Burn (Story of CI #3) (29 page)

WARA WAS IN A DAZE BY THE time they got to Timbuktu. Mercifully, she’d dropped off to sleep against the passenger side door of the Land Cruiser, just about the time the desert turned pitch black. Lázaro must have kept himself awake with his light jazz all night, because by the time Wara jerked awake they weren’t far away from Timbuktu and it was dawn.

Lázaro skirted the normal entrance into the city, driving in a direction Wara had never been. What they hit a clearing, what she saw left her mouth hanging open.

There was a palace. Made of sandy bricks. It had turrets and Arabic-style towers and the sun was blazing pink as a backdrop to the whole thing.

Lázaro drove closer to the palace, stopped the Land Cruiser and honked once. They waited there in the sand and Wara kept staring. Closer up, she could see that the place was falling apart. Chunks of castle were missing, maybe taken out by mortars. Dunes had crept up the sides of the palace.

A rusting metal door heaved open and Lázaro drove the Land Cruiser inside the mud brick wall. Wara saw a couple AQIM fighters waiting inside the courtyard and felt sick to her stomach.

Lázaro worked with these guys.

He wanted to hand Lalo and Cail over to them.

She was tired, much too tired to think what Lázaro was going to do to her. He had mentioned her leaving this place with him and the millions he was going to make selling her friends to terrorists.

She had made the choice to be with him, long ago and now. She’d tried to help her friends and warn them about Lázaro’s plans, but that hadn’t gone well at all.

Wara squeezed her eyes shut and hunched down in the seat as they drove past the warriors in loose shirts and turbans. Everyone had an AK47 slung over one shoulder and the weapons glinted in the fierce dawn. The men all gawked at her through the Land Cruiser window, grinning and leering.

“We made it, dear,” Lázaro said. His hair stuck up everywhere and his eyes were positively bloodshot. “Stick by me, now. Compared to these guys, I’m Prince Charming.”

Lázaro jumped out of the vehicle and marched around to her side, ripped the passenger door open. Wara felt all the moisture on her tongue evaporate as the AQIM warriors tried to crowd in. She kept her eyes on the sand and Lázaro’s boots. Inside the hood of her jade top, Wara was shaking.

Lázaro yelled at the other men in Arabic, told them to shut up and get back to work. “If anyone touches this woman, I will personally make them suffer,” Lázaro barked. Wara flicked her eyes up to see actual fear stamping itself across the bearded faces that a minute ago wore lust. She did not want to think what these men had seen Lázaro do that had them so afraid.

Lázaro gripped Wara by the elbow and marched her across a courtyard littered with discarded shoes, chicken bones, and empty sardine cans. They passed through an archway and into a huge room, cavernous and rosy with the remains of watermelon-colored paint.

“I don’t know if you can imagine it,” Lázaro told her, stopping in the middle of the floor and gawking at the ceiling like a tourist. He unsnapped his fingers from Wara’s elbow, leaving five round red marks. “This place,” Lázaro said, “used to be beautiful. This was the men’s sitting room. It had a golden fountain, there.” Lázaro pointed cheerfully to a hunk of concrete at the center of the room. “Everything would have been filled with brocade pillows and marble and solid gold. See, right there on the wall? You can still make out a statue of a lion. Gold’s been stripped off, though.”

“What is this place?” All the information Wara had read about Timbuktu’s history and rulers seemed to be checked out of the library in her brain at the moment. Whatever great king used to live here, it looked like years of desert and looters had left nothing of value.

Lázaro cocked his head at her and moved to take a step closer. With no warning, his leg doubled under him and Lázaro staggered, pitched unsteadily towards the floor. He caught himself before Wara could even react, grabbing a pillar and trying to smooth out the pain rippling across his face.

The drugs were wearing off. And Lázaro wasn’t getting any more until he finished the kids and Wara. Or sold Lalo for money to get the drugs himself.

Lázaro forced himself to smile and pretend everything was just fine, even though he was wheezing and his fingers had a death grip on the pillar. “This, my dear, was one of Qaddafi’s palaces,” he said. “Of course the palaces they found in Libya after his regime fell were a thousand times grander than this. But I suppose this palace was beautiful, too, in its day. I wasn’t here, then.”

