save them precious time in the future. Some of the logistical pieces were already in place, and so far their informant at the facility had proven steady and reliable.
What did he need for the mission? A few people. Believers, all. Four. No more than that. One needed expertise with explosives. Untraceable automobiles-no problem there, of course. Good language skills. They had to look the part, which wouldn’t be hard, given the target’s location; few people could discern the subtleties of skin color, and he spoke English without much accent, so that wouldn’t present a problem, either.
Most of all, though, each member of his team had to be a true believer. Willing to die. Willing to kill. It was easy for outsiders to think that the former was more important than the latter, but while there were many willing to throw their lives away, it was far more useful to discard your life only for something to advance the cause. They thought of themselves as Holy Warriors and sought after their seventy-two virgins but were in fact young people with few prospects, to whom religion was the path to greatness they would otherwise never achieve. It was remarkable that they were too stupid even to see that. But that was why he was the leader and they the followers.
12
EVEN IF SHE HAD not been to the motel before, she would have had little trouble finding it, sitting beside what the town of Beatty optimistically called Main Street, which was in truth nothing more than a half-mile gap of thirty-mile-per-hour road between highways 95 and 374.
The hotel itself-the Motel 6 of Death Valley-had, despite its outward appearance, relatively clean rooms that smelled of disinfectant soap. Not only had she seen worse, but she had applied her… special skills in worse places. And with worse men, for much less money. If anything, the name of the motel bothered her most of all.
A Kerasen Tatar by birth, Allison-her real name was Ays?lu, which in Turkik meant Beauty as Moon-had inherited from her mother and father and ancestors a healthy respect for omens, both subtle and overt, and the name Motel 6 of Death Valley certainly qualified as the latter, she believed.
No matter. Omens were mercurial, and meaning was always open to interpretation. In this case the motel’s name was unlikely to apply to her; her subject was too entranced by her to be of any threat, either directly or indirectly. And what she’d come here to do required little thinking on her part, so well had she been trained. And it helped that men were simple, predictable creatures, driven by the basest of needs. “Men are clay,” her first instructor, a woman named Olga, had once told her, and even at the tender age of eleven she’d known the truth of it, having seen it in the lingering gazes of the boys in her village, and even in the always watching eyes of some of the men.
Even before she’d started going through her changes and her body had begun to blossom, she’d instinctively known which was not only the fairer sex but the stronger one as well. Men were physically strong, and that had its benefits and pleasures, but Allison plied a different kind of strength, one that had served her well, keeping her alive in dangerous situations and keeping her comfortable in hard times. And now, at twenty-two, with her village far behind her, her strength was making her wealthy. Better still, unlike many of her previous employers, her current one hadn’t required an audition from her. Whether that was a function of their strict religious ideals or simply one of professionalism, she didn’t know, but they had taken her bona fides at face value, along with a recommendation- though from whom was unclear. Certainly someone with influence. The now-discontinued program that had trained her had existed under closely guarded secrecy.
She drove past the motel’s parking lot, then circled the block once and came back in the other direction, looking for anything out of place, anything that tickled her intuition. She saw his vehicle, a blue 1990 Dodge pickup, along with half a dozen others, all with in-state plates, save one from California and one from Arizona. Satisfied all was in order, she pulled into a gas station, did a quick Y-turn, then returned to the motel and pulled into the lot, parking two stalls down from the Dodge truck. She took a moment to check her makeup in the rearview mirror and retrieve a pair of condoms from the glove compartment. She dropped them in her purse and snapped it closed with a smile. He had begun to complain about the condoms, saying he wanted nothing between them, but she had demurred, saying she wanted to wait until they knew each other better, perhaps get tested for sexually transmitted diseases, before they took their relationship to the next level. The truth was, familiarity and caution had nothing to do with her hesitation. Her employer had been thorough, giving her a detailed dossier of the man, from his daily routine to his eating habits to his relationship history. He’d had two lovers before her, a high school girlfriend who had dumped him between his junior and senior years, and another shortly after he graduated from college. That, too, had been a brief affair. The likelihood he had a disease was almost nonexistent. No, the use of a condom was but another tool in her arsenal. The closeness he so craved was a need, and needs were merely leverage points. When she finally “gave in” and let him have her without the protection, it would serve only to strengthen her grasp on him.
She couldn’t delay much longer, though, as her employer was already asking for information she’d yet to extract. Why they were impatient or what exactly they planned to do with the information she was funneling to them was their business, but clearly this man’s secrets were of critical importance. This sort of thing could not be hurried, though. Not if you wanted good results.
She got out, locked the car door, and walked toward the room. As was his custom, he had left a red rose dangling in the gap between the doorknob and the jamb-“their” code to let her know where to find him. He was a sweet man, truth be told, but so weak and so needy that she found it nearly impossible to feel anything but disdain for him.
She knocked on the door. She heard footsteps rapidly padding toward the door, then the chain lock rattling as it was unhooked. The door swung open, and he stood there in his corduroy pants and one of the half-dozen tattered T-shirts he owned, all of which referenced some science-fiction movie or television show.
“Hey, there,” she cooed, shooting a hip like a runway model. Years of training had left her without a trace of an accent. “Happy to see me?”
Her sundress-in the light peach color he liked so much-was clingy in all the right places and billowy in the others, the perfect balance of chasteness and spice. Most men, even if they didn’t realize it, wanted their women to be ladies in daily life and whores in the bedroom.
His hungry eyes finished their scan of her legs and breasts, and then came to rest on her face. “Uh, yeah… God, yeah,” he mumbled. “Come on, get in here.”
They made love twice over the next two hours, the first time lasting only a few minutes, the second time ten minutes, and only that long because she’d held him off.
“Wow,” she murmured. “That was… Wow…”
“Yeah, it was,” he replied.
Steve wasn’t a bad-looking man, with curly reddish-blond hair and light blue eyes, but he was too skinny for her tastes, and his beard made her face and thighs itchy. He was clean, though, and he didn’t smoke, and his teeth were straight, so all in all she knew it could be worse.
As for his lovemaking skills… They were almost nonexistent. He was an overly considerate lover and too gentle by far, always worried he was doing something wrong or should be doing something different. She did her best to reassure him, saying all the right things and making all the right noises at all the right moments, but she suspected in the back of his head he was worried about losing her-not that he “had” her, really.
It was the quintessential beauty-and-the-beast syndrome. He wasn’t going to lose her, of course, at least not until she’d gotten the answer her employers needed. Allison felt a momentary pang of guilt, imagining how he would react when she disappeared. She was fairly certain he’d fallen in love with her, which was the point, after all, but he was so… harmless it was hard not to occasionally feel sorry for him. Hard but not impossible. She pushed the thought from her mind.
“So how’s work?” he asked.
“It’s fine, the same old thing: making the rounds, giving my pitch, handing out my phone numbers, and showing
