Taking Fire (11 page)

20

Talia set down her fork. She wished she could tell him that she knew everything about him. She had wanted to know where he was, what he was doing, if he was well and even alive after all this time. She'd had sources with access to information, but she hadn't let herself ask. Somehow it had seemed less painful that way.

“No,” she said honestly. “I don't know what you've been doing.”

She wasn't sure what to draw from his silence, but she imagined he felt the same blow she had felt upon discovering he'd had no idea she was no longer with Mossad. It hurt to know he hadn't cared enough to keep track of her. And based on the little he'd told her about his team, it seemed he also had access to resources that could have helped him find out if he'd wanted to know.

More likely, he'd been so angry he'd simply written her off.

“So you're not still with Fargis?”

He grunted, as if he found some cynical amusement in her question. “No. Not for several years. Seems we've both made some big changes.”

“But you're still in the same line of work.” She was counting on that—desperately. She needed the Taggart she'd known in Kabul, the whip-smart, tough soldier she'd seduced. Meir's life depended on him still being a warrior.

“If you tell me who you're with, maybe I can network them into resources here in Oman, maybe even into the city, where we need help
now.
Right
now
.
There's no time for—” She heard the hysteria leaking into her voice and stopped herself cold. She couldn't fall apart again. She needed to be the agent she'd once been.

“This team is deep-sixed into an abyss, Talia,” he said, picking up the conversation. “They're the best at what they do. You're going to have to trust me on this.”

“We're talking about my son,” she said, fighting the anguish threatening to drown her. “I have a right to know everything. I
have
to know everything, and I don't want to play twenty questions to get one simple damn answer. My son's—
your
son's—life depends on us. Depends on whoever you just called. I need to know we can count on them to be—”

“Count on them to be what?” he interrupted, his voice taking a hard edge. “To be who
I
say they are?”

“Yes.” She clenched her hands in her lap. “I need something to hang on to, someone to believe in.”
I need hope.

“Do you know how rich that is? Coming from you?” His tone was as sharp as a razor. “This is different from Kabul, Talia. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm not playing you. I don't
want
anything from you. I'm trying to find the boy. That's all.”

She hung her head, fighting for control.
Please, help me, God. We don't have time for rehashing the past. But I need Taggart.
She drew a shaky breath, forced herself to look up and meet his gaze. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—”

“What if I hadn't been here?” he bit out, interrupting her again. “What if you were on your own? Would you question an offer of help then?” He stood unexpectedly and stalked across the room. “I can't believe this. I can't fricking believe I was actually starting to . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head as if he felt like a fool.

“Starting to what?” She had to ask. Forgive her? Understand what she'd gone through?

“Never mind. What I can't believe is that you have the nerve to question me. After what
you
did to
me
.”

Anger. He was so filled with it. She'd done that to him. And she deserved every bit of it. Yet suddenly, she needed him to understand. “Did I set out to betray you?” She shifted her gaze to the kitchen, away from him. “Yes. You were my mission. You were my avenue to get to al-Attar. So yes. I used you. I seduced you. I betrayed you, because the American government wanted him alive, and he needed to die for all the Israeli lives he'd taken.”

Feeling stronger now that the words were out, she turned around to face him. He stood with his back to her, fists clenched at his sides.

“I was Mossad,” she reminded him forcefully. “I volunteered for the mission, prepared to do anything necessary—including seducing you—to get the information on al-Attar.”

“Mission fucking accomplished.” Sarcasm dripped from each word.

She couldn't let his bitterness stop her now. “But you . . . you were not what I expected. And I—” She stopped herself short of saying
I fell in love with you
. He wouldn't want to hear it. “I never planned on caring about you.”

“As you're so fond of saying, what does it matter now?”

Oh, it mattered. It mattered to her. And although he wouldn't admit it, she was certain it mattered to him. He wouldn't be this angry if it didn't.

Most of all, it mattered to Meir.

“You were right about the reason I'm no longer Mossad. I broke the code. I got personally involved with an assignment. And before I went into the operation, that's all you were. You understand that, right? You of all people? You were a name in an action plan. An individual to target to accomplish a goal.”

She stopped again and composed herself. “After we became . . . close . . . I begged for your life. I pleaded with Mossad to spare you. And yes, it cost me.”

He turned around and glared at her. “We both paid a price, then, didn't we?”

“I didn't keep track of you after Kabul,” she went on, holding his flat gaze, “because I knew you would hate me. You had every right to. And I knew there would be no purpose, no good to come from attempting to contact you. So I did the only thing I could do. I forgot about you. At least, I tried.”

