Flashpoint (4 page)

“Kazbekistan,” Jimmy repeated.

Deck nodded.

Jimmy laughed—softly, so his head wouldn’t split in two. “You are such a fucking liar. But yeah. Okay. I’ll go to Kazbekistan. You go get the plane tickets from Tom Paoletti. I’ll wait here.”

Decker’s response was to cross to the ancient television that was on and flickering, volume muted. He flipped stations until he found a cable news channel and turned up the sound.

English subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen as the anchor delivered the story in Spanish spoken too quickly for Jimmy to follow. The graphic behind the woman said
Terremoto
in crumbling letters. “. . . six point eight on the Richter scale, with the epicenter of the devastating earthquake just north of downtown Kazabek.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God. The death toll was going to be in the tens of thousands. Jimmy leaned closer.

“For the first time in five years,” the anchor—a hot bleached blonde with big lips—announced, “Kazbekistan’s borders are open to Western relief workers.”

“It would save time,” Deck told Jimmy, “if you just came with me to San Diego.”

K
AZABEK
, K
AZBEKISTAN

Sophia had her eyes closed—it was always easier with her eyes closed—when the earthquake hit.

At first she, like Bashir and his men, thought they were under artillery attack.

It certainly felt like some kind of bombardment, the way the building shook and windows rattled.

Everything happened so quickly.

A half-dozen guards burst into the room.

Bashir shoved her roughly aside and she fell onto the tile floor, her head hitting with a jarring crack.

It felt as she’d imagined it would, only unlike Dimitri, she still had her head attached to her neck.

Bashir shouted to the guards as he scrambled for his clothes, ordering them to sound the alarms, and they rushed back out of the room. . . .

Leaving her alone with the warlord, whose back was to the table beside his bed. It was the same table upon which he’d put his sword after demonstrating to her just how razor-sharp it still was.

She’d lived through a massive earthquake before in Turkey, and unlike Bashir, who was convinced he had an enemy to repel, she began to suspect that was what this was. But bombardment or quake, it was the break for which she’d been waiting two long months.

Sophia grabbed the sword.

She didn’t have the upper body strength to behead Bashir with one mighty stroke, as much as she would have liked to do just that unto him. As he had done unto others.

Instead she lunged, throwing all of her weight into it.

Even so, she didn’t manage to run him clean through. Still, it stopped him, his scream of pain lost among all the other cries echoing through his palace.

He fell to his knees, and Sophia grabbed the bedcover and ran to the door. The entrance to Bashir’s chamber was usually guarded, but everyone—guards and servants alike—had fled. She wrapped the folds of fabric around her, turning it into a makeshift burka and hiding the blood on her gown.

She made it to the front door, where a crowd of people were pushing to get outside, where uncovered women were being turned back, despite the fact that a portion of the palace roof had already caved in.

Sophia covered her head and face and slipped out onto the street, into the dust rising up into the blue morning sky, and ran.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

S
AN
D
IEGO
, C
ALIFORNIA

Tom Paoletti slid a photograph across the table in the conference room of his offices at Troubleshooters Incorporated. “Ma’awiya Talal Sayid.”

Decker picked up the photo as Jimmy sat forward to get a look. “When and where was this taken, sir?” Deck asked.

“Kazabek,” Paoletti told them in a voice that revealed his New England roots. “Today. About thirteen hundred local time.”

Deck passed the photo over, and Jimmy took a closer look at the man who was known to be a top al-Qaeda operative. “Is he . . . ?”

“Dead,” Paoletti finished for him. “Yeah. Courtesy of the quake.” He pushed more photos toward them.

Jimmy leaned forward again. None of the news stations had footage or even photos of the devastation in Kazbekistan—reporters from the West hadn’t been allowed into the country for years.

