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Purposely trying to mislead anyone watching the elevator numbers, Justice pressed buttons for multiple floors, but not the floor she needed. The elevator stopped. Justice and Amal walked out.
Justice picked up her pace toward the stairs. Amal followed.
Inside the stairwell, Amal didn’t complain or ask a single question. But for the sound of their footsteps echoing as they ran, she was almost spookily silent. Two floors up, they exited and moved quickly down the hall.
Justice struggled to remember her training. That was bad. Training should just kick in—like coughing when you’d swallowed water incorrectly. But that wasn’t happening. It might have something to do with being shot. The ache in her side. The pounding of her heart. The weight of the gun in her right hand. The fragile feel of Amal’s small hand grasped within her own as Justice tugged her to keep up.
They made it to the room, and she pulled out the key card. When she’d been doing recon, she’d spent a whole day arranging a room here. Leaving her hotel down the street, changing at a restaurant, then coming here in disguise with false ID and credit cards. It had seemed overkill. Now, she was glad she’d done it.
Time wasn’t on her side. They’d already be looking for her, scanning the cameras.
With a push of her hand, the room door swung open. Without a prompt, Amal slipped inside. Following, Justice closed the door and hurried to the bathroom.
The bathroom light flicked on when she entered. Wiping the blood and sweat off of her hands and onto her pants, she grabbed a towel and used it to stanch the wound on her side.
Her body was tense with adrenaline. Her mind racing. Digging the tips of her nails under the wire in her mouth, she yanked off the last piece of metal from her teeth. It gave way with a pop. She ran her tongue over her teeth, tasted blood.
Inside the hotel room, she found the suitcase she’d brought.
It contained three airtight packages and clothes, but nothing that could be tied to her. Except the locket Cooper had given her, which she quickly put over her head. With the last bit of metal pinched between her fingers, she pierced each of the three packages.
Air entered and they expanded. Amal gave a small squeak of surprise. Justice told her it was okay and pulled the plastic away. A noxious chemical smell filled the room as the sponges expanded more.
Two of the sponges in one hand, she walked to the bathroom, placed them on the sink, and stripped off her uniform. In her underwear and bra, she tore the sponges with shaking hands then tossed them, her hotel uniform including the vest, and the poison into the tub. Back at the sink, she washed her hands and hustled into the room.
The last sponge had expanded to the proper size. Good. The straps attached to this football-shaped sponge secured it to her midsection. Over this she slipped an abaya, and on her head a niqab. One pregnant Muslim. Check.
Amal watched this transformation with eyes growing larger by the minute. She probably would’ve been less stunned to see a car turn into a Transformer.
The suitcase she’d brought had a small pair of scissors. They’d do. Tossing the white bedding off the plush bed, she cut a square strip from the sheet.
“Can you make this into a niqab?”
Amal held out her hands, then went into the bathroom and did a fairly good job of it. Justice straightened it a little, tucked the sides under. Not perfect. Not with that blue dress. But it would have to do.
That done, Justice grabbed a towel and wiped down any surface she might have touched, including her suitcase. Back in the bathroom, she tossed the towel in the tub.
She stroked the wheel on a lighter she’d brought and put the flame to the flammable gel padding. It went up with a whoosh. She threw in the lighter. The material would burn to ash quickly, so it wasn’t a danger to the guests, but it would destroy the evidence and create enough smoke to set off the fire alarm.
Her heart fluttering in her chest like a bird against a cage, Justice grasped Amal’s hand and kept her other hand holding the gun within the sleeve of her abaya.
She gave final instructions to Amal. “When the alarm goes off, we head out, down the stairs, and out the front door with the other people.”
The fire alarm sounded.
Chapter 24
Beneath a dull streetlamp that lit only a small section of the dirt road through Zaatari, Sandesh cleaned up the bloody strips of cloth from the planks of the truck. He tossed them into the refuse container outside Salma’s headquarters.
Salma’s grandson had taken the rescued women to the new, larger facility they’d finished setting up yesterday. Originally used for aid workers, it had easily morphed to fit the refugees. They’d deal with the medical and psychosocial needs tomorrow.
Reaching for the bag of weapons, he hesitated, flexed his hands. He didn’t need them. With a purposeful mental shove, he walked back into the tent.
