Chapter 2
“Please,” Jasmine begged. “You have to let go of me.”
Ace, the man she’d dreamed about for the past four years, shook his head. “I can’t let you go. You stole the copper scroll from the museum. To do the right thing, I should turn you over to the Jordanian police.”
She held her hands out, palms up. “But I don’t have the scroll. How will you prove it? The thieves are getting away as we stand here. We have to go after them.”
He shook his head. “I’m taking you back to the museum, where you’ll tell them what you’ve done.”
Jasmine’s heart twisted in her chest. “If I do that, they’ll put me in jail. I won’t get out in time to stop what will happen. Did you not hear what I said? I have to get the scroll back and hand it over to them in the next forty-eight hours, or they’ll kill him.”
“Kill who?” Ace asked.
“Eli.” She swallowed hard on the lump forming in her throat, her eyes burning with unshed tears. “They’ll kill Eli!”
Ace frowned. “Who’s Eli? Your boyfriend?”
Jasmine shook her head, afraid to tell him but more afraid of losing Eli if she didn’t. “Eli is someone I love more than life itself.”
Ace’s eyebrows dipped lower on his forehead.
“Please.” She touched a hand to his arm and stared into his dark eyes. “You have to help me.”
“Is he being held hostage?” Ace asked.
She nodded.
“By who?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “All I know is that they have Eli.”
Ace crossed his arms over his chest. “Start from the beginning.”
She looked past him in the direction the assailants had gone, her shoulders sagging. Her gaze came back to him. “A week ago, while I was away with ...work... three men broke into my home and took Eli.”
“Didn’t you see who they were?”
She shook her head. “I was away on a job. My housekeeper contacted me immediately, but it was too late.”
“Did she call the police?”
Jasmine shook her head. “The note they left with her said that if anyone contacted the police, Eli would die. With the note, they left a burner cell phone. I was to wait until they called with instructions regarding what I had to do to get Eli back alive.”
Ace’s lips pressed into a tight line. “How long was it from the time they took Eli to the time you got the call?”
“It was an hour before I got home. As soon as I walked in the door of my apartment, my housekeeper handed me the phone, and it rang.”
“They must have been watching you or your home.” Ace nodded. “What did they say?”
“A man told me to get the copper scroll, or they’d kill Eli.” She looked around, a sense of hopelessness washing over her. “Now, I have no way of knowing where it went or if I can get it back in the next forty hours—my deadline to deliver.” She raised a hand to Ace’s chest, laying it flat against his solid muscles. “Please, let me go after them. I didn’t steal the artifact for the money. I took it to save Eli.”
Ace stared into her eyes, his own narrowing. “I’ll help you find the men who took your satchel if you promise to return the copper scroll to the museum.”
She shook her head. “I can’t make that promise. If it comes to a choice between Eli’s life or an ancient artifact, it really isn’t a choice. I’ll do anything to save Eli,” she said, her tone low, her fingers clenched into fists.
“How about this? I’ll help you find who stole the scroll from you. I’ll also help you find and free Eli. Then we’ll return the scroll to the museum.”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “All I want is to get him back safely. What happens to the scroll is not at all important. But if it works out, I’ll give the scroll back to the museum.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out, her heart banging against her ribs. “Now, can we please go after those men?” Tears welled in her eyes. “I can only imagine how terrified Eli is in the hands of his captors. I hope they aren’t hurting him, that they’re feeding him, and that he has a warm place to sleep. He doesn’t deserve this.” Her heart squeezed hard in her chest.
Ace’s jaw hardened. For a long moment, he stared into Jasmine’s eyes. Then he drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “If I help you, I’ll be aiding and abetting a thief who has stolen a national treasure.”
She nodded. “Then don’t help me. But let me go after those men.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. But to catch them, we’ll need more help than I can provide by myself.”
Jasmine shook her head. “I can’t go to the police.”
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “I’m not going to the police.”
She touched his arm. “They said that if I notified any law enforcement agency, they’d kill Eli.”
“I’m not notifying a law enforcement agency.” He selected a contact and sent a text. Moments later, he received one in response.
“Who are you texting, and what did you say?”
“My boss. I told him I had a mission I need to take care of.”
“You told me you were a Navy SEAL. Your boss is the president of the United States.” She shook her head, worry stirring acid in her stomach.
Ace gave her a tight smile. “I’m not in the Navy anymore. I work for a security agency headed up by Hank Patterson. He’s in the museum now, watching over the movie star and the film crew.”
Jasmine shook her head. “He already has a job and needs to be there for the film production. How can he help?”
Ace grinned. “He has an entire team of people who can help locate those two thieves. I’m contacting his computer guy, Swede. He knows how to tap into surveillance systems at airports, train stations and anywhere else those men choose to travel through.”
“But your Swede doesn’t know who he’s looking for.”