In these photos, the skyline of the city—an architectural blend of ancient and new—had been radically changed. The Kazabek Grande Hotel still stood, a testament to the Westernization of the tiny country in the late 1970s. But the office building next to it had partially crumbled. In the foreground of the photo, many of the older structures—homes similar to that of Jimmy’s longtime contact Rivka and his wife, Guldana—had been reduced to rubble. It looked like parts of Baghdad and Basra after the war in Iraq.

“I’m sorry—I know both of you have friends in Kazabek.”

Jimmy looked up into Paoletti’s eyes. The compassion and understanding he saw there was not feigned.

“The situation’s bad. Sewer pipes broke—water’s contaminated in most of the southern sectors. WHO’s trying to get involved—southern Kazabek’s an epidemic waiting to happen. Power’s out, cell towers—the few that were left—are down. And the local warlords are still killing each other and anyone who looks at them cross-eyed.” Paoletti smiled. “I’d make one hell of a travel agent, huh? Bottom line, this job is going to suck.”

“We’ve both been to K-stan before, sir,” Decker told him. “Conditions there have never been good.”

“Yeah. I served a short sentence there myself,” Paoletti said. “And you don’t have to sir me. We’re not in the Navy anymore, Deck.”

When Jimmy had walked into this office, nothing about this place had impressed him. The building itself was low-rent, the furniture ugly, and the receptionist’s desk empty. Tom Paoletti’s new company specialized in personal security, but at first glance it looked as if Troubleshooters Incorporated needed a little rescuing itself.

But then Paoletti—the former commanding officer of SEAL Team Sixteen—had come out of the back office and shook his and Deck’s hands, and Jimmy knew instantly why the man was a Spec Ops legend.

He had that same je ne sais quoi that Decker did—the same golden aura. It danced and glowed about him and proclaimed him a true leader of men. Of women, too, although Jimmy would bet big money that most women followed Tom Paoletti around for a different reason entirely. And this was despite the fact that, in another couple of years, he was going to be billiard-ball bald.

Deck’s still-thick head of hair wasn’t the only difference between the two men. In fact, besides that rare leadership quality they shared, they really weren’t that much alike.

Paoletti’s quietness was easygoing. There was a contentment to him, a sense of peace, a comfortable-inside-his-skin quality that could be found only in someone who—at least most of the time—liked the man he saw in his bathroom mirror each morning.

Decker’s watchful quiet, on the other hand, seemed to hold an undercurrent of danger. He was like a gunslinger from one of those old Westerns Jimmy had watched as a kid. Quiet and even polite, but with something in the way he sat or stood that let the world know this was not a man to mess with.

And if he
was
messed with, look out.

And yet, at the same time, Deck could, with very little effort, make himself completely invisible.

That was something Jimmy particularly admired, since invisibility in a crowd wasn’t high on his personal list of easy tricks.

He suspected it wasn’t on Paoletti’s either. But right now the man was silent, just letting Decker take a longer look at the photographs he’d given them.

Deck knew Paoletti from his years with the SEAL teams. In the rental car on the way to this meeting, when Jimmy had been speculating on the nature of this assignment, Deck had turned to him and said, “I’d sign on just to shine Commander Paoletti’s shoes.”

It was one hell of an endorsement.

“Where did these pictures come from?” Decker asked Paoletti now. “Who’s the photographer?”

“The client sent them to me,” he replied. “I can’t be more specific than that.”

“Understood.” Deck finally put the photos down on the table. “They’re looking for Sayid’s laptop.”

It wasn’t a question, but Paoletti nodded. He glanced at Jimmy, checking to see if he was up to speed.

He was, indeed. Al-Qaeda leader Ma’awiya Talal Sayid carried a laptop that was believed to contain a gushing fountain of information—maybe enough to clue in the West to the next terrorist target. Of course the key word there was
believed
.

“Does your client—let’s call them the Agency for short—have any proof that this mystical laptop isn’t just a rumor?” Jimmy asked. “Or that it contains more than the latest versions of Pac-Man and Solitaire?”

