Chapter Sixteen
Kira
Would someone even try to take her to Qatar? Kira wondered as she scowled at the wall.
Uncle Nadir and William were in Tanzania as far as she knew.
Kira had wrapped her arms tightly around herself, and she rocked side to side as if infant Archie was held to her chest, needing to be soothed.
If William was in Tanzania, that meant he’d left London, damaged and pregnant, alone with the servants at their Qatari home with the missiles.
Did he know this was going to happen, that the world would suddenly go topsy-turvy, that they’d shut down the airspace, and you were either in or you were out?
In or out.
That might not be true.
Lula said she’d gone to Qatar for some reason. She got out of there by the skin of her teeth, then right to North Carolina. That’s the timeline Kira had heard.
But even if Lula’s timeline was that tight, she’d said that London had to be reminded of the ring. With short-term memory issues, London could have written it long ago or that morning.
No. That felt wrong.
If London thought of the ring then and she used anxious wording, she knew it couldn’t wait. If she had told her necklace about the ring, she would have said it needed to go overnight to Kira; she wouldn’t have tucked it away, just in case Lula was going to show up and could hand-deliver it.
No, the words London chose in her letter were words that had an imminent quality.
Someone was watching Kira. Someone was coming.
The airspace in Qatar being closed wouldn’t protect her because her Uncle Nadir was a member of the global elite and could afford to hire anyone, anywhere in the world. Several anyones.
Kira was pretty sure that Lula didn’t know about the warning that had been meticulously folded to hide the cramped, minuscule letters that London had penned.
Lula would have safeguarded her. Looking back at their friendship, Lula had always been dependable. She found ways to protect her friends even as she got her job done. Lula was fiercely loyal, even if she wasn’t always honest.
Kira picked up her phone and dialed Lula, again, listening to the voicemail prompt to leave a name, number, and brief message, then the ping.
“Lula!” Kira called out too loudly. “I need to know what’s going on.
I’m sending you a picture. Tell me what to do.
Urgent!” Her words were a nonsensical jumble.
She should have said urgent first, Kira thought as she disconnected.
She took a picture of London’s note and debated sending it.
What if someone saw it and it put London in danger?
But that was crazy. How would anyone get hold of Lula’s phone?
Her phone probably had encryption stacked on top of encryption. Besides, Lula would know to erase it.
With shaking hands and blurred vision, Kira tapped her message into the text field.
Kira: I left a voicemail. Erase photo after reading. Help! please.
She thought about sending a message to Ty, but he left his personal phone in his locker on base, so there was nothing on him that could be used against him if things turned bad. And he always called the moment he was home.
Kira took a moment to carefully fold the letter back and wedge it into the secret opening on the ring. She slid the ring onto her pointer finger and thought how bulbous and large it was, how it would attract attention.
She was up and pacing from her front door to the back.
From the back to the front.
Her body was filled with tiny effervescent bubbles that made even standing still impossible.
Why? Why? Why?
Suddenly energized into action, Kira raced up the stairs and dragged her luggage from the closet, opening it wide on her bed. She ran from room to room, gathering and dumping items onto her mattress, still unmade from when she and Ty had been together that morning.
She snatched up the picture of them from her night table and wrapped the frame with one of the silk ribbons he’d tied around her wrists. She laid them gently on her pile.
She wasn’t coming back; Kira knew it in her bones. This house wasn’t safe. She’d have to live a secretive life hidden from her uncle.
What she took was what she’d have.
Opening her safe, Kira pulled out her emergency cash, her Qatari and American passports. She brought what she needed to work from her office and then started with clothing basics. The practical—panties and bras, hiking boots, tennis shoes, and socks.
Where was she going? What would she need?
Kira could hear herself asking the right questions, but didn’t hear any answers.
Still, her hands moved, rolling, folding, tucking.
The next thing she knew, she stood outside her front door, locking the deadbolt.
With her keys in her hand, the next thing to do was get in her car and drive.
Drive where? It was after midnight.
The light on her porch was dark, and Kira stole over to her car. But getting in would be bright and loud. She wouldn’t go undetected by anyone, let alone Uncle Nadir’s professional thugs if they hovered near.
And they’d know she knew because why else would she be creeping out of her house with a suitcase and a backpack?
Maybe the thugs weren’t here yet.
Kira pressed the button on her fob to unlock her car, and the bright chirrup made her shoulders convulse. She quickly swept the area, looking for any movement or strange shadows.
Maybe London’s note meant that Uncle Nadir hired someone local to report on her.
Maybe they were still in the reporting part of the assignment.
There would be little to tell. Kira went almost nowhere, staying mostly at home unless Ty or a friend enticed her out.
She’d been a hermit because her house had felt safe.
No, London said that Uncle Nadir knew Kira was bringing shame to the family.
In her mind, that could only mean someone had discovered Ty was spending nights with her, or at least visiting her at home when she was alone with him.
Yes, even that was enough of a middle finger to Uncle Nadir’s particular ideas on what was unacceptable behavior for his niece that he’d want to punish her, Kira’s American norms be damned.
But from Kira’s reading of the note, the report was made, and a plan had been formed.
There would be questions about Omar’s death, and there would be some kind of way that she’d be contained.
Certainly, if Uncle Nadir thought she was a tainted woman, he wouldn’t pawn her off as the wife to someone of importance.
And certainly Uncle Nadir wouldn’t be interested in anyone joining the family if they were unimportant.