“Right,” he said after a long moment. “Must have been a little tough, what with you carrying my kid and all. A real bitchin' bad place to be.”

Bitterness and vitriol. He was entitled to both. And she was entitled to get this all out in the open. “What would you have done? Ask yourself that. I didn't plan to get pregnant.” She rushed on. “But it wasn't long after I left Kabul that I realized I was. Did I have choices? Yes. I could have had an abortion. But I didn't. I could have told you. But I didn't do that, either.

“Think about it,” she demanded after a brief silence. “What would you have done if you'd known? What
could
you have done? You hated me. You hate me now. How could I bring a child into this world and introduce him to a man who hated his mother?”

He'd grown very quiet, his entire body tense.

“After . . . right after he was born, I came very close to looking for you. To telling you. But I was afraid you would try to take him from me.”

She dragged the hair away from her face, exhausted by the slow pulse of fear washing through her body.
My son . . . my son . . .

“You were a soldier for hire,” she went on wearily. “Undoubtedly, you still are. How could I have risked losing him to you? If I'd told you and you'd wanted him, you would have taken him. I know you well enough to know that. To hell with a courtroom and the law. You'd have taken him in the night and made sure I never found you. And how could a child have possibly fit into your world?”

He turned around, his expression a flat plane of anger. “So because
you
couldn't see a child in my life,
you
decided he was better off without me.” He tapped his chest with a tight fist. “When did
I
ever get to weigh in on that decision? Jesus, Talia. Did you ever even
once
think that I might have liked to have known about him? That I had a
right
to know about him? That I had a right to decide what my role in his life would be?”

She had no more tears to shed. “I've thought about it every single day. Questioned every day if I'd made the right decision. And now that I see you, now that I see the angry man you've become—”

“I am
not
an angry man!” he roared. “I am angry with
you
! And by God, I have every right to that anger.”

She lowered her head, because she couldn't bear to see his rage and pain.

He was right. And she accepted now, as she should have all along, that he was still as lost to her as the day she'd betrayed him.“Please tell me the plan,” she said, ending not only their conversation but any hope that they could ever bridge the distance between them. “How are we going to get him back?”

A phone rang then, adding new anxiety to the brittle tension.

21

“Rhonda,” he said, his voice still tight, as he answered the SAT phone. “What have you got for me?”

Talia watched and listened, not wanting to, unable to help herself, as his features and his voice slowly softened. An instant ago, his jaw had been clenched, his brows rigid with rage. Yet this woman—Rhonda—had wiped out his anger with “hello.”

Was she someone on his team? Someone in his life? Both? It would be naive to assume he wasn't involved with someone. A man like him, a man who looked like him, who loved like him.

Even though Taggart mostly listened and paced, head down, phone close to his ear, the conversation was clearly about Meir. For that she was beyond thankful.

His major contributions to the conversation were short and clipped words between long pauses. “Got it . . . Yeah . . . Copy that . . . Yes . . . Understood.”

Not knowing what was being said made her crazy, so she eased off the counter stool and limped into the bathroom in search of the first-aid supplies. She'd cleaned and bandaged her arm, but she hadn't yet taken care of her feet. The pain she could take. An infection that might put her down she couldn't. She had to be able to find Meir.

Taggart's team might be on the way, but she couldn't wait. It was close to nine thirty; those barbarians had had her baby for three and a half hours.

She fought anxiety and shaking hands as she gathered peroxide, cotton balls, antiseptic cream, and bandages, then carried them to the living room, where she had more room and more light to work on her feet.

“Yes, babe. I'm okay,” Taggart said, actually smiling into the phone, and God, it hurt to remember that he'd smiled that way once for her.

It also hurt that he had the nerve to flirt with Rhonda when her child—
their
child—was in unimaginable danger.

“I've got a little bump on my head. Other than that, I'm good. I promise. Look. I need you to get on that for me ASAP. Call me back when you've got things arranged, okay? Yeah. Love you, too.”

Talia tightened her jaw.

“Make sure you tell your husband I said you're way too good for him.”

If it wasn't one kind of guilt she felt, it was another. How petty. How outrageously unacceptable for her to feel relief that Rhonda wasn't a lover but the wife of a friend.

She set out the medical supplies. Nothing about her feelings for Taggart should be in play here. It shamed her that even for a moment, she thought about herself, not about Meir.

“Part of your team?” She started folding squares of gauze, then ripping lengths of tape.

