Chapter 8
Eight
Omar hit the cobblestones at a full sprint, Marielle half a stride behind him. They turned left instinctively, toward the village center. It was the logical direction for someone panicking to choose. More people. More places to hide. More chances to disappear.
The narrow street opened onto a small square dominated by an ancient fountain.
Water trickled from the mouth of a carved dolphin, and a handful of teenagers had claimed the fountain’s worn stone lip as their territory.
Their phones cast shifting blue light across their faces, modern constellations against the Mediterranean dusk.
Omar slowed to a jog, his gaze sweeping the square in trained arcs.
A café with mismatched bistro tables scattered across the pavement, their red and white checked tablecloths fluttering in the evening breeze.
A tabac with its yellow sign glowing weakly.
A boulangerie, its metal shutters already rolled down and locked against the night. No sign of a woman in a yellow dress.
He approached the teenagers, modulating his breathing to sound less desperate than he felt.
“Excusez-moi.” His French was serviceable but unmistakably American-accented.
He switched languages mid-sentence, a calculated choice.
“A North African woman. Dark hair in a braid, yellow dress. Did she come through here?”
A girl with kohl-lined eyes and a nose ring that caught the fountain’s light looked up from her screen without real interest. “Non, desolate.”
Marielle had already peeled away toward the café, her borrowed linen pants flowing as she moved.
She spoke in rapid, fluid French to the server wiping down tables with methodical swipes of a bar towel.
The man shook his head, gestured vaguely toward the opposite end of the square with his chin in the universal language of unhelpful directions.
They split up without discussion. Omar took the street that angled down toward the water, past shuttered shops with sun-faded awnings and darkened windows. He passed an elderly man in a flat cap walking a terrier the size of a throw pillow.
“Une femme?” Omar asked, breathing harder now. “Yellow dress?”
The man frowned, his weathered face folding into a topographical map of confusion and he shook his head.
Omar doubled back, frustration building like pressure behind his sternum. The village was compact and intimate, the kind of place where everyone noticed strangers. Hanna should be easy to spot.
Unless she’d found a car. Or convinced someone to give her a ride. Or ducked into one of the buildings whose doors remained stubbornly closed against inquiry.
He forced himself to stop. Breathe. Think.
Marielle emerged from a side street, shaking her head before he could ask. “The pharmacy. The wine shop. A woman watering geraniums on her balcony. No one’s seen her.”
They regrouped at the fountain. The teenagers had abandoned their perch, leaving the square empty except for a tortoiseshell cat threading between the café chairs in search of dropped crumbs.
“This isn’t working,” Marielle said, her voice tight with controlled urgency. “We need to think like Hanna. She heard us talking about abandoning her. So she bolted. She’s not gonna stay in town.”
He met her eyes, understanding crystallizing between them. “Marseille is too obvious. Where would she go?”
They said it simultaneously, their voices overlapping, “Nice.”
“Nice is big, lots of places to disappear to,” Omar mused.
“And it has a large North African population. She won’t stand out.”
“I doubt there’s anywhere to rent a car here. Could she have hitched a ride or—?”
“There’s a train station on the edge of town.” Marielle grabbed his forearm, her grip urgent. “Not the main line through Marseille. She’d avoid that. There’s a local TER station on the outskirts. Trains to Toulon, then connections to Nice.”
They ran. She led the way, and he followed.
The village streets were a blur of honey-colored stone and terracotta roofs.
Omar’s lungs burned, his legs drove forward with mechanical efficiency.
They cut through an alley barely wider than his shoulders, startling a cat that yowled its indignation, and emerged onto a wider road that curved uphill through scrubland studded with wild fennel and thorny broom.
The run-down station materialized as they crested the hill. It consisted of a single platform, a glass shelter with cracks spider-webbing across one panel, and a ticket booth no bigger than a phone box.
Omar spotted her immediately. She stood at the ticket window, her yellow dress luminous under the harsh fluorescent lights that hummed and flickered overhead. She was fishing through the small leather bag, pulling out crumpled euro notes with trembling fingers.
He cupped his hands around his mouth to shout her name.
Then he saw them.
Two of Idris’s men were positioned near a weathered bench at the platform’s far end out of Hanna’s line of site. Their dark clothes turned them into shadows in the night.
