Page 5 of Red Line

Regardless, Moussa had reached out, saying he had something, and it was significant. Something that she would want to pay him a great deal of money to know.

What would make Moussa act out of character like this?

Should she have her guard up?

Red turned on the faucet, letting the tepid water run until it was no longer rusty. Cupping her fingers, Red leaned down to splash her face.

Gliding damp hands over her head, she pressed the frizz of black hair that had escaped her ponytail back into place. Then, she reached for a towel to pat herself dry.

This towel had been white at some point in its life cycle. But the hotel paid the rural women to do the laundry in the river, and now the fibers had taken on a faint terracotta cast.

The roughness of the line-dried fabric felt nice in this instance. It seemed to scrub a bit of color into her cheeks. Red buried her face in the towel and drew in a deep breath, filling her nostrils with the scent of sunshine and goat shit. That combination was inescapable even here in the town center.

Did Moussa actually know what kind of information was worth paying for?

Maybe.

He was an educated man. Just … kind of spineless. Or so she’d thought before his phone call.

Yes, his voice on the phone quivered, but it wasn’t nerves. It had been excitement.

She glanced at her watch and then ripped open a packet of electrolytes, pouring them into a bottle of room-temperature water. With the top in place, she shook it until the crystals dissolved. That effort exhausted her. She tipped another round of antibiotics into her palm and clapped her hand to her mouth, tossing the white, chalky pill toward the back of her throat, then washed it down with the salty concoction that was supposed to make her feel like a human again.

She popped another anti-diarrheal from its bubble wrap and tucked it into her hip pocket, just in case. So far, the last round of meds was holding, and Red tried to convince herself that she was turning a corner.

After long years in the field, Red had learned a lot of tricks to stave off the travelers’ intestinal shit-shows. By reflex, she popped GI-tract-coating pills before every meal. But sometimesshe hit bad luck. Her job with the CIA’s Color Code, after all, was to befriend anyone who could further her understanding of threats to America. And friends accepted invitations to camps, eating the offered meals, even those that were iffy.

So iffy that her prep pills weren’t up to the job.

Her friends were fine.

But Red, even after years in the area, hadn’t built resistance to all the local microbes.

Tenacious buggers.

Red reached for her backpack, reassured herself that the banknotes were in place, and pulled the strings tight.IfMoussa brought valuable intel, she’d exchange this with a matching black bag that Red had given Moussa the last time they had spoken.

Ifhe remembered to bring it along.

Wrapping a scarf over her hair, draping it in such a way that it would obscure the contours of her face, Red left her room, locked the door, then tested it twice before pocketing the key. She was staying on the second floor, at the rear of the hotel, and could go out a back door at the bottom of the stairs where no one would clock her movements.

Red trudged down the worn stairs. No, thiswasn’t the nicest of hotels.

She was paying for two beautiful rooms in the modern-styled hotel just up the street that housed diplomats, passing military brass, world journalists, and contractors as they moved through this border town near the Syrian crossing. And that was where Red had scheduled her asset meeting. But for safety’s sake, Red elected to stay down the road. Here, with the cracked walls, the rusty water, and the lumpy bed. The toilet worked. That was appreciated. Greatly appreciated.

Red recalled how one time she and her informant needed to escape through the countryside on foot. They were both veryill but still needed to follow protocol. So they urinated off the trail and packed out all their solid waste. There had been a single trash bag, and she was the one who carried it. That had been a challenge in ways imaginable and unimaginable. Yeah, that had been bad.

Red wanted to push that story out of her mind.

Memories were like earworms, a melody that played over and over no matter how much she wished it would stop.

The best thing to do was focus on her immediate mission.

Stepping outside, moving around the building and onto the front walkway, the midday sun was a cudgel as she walked the three blocks towards the relief of air conditioning that she’d find in the international hotel.

What was Moussa about to deliver to her?

Hopefully, it was as good as he thought it was.

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