A dull light hung down from the wooden support rafter over a small gurney. Basic medical tools sat on a steel table. The tent resembled a clinic. Salma used it to give medical assistance to the women and girls. He avoided looking at the small, blue corpse atop the metal cart. A boy.
The Yazidi woman had been taken to the French hospital. Soon, an official would arrive to take the corpse.
He picked up a jug of water, poured some into the basin on a cart in the corner, and washed his hands. Blood didn’t usually bother him, but the brutality of the birth and the loss of the woman’s son had lodged like disease in the creases of his knuckles, the tension of his fisted hands.
Salma’s skills as a doctor had saved the woman, but only because she’d been pregnant. The baby had taken the brunt of the gunshot.
Damn. Everything in him wanted to protect the softness he’d seen in that bleeding, terrified teenaged girl. But that wasn’t his job. He was here to aid those who were injured, not to bring injury to others.
“You have dealt with conflict for so long, Sandesh,” Salma said, “that you can’t even find peace within your own mind.”
Her brown eyes glistened with knowing intelligence. She was right. He nodded. “I almost told you to take the truck and leave me to fight.”
Her eyebrows rose. “That would’ve been a problem, as I don’t drive.”
He laughed, but somehow that made him feel better. He wiped his hands on a towel and placed it beside the basin. “How do you do it, Salma? Work here, witness what happens, knowing you can only save the moment for someone, leaving them alive in a violent and unfair world to save all the succeeding moments for themselves?”
“What would I do differently? I heal. That is my mission. And when given the chance, I speak of healing, speak of their pain, and open others to the possibility of soothing the ache that too much anger and too many ideas of God’s justice has done to our delicate minds.”
Delicate minds? That seemed an oversimplification. Or was it? Was it as simple as not allowing certain beliefs to take root, make patterns in the brain that caused kneejerk reactions?
Salma’s clever eyes seemed to reevaluate him as she cleaned up the area around the gurney. “Why start this venture if you aren’t willing to risk yourself?”
Risk? Did she think he regretted helping those women? “I’m not sure I understand.”
“You have to risk your, uh, perhaps in English ego fits best?”
“Fits best for what?” God, the whole room smelled of blood.
“You are trying to change the way you see yourself. And tonight, you came face-to-face with that reinvention. Stay. Fight. Or pick the other path, the one that helps without violence. You chose a different path. You needn’t beat yourself up for that. This time, it was the right choice.”
A swish of the tent flap and Sandesh turned toward the opening. A pregnant woman in niqab and black abaya, holding her side, staggered into the emergency tent.
A young girl, her daug
hter perhaps, supported her. The girl looked at him with eyes much too old for a child and whispered, “Help.”
He rushed to the woman, caught her just as she fell. He lifted her easily and carried her to the gurney. Salma moved quickly to the woman’s side. “Are you in labor?”
Standing by the gurney, the girl took charge. “She’s hurt. Her side. She speaks English.”
The woman proved this by speaking English. “We’re being followed. Please hide the girl. Amal.”
Sandesh knew that voice. Justice?
Salma reacted with a speed that indicated she’d been here before. She directed the girl to hide in a steel cabinet. Amal, who couldn’t even have been a teenager yet, darted into the cabinet and shut the door with a metal clang.
“Justice?” It was her. Justice, but with eyes like honey. Contacts? What the hell? Justice had been injured. Justice had a daughter. No. That was panic speaking. “What’s happening?”
“I think I’m being followed. Sort of. I don’t understand. They were here when we got here.”
What the hell was she talking about? Sandesh tied down the dog of war that wanted to break whoever had injured Justice. He needed to stay calm. Why would someone be following a PR hack? “Who?”
The tent flap was tossed open. Two armed men entered. They began yelling, asking who the woman on the table was.
Sandesh slipped toward the first man, preparing to disarm him so he could take down the second.
From her place at the bedside, Salma waved her bloodied hands at the men. “Get out. Can’t you see that she has lost her baby?”
The men hesitated. The stillborn baby lay lifeless and purple-blue inside the metal pan.
Sandesh took her lead. “Outside, outside.” He waved with his hands. “She has lost much blood and might die.”
On the table, Justice began to moan. The confused men turned on their heels and left.
Sandesh waited five seconds before he glanced outside. He saw the men move away, take out a cell. They’d be back.