Lázaro gritted his teeth and took a deep breath, then motioned towards a huge set of double doors at the end of the pink sitting room. “I have the only key to open the doors to that room,” Lázaro said. “I have some things to do now, and I’ll have to leave you here, just for a little while. You heard me threaten the men. They won’t touch you.”

He marched her through the doors into a smaller room and forced her into a battered wooden chair. “I’ll put the zip ties on in front,” he said briskly. “Since you told me about your misadventure in Iran. Just in case you are one to get out of ties, just remember that I’m sure all of AQIM will be lurking just outside the door. You don’t want them to get ahold of you. You’re safer in here, waiting for me.”

He grabbed her wrists and forced them together, wrapped zip ties around them and pulled them shut. It felt horrible to not have use of her hands. Wara felt weak, vulnerable.

And confused that Lázaro remembered what she’d said yesterday about her shoulder pain and Iran.

Lázaro observed the zip ties with satisfaction. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what happened in Iran? Another educational trip, volunteering overseas with ammo?”

Wara blinked at him. “Nope. I don’t suppose I do.”

Lázaro leaned against a pillar and crossed his arms in front of him. “It sucks to be in pain all the time, though. Doesn’t it? You said it’s your shoulders?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I suppose that was the reverse hanging, then. They love doing that in prison in Iran. Did you tell them what they wanted to know?”

Wara felt the burn spreading from her restrained wrists up to her shoulder blades. “No. I would have, but Alejo got me out of there before they strung me up again,” she said hollowly.

“See, we do understand each other. In some small way,” Lázaro said with a crooked half-smile. “I’m sure you’ve found out for yourself how being in pain all the time can put one in a bad, bad mood. Well then,” he grinned. “I shall return.” Lázaro smacked a kiss onto her cheek and whirled towards the door, almost stumbling again.

He had kissed her.

She heard him grinding a key in the ancient padlock and the heavy wood doors were sealed shut, locking her in and the terrorists and their AK47s out.

It seemed like forever that she sat there behind the doors, eyes wandering in a daze. This room had splotches of yellow paint, and it didn’t seem nearly as grand as the other room. Maybe this was once the women’s sitting room. Now it seemed like AQIM used it for storage. There were boxes laced with dust in the corners and not much else. The windows were nothing more than exaggerated mail slots, high up along the twenty-foot ceilings. Maybe so no one could peek in and catch a glimpse of Qaddafi’s harem.

There was no escaping here. And Lázaro was right: she didn’t want to. Wara could hear the men shuffling around outside the double doors, snickering and yelling things she couldn’t quite catch in Arabic.

She walked around the room for a while, jerkily because her hands were tied together. Lázaro hadn’t made the zip ties too tight, but it still made her shoulders nice and sore. The only place to sit was on the old chair, because the floor was covered with shards of broken glass. Glossy white scorpions cruised around, dipping in and out of the ancient boxes.

Wara really hated scorpions.

She flopped back into the chair and curled over as best she could into a ball. She was so, so far away from home, and still confused at how she had gotten here so quickly.

She hadn’t wanted anyone to die, because in some way, all of this was her fault. She hadn’t wanted to really think about it, because that meant realizing Lázaro was gonna die. But in the end, when she saw the pistol against the back of Lázaro’s head, she’d done whatever she had to to save him.

And that meant hurting Alejo. She had hurt him so badly, and if she ever saw him again, he would hate her.

But at the river, you tried to warn Cail about the bomb at the hospital, about Lázaro’s plans for Lalo.

Wara couldn’t deny thinking about Lázaro dying had been awful. She couldn’t lie to herself and pretend she didn’t give a crap about him after their past together.

But that doesn’t mean you are joined to him forever.

Wara blinked in the dusty air, trying to push away the mess of cobwebs inside her brain.

What you did in the past doesn’t have to control what you decide to do now.

You can let it go and move on.

The thought was so clear that it made her shiver.

Really? She would love to let it go and move on. But she was literally tied up, stuck in this situation with no escape route. Even if there was an escape route, no one from her old life wanted her back.

But she knew that this wasn’t what she wanted. She’d made a bad choice, but because she didn’t want to watch someone die. This was not who she wanted to be.

