Czytaj książkę: «Kentucky Confidential»

Chapter One

“She’s dead,” Connor McGinnis whispered, though his eyes declared the words a lie.

On the street below his window, the woman he was surveilling tugged her faded coat more tightly around her swollen belly and waited for the chance to cross the street. A light wind swept snow flurries in small white eddies down the street and threatened to whip the gauzy roosari from her head. Grabbing the scarf as it slid down to reveal the dark luster of her wavy hair, she tugged it back into place, but not before he got a look at her face.

Her intimately familiar face.

She looked tired and careworn, but there were no signs that she’d been injured. Of course, the crash had happened months earlier. She might have had time to heal from even a serious injury.

Though how she’d survived the blast in the first place...

He tamped down a maelstrom of conflicting emotions. Not yet. Emotions on the battlefield could be deadly. And if Risa was still alive, he was already engaged in a war he hadn’t known about only a few days ago.

If Risa was still alive. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it yet, no matter what his eyes were telling him. He’d seen news footage of the wreckage found floating in the water off the coast of Japan. Even if someone had survived the bomb blast that sent the jet hurtling into the Pacific Ocean, no one would have come out of that crash unscathed. And Risa’s name was on the passenger manifest, which meant she’d gotten on the plane.

He didn’t know how this woman could be Risa, no matter how much she looked like her.

Except there were ways to fake passenger manifests, weren’t there? Ways to fool transportation security. It was one of the biggest nightmares facing national security agencies worldwide.

Traffic cleared momentarily, and the woman started across the street. Her gaze darted around, right and left, in front and behind, as she made the short transit from one corner to another.

Hypervigilant, he thought.

Reasonable, he supposed, for a refugee from war-torn Kaziristan.

Or for a woman hiding from her past.

Stop. It’s not Risa. It can’t be.

He was grasping at straws. Letting what he wanted get in the way of what actually was.

That was a good way to drive himself insane. He had to keep his emotions out of the equation. Think logically. Deal in facts.

If Risa had survived the crash, she’d have found a way to let him know.

Wouldn’t she?

He lost sight of the woman—the woman who couldn’t possibly be Risa—as she turned at the corner and walked under the narrow awnings of the storefronts below the shabby apartment he’d rented earlier that morning. He resisted the urge to run to the ground floor and follow her down the street. It wasn’t time to make that particular move.

Not yet.

If ten years of combat had taught Connor McGinnis nothing else, it had shown him the value of patience.

* * *

SHE WAS BEING WATCHED.

Inside her apartment, the woman known as Yasmin Hamani locked the door behind her and paused in the entryway to listen. The apartment building was old, prone to settling with creaks and groans of aged wood and plaster, but she didn’t sense the presence of another living being within the walls of the small one-bedroom apartment. Still, she unlocked the drawer of the table by the door and withdrew her compact Glock 23, feeling instantly safer.

These days, it was harder to carry a weapon than rely on her disguise to keep her safe. None of her shoulder-carry holsters fit comfortably anymore, thanks to the swell of her pregnant belly. And forget trying to work with any sort of waistband holster.

She made a circuit of the empty apartment with the Glock in hand before she finally relaxed and put the weapon on the side table where she could easily reach it. She removed the roosari covering her hair, relieved to be shed of it for a while. She wasn’t Muslim, but the majority of the Kaziri refugees who lived in this section of Over-the-Rhine were, and she donned the head scarf as both protection and concealment.

It was unlikely she’d run across anyone she’d dealt with during her years in Kaziristan, but a dead woman couldn’t be too careful. She couldn’t afford to stand out.

The baby was fussy this afternoon, turning flips in her womb. Impatient, perhaps, to greet the world outside. Yasmin rubbed her bulging belly, smiling a little at the thumps of the baby’s kicks against her palms, strong and reassuring.

The baby was her reason for everything she did these days.

She eased into her desk chair, now used to the dull pain in the small of her back from carrying the tiny burden inside her. She typed in the complex password to her laptop computer and checked her email for any message from her former handler.

Nothing.

She sighed, leaning against the back of the chair. If someone had seen through her cover, apparently Martin Dalrymple didn’t know about it.

Which meant what? That she was imagining things?

Working in covert operations had a way of making a person see shadows where none existed. Operatives got used to paranoia. Expecting the worst, seeing threats everywhere you looked, kept you vigilant. And vigilance kept you alive. But she’d thought she was done with that life. She had started a new life, one that wouldn’t include dead drops and secret identities. One that included stability and trust. Love.

She should have known better.

The baby kicked again, reminding her that she hadn’t lost everything. The pregnancy had come as a shock, a complication her analytical mind had deemed an unacceptable risk.

But her heart had wrapped itself around the tiny life growing inside her like a coat of armor, determined to keep the baby safe from danger.

She would give her baby the life he or she deserved, no matter what it took. Somehow, she’d figure out a way to do it.

But she didn’t think it could be here in Cincinnati.

She sent a coded email message to Dalrymple, trying to be as oblique as possible so that even if someone managed to break the cipher, he’d still have to figure out what the hell she was talking about. While Dalrymple knew her well enough to understand what she was trying to tell him, there wasn’t anyone else in the world who knew her that well.

