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

She remembered when they were seventeen, and Jonah showed up at church back in Nebraska with the braces that gave him that neat white smile. He was humiliated and didn't want to talk to anyone, but of course his parents made him come to church anyway. Cail had found him behind the church sulking and told him shyly that she thought he looked good with the braces. Standing in front of him now in the hostel, she saw again how his eyes had lit up as he grinned and said thanks, braces glinting in the sun.

"Listen," Grown-up, Cool Jonah was saying. "In a few days I have to leave Fez to head back to where I work. I’m just on a couple of vacation days. But it would be awesome to catch up."

"Oh.” Cail’s tongue did not want to cooperate in this effort at friendly conversation. “Well. I’m getting a new assignment in a few days, but the headquarters of my organization is close to here. In Ifrane.”

"You're a missionary?” His face told her that was what he expected.

"Uh, no," she drew out the word. What she wanted to say but couldn't:
I'm a really good sniper. I work undercover around the world, Jonah.

"I work with an NGO," she said instead. "Called CI. We’re teachers, volunteers, stuff like that. Our base is here in Morocco."

Jonah's eyes widened with surprise. "Oh, cool. Well I work with a company that digitalizes old manuscripts. It's a really good business. International groups pay big money for it. Listen, give me your cell number and let's see if we can get together before I have to head back to the city where I'm working."

Cail breathed deeply as Jonah punched her number into an expensive looking IPhone with a shiny blue case.

He looked really successful, the kind of guy who had a great life and made lots of money.

She should be thrilled that she hadn't scarred him for life. And that he had hugged her instead of knifing her back.

"Anyhow," Jonah continued as he placed his phone back onto the bedside table, "I'm also getting married. In a couple months. Maybe my family told you?"

The fact that Jonah thought Cail still talked with his family stunned her. "Uh, no. I didn't know. That's…great."

"Yeah, my fiancée's from Puerto Rico. She's a realtor in Orlando, and she's really hot." Jonah was grinning.

I'm sure she is.

"So, you'd better be careful," Jonah was continuing, "on your way back to your room. This place is a dump. I had a reservation at the Holiday Inn but they gave my room away. Dropped me off at this place instead. Can you believe it? Tomorrow I will definitely be complaining."

Cail stumbled back towards her room after saying goodnight to Jonah, hearing with disbelief his promise to call her before he headed out of the country for work.

She should be happy for him, a successful job and getting married to a gorgeous girl. He was doing well, enjoying life.

She buried herself under the covers and scrubbed at her wet eyes until morning.

When Cail cracked her eyes open to daylight, she found Wara propped up on a pillow reading a book on her Kindle, bare feet sticking out of the sheets. Cail felt like she might go crazy if she didn’t tell Wara what happened last night, but she just couldn’t. None of her present friends knew about Jonah, except Lalo and Rupert.

Was Jonah Jones still in the room next to hers? Or had he gotten up at first light to hightail it out of this place, shaking the dust off his feet and trying to forget the nightmare of Cail Lamontagne?

Cail’s mouth felt like sandpaper and she drained a bottle of water from her bedside table, then started to check messages on her phone. Anything to take her mind off last night. It was now 8:42. Rupert was going to pick them up at ten in his Land Cruiser and take them to headquarters, a short drive outside of Fez into the mountains. Cail signed into Facebook to see what stupid quotes and inane animal pictures people had been posting.

That is how desperate she was to forget Jonah.

There was an actual message in her inbox, and Cail clicked on it, squinting at the tiny screen. Her heart stalled as she saw it was from Hannah Grace Jones, who she hadn't been in contact with for ages and was definitely not one of her Facebook friends. The message wasn't very long.

Cail Chastity,

I talked with Jonah this morning. He said you are in Morocco. Are you following him? Stay away from my brother, you crazy witch. I will call whoever I have to call. Do you understand? Stay away from him.

And that was it.

She had already fought crying all night. Cail had no tears left.

