Havoc

Central African Republic

Bound at the wrists, Mercer and Cali were dragged back up the riverbank to the village and dumped into one of the few surviving huts. The men took everything from their pockets and performed an exhaustive search of Cali’s breasts and between her legs. By their expressions, there was little doubt what was in store for her when Dayce was done with them.

Two of the men remained outside the hut while the others went on to continue ransacking the small village to a chorus of screams and rifle fire.

“I think we’re going to be okay,” Mercer whispered, shuffling across the dirt floor so he could lean next to Cali. Their clothes were soaked, and despite the tropical heat he could feel her shivering.

“Are you out of your mind?” she hissed, her eyes wide. “In an hour or two you’re going to be shot and I’m going to be raped to death.”

“No, listen to me. I don’t think we’re alone. The kid who fell into the mine, he’d been shot in the back and the second guerilla who went down just before we reached the trench, I don’t think I hit him. I think there’s another force out there who took them out, a rival faction or maybe government troops.”

“I’d like to think so,” she said in return, “but doesn’t it make a little more sense that they were shot by their own men? Please be quiet and let me think for a second.”

Cali didn’t get her second. Caribe Dayce wedged his considerable bulk into the thatched hut, seemingly dropping its temperature by ten degrees just with his presence. He didn’t remove his sunglasses in the dim recess of the rondavel. The clouds of smoke wafting from his cigar masked the stench of abject poverty.

Blood dribbled from the bottom of his knife scabbard, forming a black pool in the dirt as he hunkered down to stare at his seated captives.

“The CIA must not think too much of me to send just two of you, and one is a woman.” Dayce spoke slowly in English with a deep, commanding voice.

“We aren’t from the CIA,” Cali said before Mercer could buy a little time by replying in French. “I am from the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC.”

“Ah,” Dayce said as if he’d heard of the organization. “That is the arm of the CIA that controls disease and spreads it among the people of Africa by pretending to vaccinate our children.”

“No. It is not part of the CIA,” Cali replied hotly. “I’m here to prevent the spread of disease. I hope to save your children.”

He casually backhanded her. Mercer stiffened and Dayce’s enormous pistol was suddenly pressed between his eyes. “Next lie I use my fist. You are here to spread AIDS and to give me AIDS, like how the CIA tried to kill Brother Fidel by overwhelming Cuba with pigs.”

It took Mercer a moment to realize Dayce’s warped sense of history had led him to believe the Bay of Pigs invasion was quite literally an invasion by a bunch of pigs. In another time and place he would have laughed.

“You are assassins sent to kill me and end my revolution.” He switched his attention back to Cali. “You carry the disease, yes? I am supposed to want you because you are white? And when we are done you will tell me I have the Slim.”

“Yes.” Cali scoffed in a display of bravado or idiocy. “We’re here to assassinate you with a disease that takes years to kill.”

“And you.” He turned back to Mercer, never once lessening the pressure of the gun between his eyes. “What disease do you carry?”

At that moment Mercer saw a white man pass by the rondavel’s open door. He was dressed for combat and carried a machine pistol slung under his arm. He moved with an easy professional grace, almost like a shadow in the smoke of burning huts. He had to be from the UN, one of the Belgian soldiers on guard in Kivu sent north to hasten the evacuation of the region. And if there was one there had to be more. Mercer swiveled his eyes back to Caribe Dayce and kept all trace of emotion from his voice. “Optimism.”

The African guerilla leader rocked back on his heels and laughed. “That is something that you can’t spread in Africa.”

“I know.”

Dayce got to his feet, remaining in a stooped position because the hut wasn’t tall enough. He holstered his sidearm. “I think we will not take chances with the two of you. I decree that you are CIA spies and sentence you to death. Execution is at sundown.”

“Did you see him?” Mercer asked as soon as Dacye had walked out of earshot.

Tension ran from Cali so her body sagged against his. “Yes, Jesus, I did! Who is he?”

“I think he’s a UN peacekeeper and he won’t be the only one. They must be getting into position. Get ready to bolt as soon as they attack. Can you get your hands free?”

“I can’t even feel my hands.”

“Doesn’t matter. As soon as they attack we’ll kick out the back of the hut and drop straight for the river. The truck’s only a mile downstream. All we need is three minutes’ head start and we’re gone.”

