Again, I have special protection. From Tsarnev. He thinks that I need to get back to Timbuktu to work for him…and to find you.” Lázaro smirked. He must be very proud of himself to be sticking it to the boss like this.

If he did decide to play Tsarnev.

Maybe he would end up just killing the kids and Wara, “finishing the jobs” exactly like the boss wanted.

“Yet here we are,” Wara sighed. “Listening to crappy music and driving through the desert instead of flying. You must not be on Tsarnev’s favorite employee list.”

That put a little bit of a damper on Lázaro’s mood. “No planes were available,” he said sulkily. “They were just all in use. That’s all.”

Wara propped her Converse tennis up on the dashboard. This vehicle seemed to have air-conditioning, because the temperature was actually pretty nice in here. “I get it,” she told him, “why you want to do what
you
want, not have to take orders from someone else all the time. It makes sense. It must be…horrible, to not remember your past.” She stopped and swallowed hard. Well, maybe there were some memories that were better to lose. “I think you should do it. Just don’t take orders from Tsarnev anymore. Why are you even going back to Timbuktu? You could just disappear. Live anywhere you want! Start over.”

Lázaro had an arm stretched out onto the steering wheel and he was staring at the desert through the shades. For a while she thought he was annoyed and was just ignoring her.

“Well,” he finally said. “Isn’t that a lovely idea. The problem is, dear, that I am in pain. Like I told you before, the only thing that helps the pain is what I get from Tsarnev, and that’s not exactly available in your local pharmacy. Even if it was, I couldn’t exactly afford it if I ‘start over’ as a cashier at Walmart. Al-Qaeda doesn’t look good on the resume.”

Wara felt very stupid.

Yeah, Lázaro, just start over. Be the good person I know you really want to be.

She was afraid to ask but had to. “So what’s the plan, then? You have no choice? Off me and the kids and show your boss the proof so you can keep getting the drugs?”

Shivers actually ran down Wara’s spine when Lázaro tilted his head towards her and peered at her with serious brown eyes over the top of his sunglasses. “No,” he said. He pushed the sunglasses up his nose and flashed her a white grin. “Something better, my dear. What we’re going back to Timbuktu for is freedom.”

Wara blinked at him. A bunch of grasshoppers started leaping around in front of the Land Cruiser and the windshield exploded in a mess of snowy white guts. Lázaro punched the wiper button and settled back into his seat, looking like the cat who’d caught a big, fat mouse.

“I’ve thought of a solution,” Lázaro grinned. “Something much less bloody than killing little Christian kids or my ex. No one will get hurt. At least, they won’t have to.” Lázaro cocked his head to one side and squinted at the windshield. The glass was milky with swirled insect remains. There wasn’t exactly a lot of traffic out here, though. Just gentle dunes of smooth sand, like caramel whipped cream forming waves in the mixing bowl.

“There’s something Tsarnev wants,” Lázaro said, “the reason he sent me to Timbuktu six weeks ago as Hannibal the security guard. The job was the perfect cover to pick up clues about the location of something valuable. Fixing the screw ups with you and the school were just to keep me busy. Prove my worth to Tsarnev, if you will. I didn’t take care of the kids until last week because I didn’t want to raise suspicion that would keep me from looking around for what Tsarnev wants.”

Wara blinked away the horror of the memory of Lázaro’s part in what happened to the school kids. He was talking about finding something worth a lot of money to Tsarnev, and that would be good. Right? Maybe the money would fix his drug problem.

And he could just disappear.

And leave everyone else alone.

“What is it?” Timbuktu was an ancient trade route. It could be anything. Ancient gold? One of the manuscripts.

Hopefully not drugs. Or arms.

“Not a what. A who, actually,” Lázaro grinned.

Wara felt herself start in her seat. “What?”

“Tsarnev suspected the target was in Timbuktu, but all the weeks I was there I couldn’t get any solid leads. Now you’ve confirmed that he is, indeed, there. And I know how to find him, thanks to you. If you want to come with me when I ‘start over’, maybe we can work something out. After all, you gave me the intel. And it seems we still have some chemistry.”

The disturbing references to chemistry just slipped around in Wara’s consciousness like a fish flopping around in a really tight net. She was still stuck on the fact that Lázaro just said he was looking for a person. And that Tsarnev was paying big bucks for this person.

And that she had helped Lázaro find him.