Ace glanced up at the corner of the building closest to them. “There’s a camera on that building. All we have to do is talk to the building owner, tap into his surveillance footage and send the images to Swede.”
“That all takes time,” Jasmine cried. “I don’t have time.”
Ace cocked an eyebrow. “What else do you have?”
She glared at him. “If you’d let me go, to begin with, I could’ve caught up with them.”
He shook his head. “They were moving fast, and a vehicle picked them up at the end of this street. You wouldn’t have been able to keep up on foot.”
She pouted. “You could’ve mentioned they’d been picked up.”
His lips twitched. “Come on. Let’s ask this building owner if we can tap into his surveillance system. I’m sure they’ll want to help a damsel in distress.”
She frowned. “You’re not going to tell them what was in the satchel, are you?”
He shook his head. “All he’ll know was that those men stole your purse. Of course, he’ll want to help you get it back. If we can get facial scans of those men, we’ll have something to start with.”
She didn’t like involving any more people than already were, but what choice did she have? Eli’s life hung in the balance.
Ace led the way to the front of the building and held the door to let her into a gold and jewelry shop that sold high-end items.
Ace approached the man behind the counter. “Sir, do you speak English?”
The man shook his head. “Very little.”
Jasmine touched a hand to her cheek and looked as pathetic as she felt as she stepped closer. In Arabic, she told him that she’d been attacked on the street outside his building and asked if his surveillance camera worked.
The man’s eyes widened. Answering in Arabic, he said, “I will contact the police. They will want to know about the theft and to be on the lookout for the two men.”
Jasmine gritted her teeth. This was just the situation she did not want to happen. “Sir, I’m afraid they will be long gone if we wait for the police. If we could review the recordings of your surveillance cameras, I might be able to identify them. My people have a way of dealing with individuals who harm family members.”
The store owner’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, indeed. My store was robbed last year. The police never caught the thief.” He stepped back and waved toward the door at the rear of the shop. “Come with me. We will find those men.”
Fifteen minutes later, they had images of the men who’d accosted her, had sent them to Ace’s computer guy, Swede, and thanked the shop owner for his help.
He took both her hands in his and gave her a kind smile. “I have a daughter close to your age.” His glance went to Ace. “Like your husband, I would want to find those men before the police.”
Jasmine smiled at the man, feeling awful that she’d stolen an artifact his country valued dearly. When she got it back and traded it for her son, she’d find a way to steal it again and return it to Jordan.
As they stepped out of the shop, Ace looked both ways. “Now what?”
“We go to the airport,” Jasmine said.
“Why do you think they would’ve gone to the airport?”
“Jordan is more or less landlocked and surrounded by Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia. They would be foolish to cross into those countries given the current state of affairs in each. And when I was attacked, one of the men said páre to portofóli.
Ace’s brow twisted.
“It’s Greek for get the purse.”
“Greek, huh?” He waved down a taxi. As the driver pulled up to the curb, Ace leaned close to Jasmine. “When we get a moment alone, I want the whole story about this Eli and why they would take him to get you to steal the artifact.”
She nodded. What did she have to lose? He wasn’t a member of law enforcement, and two heads were better than one in this game someone was playing with her and her son.
On the ride to the airport, Ace’s cell phone chirped with an incoming text. He read it and passed it to her. “Good thing we’re on the way to the airport. The two men who attacked you showed up there a few minutes ago.”
“Was he able to identify the flight they were getting on?”
“No, but he’s tracking them,” Ace said. “Hopefully, we’ll get to the airport before their plane takes off.”
Jasmine leaned forward and spoke in Arabic to the driver, “How long until we get to the airport?”
The driver shrugged and answered, also in Arabic, “Twenty minutes.”
Jasmine met the man’s gaze briefly in the rearview mirror. “I’ll pay you one hundred more dinars if you get us to the airport in ten minutes.”
The man frowned, glanced at the speedometer, then pressed his foot down on the accelerator, getting more aggressive in passing slow-moving traffic.
“What did you say to him?” Ace asked.
She leaned back in her seat, looking for a seatbelt. “I just gave him a little more incentive to get us there quicker.” When she couldn’t find a seatbelt, she reached for Ace’s hand.
The taxi driver wove in and out of traffic, throwing his passengers from side to side across the back seat.
Jasmine braced her empty hand on the back of the seat in front of her and counted the seconds until they arrived at the airport.
The driver came to a screeching halt in front of the departure terminal.
Jasmine let go of Ace’s hand, pulled a wad of over two hundred dinars from her pocket, tossed it into the front seat of the taxi and dove out the door.
Ace was right behind her.
Once inside the doors, she looked around frantically. “Where would they go?”
A chirping sound had Ace glancing down at his cell phone. “They’re at the gate, boarding a plane for Athens.”