They crawled to the back of the hut and braced their feet against the wall. One or two good kicks would likely knock the entire structure down. The tall riverbank was only a couple of yards beyond the hut. For the first minutes Mercer felt adrenaline sing in his veins as he waited for the inevitable assault. But after five his body relaxed as his mind began to wander. The UN soldiers had to have seen their capture. They wouldn’t wait until the last minute before attempting an attack. Granted they were outnumbered, but Mercer had taken out a half dozen rebels and he had nowhere near their combat training. More experience maybe, but not training. Even if they didn’t attack Dayce’s entire force, they must know where he and Cali were being held and could rescue them.

After another couple of minutes Cali pushed back to a sitting position, her lower lip quivering slightly. “We’re wrong.”

“You can’t be sure.”

She composed herself and gave him a wry smile while mimicking Caribe Dayce’s voice. “You can’t spread optimism in Africa.” She looked at him levelly. “If there really is a UN force out there, they’ll wait until after sundown to attack. That’s what I would do in their position, making it a bit late for us.”

Her easy grasp of military tactics was at odds with what she’d told him about herself. Again Mercer wondered if she’d been in the military. “Who are you?”

“I told you. I’m with the CDC.”

“And before that how long were you in the army?”

“What makes you think…”

“No one who hasn’t seen combat is as calm as you.”

She looked away. “I was captured by Sunni insurgents in Baghdad in 2005. They couldn’t pull a Jessica Lynch for me because no one knew I was missing.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Medic in the National Guard. I got separated from my unit just before they ran into an ambush. It took three days for our guys to recover our Humvee and realize mine wasn’t one of the four burned bodies. Another five days passed before Special Forces got me out.”

Mercer was about to ask why the media never picked up the story, but he stopped himself. He imagined that military censors quashed it. The reasons would forever be locked in a file someplace and in her heart.

A tense silence filled the hut. Even the village had gone quiet.

“I wasn’t raped,” Cali said softly after a minute.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said I wasn’t raped. I just wanted you to know. I’m scared shitless right now but the Iraqis didn’t touch me and I’m relieved that Dayce’s men won’t get to me either.”

“I’m grateful for that too,” was all Mercer could think to say.

Although it put his wrist in an awkward position, he reached out as much as the binds would allow and took Cali’s hand. She returned the grip and together they waited for a rescue that seemed less likely with each passing second.

A half hour before the sun set on the overcast day, the final flicker of hope vanished when the white soldier they had seen crossing the camp suddenly stepped into the hut. In the glow of the lantern he carried, they could see he was as large as Caribe Dayce and equally muscled. His features were Eastern European, with thinning blond hair and thick, slack lips. One of his eyes was hidden by a black patch that couldn’t cover all of a scar that ran from his temple to his nose. His other eye was watery blue and small, but held dark malevolence. Whatever had taken his eye had damaged the tear ducts because the patch was moist and he wiped at it with a finger absently as he regarded the two prisoners.

Mercer knew the type. He’d even run across a few. The man was Special Forces from the former Warsaw Pact, now turned mercenary. Spurned by the countries who’d trained them to be killers, many elite soldiers had sold their skills on the open market. While Western governments concentrated on keeping Russian nuclear scientists from trading their skills with terror organizations, ranks of highly specialized soldiers had gone to the very same terror groups to train the next generation of fighters. While the fear of a nuclear device falling into the wrong hands was very real, a perhaps more immediate threat was thousands of fundamentalists with skills rivaling the best Special Force troops in the world.

Caribe Dayce entered the room and slapped the mercenary on the shoulder. The man whirled. Dayce recoiled. He had an army of soldiers at his command, a reputation of brutal savagery, and the confidence that came from his huge size, and still he feared the mercenary.

“What have they told you?” The mercenary’s accent was thick, Slavic or Russian, and his voice was as deep as Dayce’s.

“There is nothing they can tell us,” the rebel leader said with a touch of deference. “We will find what we find, as I said.”

“I do not like that they are here when we arrived.”

“I don’t either, Poli,” Dayce agreed. “My men saw them enter just before the attack. Whatever they learned will die with them here.”

“We do not know who sent them.”

“They are American. It must be the CIA.”

The mercenary looked Mercer up and down, then gave Cali the same scrutiny. He didn’t appear impressed by what he saw. “I do not think they are CIA.”

“Then torture us and find out, you stupid son of a bitch.” Cali’s outburst startled all three men. Mercer tightened his grip on her hand to steady her, but she continued. “Jam bamboo shoots under our nails. Cover us in hot coals. Do whatever you want. In the end you will know that I work for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and Mercer is here on behalf of the UN. In case it escaped you, your little revolution has caused a humanitarian crisis that has killed God knows, no you know, how many people, and forced thousands to flee their homes.”