Wara felt a little better.

Until the double doors creaked open.

And Lázaro and three AQIM goons dragged Jonah Jones into the room.

JONAH JONES. WAS HERE. WARA was pretty much too shocked to even speak.

They hauled Jonah into the room on a dirty tarp and left him over by the boxes. Jonah was wearing sweats and an untucked baby blue dress shirt. His long limbs were sprawled at all kinds of unnatural angles and he was missing the black nerd glasses. The AQIM guys marched out and Lázaro stood there rather proudly.

“He’ll be fine,” Lázaro waved a hand absently. He was smirking at no one in particular. “Don’t you worry about him. Remember, I told you we can’t damage him. He’s worth millions.”

Wara felt herself mentally tripping all over her own tongue. She was too confused to know where to start.

Lázaro wanted Daniel/Lalo Navarro, the psychic kid who had escaped from Russia. What the heck was Jonah doing here?

“It was easy, really,” Lázaro was explaining. He strolled over to Wara and grinned. “I pretended to be your friend Cail on the phone and got this guy to meet me out back behind the compound. I drugged him and got him out pretty quickly. After all, I know the place very well. The Ancient Text guards didn’t even know I was there. I think they think Jonah’s napping.”

“And Cail?” Wara rasped. She was still trying to figure this out.

“I assume she’s at the hospital,” Lázaro said, stroking his chin. “There wasn’t a good way to get the psychic and the insurance at the same time, without one alerting the other. But now that I’ve got him,” Lázaro shot a disgusted look in the direction of Jonah passed out in the corner, “I’ve got leverage to get the girl.”

Lázaro thought Jonah was the psychic, the one who could do remote viewing.

Either Lázaro hadn’t taken a look under Jonah’s shirt yet, or he didn’t know anything about the scars. Lázaro wouldn’t be so stupid, would he?

Tsarnev’s uncle must not have mentioned the scars in his file.

Lázaro was dialing someone on his cell phone. Wara’s heart sank when she heard him snicker, “Cail Lamontagne?” Lázaro winked at Wara and put the call on speakerphone.

“Who is this?” Cail’s voice was all business.

“Your friend Wara’s ex,” Lázaro said snottily. “Don’t hang up. I have your psychic boyfriend, Jonah. But you, my dear Cail, will not alert anyone that Mr. Remote Viewing is missing. I need him alive, but he doesn’t need all his fingers. I’m sure I could think of other things that would be fun to amputate. Plus I can kill your friend Wara. No one will pay me anything for her.”

Wara heard Cail make a strangled noise. It was barely audible, but Wara could imagine Cail standing there clutching the cell phone, leaning against the wall, all the blood from her face draining into her toes.

“Jonah?” Cail croaked. “You’d better not hurt him. Or Wara. Where are you? We’re coming out there.”

“
You
are coming out here,” Lázaro said. “If you let anyone know Boyfriend is missing, he will suffer and Wara dies.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Cail said lowly. She sounded furious.

“Tsk tsk.” Lázaro rolled his eyes. “I know it was unprofessional, but everyone sneaks a passionate kiss in the laundry room behind the compound every now and then. I saw everything. I only had time to review the last couple hours of my surveillance cameras when I arrived in Timbuktu, but thankfully the two of you gave me some interesting material this morning. You confirmed exactly what I needed to know.” Lázaro was still smirking. “You have fifteen minutes to get here, alone,” he ordered Cail. “We’re in Qaddafi’s palace. I have twenty men outside and they’ll be expecting you, no one else.”

Lázaro ended the call and settled onto one of the filthy boxes to wait. Jonah snored softly on the tarp, making little moaning noises as his eyes fluttered and he did his best to wake up.

What were they going to do to him?

What were they going to do to Cail?

And on a weirder note, why was Cail kissing Jonah in the laundry room?

Lázaro had seen them on his cameras, and now he assumed Jonah was the one in love with Cail, the psychic everyone would pay millions for.

Snowy white scorpions slithered out of the box where Lázaro sat and scuttled over his thigh. He didn’t even notice.

Wara jerked so hard the chair legs rattled on the concrete when Lázaro finally said her name.