But inside she was dying.

FEZ FLASHED BY OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, smoky and star-lit and tinted with silvery gray. Wara pressed her forehead against the backseat glass of Rupert's Land Cruiser, taking in the crowded streets. Men leaned against white-washed pillars from another age, wearing pointy-hooded djellaba robes and munching on skewers of barbequed meat.

This city was ancient. Cail's passenger-side window was open, and the night air that rushed past Wara's cheek was cool and soaked in spices. Cail was staring out her window, eyes vacant, white and gold baseball cap pulled down low over her face. It took a lot to upset Cail, but she had been in another world since the embarrassing thing that happened with her old friend in the hostel yesterday.

Wara had never known Cail to get so embarrassed over anything. Cail hadn’t even wanted to talk about it at all, but finally snapped out the bare-bones of the story.

Now Wara was really wondering who this Jonah guy was. But one look at Cail's wary eyes was enough warning to leave it alone, so Wara just stuffed her curiosity.

Wara had enough stressful things of her own to think about.

Lázaro tried to kill her.

He didn't remember who he was.

She closed her eyes slowly, trying to steady herself in the coolness of the glass windowpane. The Land Cruiser's tires slowed their whine as the vehicle turned out of the city and onto the smoother highway that led to the airport.

"My app says the flight's on time," Cail clipped from the front seat. Wara popped her eyes open. Cail had turned her ghostly stare from the window and was tapping at her phone. "He should have already landed. It’ll take him a while to get through customs, though. They always just have one or two people stamping passports for the whole freaking planeload of people arriving."

Wara slowly let out a breath and glanced down at her faded Rock and Republic jeans, hoping no one would notice how stinking nervous she was here in the backseat. She'd been way too jittery getting dressed, and really, really annoyed to realize that fact. She finally just threw on a black shirt dress with the jeans, and her favorite sandals with little white shells around the ankles. Fez at night was still hot and muggy, so she'd pulled her shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail, clipped a few beaded pins from a craft market in Rabat at the sides. Her hair was now back to her original color, espresso brown, and she had it cut with messy bangs on one side.

Before going to Rabat, she’d finally got laser eye surgery, and it was super cool to not have glasses anymore. She still had the gold star nose ring, though. Wara loved the nose ring, and it was probably gonna stay for a very long time.

They pulled into the airport parking lot, and Wara realized she was rubbing a chipped nail against her jeans, trying to smooth out the jagged edge somehow before getting to the airport.

This was ridiculous.

But it had been four months. Four whole months since she had seen him.

Alejo was here, probably sitting on the ground at the Fez airport right this moment. He came all the way from assignment in Mali to keep her safe from the crazy guy who wanted to kill her.

And Alejo wasn’t just some guy she really liked and thought was cute. He’d gone into one of the worst prisons in the world to save her last year in Iran. There was no way she could ever forget that.

Wara knit her hands together in her lap and made herself breathe. Rupert was tossing coins at the guy who collected tolls at the airport parking entrance. The clunky yellow barrier ground upward and Rupert accelerated through, jerked the vehicle to the right and halted in an empty parking space. Rupert turned to the backseat and gave Wara a knowing look that was just awkward.

Alejo and Wara worked for Rupert, and it was obvious that the two of them were really attracted to each other. Rupert was the kind of guy who was totally not ashamed to make annoying jokes about love and marriage, having those six babies together and living happily ever after. Wara had pretty much gotten used to it during the months she lived at headquarters and was in training to work with CI. Training had been awesome, because Alejo was there too, teaching her things like how to pick a lock and get out of handcuffs and jump out of a window a couple stories up without breaking anything.

She wasn't gonna deny that she had really, really liked their time together.

Before Alejo was sent to work in Timbuktu.

Before she and Cail had headed out to Rabat.

