CHAPTER 18
The doorway stank of piss and the last thing Grace wanted to do was sit in it.
Unfortunately, she had no choice. With the morphine worn off, it was too painful to stand.
She slid down the wall, eyes tight, thighs protesting her descent.
The cement was clammy. She pressed her bruised shoulder against the wall, held her throbbing temples, and closed her eyes.
Silence closed around her. She couldn’t believe she’d willingly walked away from her safe sunny home to subject herself to this.
If day broke without Brenna’s return, she would cross the city alone, and do everything Brenna had instructed her to do.
Except.
She would not leave Kav?ak without Brenna. She would get help and find her.
Tonight, she had lain with her, limbs entwined.
That close, she’d felt Brenna’s pain, the anguish she so ably concealed.
At the railing, she had seen her teeter at the edge of a crumbling emotional precipice, face in hands, woman’s heart momentarily exposed.
She was desperate to be enfolded. Yet, what she knew how to give—comfort—she didn’t know how to receive.
She was by herself, roaming hostile streets, and had been, for thirty months.
She needed to get home—and not in a box.
She yanked at her shirt. She wanted to get the medications out of sight. Brenna had left her the ticket out of here, along with the precious bags she allowed no one to touch. Unclasping the belt of the pouch so she could get it around her waist, she froze.
Trucks.
Coming this way.
She fumbled in the darkness, racing to close the unfamiliar buckle.
A blade of light slashed the wall across the street, so bright it cut her eyes.
She flattened her cheek against the reeking floor.
They had to be military vehicles. Gears ground downward and the trucks slowed, creeping nearer, roof-mounted floodlights sweeping alternate sides of the street.
Brilliant flashes bounced off the ceiling of her narrow doorway.
These vehicles weren’t driving through. They were looking for something.
Diesel engines clacking, exhaust hanging low in the cold air, the trucks came nearer.
The doorway flared laser-bright. Grace plastered herself to the cement, head down, staring at the stitching on Brenna’s bags.
The light explored the narrow crypt, unable to probe the shadowed wedge where she lay. She held her breath.
They weren’t moving on.
Sweat ringed her neck. Damn it, how interesting could a doorway be? Finally, the forward vehicle crept onward. She was plunged abruptly into pitch darkness. She exhaled with relief.
But an unintelligible order erupted over a public speaker from the rear vehicle. The forward truck halted with a squeal. Grumbling soldiers flung open steel doors, filling the air with what were surely oaths. Booted feet rounded the truck on the double, rifles clattering.
Flashlight beams criss-crossed the night, flaring into and out of the doorway.
Had they seen her? Voices called from the direction of the second truck like bloodhounds on the scent.
The nearest men topped the sandbag barrier and landed heavily on the sidewalk, scarcely three feet from where she hid.
Fear gripped her. Kill me outright, she prayed. Don’t rape me.
A beam of light cut inside the door well and stabbed her eyes. An exultant shout rose and spread contagiously to the furthest man. The prey was cornered.
Grace stood up, shielding her eyes. All she could make out was rifles, silhouetted men, and clouds of breath hanging in the bitter air.
The point man advanced, muzzle aimed at Grace’s gut, and motioned her to step forward.
Grace’s heart pounded. Adrenaline swept through her body. She straightened, facing the soldier. I think not.
The point man kicked Brenna’s bags aside, and seized Grace’s injured shoulder.
She cried out, staggering as pain shot through her.
She fell against the soldier and they stumbled into the concrete wall.
The backup troops surged forward and grabbed her arms.
Grace fought them in the confined space.
She was outnumbered. Resistance wouldn’t change the outcome, but she refused to submit.
“Ст?й!” A biting command erupted behind the teeming mass. The effect was electric. The men froze in mid-motion.
Was her mind playing tricks on her? The soldiers released her and stepped back.
“You might cut them some slack, Alcott. They’re only trying to help.”
She blinked uncomprehendingly. The flashlight angled to the ground. Brenna stepped out of the shadows.
Relief swept through Grace, a feeling so powerful her knees buckled.
Brenna caught her. “Twenty-four minutes,” she said, a hint of amusement in her cool voice. “Sorry for the delay. Ukrainian crew, you know. Language barrier.”
Inside the eight-wheeled Ukrainian BTR-4 armored personnel carrier, Brenna watched Grace. She was hunched forward, clutching a liter bottle of Evian water in one hand, and cradling her head with the other. Swaying with the motion of the moving vehicle, she grimaced every time they hit a pothole.
The day was collapsing on Grace. Not just because of the physical pounding she’d taken, but because she defined herself as a moral woman and today Kav?ak had forced her to revise her opinion.
She was struggling psychologically, clinging to her beleaguered sense of personal decency while Kav?ak hammered her.
Welcome to hell.
Brenna was grateful now that she had hidden Grace and gone reconnoitering.
It turned out that UNPROFOR was still holding onto the Old City despite deep Nationalist incursions.
Seeing them, she’d flagged them down, and convinced them to return for Grace.
Luc, bless him, had issued a forces-wide lookout for them after Michael Stanford was found in the torched van and they hadn’t showed up at the hotel.
Grace broke the silence. “Where’re we going? The hotel?”
She shook her head. “Airport. There’s a clinic there.” Also, a Comm center.
In minutes, they would get medical help. And just like that, the fickle pendulum had swung.