Poli regarded her for a moment as Cali struggled to get her breathing under control. He said nothing and backed from the rondavel. Dayce followed him out and a moment later four teenage guerillas stormed into the hut. Since Dayce’s pronouncement earlier, Mercer and Cali had known this was coming, but now the moment of reckoning was here. Cali screamed and Mercer struggled to his feet. He kicked the gun from one rebel’s arms and threw himself bodily at a second, knocking the skinny youth to the ground and landing on him with his full force. The teen’s breath exploded in Mercer’s face, a rank combination of stale liquor and rancid meat. Mercer head-butted him to keep him down and was just getting his legs untangled from the youth’s when a third soldier rammed the stock of his AK-47 into his kidney.

Mercer recoiled from the strike, searing agony radiating from the blow. The guerilla tried to repeat the attack. Mercer managed to roll enough so the wooden butt slammed into the back of his thigh, deadening his leg. He continued to roll as the soldier rained blows, swinging the assault rifle like a club. Mercer came up against the hut’s wall and frantically tried to kick his way through. It was a test of endurance between the rondavel’s rickety walls and his ability to absorb punishment, but as fate would have it the wall was the hut’s strongest, and a particularly sharp blow to the back of his head knocked Mercer momentarily unconscious.

The rebel clubbed Mercer once more for good measure, then he and his partner hauled him to his feet. Cali had been subdued in the first seconds of the melee with a rifle butt to her lower abdomen that nearly ruptured her bladder.

They were both dragged outside, where several excited soldiers waited in the village’s central clearing. Only two huts remained; the rest were smoldering piles of ash. A short line of men waited outside the second hut. They joked with each other with nervous gibes and toothy grins as they waited their turn with whoever was alive inside.

Two wooden poles had been rammed into the loamy soil behind an odd stone pillar. Mercer was dimly aware of the strange column’s size, about seven feet, and how it was shaped like an obelisk, before he was turned and thrust up against one of the poles. Cali fell as she was pushed against the second one. A rebel hauled her to her feet while another tied her bound wrists to the pole. Mercer tried to fight off his two guards but was eventually secured as well.

Dayce ambled over to them, examining the glowing tip of his cigar in the fading light. There was no sign of the mercenary.

“Any last requests? Sorry but I can’t spare one of my cigars. Maybe one of my men will give you a cigarette instead.”

“General Dayce,” Mercer began. He was about to beg for their lives and he stopped himself. Dayce’s bemused expression showed he’d been in this position countless times and enjoyed the entreaties for mercy. Mercer wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. If he was going to die, he wanted it at least partially on his terms. “I want to give the order to fire.”

Dayce’s expression changed slightly. He nodded and gave a deep, barking laugh. “You are a man, I see. I respect that.” He shouted to the four men milling a short distance off. The firing squad. One of them gave Mercer a thumbs-up gesture.

“I’m no man,” Mercer said. “Not like you think.”

Dayce patted Mercer’s cheek.

“In that case, die well, No Man.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Cali whispered as Dayce moved off to form up his troops.

“When the shooting starts, drop to your butt.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

“Think we can dodge the bullets like in that Matrix movie?”

“You never know.”

The four troopers had formed their firing line. Caribe Dayce stood to their right and slightly behind. He had his big pistol in hand to administer the coup de grâce. Poli, the mercenary, stood a dozen or so yards behind them, idly wiping a tear from under his eye patch.

“Make your count.”

The men held their weapons low at their waists, their eyes bright with the prospect of killing two more people. Mercer glanced at Cali’s profile. Her face was rigid while her chest heaved. “Mercer,” she cried softly. “I don’t want to die.”

“Drop to the ground like I said.” Mercer looked beyond the firing squad, even beyond the mercenary, where shadows played at the edge of the jungle.

“Make your count, No Man, or I will do it for you.”

As loudly and with as much authority as he could muster, Mercer shouted, “At the ready!”

In unison, four Kalashnikovs snapped to port arms. All around them the rebels watched the proceedings with fascination. Most of them had left their weapons outside the hut they used to rape any of the women they’d captured.

Cali began to whimper.

Mercer waited as long as he dared, never taking his attention off Dayce, judging the man’s impatience to the second. Just as the guerilla was about to speak, Mercer whispered to Cali, “Don’t forget what I said.” Then, tensed for the inevitable, he shouted, “Take your aim!”

