The Deadliest Strain

Chapter Nineteen

She was standing there one minute and the next she was gone. Austyn shouted for Ken over his shoulder and pushed his way through the passing wedding celebration. When he reached the sidewalk, a sea of angry faces greeted him every way that he looked.

He didn't care. He couldn't see her. He strode to the place where he'd seen the dervish sitting, but he was gone, too.

Ken reached him. "Where is she?"

"Gone," he said angrily over the music and cheering of the wedding procession, which had stopped and formed a circle in the street.

He grabbed a wooden box from a stack next to a fruit stall and climbed on it. He scanned the crowd. Still, he could see no sign of her.

"I'll go talk to those Peshmerga," Ken told him.

Austyn saw the three uniformed Kurdish soldiers standing by the curb, enjoying the festivities. Based on what he'd heard so far, he doubted they would help a foreigner at the expense of a Kurd — no matter what the reason was. They took care of their own people and their own problems.

Inside, he was kicking himself. He had somehow gotten to the point with Fahimah that he actually couldn't believe that she would do this to him… that she would just walk away. Like a moron, he thought they'd formed a working relationship, at least. They had an agreement. He'd believed her when she said she was going to help them.

Austyn thought about the five years that she'd been held in their prisons. What kind of grudge would he carry after being treated like that? What a fool he was!

"Fahimah!" he shouted out, knowing there was no purpose to it. He wouldn't answer if their places were reversed.

A few people in the crowd near him turned around and gave him a side look. They soon went back to watching the wedding celebrations.

Ken was walking away from the soldiers. Austyn saw the soldiers' attention turn to the dancers again.

"Anything?" he asked as he stepped down from the box.

Ken shook his head. 'That was a waste of breath. They haven't seen her. They don't have time to look for her. And they didn't know what I was talking about as far as Jalal goes. There's no such person, so naturally they couldn't know where he lives."

Austyn kept looking beyond the crowds as he talked. "We can spread out and check the side streets. Also, I need you to get hold of Matt. I want him and the rest of our men down here. Can we get help from your base?"

"I'll call them," Ken suggested. "But it will take time to round them up and get them down here. As I told you before, we have only a skeleton crew stationed in Erbil."

"I'll take whatever I can get."

"You know, maybe you should give her a little time. She might come back on her own. Fahimah did tell us that she wouldn't be able to get any answers if we were hovering over her shoulder."

"I'm not willing to risk that," Austyn told the other man. "She might have been abducted."

Ken shook his head doubtfully. "I know that's an everyday occurrence south of here, but you just don't hear it happening in Erbil."

Austyn disagreed. "If this is all connected to Al Qaeda, if the sister is behind the attacks, then the word could be out that Fahimah is here and that she could ruin everything. And even if Rahaf is not involved, she could hold the key to the remedy. If that's the case, then it doesn't matter which sister they get hold of. They'll know grabbing Fahimah is one way to stop any cooperation with us."

Suddenly, Ken seemed a lot more motivated in getting to a phone.

Austyn wanted to think of Fahimah as walking away of her own free will. He didn't want to think her life was in danger. It was so much easier to be angry at her than to think that he hadn't done a good enough job protecting her.

The truth was, though, that he'd failed miserably.

There was a tug on his sleeve. He looked down. A Kurdish boy, who couldn't have been more than six or seven years old, stuffed something into his hand and ran away. Austyn took a couple of steps after the boy, but the street urchin disappeared like a ghost into the crowd.

"What is it?" Ken asked over Austyn's shoulder.

"It's a scrap of paper." He opened the crumpled note, read it and looked in the direction the boy had gone. "It says, I'll see you back at the hotel.'"