Page 28 of Stand Fast

Her dark eyes flashed up to his, a little annoyed. “I need to take this,” she argued, trying to pull her arm free as she raised the phone to her ear with her free hand.

“You can take it once you’re off these steps,” he told her, and hustled her down and into the relative safety of the shadows. She followed, barely paying attention to him.

“Barakat,” she said, causing Zaid and her boss to look at her sharply. He’d called her? There was no way she’d given him her personal cell number. Maybe she’d had another number forwarded to it. And this must be important, for him to miraculously overcome his earlier dislike of her. “Where are you?”

Zaid kept moving her toward the vehicle. The driver had pulled it up to the main gate and waited with the engine running.

But Jaliya dug in her heels and twisted away from Zaid a few yards from the main gate. She shook her head adamantly at him when he tried to grab her arm again, and began speaking in rapid Dari.

Zaid and Prentiss immediately went back into sentry mode, watching for threats while she continued her conversation. Her voice was clipped, her posture tense. “No, he’s not all right,” she told Barakat. “His body is on its way to the morgue right now. What do you know about it?”

Her boss stood a few paces from the gate, eyes glued to her. “Where is he?”

Jaliya shook her head at him and continued to talk. “No. No deal. The intel you gave us before? Useless. We sent a team out to the site you gave me and there was nothing there.” Her mouth compressed into a thin line as she listened to whatever Barakat said next. “I don’t think so. You expect me or anyone else to listen to you after what happened? No. Your words carry no weight with me.”

A tense pause followed. Jaliya’s gaze flicked between Zaid and her boss. “All right, I’m willing to meet with you. Right now. At a location of my choosing.” She named an address Zaid wasn’t familiar with, but he guessed it was somewhere in the city. “Twenty minutes. Come alone. If you don’t show up, or if you feed me more lies once you get there, I promise you’ll wish you’d never taken my call that first time.”

She hung up and strode for the truck, an air of palpable excitement radiating from her. “He’s meeting us in twenty at a café a few miles from here.”

Her boss raised his eyebrows. “Us?” He shook his head. “I’m due back at Bagram within the hour, so I’m already going to be late as it is. With this assassination under investigation, I can’t push back the meeting.”

“But he says he’s got intel that could help our investigation. He said The Jackal is still alive.”

David cursed under his breath. “And what if he’s straight up lying again, just to get more money?”

“Or trying to lure you in for a kidnapping or targeted hit?” Zaid said, unimpressed by Barakat’s sudden change of heart about “helping” them.

She turned her head to stare at him, her expression unflinching. “I need to meet with him. I want to see his face and read his body language.”

In other words, she was going with him, or without him. His choice.

Her boss’s gaze shifted to Zaid and Prentiss. “Can you go with her?”

What?Zaid stared at him. He was seriously going to allow her to jeopardize her safety for a meeting with this little asshole?

“We’ve got our own security with us, so you and Prentiss can stay with Jaliya. If your team can spare you a while longer,” David added.

Since the guy outranked him, Zaid kept what he was really thinking to himself. “You sure about this?”

David glanced at Jaliya, then back at him. “Yeah. You guys will escort her to the meeting. If it feels off, get out of there. If it feels okay, make it fast, find out what the kid knows—if anything—and leave. Call me with an update as soon as you’re done. If he really does have something for us, I want to move fast.”

“Okay.” Jaliya looked over at Zaid. “Where did you park?”

Zaid couldn’t believe they were doing this. He wanted to put her in the truck and drive her straight back to Bagram. But if she insisted on going through with this meet, then he was going with her. “You good with this?” he asked Prentiss.

His buddy nodded once. “Yeah. I’ll call Hamilton, let him know what’s going on and see what he says.”

“Okay.” He waited while his teammate made the call. There hadn’t been anything scheduled when he’d left base, and neither Hamilton nor Taggart had called them back in, but something might have come up in the past couple hours.

Prentiss ended the call and put his phone in his pocket. “Got a green light.”

Guess we’re doing this, then.Zaid turned to Jaliya, trying to be all business and ignore the invisible pull she had over him. “Stay close to me, and don’t get in the truck until we check it.”

She frowned at his brusque tone, but didn’t argue. “Fine.”

His senses were on high alert as he, Jaliya and Prentiss headed for the truck, parked outside the main gates behind the other agency vehicle. He made Jaliya stay back about twenty yards on the sidewalk while he and Prentiss checked to make sure no one had tampered with the vehicle or rigged it with wires or explosives. Only when he was satisfied that he wouldn’t blow them up by turning the ignition did he go back for her and escort her to the rear driver’s side door.

Once she was settled he scanned the street before climbing behind the wheel and starting the engine, while Prentiss rode shotgun. “Where are we headed?” he asked her.

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