Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
LEXI
Agnetha and I collapse into our chairs in a restaurant that’s become our regular haunt in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.
“Coca-Colas for my American friends,” Tariq, the owner, says from the other side of the room. He’s treated us well since we came here on our first day. To others in the community, we’re not that welcome. So it’s good to have somewhere we feel safe and at home to relax and eat at the end of the day.
“Oh dear God.” I wipe the sweat from my brow. “Has it really only been three weeks? How the hell are we going to do three more?”
“It’s exhausting, huh?” Agnetha pulls her camera strap over her head and deposits the camera on the table.
In New York right now, fall has fully set in. People are wandering the streets, hugging their pumpkin-spiced drinks and thinking about what holiday gifts to buy.
Here, although it gets chilly at night, we’ve sweltered our way through to the early evening, charging around here and there trying to get someone from the government to talk to us about overcrowding at the few hospitals remaining after so many others were attacked.
Tariq appears at our table, places a glass in front of each of us, uncaps two bottles of cold Coke, and puts them beside the glasses.
“Ladies,” he says with a nod, and walks off.
I immediately lift the Coke to my forehead.
“Bliss.” My eyes close on a sigh the instant the icy glass hits my skin.
“Ow, argh.”
Agnetha’s yelp snaps my eyes open and jolts my heart rate. I learned quickly that you never know what a sudden cry might mean around here.
But all is fine. Agnetha’s just resting her bottle against her pant leg a few inches below her knee. She hurt it this morning when she was walking along, looking through her viewfinder and didn’t see a pothole.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t watching out for you,” I say for the tenth time since it happened.
“It’s only a bruise. I’ve done worse things in my time than fall on my ass on a Yemeni street.”
Agnetha has been a war photographer and videographer for thirty years. She’s worked for every prestigious news outlet you could name. Won award after award after award. So if she’s struggling here, it must be hard.
“What makes you keep coming back for more?” I ask.
She shrugs. “What else am I going to do?”
She has no family. Her parents both passed away in the last decade, she has no kids, and she’s never been married or, it seems, had any kind of a long-term relationship.
“Spend the rest of your life sipping margaritas by your backyard pool in Tucson?”
Agnetha is from Arizona. She bought a house there years ago, when she got her first job, but has never lived in it. It’s been rented out since the day she got the keys because she’s always overseas.
“Could you actually see me doing that?” she asks. “Okay, I might enjoy the first day. But the next morning when I got up and there was nothing else to do but the same thing all over again…? Pfft. It would be a living hell. Like being in a very sunny jail.”
I pour my drink slowly down the tilted side of my glass, watching the bubbles wiggle their way to the surface. “Do you ever wish you’d done anything differently?”
She rubs her leg where the bottle just was. “Nope. Can’t imagine it any other way. The idea of a spouse and kids is terrifying. Give me a war zone any day.”
I take a long, slow sip of the thirst-quenching fizz.
“How about you?” Agnetha pours her Coke straight into the glass without tipping it, forming a thick froth that quickly rises to the brim. “Would you give this up for that?”
“Can’t you have both?”
“Ha.” She rocks back in her chair. “Maybe. But I’ve never seen it. I’ve worked with women who’ve tried, and not a single one managed it. It works out for the male reporters, but not the female.” She picks up her drink. “If you ask me, we haven’t come as far as we think.”
“Honestly”—a tremor rises in my throat at the thought of verbalizing something I never thought I’d say—“I’m not sure I can do another contract here.”
She rests her elbows on the table and leans toward me with a gleam in her eye. “You got a guy at home you haven’t told me about?”
“No.” Agnetha doesn’t read trash publications, which I hope means she doesn’t know about the Oliver thing. If she does, she’s never brought it up. And I sure as hell haven’t. “It has nothing to do with a guy. It’s more about not feeling like this makes the difference I thought it would.”
“You mean, you thought your editors would take every great story you pitched? That they’d see the value in shining a light on the plight of regular folks suffering at the hands of powerful assholes with an entire nation’s weaponry at their fingertips and want to bring it to the world’s attention?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“You’re not green, not wet behind the ears, and definitely not stupid.
” She shakes her head and pauses to take a long drink.
“You know it’s the face on the cover of a magazine that drives sales.
People buy the story of how the cool tech bro of the day made his most recent ten billion.