Jasmine ran to the closest departures display board and searched for the soonest plane leaving for Athens. “There!” She pointed at the one leaving in less than ten minutes. When she turned toward security, a hand gripped her arm.
She spun toward Ace. “What are we waiting for? They’ll leave soon. We have to stop them.”
Ace shook his head. “You won’t get past security without a passport and a boarding pass. By the time we get through that line,” he nodded toward the line to get into the airport through the security checkpoint, “they will be well on their way.”
She looked left and right, desperation making her want to scream.
Ace draped an arm around her shoulders and leaned close. “And you don’t want to draw any attention to yourself from the security guards, or we won’t get in at all.” His cell phone chirped again. “And now, we have a bigger problem.”
Jasmine’s belly clenched. “What?”
He guided her back out the doors. “The museum was just notified that the copper scroll has gone missing. Hank is working with the curator and their security staff, going over surveillance videos to determine when it happened and who is responsible.”
“Damn,” Jasmine muttered beneath her breath. “They’ll know it was me.”
Ace nodded, his brow knitting. “Most likely, they’ll forward your image to the police and security personnel at airports, train stations and security checkpoints.”
At that moment, a tour bus stopped in front of the terminal, and tourists started to disembark, laughing and talking with each other. The bus driver and a porter pulled suitcases from the storage area beneath the bus and stacked them by the curb. As they exited the bus, tourists searched among the cases for theirs.
“I’ll be right back,” Jasmine said. She left Ace’s side, waded into the clump of men and women and grabbed a black suitcase that looked much like many of the others but had a bright pink bow on the handle. She covered the bow with her hand and rolled the case away from the others before all the people had made it off the bus.
She kept rolling the case, heading back into the terminal.
Ace followed. “What are you doing?”
“We have to get on a plane to Athens,” she whispered, ducking her head as she passed an airport security guard.
Following closely beside her, Ace waited until they were past the guard before saying, “How are you going to do that when they’ll know you were the interpreter?”
“I’ll explain in a minute,” she said, then ducked into a ladies’ bathroom.
She entered a stall, closed the door and locked it. Then she held her breath as she opened the suitcase. “Thank God,” she breathed as she stared down at a bright array of ladies’ clothing. After riffling quickly through the contents, she selected a pair of khaki slacks, a white blouse and a navy-blue blazer.
She quickly stripped off the dark tunic and trousers she’d worn to the museum and stepped into the trousers she’d selected. Thankfully, she’d worn the pouch she carried with her everywhere, tucked beneath her clothes. In it were a number of passports she’d acquired over the last four years and the burner phone that was her only link to Eli.
She extracted a passport with her American identity, tucked it into her front pocket, then pulled the blouse over the pouch, tucking the hem loosely into the waistband of the trousers.
The clothes were large on her narrow frame, but the thin red belt she found among the woman’s accessories helped her cinch the waistband of the trousers so they wouldn’t fall off. Her dark shoes were serviceable runners a tourist might wear.
She pulled her hair back, tied it with a flashy blue and green scarf at the base of her neck and fit a white floppy hat on her head. Satisfied with her transformation from dark to light, she zipped the suitcase and removed the luggage tags that indicated the tourists were headed for Egypt next. She tucked the tags and the pink bow inside the case and zipped it closed.
The entire transformation took less than five minutes.
Before she left the bathroom, she dropped the tunic and trousers into a waste bin and added enough wadded paper towels to cover them.
When she emerged, she found Ace leaning against the wall beside the door.
She grinned when he did a doubletake.
He pushed away from the wall and shook his head. “You wanna clue me in?”
“Are you ready for our trip to Athens, darling?” she asked, using her best New England elitist accent.
His brow twisted. “How?” His eyes narrowed. “Oh, wait. You didn’t give them your real name when you worked on the set, did you?”
She shook her head. “They’ll be looking for Rania Hussein, not Julia Lordsworth.” Jasmine cocked an eyebrow. “Do you have your passport with you?”
He nodded.
“Good,” she said. “We need to purchase tickets on the next flight to Athens.” Though her words were light and flippant, her gut knotted at the thought of the copper scroll making it to Athens before her.
“Swede can make the reservations for us. That way, it looks like we came to the airport for the flight.” He held out his hand. “Your passport?”
She handed over her passport, a frown pulling her brow low. “I prefer to make my own arrangements to avoid full-body scanners.”
“Swede can do that—and we won’t have to go to a counter.” He sent a copy of her passport in a text and keyed in his request.
Minutes later, a text chirped on his phone. He smiled down at the response. “I have our boarding passes. Our plane leaves in forty minutes. They board in fifteen.”
Jasmine’s mouth pressed into a tight line. “Let’s just hope we’re not searching for a needle in a haystack of millions of people for those two bastards. I’m running out of time.”
Eli was running out of time.