“You said some ‘thing.’ At first,” Wara managed.

Lázaro smiled. The vehicle hit an epic bump and Wara’s butt left the seat. She grabbed ahold of the dashboard and her tennis shoes clumped down to the floor.

“That’s because everyone else out there thinks they are looking for an object. A system,” Lázaro said. “But I know differently. And that’s why I will find what Tsarnev wants, and he will pay me. Money, drugs, whatever I want. I’ve already contacted Tsarnev that I’ll have his prize ready for pick-up in Timbuktu tomorrow at noon, thanks to you, dear. I’ll negotiate the price a little, get some extra cash to put away. The thing is, Tsarnev will never suspect that I’ll take the money and never look back. He thinks he’s programmed me so well that I would never leave him. He knows he took my memory and he’ll never guess I’ve found a way to get it back, that I have you to help me. This is how I’ll start over.”

Lázaro was grinning at the sand and he looked a little feverish. Wara felt a chill spread across her back like a pair of icy wings. “Who are you selling to Tsarnev?”

“Oh you wouldn’t tell me his name.” Lázaro puckered his lips. “But I’m honestly shocked you gave me as much intel as you did in so little time. I expected to have to be holed up with you in that house for days. What you did tell me is that your friend Cail Lamontagne, that skinny blond who showed up with you a few days ago, is in love with a man who can find anyone. Anywhere. A psychic who can do remote viewing and has been keeping it secret for years because there are bad guys after him. She won’t admit she’s in love with him, but she was so happy she finally got to go to Timbuktu to be with her dearest love.” He was mimicking the voice of some lovesick girl. “He’s there with her, in Timbuktu right now. I saw some things when I was Hannibal, and I’ll keep checking my security feed from the mission house. It won’t be hard to figure out who the psychic is.”

“Wh-what?” Wara was beyond horrified. She’d said that thing about her friends finding her out of fear. How was she supposed to know Lázaro would have any idea what she was talking about? And drug her to get more information?

This was horrible. He had actually been in Timbuktu all along, looking for Lalo. Searching for him, to sell so Al-Qaeda could use what Lalo could do.

And Wara had told Lázaro all he wanted to know.

“How did you…” Her voice was shaking. A lot. “How did anyone know that he was in Timbuktu?” she asked. Cail hadn’t told Wara a lot about Lalo, just what he could do and that it was a big secret because many people would want to take advantage of power like that. It had seemed pretty far out at first, but Wara found out on the internet that the US government actually spent millions on programs to develop remote viewing skills, hoping to use it in the military. There were even tons of websites and schools where the average person could supposedly train to remote view. That meant you could see things that were hidden from your view, often locations far away. Even other planets, remote viewers claimed.

“I told you before that Tsarnev loves all this psychic stuff,” Lázaro said. “He has other people who work with him, other remote viewers. They’re probably only average, at best. Most remote viewers don’t see things with much detail at all, but of course Cail’s boyfriend is different. One of Tsarnev’s remote viewers picked up the trail of the powerful psychic Tsarnev wanted in the Timbuktu region of Mali. Like I said, they weren’t that good, and that’s as close as they got. So Tsarnev sent me to find the guy with more conventional means.”

Wara felt herself blinking, fast. “And how did Tsarnev even know about this person?”

“Ah. I’ll tell you a story. Tsarnev didn’t just pick up his nutty interest in anything psychic. His uncle was a man who ran the Russian military’s psychic program for years. Igor Markov. Back in 1995, this Markov paid thirty million bucks for a kid who was the best remote viewer the world has ever seen. They said he could find any target, any place, anyone.”

Lalo. “He was a kid?”

“He was thirteen. I know this because after old Markov kicked the bucket, nephew Tsarnev inherited his top-secret files. They weren’t very nice to the poor kid.” Lázaro stabbed Wara with his eyes over the top of his shades. “Of course, now a days I’m sure he’s going by a different name. Back then they called him Daniel. After three years, Daniel ran away. Surprisingly. They thought he would never run because, according to the files, the Russians had insurance, something that would guarantee Daniel would always help them out willingly.”

Wara had seen a little of what Lalo’s skin looked like under his shirt. It made her want to puke thinking of Lalo as a kid, in the hands of the Russian military as an intelligence weapon.

Of course they had “insurance.” She did not want to imagine what they had done to him.