She’d been warned of honor killings all her life.
And somehow, she always knew that was probably how she’d die.
That didn’t mean that Kira wanted to make it easy for them.
She put her bags in the back seat, climbed under the wheel, and locked her doors.
Where should she go?
Before Kira knew that Lula was a CIA field operator, Lula had said that she worked for the State Department in the diplomatic corps.
And as such, she had ongoing training in how to stay safe in a foreign country where she might be the target of terrorism, kidnapping, or other kinds of attacks.
Lula had talked to Kira about her safety and given her a few lessons on how to be a ghost, in case her uncle called with a marriage contract that Kira found unacceptable.
Lula had explicitly said that Kira shouldn’t do the things she read in romantic thrillers because most of those were written by retired women who were more interested in what the sweaty bodies of the operators were doing during their between-the-sheets rumba and less about the application of actual spy craft.
Kira didn’t read suspense thrillers. She read historical fiction that depicted the lives and circumstances women navigated in a time when they were considered little more than children in terms of brainpower and emotional maturity.
Kira would rot under such circumstances.
But the heroines in the books found ways to thrive.
Thrive might be beyond her. Right now, she wanted to survive.
No, Kira didn’t know anything about anything when it came to survival against trained and determined men.
Kira realized that idling in her car in the middle of her drive made her the proverbial sitting duck.
She forced herself to back out of the drive steadily, without calling attention.
It was after midnight, she reminded herself, she was going to call attention.
Kira drove out of her neighborhood, following the route into the city, and considered the police station. But no one had done anything to her. She had seen no one. What could the police possibly do to help her?
So she drove with no particular destination.
Checking the gas gauge, she saw that Ty must have filled up the tank for her at some point.
Full was helpful.
Kira’s mind spun around and around, and try as she might, she couldn’t find a solid footing for a clear thought to land on.
Somehow, she was on a highway completely turned around. Without signs, she didn’t know if she was heading north or south.
Distance was her only goal.
Away seemed good enough for the moment.
“Get it together!” Kira yelled as she gripped the steering wheel hard enough that the skin on her knuckles pulled tightly over the bones, and Kira thought her skin might split.
She moved into the right-hand lane and checked her speed.
So far, her body seemed to be working on autopilot, and she was grateful.
Uncle Nadir had questions about Omar.
What did Kira know of Omar Imadi?
Next to nothing.
Before the party in Tanzania, London had warned Kira that Uncle Nadir had promised her to Omar in marriage.
Her Uncle never told her about that. In fact, as far as Uncle Nadir knew, Kira was still in the dark about the name of her intended.
Before any of it could be discussed, Omar was dead.
Kira thought Ty had probably killed Omar, but he never said, and she never asked. If Ty had killed Omar, it was because he was ordered to take out a terrorist, not to save her. Saving her was a side bonus.
So what would she say if the interrogators asked?
Honesty as much as possible. Yes, Kira knew Omar was her intended. Yes, London had told her because that’s what best friends in the American culture do. And yes, she was ready to follow the family tradition and marry Omar, sight unseen.
Kira had greeted Omar on the back step of Davidson’s Tanzanian mansion and escorted the party into William’s home. She’d hosted them through cocktails, and she’d escaped with baby Archie up the stairs when he was kind enough to start screaming.
Omar was middle-aged. He was missing a finger. He looked at her approvingly when she soothed baby Archie.
That’s what she knew of Omar.
Kira had been prepared to succumb to her uncle’s wishes. But that was before she’d fallen in love with Ty.
Had Tanzania taken place a week earlier, had Ty been unavailable because he was already out on his other mission, the family sacrifice wouldn’t have been such a dagger.
If Ty and Rory weren’t there, she and the villagers would probably have been killed that night. And none of this would matter because she’d be washed, wrapped in a kaffan, and buried in the soil, maybe in Africa, maybe Qatar.
But the stars had lined up, Ty and Rory were with her, and she ran into the night to escape the attack on William’s compound.
Then Omar was dead.
That was, start to finish, quite literally all that Kira knew of Omar.
What she knew amounted to a phone conversation, not a henchman situation.
It had been almost two years since Omar Imadi was shot in the raid at the Davidson compound. Everyone had said that there were warriors who had come over the border on a raid, and they were the ones who shot Omar when he resisted getting into their helicopter.
It might not have been Ty.
In Kira’s heart, it felt like it was Ty.
Kira and London had hidden with the other women and children at the animal preserve. London might have told everyone about the American soldiers who helped them escape. Surely she told William everything about that night.
It could have been the rangers at the preserve who were stunned by the American military team that rose from the field in their ghillie suits, rifles in hand, to talk to Ty.
The militant group and the American soldiers might be the reason why Uncle Nadir thought Kira brought death to the Davidsons’ compound.
He thought she was a spy?
Did he know that Lula actually was a spy?
Kira needed to warn Lula that she might have been exposed. She turned her head to look at her phone on the seat beside her.
She’d text when she stopped.
Swinging her eyes back to the road, Kira’s gaze caught on the big fat ring on her index finger.
“London, thank you for warning me. Thank you. Thank you.”
Though London had become a different person since she met William, Kira still thought of London as a sister and of Archie as her nephew. She loved them both, still, it was just that, yeah, Kira thought she needed to stay out of that world.
The thing that snagged Kira’s attention was that she’d heard not a single word from Uncle Nadir for almost two years. If he suspected her of spying and assassination, why hadn’t he acted on it before?
Why now?