Not anymore, anyway.

The baby gave another kick. She was only four weeks away from her due date, though her obstetrician seemed to think she might deliver late. First babies often took their own sweet time.

Rubbing her belly, she logged off and closed the laptop, hoping Dalrymple would respond soon. The last thing she needed in the final days of her pregnancy was this kind of stress.

Come on, Dal. Tell me I’m imagining things.

She settled in the rocking chair she’d picked up at a thrift store. Most of her furniture was secondhand. Her clothes as well.

She’d never been wealthy, and she could remember plenty of lean times in her life, both as a child and later as an adult. But life as a pregnant Kaziri refugee was proving to be a whole other level of needy. And there was no hope of ever going back to the life she’d once lived.

From down the hall, faint strains of an old Kaziri folk song added a discordant counterpoint to the Bing Crosby tune playing on the radio in the apartment next door. Refugees had taken over several of the empty apartments in the building, but there were a few native Cincinnatians who’d been living in Over-the-Rhine for decades, through bad times and good. Some of them eyed the newcomers with suspicion and even fear, at times signaling their defiance by shows of blatant patriotism in case the refugees forgot where they were living now.

Yasmin felt strangely caught in the middle, someone who knew all the words to both songs clamoring for attention. Her mother had sung “Nazanin” to her as a lullaby for as long as she could remember. And Bing’s “White Christmas” had always been one of her father’s favorite songs.

It would have been easier if Dal had placed her in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area, where another group of Kaziri immigrants had started to form their own small cultural enclave. Those Kaziris came from the small Christian community, with its more westernized habits and customs. She could have fit in there quite easily, given her mother’s background.

But she wasn’t going to find what Dalrymple was seeking in North Carolina. So there would be no Christmas lights this year. No holly wreath on her door or stockings on the mantel. Not if she wanted to fit in with the rest of the Kaziri community here in Cincy.

Still, as she rocked slowly in the chair, making herself wait a little longer before she checked for Dal’s return email, she found herself humming along with Bing, feeling a little melancholy.

Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. And this year, she’d be spending it alone.

* * *

“IS IT HER?” Maddox Heller’s drawl rumbled through the phone receiver, bracingly familiar.

Connor stepped away from the window. “I’ll admit, it looks like her.”

“But you’re not certain.” Heller’s voice was tinged with sympathy. A former marine, like Connor, he’d gotten in touch after the plane crash and Risa’s death, first to offer his condolences, and later, the new job that had eventually brought Connor to Cincinnati.

“No, I’m not certain.” Connor had come to terms with the fact that he wanted to believe the woman he’d seen was Risa. But self-deception during a mission was a great way to end up dead or captured. “The woman is definitely pregnant.”

“How far along?”

“How the hell would I know?” He heard a tinge of bitterness in his voice and quelled it. Stick to the facts. “Big. Probably last trimester.”

“If it’s Risa,” Heller said quietly, “then...”

Then the baby could be his. “I know.”

“Quinn has feelers out to some of his old contacts at the agency, but if she’s part of an ongoing operation, they’re not going to tell him anything.”

“Do you think...” Connor swallowed and started again. “Do you think she could have planned it all along?”

“What? Faking her death?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. CIA folks can be a little squirrelly, but...”

But she loved me, he thought. She loved me, and we didn’t have secrets.

Self-deception, he reminded himself. Always dangerous.

“I think she must live in this area. The Kaziri refugee community seems to be centered here near the new mosque on Dublin Street,” he told Heller. The mosque had once been a Methodist church, according to some of the locals he’d talked to earlier that morning. With the exodus of locals and the advent of the refugees, a lot was changing in the neighborhood. Longtime diners had become halal markets and restaurants. A boutique down the street from the mosque now sold hijab coverings for women.

“That’s what our intel says,” Heller agreed.

By intel, he suspected Heller meant an undercover asset. Maybe more than one. Connor was new to Campbell Cove Security and the academy the company ran. He had a feeling there was a lot about the company he had yet to discover. And other things, he suspected, he might never discover unless there was a pressing need to know.

Heller broke the silence that had fallen between them. “What’s your gut on this?”

How the hell was Connor supposed to answer that question? He’d spent the past three days since spotting the pregnant woman in the surveillance photos trying not to feel anything at all, in his gut or anywhere else. If he let himself feel, then he’d lose any chance of dealing with the situation with reason and logic.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t let my gut lead here.”

He wanted to believe way too much to trust his gut about anything where Risa was concerned.

“What are you going to do next?” Heller asked.

Connor checked his watch. Nearly two thirty. “The operative says she works the dinner shift at The Jewel of Tablis, right?”

“Not every night, but yeah.”

“So I guess I’ll wait a couple of hours and then go have myself a nice halal dinner.”

* * *

BY THE TIME Yasmin had to leave the apartment to get to her job at the restaurant, she still hadn’t heard from Dalrymple. Going on twelve hours since their last contact. Dal had always been the kind of man who lived on his own timetable, but he’d never taken this long to get back to her.

