“Court?
“Maybe you could pull that shit in Afghanistan, but not here,” Bugs said.
Hollywood was quick to jab a finger at Bugs’s face. “
Bugs followed Hollywood’s gaze, narrowed his eyes. “You mean, give him to Pryce?”
Hollywood shrugged.
“I thought you didn’t approve of Pryce,” Bugs said.
“I don’t. Pryce is a freak of nature. But it can’t hurt to try.”
“We got less than an hour till the suits get here from D.C. Can’t be any rough stuff, not so it’d show.”
“So we agree,” Hollywood said, smiling. He now approached the prisoner with open hands to show Bugs his benign intent and removed the adhesive blindfold, pulling with steady pressure. The prisoner, still dazed from his trip into the wall, winced, losing a little hair to the tape. He blinked several times, adjusting his eyes to the light. Then he rallied, looked past the two Americans, and fixed his eyes with a disciplined stare on a bare patch of wall.
“Okay Omar, here’s the deal,” Hollywood said. “I know you got your engineering degree at the sore-fucking- bone in Paris. I know you speak French, German, and excellent English. So I know you hear what I’m saying. And I know you don’t care to talk to us infidels and all. But I feel obligated to clue you to this one important fact.” He yanked his thumb at Bugs. “Him and me, we got our differences but basically we’re
The prisoner, whose name was not Omar, continued to stare at the wall.
Hollywood leaned forward and spoke into the prisoner’s ear. He dropped his voice to a low, amiable tone. “I’m just saying,
The prisoner shifted on the chair and then spoke in precise, un-accented English. “I would like to speak to my attorney and I would like to use the bathroom.”
Hollywood was still close to the man’s ear. He smiled a kindly smile. Conceivably he was someone’s grandfather. “Number one or number two?” he asked.
The prisoner shook his head briefly, then refocused his fatalistic gaze straight ahead on the wall.
“Fair warning,” Hollywood said as he and Bugs ambled across the room and opened the door. As they stepped into the hall, Bugs called out, “The A Team is off the court, you can bring in the bench. Oh, and he wants to go to the john.”
“Rashid, my man! The Gucci Terrorist-actually you don’t look so bad, considering how your day has gone completely to shit.”
Hearing his name, Rashid looked up and for a fraction of a second lost his concentration and fixed his gaze on Major Nina Pryce as she walked into the hotbox room. She came straight at him; no frills, no wasted motion, no bullshit. She was a rangy, athletic thirty-five years old and stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed one hundred and forty-three highly trained pounds. Dressed down for the heat, she wore cut-off Levis and a ribbed tank top.
Rashid was trying to force his stare back to its meditation on the bare patch of wall when their eyes met. Nina raised her arm and ran her fingers through her short flame-red hair. Rashid’s eyes followed the movement and became tangled in the interesting play of flesh on her bare upper arm. He noticed that the lobe of her left ear was missing, just a shrivel of scar tissue. A skull-and-crossbones tattoo grinned on her left shoulder like a memento of a wild youth. He saw the old-fashioned 1911 model Colt.45 automatic jammed into her waistband.
Finally, he yanked his eyes away from her flaunted American body. The light in the depths of Nina’s gray- green eyes adjusted as she noted the way he stared at her bare arms. Her tanned forehead, which was sprinkled with copper freckles, frowned slightly.
Then, as Rashid looked away, she studied the collision of revulsion and lust; the way it flashed in his eyes, then resolved into contempt. She’d pulled several tours of duty in the Middle East. She knew that look from certain Arab men. It was pre-Islamic, rooted in ancient taboos of the North African tribes: contempt for the strangeness they saw in the female sex. And nothing was more alien to them than a free woman packing a.45.
But quite possibly, in this case his cultural baggage could work to her advantage. So she smiled. And not a bad smile. Ten years earlier and a bit slimmer, she would have been considered downright pretty.
Today she’d still look pretty-but no longer Starbucks-early morning-coffee pretty; more like last-call pretty in a country-and-western bar. Which was fine, because there was a lot more country than Starbucks in her chosen line of work.
Her clear, strong voice had served her well singing alto in her high school choir; but that was several lives ago, before she cut a swath through the U.S. Army: first female to command infantry in action (Desert Storm); first female to be awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Now she’d wrangled her way into Northern Route via Delta. No one called her major now. Rank didn’t matter here, only the mission.
Her cut-off jeans, running shoes, and a close-fitting purple tank top were a practical choice for undercover work, given the heat this July morning. To Rashid, however, the attire was totally revealing of her upper body and lower legs. Breaking his concentration, he now stole glances at her. He averted his eyes from her bare arms and the tidy swell of breasts confined in a sports bra. Her shoulders and throat were trim, muscled, well shaped. The clean physicality of her American-woman sweat cut toward him through the stale air like a dangerously unsheathed blade.
She smiled knowingly when she saw him struggle to avert his eyes. She stepped directly in front of him so that she was in line with his point of concentration on the wall. She folded her arms.
“Let’s understand each other from the start. We have a lot in common, because this outfit I’m in is sneaky and very results-oriented. Just like you guys. It’s like…” She paused, cocked her head to the side, and gave him a thoughtful squint. “Do you have kids? Well, you know how when you talk to a little kid it’s best to stoop down, get on the same level with them and make direct eye contact?” She leaned forward from the waist, planted her hands on her knees, and looked him straight in the eyes. “What’s happened is, because of what you guys did, my government has quietly given a few of us permission to get down on your level, follow me?”
Very deliberately she extended her right hand and placed her open palm on his bare chest. The whites of Rashid’s eyes enlarged as he shied away. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Is it true that Ali, the husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, said that ‘God created sexual desire in ten parts; nine parts were given to women and only one to men’?” She removed her hand, straightened up, and said, “I just felt your heart speed up in your chest. I understand this is not the most comfortable setting. You almost naked, me…uncovered.”
She placed her hands on her hips. “But the fact is, we don’t have a lot of time, you and I. That’s for other people; the suits who work in offices and flirt by the watercooler and generally fuck things up.”
Rashid had turned his head away from her and now fixed his gaze on a different wall. So she reached over and gripped his thick hair in her left hand and drew his head back toward her. She gauged him carefully, the way he tensed and planted his bare feet on the carpet. An inch shorter than she, and soft in the middle, but he had powerful soccer legs.
With her right hand she shoved the heavy pistol to the side of her waistband and quickly undid the snap on her Levis. “Is it also true your imams believe the greatest insult the United States inflicted on the country of the Two Holy Places was sending female soldiers there?”
She flicked the zipper down and used the pistol to lever back a corner of denim and some panty, revealing a raised whorl and purple dent of scar tissue. The entry wound was located in the whiter skin and freckles west of her belly button.
“Kalashnikov round, from an Iraqi Republican Guard. He got me low and to the right. I got him higher, center mass. And so ended one of my several dramas in the sand dunes. Remember Desert Storm? Back when we were defending your backward medieval kingdom?” Elastic snapped, the zipper hissed back up; Nina deftly buttoned her jeans and jammed the Colt back in place. “Yeah, I been to Saudi. Back then, when we traveled off base, we had to wear the Halloween costume. You know, that black bedsheet you make your women wear?”
She released her hold on his hair. Rashid leaned back and unfocused his eyes, turning his vision inward. To Nina it looked like he was searching for his desert trance. But she noted that, while his eyes toiled to achieve calm, the BBs of sweat on his forehead were growing to the size of gumdrops.