She’d never heard him call her Wara. He always said something stupid like “dear” or “Ms. Cadogan.” It made her feel like an experiment in his lab, the way he tossed out those terms at her, mocking and haughty.

But now he said her name.

“I remembered you,” Lázaro said slowly, crossing arms in front of his chest. “When I interrogated you after dinner. That’s when it started. The whole drive after that, I kept remembering. I remember being with you, at your apartment. In Bolivia.”

The burn flashed across the bridge of Wara’s nose and she felt her lungs get all tight.

Lázaro kept talking, but he was missing the cocky tone he usually took with her. He seemed…amazed. That he had memories.

“I actually remembered my family,” Lázaro said. “My mom. Brothers. And that you and I were going to visit them. I was really happy about that because the girls my brothers met in our neighborhood were always kind of rough. But I was proud, because I wasn’t gonna live that way anymore, and I walked down the aisle at that church and gave my heart to Jesus. And now I had a nice girlfriend, a missionary, one my mama was going to be so proud of.”

This was freaky. He did remember.

Wara knew he’d been quiet all night. She figured it was because he was so mad she tried to shoot him out in the wilderness with no decent hospital nearby.

But he was remembering. Wara and Bolivia and his family.

She couldn’t reconcile the person Lázaro was talking about, the guy she flirted with at church camp and dated and bought beer with from that coffee shop, with the man all armed and sitting there with scorpions crawling all over him, not even flinching.

“I thought that we really had something.” Lázaro raised an eyebrow at the dirty floor. “After that night and the beer. I knew what happened wasn’t what was supposed to happen, but I really
cared
about you.” Bitterness twisted Lázaro’s tone. “When you didn’t come to the airport, I thought something terrible happened. An accident. Thieves got into your house. A heart attack. I missed my brother’s wedding because I was going all over Cochabamba trying to find out what happened to you. It took me a while to get it, even after all your friends told me you had a ‘family emergency’ and had to go back to the States for a while. My brother was pissed about all his money and the ring. But I finally figured out you just wanted to be left alone.”

Lázaro snorted and rolled his eyes. All Wara’s muscles felt like melted butter.

Lázaro never went to his brother’s wedding? Because he was worried something had happened to her?

“And that’s all I remembered,” Lázaro said a little louder, scowling and whacking a scorpion off his knee and clear across the floor. It clacked and bounced across the uneven concrete like a poison skipping stone. “I don’t remember seeing you after that, til I found you in Montana. But memories are coming back. All the time. I even remember things from when I was a kid. I guess they are all real memories. I don’t think Tsarnev cared enough to plant a bunch of fake memories about me playing basketball in the street with my bros back in Puerto Rico.”

Wara sat there blinking. Lázaro was not angry.

She thought he’d be furious, but instead, he just seemed…confused.

“If you wanted to end it with me,” he frowned at her, shifting positions on the box, “you should have just told me.”

Wara felt something razor-sharp pulse in her heart and spiral down to her toes, making cuts all the way down. “I’m sorry…” she started to say, voice broken and jagged.

A commotion echoed off the ceiling and three loud booms rattled the wooden doors, which Lázaro had closed but not locked. A cluster of men pushed the doors open, and there was Cail, towering over all of them by several inches. All the AQIM fighters had their AK-47s pointed at her. Cail was wearing black clothes with a white jeweled bandana over her hair. Her wrists were zip tied in front of her. Obviously, they’d taken all her weapons away and stripped off her body armor.

Her face was pale as a ghost when they pushed her into the room. She glared at Lázaro, eyes blazing, then saw Wara sitting there tied up and her jaw dropped a little. Cail paled even more when she saw Jonah sprawled on the tarp.

“He’s fine,” Lázaro sniffed. “Glad you could make it.”

“You bastard,” Cail said coldly. The AQIM guys shuffled out of the room and closed the doors, leaving the four of them alone.

Wara felt like sinking down into the floor and disappearing. Cail walked over to her, black boots thumping across the concrete. She turned her back to Lázaro.

“That was horrible,” she hissed at Wara. “What you did to Alejo.” She pressed her lips together, pain stamped all over her face. “But I know why you did it.”