Unless something had gone wrong.

As she tied her apron above the swell of the baby, she glanced around the restaurant, trying to remember the feeling she’d had before while walking home from the doctor’s office. A tingle on the back of her neck that said, “Someone is watching.”

She supposed it was possible a lot of people were watching her. Pregnant women living alone weren’t the norm in a culture like Kaziristan’s. She had lived there with her mother for three years while her father was doing a tour of duty overseas. At least, that’s what her mother had told her, though she sometimes wondered if the Kaziristan years had come during a rough patch in her parents’ marriage.

They’d stayed with her mother’s brother and his family, and the experience had been eye-opening, not always in a good way. But during those years, she’d learned a lot about being a Kaziri woman. While a large swath of Kaziristan was cosmopolitan and culturally advanced, some of the rural areas were still deeply tribal, including the part where her mother’s brother lived. Those areas were patriarchal in a way people in the West couldn’t really comprehend.

But even in those parts of Kaziristan, women had ways of getting things done beneath the veil. It was a lesson she’d never forgotten, and she was banking on that lesson to get her through the next few months of her life.

“Yasmin?” The sharp voice of the restaurant manager, Farid Rahimi, jerked her back to attention. She turned to look at him, trying not to let her dislike show.

He was a short man, and lean, but she knew from observation that he was strong and fast. He was also mean, keeping his employees in line with threats and derision. He was a US citizen, which put him in a far more stable position than most of the people in the community, including all of his employees. Most were here on temporary visas or provisional refugee status, and he made sure they understood just how perilous their lives in the States really were.

“There are a couple of special guests coming tonight. They want the prettiest of the serving girls to wait on them exclusively.” He flashed her a bright smile before adding, “So Darya will be serving them. You’ll have to pick up her tables.”

“Yes, sir,” she answered in Kaziri, trying to ignore the flash of cruelty in his smile. One of the hardest things about pretending to be a Kaziri refugee was behaving as if she was resigned to being at the mercy of others.

In another life, she would have cut him in half with her words. And he’d be lucky if she’d stopped there.

“Speak English,” Farid added in a harsh tone. He waved one sinewy hand at her head. “And cover yourself.”

She reached up and straightened her roosari, tugging it up to cover her hair. It’s all part of the assignment, she reminded herself as she picked up her order pad and went to work, her teeth grinding with frustration.

The conversations she overheard as she worked were unremarkable. Despite its location in the heart of the Kaziri refugee community, The Jewel of Tablis was beginning to draw patrons from all over Cincinnati. In fact, most of the refugees Yasmin knew were too impoverished to eat out, though most of them shopped in the small halal food market attached to the restaurant. So far tonight, all of her diners were English-speaking Americans. Not one of them said anything that might have piqued Dalrymple’s interest.

She was beginning to wonder why he’d wanted her to move here to Cincinnati rather than simply relocating her somewhere out West, where she could live in solitude and see trouble coming for miles before it arrived.

“Darya!” Farid’s voice rose over the ambient noise of conversing diners, drawing Yasmin’s gaze toward the door where he stood. There were two dark-featured men, each wearing an expensive payraan tumbaan, the traditional long shirt and pants typical in Afghanistan, Pakistan and, these days, the Kaziri moneyed class. The intricately embroidered silk vests the two men wore over their shirts were definitely products of Kaziristan, adorned as they were with the brilliant-hued fire hawk of Kaziri folklore.

She didn’t recognize either man, though the taller man on the right looked oddly familiar, even though she was certain they’d never met. Maybe she’d run across one of his relatives during her time on assignment in Tablis, the Kaziri capital city.

She’d kept a low profile while she was there, playing a similar role blending in with the native Kaziris in order to keep an ear close to the ground during a volatile time in the country’s downward spiral toward another civil war. Strange—and alarming—that she’d been afforded more autonomy and respect as a woman in Kaziristan than she was as a woman in the insular Kaziri community in Cincinnati.

On the upside, being pregnant and makeup-free was working in her favor here. People saw the round belly first and never bothered letting their gazes rise to her face, especially with more nubile, exotic-looking beauties like Darya and her bevy of young, unmarried friends to draw the attention of Kaziri men. And the Americans as well, she noted with secret amusement, as the middle-aged male patrons she was currently serving kept slanting intrigued glances at Darya as she walked with sinuous femininity to the VIP table to take their orders.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed another customer enter the restaurant and take a seat at a table near the window. She delivered her most recent order to the kitchen and returned to the dining hall, grabbing a menu and pouring a glass of water before heading to the newcomer’s table.

A burst of laughter from the VIP table drew her attention in that direction. One of the men was flirting outrageously with Darya, who was eating up the attention with the confidence of a woman who knew her appeal.

Swallowing a sigh, Yasmin turned her attention back to her new customer. He lifted his head, pinning her with his blue-eyed gaze.

Her stomach gave a lurch.

The glass slipped from her hand, but the man whipped his hand out and caught it on the way down. Only a few drops of water splashed across the dark hair on the back of his hand.

He set the glass on the table, still looking at her.

“Hello, Risa,” Connor McGinnis said.