She leaned back, thinking about the P2 memory card tucked in her jacket. It proved ?avi?’s role in mass murder. Her task now was to get it out of Kav?ak and broadcast it as widely as possible.
Since she had been on their payroll when she shot it, EBS owned the footage.
But given that the cable channel did not produce a nightly news show, it made sense for Sam Chisolm to license it to the highest-bidding network, thus retaining ownership of it for the documentary and benefiting from free advance publicity.
Done right, the footage could generate enough income to cover her fee.
Her work could effectively become a freebie for EBS.
However, it was tricky.
Stateside news was notoriously uninterested in international politics.
How many bodies, an editor would ask. And how many were American?
?avi?’s body count—and the fact she caught him red-handed—might be worth forty seconds of prime time.
A bit more on a slow news night. Fleetingly sensational, but insufficient to mobilize public opinion.
What she needed was an American angle, some hook that would make the networks play the footage over and over, keeping the issue in view long enough for the message to sink in.
She frowned. The only U.S. perspective in this story lay in her kinship to America’s foremost statesman.
This damning footage—taken on the eve of Special Envoy Brendan Rease’s negotiations with ?avi?—had been taken by Rease’s own daughter. Sam Chisolm had to sell the clash between the Envoy and his notoriously rebellious Problem Child. With that noted, the networks would turn up the heat themselves.
She could hear the newscasters now: “As you know, Brenna Rease has a long record of public acrimony with her father...”
Her eyelids slid shut. Shit. Her past would be resurrected.
The Billiard Ball, her drinking sprees, the string of men—the awful reputation she wanted forgotten.
Her history refused to fall away. The fresh start she had envisioned back home would not be hers.
And her father. This campaign of hers might land the blow from which he could not recover, and send him down sputtering at the end of a brilliant career, his lifetime of accomplishment canceled out by her final willful act. How consistent it was, that her life brought him nothing but grief.
And yet. A hundred and sixty-seven voices had joined the multitudes crying out to her.
Who would shake a sleeping international community, if not her?
Who else would protest what had happened to Corporal Stanford, and the keening widow in the marketplace, and the woman who’d been gang-raped in the square?
She had borne witness to the barbarity that had befallen them all. It was her job to tell the world.
The vehicle rolled to a stop.
Grace lifted her eyes to Brenna’s.
“Airport checkpoint,” she explained, hearing men’s voices. A chain clattered, and the armored vehicle rolled forward with a toot of the horn. They would arrive at the terminal in a minute.
Brenna glanced at her watch, rapidly calculating time zones. “Where would Sam Chisolm be at four-thirty in the afternoon?”
Grace turned a blank gaze in her direction.
“At what telephone number?” she prompted. “Give me his private line, if he’s got one. His cell phone—all his numbers.”
Grace stumbled through the familiar digits while Brenna jotted them on her tiny notepad.
“Do you want to write the copy?” she asked Grace, pro forma, chuckling inwardly at the thought of what she’d compose in her drugged state.
“Uh… copy?”
“For today’s footage. I’m going to ask Luc to beam it out.” A brazen request, it would further muddy the boundaries between Brenna and Luc’s personal lives and their work.
Grace shook her head, trying to clear her brain.
“I can do it if you like. It’s pretty standard,” she said, affecting a newscaster’s voice in soft mockery: “In Kav?ak today, General ?avi? personally ordered the massacre of one hundred and sixty-seven unarmed women, children, and elderly men corralled in the market by his Nationalist army.
This footage, shot by Brenna Rease, daughter of U.S. Special Envoy Brendan Rease, belies his assertion that the General has not been personally involved in ethnic cleansing.”
“Sure,” Grace mumbled. “Standard. File it.”
An icepick-sharp squeal of brakes skewered Grace’s eardrums, and she was thrown forward.
A moment later, the rear hatch opened from the outside and cold air mixed with the heat accumulated in the steel cocoon.
The vehicle was on a ramp, inside a building of some sort.
The basement of the terminal? An out-building?
A string of pallid light bulbs lit the low-ceilinged corridor.
There were sandbags piled against both sides of the walls, and she heard the muted sound of a generator coming from behind a set of steel doors.
A young brunette with a medic insignia appeared with a wheelchair.
“I had them radio ahead to get you a ride,” Brenna said.
Colonel Luc Morriseau, back straight, uniform crisp, stepped into view beside the medic and peered inside the APC. His eyes lit on Brenna. The tension in his face broke, transformed itself into pleasure, then longing.
Brenna cleared her throat, tipping her head toward Grace.
The Colonel hastily shifted his gaze. “Mon Dieu.”
Grace tried to get up, was overcome by wooziness, and toppled backwards.
“Easy,” Brenna murmured.
Luc reached inside the APC, a strong hand outstretched. Grace took it and stepped down. The ground didn’t feel solid.
While the medic guided her into the chair, Luc next offered Brenna a hand. She took it and hopped out, her boots lightly patting the ground.
She’s magnificent, Grace thought, looking at her.
Evidently, Luc thought so too. He’d drawn Brenna so possessively alongside himself that the side of her breast was brushing his arm.
As the medic rolled Grace around, she heard Luc murmur: “My quarters?”
“Yes,” Brenna replied.
Grace dropped her aching head.
Yes.
But so what? What did she care whose quarters Brenna went to?