They don’t buy kids in a crowded hospital ward who are dying because there isn’t enough medication, or blood, or doctors. ”
“I realize that now.” I draw a line down the condensation on the outside of my glass. “And it’s bullshit.”
“It is, my dear. It is,” she says. “But you’re not going to be able to single-handedly change that.
You can’t be in this biz just because you think it’s an important job that needs doing—it also has to be the life you want to live.
If these three weeks have already taught you that this job you’ve worked toward for however many years has turned out not to be right for you…
” She leans back in her chair. “Well, don’t waste time trying to convince yourself it is.
Don’t worry about losing face. And most of all, don’t wreck your life for a job that isn’t going to change the world like you’d hoped. ”
She turns her head to look up at the menu written on a chalkboard in Arabic. “I’m going to have that chicken thing I had last night again. It was good.”
“Ma’am.” My head snaps around at the sound of an American male voice behind me.
It takes a second to process what I’m seeing. It’s something so out of context, like spotting a zebra at the North Pole, that my brain needs a moment to catch up with my eyes.
Standing there is Dane, in khakis, a linen shirt, and Ray-Bans, looking exactly like the royal security guard he is. He couldn’t stick out more if he’d walked in here wearing a Santa suit, jingling bells and shouting, “Ho, ho, ho!”
“Oh, hello.” Agnetha grabs her camera.
I hold up my hand to stop her. “Absolutely not.”
“If something’s about to happen to this guy, I want to catch it.” She directs her gaze around the room, where every head has turned to stare.
Fuck. Is this dangerous? He does look like he’s Secret Service protection for the US president.
“Dane, what the hell are you doing here?” I pull out a spare chair. “Sit down so you look less…conspicuous.”
“Not staying, ma’am.” He widens his stance and clasps his hands in front of his belt. “I’m only here to take you to the airport.”
“The airport?” Has Oliver sent him to get me out of here? No fucking way am I having a prince on a white charger with two jet engines swoop in here to save me from myself. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Seriously.” Agnetha raises her camera. “If you’re being kidnapped, I need pictures.”
“No one’s kidnapping anyone, ma’am,” he says with a respectful nod. “I just need to borrow Miss Lane for an hour or so. There’s someone at the airport who needs to speak with her.”
Goose bumps shoot down my arms and legs. Oliver is here?
Wow.
But regardless of how far he’s traveled, I’m not running when he snaps his fingers.
“I’m not being summoned, Dane. If someone wants to speak with me, they can come to me.”
“This person cannot come here, miss.”
“Why not?”
“Security reasons.”
Convenient answer.
“How did you get an entry visa?” Agnetha asks.
“I know people, ma’am,” Dane replies.
Mouth now utterly parched, I take a glug of Coke.
It also buys me two seconds of thinking time.
When I put down my glass, I pick up my phone. “Could this person not have just texted me from their house? Or called me? Like a normal person without access to private jets might?”
“The person needs to see you in person, ma’am.”
“Tell him, I mean the person, that I’m not coming.”
Dane pulls out his phone, sends a message, then stares at the screen.
The seconds that tick by as the entire room watches him until his phone buzzes with a reply are excruciating. And I’m more than a little bit terrified by the way some of the locals are eyeing him.
He puts his phone away and resumes his solid stance.
“Well? What did the person say?” Agnetha asks.
“The person says to wait until Miss Lane changes her mind.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Now some of the eyes are on me. “He knows I’ll worry you’re in danger and that I’ll go with you to get you out of here, right?”
“The response was to just wait, ma’am.” Dane’s tone remains utterly flat.
“I’m assuming you know who the person is,” Agnetha says.
“Yes.” I drop my face into my palms. “I do.”
“And is the person a good person? Someone you’re certain you’re safe around?”
I nod into my hands.
“And are you worried that someone might, at any second, shoot this dude who seems to have an armored car with a driver parked outside with its engine running?”
“He has what?” I swing around to look out of the window and there is indeed a large black SUV with dark windows parked outside this most inconspicuous of restaurants. He might as well have slapped a bull’s-eye on the front door.
“Fuck.”
I drain my glass, a few more seconds thinking time.
“Okay.” A confused mixture of excited butterflies, dread, and bafflement at what my life has become, mix with the still-fresh shock of seeing Dane here as I pull the strap of my bag over my head. “I’m coming.”
“Chicken for one then, huh?” Agnetha says as I follow Dane to a car that’ll take me to the man I thought I’d never see again.