“Mateen? Look at me, please,” I beg. “I am on my way,mon chou.But I need to know you are all right.”
“I want to go home!”
“You are home,” Raziq roars. “Say it!”
Mateen shakes his head. The video jerks, and a shadow looms over my son as Raziq hands the phone to another man. He grabs Mateen by the arm and yanks him to his feet.
“Say it! Or you will not eat until tomorrow!”
At my side, Nomar trembles with barely contained rage and takes the phone from my hand. “Mateen. Look at the camera, buddy. Look at me. Okay?”
Sniffling, my son lifts his gaze.
“Sometimes, we all have to do things we don’t want to do. Remember when we played FIFA at the hospital and I asked you to teach me all those trick shots? You didn’t want to. But you did. This is the same. Say it.”
“I am home,” Mateen whispers.
“Good job, kiddo. I’m proud of you.” Nomar’s expression hardens when the camera pans back to Raziq. “He did what you wanted, asshole. Time for you and me to have a little talk.”
The anger in Raziq’s eyes terrifies me. “You do not make the rules here. I do. This boy,” he jerks his head toward Mateen, “knows nothing. He cannot read the Quran, he does not know how to pray—or evenwhento pray.”
“He ismy son!I decide what he learns. Not you!” I regret the words almost immediately. In the background, Mateen scrambles back onto the bed and wraps his arms around his bent knees. Raziq strides out of the room. The other man with him slams the door and locks it from the outside.
“You are not fit to be his mother.” His snarl is so like Faruk’s. My heart pounds in my ears.
“Listen, shithead,” Nomar says. “The only reason I haven’t hung up on you is I still need to see Amelie and Philippe. Because we don’t get on our next flight until I know they’re alive. We’ll be in Kabul by noon—”
“Our agreement was thirty-six hours. I expect you to be at the south end of Mandai Market by 10:30 a.m. If you are not, I will kill the woman. And her son.”
I turn to Nomar, burying my face against his shoulder. This is all my fault. Laurent. Amelie. Philippe. They could all die. Because of me.
The arm banding around me should bring me comfort. It would if I had any hope of surviving past tomorrow.
“Thirteen-thirty,” Nomar growls. “You try getting a commercial flight out of Toulouse in the middle of the night. We flew to Paris this morning, we’ll get to Istanbul at twenty-three-hundred, and leave for Kabul at oh-five-hundred tomorrow. Not all of us have our own goddamn planes. But if you don’t show me Amelie and Philippe right fucking now—”
Raziq laughs. “You will do what? Kill me? I would like to see you try.” He strides down the hall where another man stands in front of a door with a large padlock on it. “Open it.”
“No…” I cover my mouth with my hand. The woman huddled in the far corner of the room wears a black burka. I cannot even see her eyes behind the dark mesh. Heavy manacles bind her wrists in front of her. Philippe has his arms wrapped around her waist. Dirt stains his face, though like Mateen, he wears a brown tunic and dark pants.
“Amelie? I need to know you and Philippe are okay,” Nomar says. “Show me your face.”
She flinches and lifts her head. Philippe presses closer to her. His bright blue eyes are dull, but he does not appear to be bound. “I cannot. He said…he would beat me again.”
Again?
“That is enough.” Raziq slams the door, and his face fills the screen. “They are alive. They will stay that way until tomorrow. I am a reasonable man. But if you are a minute later than thirteen-thirty, I will cut her throat.”
“You fucking—shit. The asshole hung up on me.” Nomar tosses the phone on the conference table. “Zephyr, tell me you could trace that call.”
On the tablet screen, she rolls her eyes. “I thought you’d been in country for most of the last twenty years. When have you knownanythingto be easy in Afghanistan? But the room Mateen was in matches the real estate photos I pulled from the archives. Minus the bars on the windows, anyway.”
Austin and Nomar start talking about ingress and egress points, but I turn away. I recognized the look in Raziq’s eyes. It was the same one Faruk would get when he knew he had his enemy cornered. When he knew he was going to win.
* * *
Nomar
I glance at Lisette, curled under a blanket at the back of the plane. She fell asleep an hour ago—not long after Zephyr finished her briefing. The rest of us shared a box of cereal we found in the galley, and now we stand around one of the smaller rucksacks filled with more appropriate clothing.