Guns came up to shoulders, the men settling into their stances as their fingers sought triggers. Mercer flicked his eyes to the jungle perimeter, then back to Dayce. He opened his mouth wide to fill his lungs.

Fire erupted from all quarters of the jungle. The four men making up the firing squad were scythed down like wheat. Caribe Dayce was stitched from thigh to head from two different directions, his body exploding under the onslaught. The men who’d preferred to keep their place in line at the hut rather than enjoy a ringside seat at the execution were taken at the same instant, shot through the head with a pistol by a figure dressed in black who had materialized behind them. The assassin slipped into the hut and two more shots rang out.

Any of the rebels holding weapons were targeted next. One managed to counterfire and was gunned down with half his neck vanishing in a gout of blood. Next came any soldier who made for his rifle. Some dropped to the ground to crawl to the cache while others ran doubled over. It didn’t matter. The unseen gunmen found their marks and the guerillas died. Those that tried to flee into the jungle were shot in the back. Those that turned to beg for mercy were shot in the front.

At the instant of attack, Poli was far enough from the mass of rebel soldiers to escape immediate detection. Rather than run and draw attention to himself, he eased to the ground and edged toward the river embankment, crawling so slowly that in the fading light he looked like nothing more than a faint breeze blowing through the undergrowth. When he reached the steep hill, he slowly rolled over the precipice and slid down the unprotected face, keeping his arms and legs spread to maintain a slow pace. He allowed himself to roll into the water without making a splash, filled his lungs with as much air as his powerful chest could hold, then struck out underwater for the far shore.

He surfaced near a felled tree and drew himself from the water with the patience of a crocodile stalking a shore animal. Despite his exposure, he crawled slowly and steadily, knowing a sniper with a night scope could easily pick him off. But he reached the top of the escarpment and faded into the jungle. By the time the firing in the village stopped, he was a half mile away and eating ground with every pace.

Mercer hadn’t told Cali about seeing the shadowy figures encircling the village, because he wasn’t sure if he’d really seen them himself. They were like wraiths, hints of movement rather than solid form. He hadn’t wanted to give her false hope again. His whole charade about wanting to give the command to fire was his way of helping his rescuers if they really existed.

As soon as the first rounds raked the firing squad, he dropped to his backside and leaned as far over as he could, trying to present as small a target as possible. He couldn’t shout to Cali over the din of automatic fire but he saw she had followed his lead. She’d even managed to flatten herself to the ground using some double-jointed maneuver.

The one-sided firefight lasted less than five minutes, dwindling to silence as the unknown force picked off the last of the rebels who’d fled into the night. In all, one hundred and forty-eight well-armed guerillas had been massacred. The mysterious attackers had done what neither the Central African Republic’s army nor the UN had been able to do.

When it was over Mercer stood on shaky legs. He’d hoped for this but the aftermath left him drained. Cali didn’t bother to stand. She lay back against her pole, her eyes shut.

“You knew they were out there?” she finally asked.

“I suspected.”

“You weren’t going to tell me?”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

“You’re right. I would have thought it was a lame attempt at being gallant, and I would have died thinking you were a misogynist jerk.”

“And now?”

She finally looked over. “Well, you’re not a misogynist.” And then she rewarded him with a tired smile.

A few seconds later Mercer felt someone behind him. He stiffened before feeling a knife slice through the ropes securing his wrists. When he tried to turn to face his rescuer, strong hands clamped the sides of his head.

“Do not turn around.” The voice was pitched low and expressionless, as if masking an accent. Keys rattled next to Mercer’s ear. “These were in Dayce’s pocket. The two men he sent to search for your vehicle have been dispatched. Take your woman and go. Never return here.” The man thrust the keys into Mercer’s hand along with two other items. “You dropped these.” It was the canteen and the necklace made from the bullet that the old woman had worn.

“Who are you?”

“That is not your concern. Go.”

“But—”

“You leave in five seconds or die in six. We give you this chance for our own reasons. Take your woman’s hand.” Cali was moved next to Mercer, her fingers locking with his, their palms tight. “Walk straight forward until you reach your truck, then drive to Rafai. Tell them Dayce is dead and then never come back to this area again.”

As soon as the unseen man released Mercer’s skull, an accomplice racked the slide on a pistol to emphasize his point. Cali and Mercer needed no further urging. As if they were soldiers on parade, they marched in lockstep from the ruins of the village, bodies rigid, eyes straight ahead.