She’d felt so close to Alejo then, but now everything felt weird. Wara hadn't seen Alejo in so long, and the only reason he was now in the Fez airport was because Wara's ex-boyfriend had shown up out of the night like the Terminator and nearly killed her.

"Here," Cail snapped, scaring the crap out of Wara. Cail tossed a white rectangular package at Wara’s chest. "You can carry this."

Wara fumbled and caught what she realized was a dented pack of Starbucks dark roast. She and Cail had talked about bringing a welcome back present for Alejo, because they knew he and the guys hadn't been drinking coffee on assignment in Timbuktu. The whole area was full of Al-Qaeda fighters and no coffee had been getting in. Alejo really loved his coffee, strong and black.

"You bought this?" Wara blinked, feeling rather crappy that Cail had remembered to get the coffee and she hadn't. Cail would have had to visit that crowded warehouse on the outskirts of Fez to get this coffee, rifle through tattered boxes of imported foreign groceries you had to pay big bucks to buy.

"Yeah, I bought it," Cail said. "The guy has been through a lot.”

Wara scrambled out of the car and hurried after Rupert and Cail towards the squatty airport terminal. The smooth shells on her sandals pulled at her ankles and made a sucking noise as she trekked across the asphalt. Her fingers dug into the loamy pack of coffee.

The guy has been through a lot,
Cail said.

Wara hadn’t been able to get Alejo to tell her anything over the phone about the school burning down. But it must have been awful. Her shoulders sagged a bit as the electric doors whooshed open around Rupert, letting them into the lobby.

Of course Alejo was upset. He and his team were supposed to be guarding the Christian school from the Islamist extremists who wanted to hurt those kids. Alejo would feel responsible for every one of the children who were killed.

Suddenly, she just wanted to wrap her arms around him. She had wanted to be right next to Alejo for days, because the whole thing with Lázaro had freaked Wara out so badly all she wanted to do was feel him by her side. But now she wanted to see
him
, to know if
he
was alright.

Wara could not wait for her best friend to clear customs. It didn't matter if Rupert, the match-maker, and Cail, her deadpan serious friend that didn't have a romantic bone in her body, were watching. Wara was gonna throw herself into Alejo’s arms and do one of those cheesy hugs from a movie, let him know that she was here for him, and was so, so glad he was here with her.

The line trickling out of the customs/baggage area was moving very, very slowly.

"We might as well take a seat," Rupert said. "Looks like it might be a while."

They dropped into a row of sad-looking chairs, chained together and covered in shredded gray vinyl. A majority of the Moroccan men in the airport almost did a one eighty as they walked past, craning their necks to gawk at the two foreign girls sitting on either side of the old white guy in a flannel shirt and outdated jeans. Most of Cail's spiky blond hair was stuffed up under her cap, and she was wearing a really long shirt over her jeans, like Wara. In Morocco, you had to at least wear something that covered your butt, or the staring would just get out of control. Moroccan guys loved to stare, and it was kinda hard to get used to.

Normally when the gaping started, Wara would be tempted to get the scarf out of her purse and throw it over her hair. Tonight, she was way, way too preoccupied. She slouched down farther into the ripped seat, crossed her arms protectively in front of her around the Starbucks coffee as if it were her baby.

Maybe half the people from the Bamako-Fez flight had already cleared customs and were racing toward the parking exit.

What was Alejo gonna do when he saw her?

Wara's stomach throbbed with an explosion of butterflies as she scanned the travelers with suitcases crossing the tiles. Some foreigner with a tweed jacket and a riot of blond-white hair tried to weave his way past the slow-moving line of people, silver Swiss Gear suitcase whining across the tiles. Wara's breathing stalled, fixed on that hair. She squeezed her eyes shut as the scene from the futon in Montana flashed across her skull.

She almost hadn't recognized him that day, because the Lázaro she remembered was tanned with gelled hair the color of nutmeg. It had scared her to death to have him show up and pin her down that night, scars running down his neck, hair wild and bleached around his face.