“Nope,” Paoletti told him, with a coolness in his eyes that let Jimmy know his easygoing friendliness was for Decker and Decker alone. Paoletti still hadn’t decided whether he and Nash would be buddies. Which was different from most people’s prejudgment. Most people filed Jimmy in their troublemakers folder before even meeting him.

“And let’s not call the client anything but the client,” Paoletti added. “They like it better that way.”

“Especially since you haven’t got your Cone of Silence up and working,” Jimmy said with a deliberate glance around the room, letting Paoletti know that he, too, hadn’t yet decided if he was going to climb in bed with the former SEAL. So to speak.

Paoletti laughed, getting both the
Get Smart
reference and Jimmy’s unspoken message, which was another point in his favor. “Yeah, well, we moved into this office two months ago and I haven’t had time to hire a receptionist, let alone set up some kind of shielded room.” He included Deck in the conversation. “I’m turning work away, Chief—I can’t keep up with the demand. Lot of people traveling overseas want an armed escort these days. Even domestically, there’s a huge call for additional security, evacuation plans, that type of assignment. And those are just the corporate clients. But this job . . . this one’s important. The client can’t send in their own, um, employees—the U.S.–K-stani relationship has deteriorated beyond repair and if those
employees
were discovered, there could be real trouble. I don’t think that’s news to either of you.”

It wasn’t. It had been more than three years since Jimmy had gone into K-stan with Decker on an Agency assignment. “And yet someone eliminated Sayid,” he commented.

“No. Mother Nature eliminated Sayid. His death was from internal damage, believed to be caused by a collapsing building,” Paoletti informed them. “He apparently crawled free and found his way to a hospital before he died. We have no idea where he was at the time of the quake, or if his laptop is still there in the rubble. Even if it is, it could be destroyed or damaged.”

“Which hospital?” Deck asked.

Paoletti shook his head. “We don’t even know that.”

Deck glanced at Jimmy, who sat forward to look more closely at the two pictures of Sayid. They were both the same photograph, but one had been cropped and enlarged so that the terrorist leader was in close-up. The original shot showed a long line of injured people in makeshift beds, really no more than pallets on the floor, in an ornately tiled room being used as a temporary hospital ward.

“This is the lobby of the Hôpital Cantara,” Jimmy told Decker. “Near Kazabek’s City Center.” He glanced at Paoletti, resisting the urge to bat his eyelashes.
So do you love me yet?

“You’re that certain?” the former SEAL CO asked.

“I went there a few years back to get some stitches,” Jimmy told him.

Paoletti lifted an eyebrow. “I thought you Agency types were like the SEALs and stitched yourselves up.”

“In my large intestine,” Jimmy added. He often got dinged up out in the field, a result of playing hard and rough, but that time he’d been stabbed.

I can’t believe you call getting stabbed “dinged up.”
Tess Bailey’s voice echoed in his head from that night, two months ago. He’d answered,
There’s a big difference between getting dinged and stabbed.
She hadn’t believed him, but it was true.

The barely noticeable ding Jimmy had gotten on the night Tess had helped him keep Decker from being gunned down in the parking lot of the Gentlemen’s Den was very different from the injury that had brought him to the Cantara hospital.

He’d been jumped. Three to one—odds he normally wouldn’t have blinked at, but one of ’em had a knife that Jimmy hadn’t seen until it was almost too late. He’d stopped the blade from going into his chest, instead catching it lower, in his gut.

That had hurt. But it hadn’t killed him. It
had
warranted that trip to the hospital, though. Which was serendipitous, since he could now give a positive ID to the location of Sayid’s body.

“I sat in that lobby for ten hours,” Jimmy told Paoletti. There had been that many people there who were more seriously wounded than he was. It was just another night in Kazbekistan. He tapped the picture. “This is L’Hôpital Cantara. No question in my mind.”

Paoletti nodded. “I’m putting together a team,” he said, “to enter Kazbekistan as earthquake relief workers, and to find and extract Sayid’s laptop.”

Decker nodded, too. “Who’s your team leader, sir? Starrett?”