One of them was big. Very big. Shoulders like a linebacker, head shaved to gleaming smoothness.
Bashir.
The second man was smaller, leaner, with the wiry build of someone who relied on speed rather than power.
He wasted a moment wondering how they’d tracked the village down so quickly. Was Hanna carrying a tracker she didn’t know about?
The men were focused on Hanna with the patience of professionals, waiting for her to step away from the relative safety of the ticket window. Waiting for their moment.
Omar caught Marielle’s eye and gestured sharply: You intercept Hanna. I’ll handle the guards.
She gave a crisp nod of understanding and moved, angling toward the ticket booth with quick, purposeful strides.
Omar circled wide, keeping to the shadows at the platform’s periphery where the fluorescent lights lost their battle with darkness. His hand went automatically to his hip before memory caught up: no gun. He’d left his Glock in the dry bag at the inn.
Stupid. Sloppy. Jake would have his head for it.
He’d have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Hanna completed her transaction and turned from the window, ticket clutched in one hand like a passport to safety. Bashir and his companion straightened, muscles coiling.
Marielle sprang out from the side of the booth and intercepted her before she’d taken three steps. She grabbed Hanna’s arm and pulled her close in what might have looked like an affectionate reunion. Hanna’s mouth opened in shock, her eyes going wide with recognition and confusion.
Bashir growled when he spotted Marielle. His companion’s right hand drifted toward hip.
Gun.
Bashir moved forward, his massive frame eating up the distance.
Omar moved faster.
He came up behind the smaller guard and drove his elbow into the man’s kidney with surgical precision.
The guard grunted and his body folding forward involuntarily.
Omar grabbed the back of his head with both hands and pulled it down into his rising knee.
The satisfying crunch of cartilage was followed by a spray of blood that painted the concrete platform in dark, wet spatter.
The man collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
One down.
Bashir spun toward the thump as his partner hit the ground. He moved with surprising speed for a man his size. His face contorted with recognition and rage when he saw Omar. “You.”
“Me,” Omar confirmed, settling into a fighting stance.
The big man came at him like a freight train jumping its tracks—all momentum and mass.
Omar sidestepped, but not fast enough. Bashir’s shoulder caught him squarely in the ribs, driving every molecule of air from his lungs in a single explosive exhale.
They crashed into a metal bench, and pain spread through Omar’s back like a starburst.
He twisted, using Bashir’s forward momentum against him, and they tumbled to the rough concrete platform in a tangle of limbs.
Omar worked his right arm free and drove his fist into Bashir’s face once, twice. Blood bloomed from the man’s split lip, dark and immediate, but Bashir barely flinched.
The big man roared—an inarticulate sound of fury and pain—and heaved upward with the raw power of someone who’d built a career on physical intimidation. Omar went flying, hitting the concrete hard.
They scrambled to their feet simultaneously, circling each other like prizefighters in the fluorescent-lit ring of the platform.
From the corner of his vision, Omar registered movement. Marielle. She stood in front of Hanna, pointing her firearm at a third guard.
Two thoughts raced through Omar’s brain: thank God she brought her gun, and this third guy must be the driver, ate to the party because he’d had to park the car.
Then he turned his full attention to the two hundred forty pounds of primal anger heading his way.
Bashir feinted left, testing Omar’s reactions, then exploded forward from the right.
Omar blocked the first strike, absorbed a punishing blow to his shoulder that sent pain cascading down his arm like fire, and countered with a hook to the big man’s jaw.
His knuckles screamed in protest, bones meeting bone, but Bashir’s head snapped sideways. The giant staggered.
Omar pressed his advantage, not giving Bashir time to recover, driving forward with textbook combinations: jab, cross, uppercut. Each strike landed with satisfying impact. Bashir’s head rocked back with the uppercut, blood flying from his mouth in a fine spray.
The big man tried to close the distance, to use his size and strength to grapple, but Omar dodged him—barely, but he did it.
He got behind Bashir and wrapped his right forearm around the man’s throat, locked it in place with his left arm, and squeezed like his life depended on it. Because it probably did.
Bashir clawed at Omar’s arm, his thick fingers scrabbling for purchase, for any leverage to break the hold.