She realized she was about to poke a hole right through Alejo's crinkly package of coffee. Wara forced herself to breathe, not follow the pudgy traveler with the wild curls's progress out the airport door.

She’d traveled here on another passport, nothing connected with Wara Cadogan. Lázaro couldn’t know she was here.

He thought he’d left her for dead.

Wara grimaced and rubbed fingers down her upper arm. Her shoulders and arms still hurt a lot, thanks to the way the jailers at Evin prison had treated her during the Big Mess in Iran last year.

The nightmares about Iran didn’t help her muscles relax, either.

“Rupert,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

She’d heard talk of the plan involving Timbuktu. Rupert had Wara and Cail reading up on Mali. Timbuktu was the definition of remote, so it did seem to make sense as a place Lázaro Marquez would never find her.

Rupert shifted his eyes to her. Wara was still watching the people exiting customs.

"Listen,” Rupert sighed. “When Alejo gets here, we’ll talk. But we’re your family now. We’ve got your back and we’re gonna take care of you.”

Ok.

Wara forced herself to just leave it at that. For now.

She let go of the Starbucks coffee she was killing and left the packet on her thigh, went back to crossing her arms in front of her and eyeing the people leaving customs. The point of muscle right under her shoulder blade was throbbing harder than ever.

"There he is." Cail’s voice made Wara jolt. Cail speared Wara with sea-green eyes. "Don't forget to give him the coffee." When Wara just sat there like a deer in the headlights, Cail narrowed her eyes. "Come on," she enunciated each word slowly. "Go tell him we're over here. Go give all these sick Moroccan guys staring at us something to be jealous of. Go on."

Cail flicked a long pale hand at Wara and Wara jerked, climbed to her feet. "Oh…ok. I'm gonna go get him?"

"Yeah," Cail rolled her eyes. "No sense in us all getting caught in the crush of people over there. Or would you prefer if we all went and did a big group hug and kiss?"

Ok, that was enough. Wara felt a low simmer spreading over her face. "Going. I'm going." She returned Cail's scowl. Wara crossed the tiles with the coffee clutched in both hands like a shield.

Alejo was walking pretty slow, hunched under a scuffed backpack, wearing a green and navy flannel shirt and the usual khaki pants. Instead of pockets all down the legs, this time the khakis were tailored and dingy around the bottom with the grime of the Sahara. Alejo's skin was dark, tanned about three shades deeper than his usual coffee with a touch of milk. The dark curls had grown out again, covering half his ear and forehead.

Wara felt something tighten in her heart, because it was pretty obvious he had lost weight. She remembered the coffee in her hands, how Cail said the guys hadn't been able to drink coffee or eat well. When Wara talked with him over the past few months, Alejo hadn't mentioned anything about the kind of food he was eating over in Mali. There was never any complaining.

Wara was almost at Alejo's shoulder, and he was still staring straight ahead. His dark lashes shifted over those hazel eyes as he tried not to get jostled against five Moroccan guys in front of him, all of them gaping at veil-less Wara with saucer eyes. The Moroccans seemed disappointed when Wara reached out and touched Alejo's arm, brushing the soft flannel. He jerked, then saw her.

"Wara." Alejo fumbled out of the line and they stepped a few paces away. He searched her face and Wara tried to remember what her plan had been. All her thoughts just drained right out onto the floor, confused by the way Alejo’s shoulders hung under the backpack, the way his eyes wandered across her face as if he barely knew her.

It looked as if Alejo's soul had been sucked out through his eyes.

"Alejo." Wara felt herself crumple, remember how much she wanted to be close to him. She crossed the tiles between them in her shell sandals and fell into his chest, hugging him backpack and all.

He
was
thinner. Wara's hands brushed along his ribs as she pulled away, feeling cold when he did not hug her back. She looked up at him, but his eyes were a few million miles away.

"I…I’m so glad you’re here." As soon as she said the words, Wara felt really, really dumb.