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Leila hurt too much to laugh, but yeah, her nene would slap her hand with a spoon if she didn’t say please and thank you.
She keyed in the phone number she had memorized.
Before the phone had even completed ringing, Captain Evers was saying her name.
“Leila, do you know where you are?”
Her stomach plummeted.
Every ache and pain stopped. It felt like her very life had stopped as she replayed his question in her mind.
“How come you don’t know where I am?” Her voice was flat.
Katherine grabbed her thigh; her nails dug so deep Leila thought she might leave tiny bruises.
“There’s a problem with your phone. It’s not working right in Syria. Something to do with the cellphone towers.”
“Will it be fixed?”
“We’re working on it. The ETA is sixty minutes.”
“Captain, I’m with Katherine Cole. I don’t know where the others are. We’ve kept this phone on because it was supposed to have all the capabilities explained to me. The battery is very low. I don’t have sixty minutes to leave it on. Hell, I don’t know if I have sixty minutes before the terrorists take us out of the truck and do whatever they have planned.”
She heard him whisper, “Fuck.”
“Can you memorize a phone number if I give it to you?”
“Yes. That I can do.”
He gave her the number.
“How much juice do you have? Can you check in every fifteen minutes?”
“I’m at six percent. The problem is with all this software loaded on the phone, I don’t have any idea how fast I’m losing power.” She tried to make out the face of her watch, but she couldn’t. “I also can’t read my watch.”
“My watch has a pearl face. I can track the time,” Katherine said.
“Okay, twenty minutes, or sooner, if the truck stops,” Leila told the captain.
“Just so you know, we have Phelps, Hopkins, and Annie Trent at the American outpost. Now we just need to get you home safe.”
“That’d be nice,” she agreed.
“Hang in there Leila,” Evers said.
“We will.”
Leila closed her eyes and said a prayer. Leila repeated back to Katherine what she’d discussed.
“Do you think it will work?” Katherine asked after Leila powered off the phone and handed it back to her.
“I wish I knew.”
“That’s why we’ve been taken and we’re still alive. It’s because you know something, right?”
Leila nodded. Then realized Katherine couldn’t see it. “Yes. Yes, I do. Elijah works for the CIA. I used to, so besides doing translation, he sometimes asks me to come with him for a little more work. But nothing like this.”
“You can’t tell them what you know. It’s the only leverage that you have,” Katherine told her.