His face darkened from red to purple as oxygen deprivation did its work.
He thrashed like a landed fish, powerful and desperate, but Omar held on.
Every muscle in his body strained, his arms burned, his ribs screamed where Bashir had slammed him into the bench. But he didn’t let go.
Finally, after an eternity the big man stopped struggling. His hands fell away. His massive body went limp, all that bulk becoming dead weight.
Omar lowered him carefully to the ground and stood gasping for air. His ribs throbbed with each breath. His hands were a disaster of torn skin, split knuckles, and smeared blood.
He looked up, sucking air into his screaming lungs. Marielle had closed the distance between her and the third guard, her gun steady in a two-handed grip aimed at the man’s center mass.
“Put your gun on the platform,” she instructed them man.
He crouched and set the weapon on the ground in front of her feet.
As he rose, she holstered her gun and and wrapped her arm around his throat, mimicking the choke hold Omar had just used.
The guard struggled, his hands grasping at her forearm, his body bucking, but she had the angle and the leverage.
Her technique was textbook perfect. Ten seconds of controlled pressure, and he slumped unconscious in her arms.
She released him and let him slide to the concrete, then met Omar’s eyes across the platform.
“Not bad for a desk jockey,” Omar managed, his voice scraped raw.
The ghost of a smile flickered across her face, there and, then gone, like summer lightning. “Olivia insisted I take hand-to-hand refresher courses. She can be very persuasive. She even talked your sister into joining us.”
Hanna stood frozen by the ticket booth, one hand pressed against the grimy glass. She looked from the three unconscious men on the ground to Omar and Marielle with a mixture of shock, fear, and disbelief.
Omar straightened, wincing as his ribs protested. Everything hurt, and tomorrow would be worse.
“We need to move them before they wake up so we can get out of here before the police arrive. I’m sure the ticket agent’s called them by now.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Marielle rasped, “That guy ran out the back door the moment the fighting started.”
She plucked the keys from the driver’s front pocket. Their rental car, a nondescript charcoal gray Renault sedan, was the only vehicle in the small parking area behind the ticket booth.
Omar relieved all three men of their guns and spare magazines while she popped the trunk.
Together, they worked quickly to drag the unconscious men to the car. The small guard with the shattered nose was the easiest. Omar and Marielle each took an arm and hauled him the short distance like a piece of luggage. The driver required more effort, his unconscious body heavy and uncooperative.
But Bashir was something else entirely. They had to rouse Hanna from her trance to help them.
His massive frame required all three of them working in concert, with Omar taking most of the weight, to drag him to the parking lot and maneuver him into the trunk.
By the time they’d squeezed Bashir’s bulk into the trunk with his colleagues, Omar’s back was screaming and fresh blood seeped from his split knuckles.
He slammed the trunk shut with more force than necessary and pocketed the keys. “Luck can call the gendarmes. Let the local police sort this mess out.”
They hurried Hanna back toward the village, keeping to the darker edges of the road where the streetlights barely penetrated. She moved like a sleepwalker, stumbling over the cobblestones. Twice Marielle had to steady her with a hand on her elbow.
By the time they reached L’Auberge Arbousier, full darkness had settled over the coast. Luc met them at the door, his expression carefully neutral as he took in their Omar’s battered hands, Marielle’s torn linen pants, and Hanna’s vacant stare.
Omar pressed the car keys into Luc’s palm and gave him the location, keeping his voice low and matter-of-fact.
“There are three men locked in the trunk of a Renault in the train station parking area. They’re dangerous criminals with possible connections to human trafficking. Call the police, but don’t mention us.”
Luc’s gaze sharpened with understanding, his designer’s eye suddenly replaced by something harder, more worldly. “Consider it done. Are they …?”
“Alive, but unconscious,” Marielle told him.
“Bien s?r.”
Luc glanced at Hanna, who was trembling despite the warm evening, her arms wrapped around herself as if she could physically hold the pieces of herself together.
“Take her upstairs. I’ll bring tea. And ice for those hands.”
They guided Hanna up the narrow staircase, their footsteps muffled by the worn runner. She sank onto her bed without being asked, and finally—finally—the dam broke. Tears spilled down her cheeks in silent rivers, her shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs.