Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(65)

“Hey, stranger,” I said.

“Nikki?”

“Vietnamese food,” I answered. “How did you know it’s a favorite?”

Ethan’s voice brightened. “Some random girl once told me that everyone makes assumptions. Something about how the only question is if they’re right or not.”

“A random girl? From what I understand that’s generally a very trustworthy type.”

“So … I was right?”

I answered with a question. “You free tonight?”

“Sure,” he said, surprised. “I mean, I’ll have to ditch my friends for trivia, which means they’ll probably lose, but they’ll get over it. We usually lose anyway, to be honest. I tend to blame the questions. They’re way too superficial.”

“Tell me where,” I said, “and I’ll see you in an hour.”

As I hung up I felt better. I wanted to see him again. I wanted to talk books or laugh or lean against his shoulder, feel an arm around me and not say a word. Not make decisions. I didn’t even want to see a menu. I picked up the phone again, dialed Brenda Johnson’s number. No answer. I’d try her later.

Meet me there at ten o’clock tonight.

I’ll tell you everything I know.

But ten o’clock had been too late. Too late for Karen to tell me.

Too late for me to save her.

That afternoon. The look of fear on her delicate face. Her eyes showing frustration and helplessness all at once. Frustration, because there was so much I didn’t understand. Helplessness, because there was so much that she did understand.

And I had sent her off to die.

I poured a new drink and started going through the photographs again. I’d stared at the faces so many times I felt like I knew each person. Who were they? Why did they want to do evil things to innocents? A handsome man with tousled hair walking out of a mosque. A woman with sad eyes and a haunted face, mid-step, black hair swinging in a frozen ponytail. A skinny man kicking a soccer ball in an asphalt lot. A woman with a round, determined face and high forehead, seated in a restaurant, fork halfway to her mouth. A tough-looking man in an overcoat, hurrying somewhere, a satchel clutched in one hand.

I stopped at one picture. A man with a missing tooth. The same man who had smiled out from the blurry newspaper photo. Someone who was now, according to the newspapers, a dead man. What did that mean? How did it connect? I stared at the photograph, feeling that there was something just out of reach. I pushed my frustration away, forcing myself to think logically through the possibilities.

One: he was an anticorruption blogger, just as it seemed, and he had committed suicide for whatever reason, just as they said. Which was completely possible. Families were notoriously unwilling to accept a loved one’s suicide. Fairly or not, a suicide forced people to ask all kinds of unpleasant questions of themselves. Far easier to think of death as something involuntary, even unavoidable.

Two: he was indeed a journalist of some kind but his widow was right and he had been killed. Which could have happened for any number of reasons. Maybe he’d simply written the wrong piece that stirred up some unrelated trouble. Or just run afoul of some local gangsters, maybe had a bad debt, a gambling problem. Blogging about corruption didn’t automatically confer sainthood.

Three: he wasn’t a blogger at all, but something more sinister. If he’d been part of some kind of cell, it wasn’t stretching the imagination to think that he could have gotten cold feet and been killed after trying to back out. Or government security forces had gotten to him. Egypt’s security forces were notoriously violent, even for the Middle East. In recent years, they’d killed thousands, often for little or no reason. If they suspected a blogger or anyone else had even the most tenuous jihadist connections, his life would be worth nothing once they found him.

People will die.

Karen Li had told me that whatever I thought, it was worse. If there was a plot, and the people in these photos were involved, what was the target? The final week of October and I still didn’t know who was being targeted, what milestone Care4 was approaching, or what these pictures had to do with it. And why did I have the unsettling feeling that I was missing something?

I flipped through the pictures, noting the foreign backgrounds and different languages. Arabic, Spanish, English, Cyrillic. What was being planned? What was I not seeing?

Feeling more than ever that I was missing something important.



* * *



The office had grown dark. The days were shorter, approaching daylight savings. I tried Brenda again, once again reached her voice mail. Mentally running through what I wanted to wear to the restaurant, I decided I’d just get in touch tomorrow. I wanted time to shower and put on a little makeup before dinner. I hadn’t seen Ethan in a while. I wanted to look nice. Outside, Telegraph Avenue was busy with traffic and pedestrians. A black van with impenetrably tinted windows pulled up across the street and double-parked. One of the big Mercedes Sprinters used for airport pickups or to ferry around private school tennis teams.

Three men in suits got out of the van.

Not a tennis team.

The three of them approached the crosswalk.

One of them pressed the Walk button.

They waited.

I watched.

The flashing orange figurine froze white.

The three men crossed the street.