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SEVEN
“I’m not going back down allthose steps,” Harry grumbled. He was too tired for this bullshit.
“I thought you said your ankle was fine.”
“It is.” It kinda wasn’t. “But I’d like to keep it that way.”
Asher’s eyes glittered with humour. “This way then,” he said, going up to the end of the lane and turning left into what was kind of a tunnel. And it opened out onto a street. Like an actual street, with traffic.
Harry stopped. “Do you mean we could have driven up here instead of walking?”
Asher laughed again. “Of course.”
“Then why the fuck didn’t we?”
But then it dawned on Harry why Asher had done that.
It was to keep an advantage over him. Push the pain limit on his ankle to keep Harry the weaker of the two. “I should just fucking shoot you right now.”
Of course Asher laughed at that. “It wasn’t all about you. Where we left the truck was the drop off point. It was just unfortunate the room is in the high end of the Casbah, but that room was chosen for good reason. No windows, no elevated post positions close by for a sniper to perch on.” He gestured to the cluster of run-down and neglected buildings behind them. “And no one would think to look for us here. And it was all arranged without us having to do a damn thing.”
Harry hated that he made sense.
An old taxi came over the hill and Asher flagged him down. He opened the back door for Harry and waited. “Get in. I’m hungry, and you know what happens when I’m hungry?”
“You get more annoying.”
Asher’s smile turned into a sneer. “I should have shot you in Madrid. Get in the fucking car.”
Harry returned the favour by grinning right at him as he slid into the backseat. Asher slammed the door closed and climbed into the front passenger seat and had a lovely conversation with the driver as he drove down the hill.
Harry’s Arabic wasn’t great, but Asher seemed to be able to switch between languages like he was just swapping accents and not whole complex dialects.
Harry made out the words market,mahjouba, andmakrout. Food, Harry deduced, and the driver laughed at something Asher had said.
He could charm the leg off a chair.
He really was insufferable.
Asher paid the fare, adding some extra for the recommendations, and when the taxi drove away, Asher pointed to one of the narrow walkways into the lower Casbah. “This way for the best mahjouba in the city.”
Harry wasn’t even sure what mahjouba was, but it wasn’t long before his nose and stomach found the source. Asher ordered, Harry gave him the cash, and with a bag full of food and some drinks, Asher nodded to the town square that buffered the Casbah from the road and marina.
They found a bench seat amidst the crowd and sat to eat. Harry was on his third pancake, Asher on his second, when Harry decided he needed some answers.
“How many times have you been here, to Algiers?”
Asher kept his gaze out toward the sea. “Many times.”
Harry had assumed as much. “You seem at home here.”
Asher was quiet for a long second and still wouldn’t look at Harry. “I have no home.”
“Do you have an apartment anywhere? A house?”
“No.”
“So everything you own is in your duffle bag,” Harry noted.
