Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(88)

“Uncuff him,” I said.

“I don’t have the key.”

“You can’t spend all that Saudi money if you’re dead.”

The expression on her face changed, racing through a series of emotions that came and went so quickly I couldn’t catalog them. Whatever else she was, Almasi was a complicated woman. But at the end, fury radiated off her like a furnace.

“Key is on the table,” she said.

I held the gun between my shoulder and chin, swept up the key, and tossed it to her.

“Hurry,” I said.

While she bent to Cohen, I lifted a slat on the blind. No one outside yet. At least not where I could see them.

“I have the bird,” I murmured into the radio microphone.

Silence.

Cohen groaned.

“Mike,” I said.

His eyes opened. “Sydney?”

To Almasi I said, “Now the tape.”

She peeled the duct tape away from his arm.

“Help him stand.”

She grabbed his wrists, braced herself, and pulled. Cohen slid forward an inch.

“Cohen!” I snapped. “On your feet!”

He jerked.

“Get him up,” I said to Almasi, “or by fuck I will blow out your knees.”

She pushed and pulled Cohen from the chair. He wobbled to his feet.

“Help him over. Bring the cuffs.”

The anger in her face would have frightened Hades. But hell no longer scared me. Almasi draped Cohen’s arm across her shoulders and braced her shoulder in his armpit. She grabbed the cuffs, and they hobbled toward me.

Cohen’s face looked more battered than it had in the photo. The bruising ran down the side of his neck and disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt. The tips of three fingers on his right hand were taped.

His clothes were spattered with blood.

Process it later.

I peered out the slats. Two armed men now stood at the end of the corridor between the trailers.

When Cohen and Almasi were close enough, I took the cuffs and ordered her to bring her hands together in the front. I snapped on the cuffs and pocketed the key.

“Mike, can you walk on your own?”

His eyes met mine. The darkness I read there made me flinch. Maybe I was afraid of hell after all.

“Sydney.” His voice sounded like they’d scraped down his vocal cords with a metal file. “Water.”

I found another glass and filled it at the tap, my eyes on Almasi. He drank it down, and his eyes cleared a little.

I unslung the rifle and handed it to him. He took it with a nod.

It had been more than ten minutes since I’d told Dougie where we were. We needed a vehicle. I did not want to walk Almasi and an injured Cohen past armed guards.

I looked out the window again. The two men were conferring, and one pointed south, away from the trailer. They looked alert but not anxious. Given the size of the complex and the constant roar of the wind, they probably hadn’t heard the shots. And since Almasi was using the trailer to torture a cop, my guess was she’d issued a do-not-disturb notice to everyone on the complex.

Her men didn’t yet know I was inside.

I murmured into the mike. “T3.”

Silence.

A third man joined the first two. They talked, and then all three moved away. Now would be the perfect time to show up, Dougie.

“All I want is the intel,” Almasi said. “I assume you have it by now. Turn it over, and we can forget about all this. You go your way. I go mine. Nice and civilized.”

She didn’t look civilized. She looked like she wanted to hack out my eyes with a knife and then run them through a kitchen disposal.

But beneath the anger lay another emotion. I peered more closely at this woman who had occupied my nightmares for years. In my mind, I’d made her godlike—all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. But here she stood in a sunbaked construction trailer in the middle of nowhere. A small, graying woman with age-spotted skin and a squint.

Nothing about her was what I’d expected, other than the rage.

Anger was often a cover for fear, or so my counselor said. I got that. I had plenty of both. But beneath Almasi’s more obvious reactions I caught a flicker of something else.

“What?” she snapped at me, tired of my perusal.

Grief, I realized. What Almasi carried in her eyes was grief. The profound kind. The kind I’d seen at memorials and funerals and in the eyes of the chaplain when we carried bodies onto the base. The kind that breaks every bone in your body, but which you have no choice but to carry with you across a lifetime.

Something terrible had happened to her. Whatever it was didn’t offer absolution for what she’d done. But it gave me a glimpse inside her armor.

I would give Dougie a few minutes more.

“Tell me about Kane,” I said. “Was it the photos he took that tipped you off? Made you realize he’d connected Valor with the weapons smuggled into Iraq?”

She perched on the metal table where the keys had been. Probably she was okay with buying time, too. Give her men a chance to realize something was going down and move in.

The dice could roll either way.

Almasi cleared her throat. “The security cop? He was killed by a tramp.”

“While you watched. Don’t you trust your own people to do their work? Or do you just enjoy watching good men die?”