“Rhonda's our computer hacker techno wizard. And she already has information for us to go on.”

Every cell in her body shot to attention. “A lead?”

He continued to pace the room. “When I called Nate earlier, I filled him in on what we knew. That Hamas was responsible for the bombing, that you were their target, and that when they realized you were still alive, they kidnapped Meir.”

It all sounded so surreal, as if it were happening to someone else, when he said the words out loud in such a detached, matter-of-fact way. But it jolted her back to reality. She had to start functioning as if this was a mission happening to someone else.

She needed to divorce herself from her fear and love for her son and attack the problem as an operative would. As she'd been trained to do. Logically and systematically. If she kept letting her emotions come into play, she wouldn't be any good to
Meir.

“Back up a second, please. Nate—he's your boss?” she asked as calm settled over her.

“Yes. Earlier, I sent him the pictures of our four dead terrorists. He forwarded them to Rhonda. She's in the process of running the photos through our data­base. While she's waiting for results, she went ahead and accessed NSA files.”

“NSA?” That stopped her in the middle of applying the antiseptic cream to a nasty cut on her heel. “You have access to the NSA's digital files?”

“Sort of,” he said, heightening her curiosity about his organization. “Rhonda ran a check on al-Attar's background. Family. Friends. Partners in terror. Whatever. Al-Attar has a son, Hakeem. Did you know about him?”

“He was in his teens, I think, when . . .” She trailed off and went back to work on the bandages.

“When Mossad killed his father,” he said, finishing the thought for her. “He's twenty-something now, and he's on a terrorist watch list along with al-Attar's older brother, Amir. While no ironclad cases have been made against them, in addition to numerous bombings and attacks, both are suspected to be connected to the Mossad agents' deaths.”

She let out a long breath. “That pretty much confirms that this
is
about retribution. If I'd known about the deaths earlier, Meir and I would have been gone before this ever happened.”

“But you didn't know. And all the self-­recrimination in the world isn't going to change that.”

Her head came up. She was surprised to see that the anger in his eyes had been replaced by a look of purpose. He, too, had shifted into operative mode. His focus, his intensity, all geared toward finding Meir.

“I wonder how they found you out,” he said pensively, and she could tell it had been bothering him.

“That makes two of us. No one outside of Mossad knew the photojournalist job was a cover. They never would have leaked it.”

“I knew,” he said, watching her face intently. “What makes you think I didn't leak it?”

Probably a good question. He'd figured out she was Mossad immediately after she'd betrayed and left him. But she knew it wasn't him. “There's a difference between anger and evil. You're not evil.”

The set of his mouth told her he wanted to be indifferent to her trust. His eyes told a different story.“I'll probably never know how they connected me with Mossad. I saw no need to change my identity when I went to work for the State Department. It was a natural transition.”

He pinched his lower lip between his thumb and finger, still not satisfied. But it didn't matter how they'd found out; the damage had been done.

“Do they know anything about Ted Jensen? About casualties in general?” she asked.

“Ted's going to be okay. The death toll is much less than I expected, considering there were around two hundred people inside. Seven dead at last count. Many more hospitalized, some in critical condition.”

And she wasn't supposed to feel guilty. She closed her eyes, saw her dead aide. Wondered how many others might still die. She'd thought she heard a voice at one point during their struggle to get out of the building, but her ears had been ringing so loudly she couldn't tell what direction it came from. Even if she could have found them, what could she have done? “They might still be alive if—”

He cut her off again. “You aren't responsible.”

“But if I hadn't come to Muscat—”

“Hakeem, Amir, and the rest of their al-Attar Hamas brothers are the bad guys here. So stop with the guilt trip. It won't do Meir any good. We need to look forward, not back.”

He was right. “So what else?” she asked, and returned to bandaging her feet.

“The word on Hakeem is that he's hotheaded. Very radical. Very devoted to his unholy cause and the memory of his father. And he's out for vengeance. Clearly, he didn't think about the fallout of bombing a U.S. embassy. Both the Pentagon and DOD are in a tailspin, trying to figure out a strategic and diplomatic plan for addressing the bombing. So requests are apt to get knotted up in the red tape. Which is actually good for us. It means we may not have to dodge a U.S. military operation that could screw up our search—at least, not right away.”

“What about Amir?”

“A false religious zealot. The worst kind. He spouts all the ‘Hamas versus infidel' propaganda, but he likes his alcohol and women. He might be the weak link that leads us to Meir. Rhonda will text us pictures of both Amir and Hakeem.”