Only after they’d made their way along the dike separating the mine from the riverbank and climbed up from the cut left by the RPG did Cali finally ask, “What the hell just happened back there? Who were those guys?”

Mercer noted they were still holding hands. “I don’t know. That wasn’t another rebel faction. They fought like commandos and the guy who spoke sounded white, although not American.”

“Could they have been UN?”

“If they were, why not let us go with them? No, this is something else. That warning about not returning to the area. They were here to protect something and I don’t think it’s coincidence that they got here the same day as Caribe Dayce.”

“Or us for that matter. Do you think they were here all along, keeping watch over the village?”

Mercer thought it over. It was possible, with one glaring exception. “If they were here to protect the village, why allow Dayce to slaughter everyone and rape the few that survived? It’s something else.”

“The old mine?”

“I can’t think of anything else.”

“But why?”

“That’s something I plan on finding out.”

“Well, this is kind of out of both our purviews.”

“Not mine,” Mercer answered.

She glanced over, startled by the mettle in his voice. “How so?”

There was never any easy way for Mercer to explain his part-time position with the government without sounding like he was boasting. He usually just told it straight. “Two years ago I was hired as a consultant to the President of the United States. My title is special science advisor. Because my work, like yours, takes me to some pretty hostile places, I act as an intelligence gatherer for anything that could threaten the United States.”

“You’re a spy?”

“No, not like that.” Mercer reconsidered. “Well, kind of. If I come across anything out of the ordinary when I’m in the field, I write it up and forward it along to a deputy national security advisor named Ira Lasko. Truth be told, I’ve only passed on a couple of things in the two years since I agreed to take the job, and nothing’s ever come of them.”

“And you are going to follow up on this.”

“Cali, we just saw a village butchered and then some other mystery group come out of nowhere and annihilate the vanguard of a rebel army. How could I not follow up on it?”

They had reached the truck. It was almost dark. The jungle canopy was a silvery gray and the waters of the Chinko River ran black. They spied curious puffy white shapes milling around the battered cargo truck. Mercer held out a hand to take Cali’s wrist and lower her to the ground. A pair of figures stepped from the far side of the vehicle. Mercer cursed himself for not retrieving his Beretta. It was hard to make out details, but both people carried something long in their hands. Weapons?

One of the figures brushed aside one of the odd pale shapes and it protested with an angry bleat. They were sheep. As soon as Mercer realized it, the details came into focus. It was a man and a woman. They had just forded the river with the twenty-five or so sheep to flee Dayce’s army. The animals must represent the sum of their wealth. As Mercer and Cali watched, a pair of naked toddlers joined their parents. The mother lifted the youngest to a hip and allowed him to slide her breast from her blouse and begin to feed.

“What do you think?” Cali asked.

Mercer was pretty sure that all of the men with Dayce were dead, but he couldn’t take the chance a few were still out in the jungle. He couldn’t leave these people here, vulnerable. He stood, holding his arms wide in a friendly gesture as the family’s father saw him and lowered his staff as if to joust. It was all just too bizarre, but that was Africa. Mercer chuckled. “I think we’re making our escape from the CAR with a frightened family and a flock of wet sheep.”

It took Mercer and Cali three days to get from Rafai to the capital, Bangui, and from there a flight to Lagos and finally to New York’s Kennedy Airport. To Mercer it seemed the closer to home she got, the more withdrawn Cali Stowe became. He suspected it was a defense mechanism to distance herself from the horrors of the past days. She had compartmentalized the episode and was slowly building a wall around the memory, locking it deep in her soul so it would only return as nightmares, and given time even those would fade.

Mercer recognized the technique. He’d done it himself dozens of times. He’d seen savagery on a scale Cali couldn’t possibly conceive. Not the slow death by international apathy someone from the CDC would witness in refugee camps or in rural AIDS clinics, but wholesale violence for violence’s sake. He’d seen wars on four continents, regional dustups that barely made the evening news but left thousands dead; he’d rescued enslaved miners in Eritrea, and he’d held a woman he loved in his arms as she died.

Harry White had been in a particularly philosophical mood one night not long after Tisa Nguyen’s death and told Mercer that God didn’t place a burden on a person that He felt couldn’t be handled. Look at Job, Harry had said by way of example. The guy had it all when God took it away — family, money, friends, health, the whole magilla. But God also knew old Job could take it. You soldier on, Harry had continued; you take the shit life tosses at you and keep on going. There’s really only one alternative.