A Texan by the name of Sam Starrett, also formerly of Navy SEAL Team Sixteen, was a major player in Paoletti’s new company, as was Starrett’s wife, former FBI agent Alyssa Locke, whose beauty was as legendary as her sharpshooting skills. Jimmy had hoped to meet the two of them today.

“Sam and Alyssa are both out of town,” Paoletti told them. Of course, “out of town” meant something a little different for his employees than it did for most people. “I was hoping you’d lead this team, Deck.”

Whoa. This wasn’t just a job offer—this was an open door. Paoletti was offering Decker a new career.

But Deck, being Deck, didn’t leap up and start doing cartwheels. He just nodded as if he were thinking about it, as if he might actually say no. He finally glanced at Jimmy before asking Paoletti, “What size team are you hoping to send over?”

“I’d like to send a battalion, but I just don’t have the manpower,” Paoletti said. Rumor had it he was recruiting as fast as he could. But recruiting took time. Background checks could be a real bitch.

Jimmy knew what his own background check had revealed. Nothing of substance. A name, a social security number, a date and city of birth. A two-word message:
Access denied.

And just enough rumors to warrant that coolness in Tom Paoletti’s eyes.

He was actually surprised that Paoletti hadn’t asked to speak to Decker privately. Of course, there was still time for that.

“I’ve got two men who’ve worked with me for the past few months who are already en route to Kazabek—Dave Malkoff and Vinh Murphy,” the former SEAL CO continued. “Normally I would’ve asked for your approval as team leader before sending them out, but I couldn’t wait. Murph spent ten years in the Marines; Dave was with the CIA.”

“I know them both,” Deck said.

So did Jimmy. Murphy was cool, part African-American, part Vietnamese, with just enough Irish thrown in to make things completely confusing to anyone walking into a room and looking for a guy named Murphy. But CIA agent—former CIA agent, apparently, since he was now working for Paoletti—Dave Malkoff was a complete head case. He was a bundle of raw nerves in need of some serious decaffeination. And a new wardrobe. He made the MIB squad look colorful.

“Nash isn’t a big fan of Malkoff’s,” Decker told Paoletti, “but I’m okay with him. And Murph’s solid.”

“I’d also like to send along a computer specialist,” Paoletti told them, “but there’s a real shortage of skilled people. I got a call just this morning from a comspesh who’s had field training, but no experience. I know that’s not ideal. And I’ve never worked with her myself so I can’t vouch for—”

“Her?” Jimmy interrupted. Whoops. Deck was giving him a look. “Excuse me.” He threw in a little extra respect. “Sir. You’re actually considering sending a woman into Kazbekistan?”

Sending female agents into K-stan hadn’t been done without a great deal of angst five years ago, before the armpit of a country had had a regime change. And over the past few months things had gotten even worse there. Even the most basic of women’s rights had been flushed down the toilet.

“She wouldn’t be my first choice,” Paoletti said. “If I
had
a choice. Like I said, I haven’t worked with this comspesh, I haven’t even met her. But I’m pretty sure you both know her. She just left the Agency.”

A comspesh that he and Deck knew from the Agency who’d had field training? Oh, no. No, no.

“She worked in the support office.” Paoletti shuffled through the papers in front of him. “Her name’s . . .”

Not . . .

“Tess Bailey.”

Oh, shit.

Paoletti looked sharply up at Jimmy. “Problem, Nash?”

Had he said that aloud?

Apparently he had, since Deck was looking at him, too.

“No,” Jimmy lied automatically before his brain fully kicked in. There were a lot of problems with Tess Bailey joining the team, and only one of them related to the fact that he’d spent the night with her two months ago and then left town without calling, without emailing, without a single word.

“Well, actually yes,” he quickly countered. “She’s great. Don’t get me wrong, Tess Bailey is really,
really
great. Good person. Smart, resourceful . . . But like you said, she’s got no experience out in the field.” He looked from Decker to Paoletti. “None. Whatsoever.”