The SAT phone rang just as he said it. But it wasn't photos of Hakeem and Amir. It was another call from Rhonda.

*   *   *

“I'm going to put you on speakerphone so Talia can hear the conversation, okay, babe?” Taggart hit the speaker icon and set the phone on the coffee table in front of them. “All right. Shoot.”

“Talia. Hello.” A strong woman's voice came over the line. “I'm sorry we're meeting under these conditions. But we're going to get your son back, okay? You've got the best people possible working on it.”

“Thank you. Thank you for helping,” Talia said, suddenly overwhelmed by the idea that someone she didn't know was doing so much for Meir.

“Talk to me, sweetheart,” Bobby said.

“Okay. I've got a lot of info, so I'm starting from the top, and it's coming fast, so hang on. First, we got an FRS match”—

“Facial recognition software,” Taggart mouthed to Talia.

—“on one of the dead men. Known associate of Hakeem al-Attar, so they were definitely his men. I suspect we'll get a match on the other three soon, but we're not waiting around for confirmation. We're moving on this.

“Next, I believe I already told you that Hakeem and Amir are on the terrorist watch list. We got real lucky. Hakeem was last spotted five days ago at a rental-car desk at the Muscat International Airport. So he's definitely in Muscat, because there've been zero sightings of him anywhere else since. And now we know that in addition to a white VW Golf—that was the vehicle, right?”

“Right,” Taggart said.

“In addition to the white Golf, they rented two more vehicles: a light blue four-door Golf and a cream-colored Toyota Highlander. I'll text you the plate numbers after we hang up.”

“So we're looking at four more men fitting inside the blue Golf and five in the Toyota?” Talia asked.

“Sounds right. They could maybe squeeze another into the Toyota, but why? We're thinking they'd want cargo space for weapons and supplies.”

Nine, Talia thought, as a sickening knot formed in her stomach. Nine more men had her baby.

“We've also put a watch on the airport for Meir or any child with an Israeli or American passport attempting to leave the city,” Rhonda continued, helping Talia to focus on what they had, not what they didn't have. “We don't think they'd have had the foresight to prepare false papers for Meir, but just in case, we've got that area covered. I hacked the school's database and found a picture of Meir that's been sent out over the wire. No one's getting that boy out of Muscat by air without someone in security recognizing him. So far, no children have been flagged.”

“They could transport him on the ground,” Talia said, and Taggart nodded in accord.

“They could,” Rhonda agreed. “But why move him out of Muscat? You're their target, not the boy. He's their ticket to get to you. We think they'll want to use him as bait to draw you out. And as frightening as that sounds, we think that's a good thing, Talia.”

“How can that be good?” She couldn't help it; fear for Meir got the best of her.

“The general consensus is they're not taking him anywhere. The odds are they'll attempt to ransom him—for you. We feel this very strongly. And when they finally make that call, you're going to ask for proof of life. You're going to demand that they let you talk to him. And they are going to anticipate that. For that reason alone, we're sure Meir is alive.”

Talia let that settle, then looked to Taggart for some indication that he agreed with Rhonda. He nodded, looking confident.

“Talia, do they have any way of getting in touch with you?” Rhonda asked.

“Yes,” Taggart answered for her. “I think they do. I searched the dead bodyguard's car and didn't find his cell phone. Makes sense that if they plan to ransom the boy, they'd need that phone to contact Talia. Her number would be stored on it.”

“That does make sense,” Talia agreed. “We attempted to reach Jonathan several times. My name would have shown up on his missed-call log.”

“Good. That's good,” Rhonda said. “Then we wait for the call. But we're going to find Meir long before you have to worry about meeting any ransom demands. Right now, there's a 737 cargo jet filled with equipment fueled up and ready to go at Dulles Airport. And guess who Nate persuaded the Pentagon to send over to investigate the bombing?”

A smile bloomed on Taggart's face. “I knew he'd figure out a way.”

“We're just waiting for the guys to touch down at Dulles, then they'll be wheels up.”

“Wait?” Talia asked as alarm shot through her. “Why do they have to wait?”

“Rather than tie up the line, I'll let Bobby fill you in. I've still got a lot of info to feed you.”

Something wasn't as it should be; she could feel it. Why weren't they already on their way?

“Okay.” Rhonda drew a deep breath. “Bobby, after we disconnect, watch for my texts with those plate numbers and the photos of Hakeem and Amir to come through—I'll send to both the SAT phone and Talia's cell. You're going to need them to start your search tonight, even though I still think you should both get some rest and start looking tomorrow.”