“Yeah, I could turn into a bitter drunk like you,” Mercer had replied, “hanging out in a bar twelve hours a day waiting for some dupe to pick up your tab.”

Harry had grinned at that, his lopsided grin that turned the eighty-year-old rogue into an eight-year-old scamp, if only for an instant. “That’s exactly the alternative I’m talking about.”

But in a way, Harry had a point, and his words had stuck. Mercer did soldier on. Maybe what he’d seen and done in his life clouded his once crystalline beliefs, forced him to search through the shades of gray, but the core was still there, the ability to find the good amid the rotten, and hold on to it while the rest eroded with time.

He sensed that Cali worked the same way. In a week or a month she’d look back and recall an episode from her trip, maybe their profanity-laden struggle to load twenty-seven damp sheep into the truck, and she would smile. That would also bring back the panic she’d felt in the village and the smile would fade, but so too would the intensity of that fear. In six months or a year she’d still smile at the sheep and maintain just a vague unease about the rest.

In order to do all that, she needed distance, distance from Africa and distance from Mercer. He understood, and as she waited with him at the US Airways counter, they exchanged phone numbers and made indeterminate plans to stay in touch. Both knew they wouldn’t; however, there was comfort in the ritual.

“Well, good luck with your search,” Cali said stiffly.

“And I’m sorry about yours.” She shot him a puzzled look. “Your cancer research. It had sounded promising.”

“Oh. I think I got carried away when I first read about that village and ignored the number one rule in medical research. There are no shortcuts.”

“Where will you go next?”

“That’s up to the CDC. Though I won’t be putting in for any new assignments for a while. I think I’ll stick to a desk until…” Her voice trailed off.

Mercer took both her hands, made sure she was looking into his eyes, then leaned in and kissed her gently on the corner of her mouth. It was perhaps a bit more intimate than he intended, but he had to feel the texture of her full lips, if even just a sliver. They were softer than he’d imagined. “Good luck, Cali Stowe.”

“Good luck, oh my God, I can’t remember your first name. I’ve just been calling you Mercer.”

“Don’t worry.” He smiled. “Everyone does.”

Their eyes remained locked, steady. He held on to her strong fingers a moment longer, and she let him. Both knew this was the last they’d see of each other. It was awkward, but charmingly so. Had they met at another time, in another place, they’d have been making plans for a date, not saying good-bye forever.

Just before he released her, Cali impulsively returned his kiss. Her lips didn’t linger and she turned, her red hair flaring, catching sunlight and reflecting back like spun copper. “Good-bye.”

She was swallowed immediately by the throng of commuters and tourists.

A few moments later an elderly woman in line behind Mercer tapped his elbow. Her hair was a white bush, her eyes blue and friendly. “It’s none of my business but I think you should go after her, young man.”

Mercer looked to where Cali had vanished. “I think you’re probably right, but such is life.”

“Yes, I suppose. Making mistakes is how we learn.”

Mercer smiled at her. “You think I’m making a mistake letting her go?”

“Only you can answer that.” She pointed. “There’s a spot open at the counter.”

Mercer grabbed the bag he’d bought in Lagos containing Chester Bowie’s canteen and the mashed bullet the old woman in the village had shown him. He took one step toward the counter, then turned suddenly. “Thank you, ma’am, you go ahead.”

He dashed out of line. He moved quickly through the terminal, hoping to spot the flash of Cali’s hair above the crowd. Already he was composing what he’d say to her. “This is stupid. I think we’re attracted to each other and I don’t think it’s right that circumstance should bring us together only to force us apart. I know you want to put everything behind you, I do too, but I also think one date wouldn’t kill us. I can be in Atlanta the day after tomorrow. I just have to file a report with my contact at the UN, Adam Burke.”

If she said no, she said no. It would only cost him an hour’s delay until the next flight to Reagan National, but if she said yes then maybe it would help heal a little of the loneliness that had dogged him for the past six months.

With Atlanta being their hub, he assumed she’d made reservations for a Delta flight. He’d stepped out of the airport and begun searching for a skycap to ask where their terminal was located, when he saw her across the traffic-choked street. He was about to call her name when she reached a black Town Car.

She didn’t look back or even acknowledge the driver holding the door as she ducked into the backseat. Mercer waited until the Lincoln was rolling before dashing out into traffic. A cabbie leaned on his horn and a traffic cop shouted. Mercer ignored them, angling so he could see the vehicle’s license plate. The white background and black letters were distinctive, and suddenly a great many things came clear, while even more became confused.

The Town Car was registered to the United States government.