“Please shut up,” Lázaro said from across the room. “This isn’t a ladies’ tea party.”

Wara’s shoulder slumped towards the floor and she felt her face crumple.

I know why you did it.

It didn’t matter anymore why she did it. There was no way to take it back.

Something awful was about to happen. “He wants to sell you and Lalo to the terrorists,” Wara whispered. “I tried to warn you when I called.”

“I know,” Cail sighed. She lowered herself onto the chair next to Wara and threw a glare Lázaro’s way. He was making a call over in the corner. It sounded like he was scheduling pickup for Jonah. Wara and Cail just sat there, shoulders pressed together, staring at the floor. “By the time we figured out what was going on,” Cail said lowly, “we couldn’t move out. Tsarnev must have told everyone they were about to capture the psychic they want. The troops moved in.”

“Why did you come here?” Cail had to know this was gonna end badly.

“To save Jonah?” Cail shot Wara a wry smile. “I used to be in love with him, remember? I couldn’t live with myself if Lázaro makes him a eunuch. Or messes up his pretty face. And then there’s you.”

Wara felt her eyes slide shut. “When they realize Jonah isn’t Lalo…” She heard Cail inhale sharply next to her.

“They won’t be happy,” Cail said. “We have to find a way to get out of here before then. The three of us. Good thing Jonah’s skinny cause he’s looking pretty doped. We might need to carry him.”

For the first time in days, Wara felt her heart warm up a bit with hope.

All three of them. Escape together.

She was here with Cail, and they were going to work to get out of this together.

Even though the chance of this ending well was basically impossible.

Wara and Cail started at the same time as they realized that Jonah was trying to sit up on the tarp. Then they jumped as the wooden doors banged open.

“Ah. Good. He’s waking up,” Lázaro grinned. “This will make everything a tad bit easier.”

Six guys in baggy shirts with AK-47s strode into the room and hauled Jonah up off the floor. The terror in his blue eyes was visceral. He hadn’t noticed Cail and Wara yet, sitting there watching him from the chair.

“Take him to Tsarnev,” Lázaro ordered. “Tell him to call me in a few days, and if I’ve received the money he promised I’ll be happy to turn over the insurance policy that goes with the psychic he ordered. Until then, tell Tsarnev I’ll probably be on the beach. Surrounded by lovely ladies. As usual.”

They were already taking Jonah! It was all happening too fast.

Wara and Cail hadn’t even had a minute to work on their escape plan.

The guards threw the girls in zip ties toothy grins and saluted, completely ignoring Jonah’s confused shrieks. Cail was quivering on the chair next to Wara. She knew Cail wanted to rush them, to get Jonah back, to keep them from taking him away like this.

But there were six of them, and they had AK-47s. There were many more outside. Lázaro probably still had the Skorpion under his shirt, and Wara would bet anything it was now loaded.

“Take me!” Cail yelled at Lázaro. Jonah was already out of the room. “It’s foolish to give him to Tsarnev when you haven’t gotten any money. Give me to him first, and when you get your money you can give them Jonah.”

“This is wrong,” Wara fumed Lázaro’s way. “Don’t do this!”

Lázaro ignored both of them. He rolled up his shirt and yanked the weapon out of its holster, sliding the steel over all his scars. A scorpion ran down the leg of Lázaro’s pants and when it fell to the dirt he smashed it with his heavy boot.

“I’m taking you with me.” His eyes fell on Cail. “In a few days’ time, I’ll hand you over to Tsarnev. If he gets me my money.” There were still three guards left in the doorway. The rest appeared to have driven off with Jonah in a caravan of pickups that Wara heard roar by the windows. “Take her out to the vehicle for me and watch her,” Lázaro ordered his guards. He stuffed the Skorpion into the waistband of his pants. “In a second I’ll meet you at the vehicle and you can hand her over to me. The three of you will join Tsarnev.”

“No!” Wara wailed, panicked as the three henchmen saluted and moved from the door towards her chair. They ripped Cail to her feet so fast Wara heard her gasp and manhandled towards the door. Wara leapt up and tried to follow Cail, but Lázaro caught her by the shoulders and pushed her hard back into the chair, held her down while she kicked at him.