Chapter 7

 

Tangier, Morocco

 

When Nick LaGrange began to drift back to consciousness, he found himself locked inside an animal cage. At least, that’s what it looked like. The space was enclosed on all three sides by wire mesh fencing, and dogs were barking all around him.

His first thought was of Isabella.

What had happened to her?

He was lying flat on his back, on a dirty concrete floor that reeked of dog piss, his head throbbing so painfully it took all his effort just to turn and look for her.

His vision was blurred, and his head hurt as he glanced around the dimly lit cage.

Thank god, Isabella was here, too. She was crouched in the corner of the cage, blood caked under her nose, shaking.

“Where the hell are we?” Nick said hoarsely, and then finally managed to find the strength to push himself up and crawl towards her. “Are you alright?”

All the dogs around them started barking again—it sounded like they were in a kennel.

That’s indeed what it looked like, too—there were cages on either side of them, with pit bulls in each one.

The dog in the next cage leapt against the metal mesh fence that separated them, snarling at Nick, its jaws snapping. Even though Nick knew the animal couldn’t get to him, he scrambled away from the fence on all fours, like an animal himself.

Isabella seemed unfazed—she sat perfectly still, staring at the dirty floor. He thought she might be in shock.

“What happened?” Nick said, and put his hand on her shoulder. He had no recollection of how they had gotten there.

Then he noticed how her legs were pressed together.

She’d been raped.

And then he remembered the white van that blocked the path of their rental car...and his mind went back to the beginning of the chain of events that had landed the two of them here.

 

* * *

The sight of Elaine hugging Giorgio Cattoretti goodbye, at the Tangier airport, had shaken Nick to the core.

Stunned, he had walked out to the airport parking lot and told Isabella he was going to get drunk. He had started the rental car’s engine and driven straight out to the Tangier beach front, where the high rise hotels were located.

They’d gone to some dive bar/beach hut that was almost right on the water, at one end of a long string of hotels. It was packed with local riffraff but Nick couldn’t have cared less.

He’d started off with a few shots of vodka, and he’d soared to such giddy heights that it felt like a two ton weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Through the hazy, colorful lens of inebriation, the situation he found himself in now was just fine! Let Elaine and Giorgio Cattoretti fall in love with each other! Let Elaine go off with some ex-CIA agent, alone, traipsing across Chad. What did he care what she did anymore? He wasn’t that crazy about married life, anyway. When things weren’t going well between them, he longed for the “good old days,” back when he was footloose and fancy free in Washington, before he’d even met Isabella. And all the other good bachelor times, such as when he was living in Bulgaria, before Elaine had been assigned to the Secret Service office there. Life was simple and easy back in those days! No kids, no responsibilities. All those sexy, long-legged Bulgarian bar girls hanging all over him every night. Neekie, come party weeth us!

But as Nick continued drinking, the expansive euphoria and renewed sense of freedom began to fade. Within an hour he had been transformed into a slobbering, maudlin drunk, and sat slumped at the bar, wallowing in self-pity. He vaguely remembered Isabella trying to stop him from having more vodka, and lashing out at her in a slurred voice “Don’t tell me what to do, shtupid bish,” barely able to focus his eyes on her. “Ryan isn’t even my shun.”

Isabella hadn’t heard this remark, or pretended not to hear. Then he vaguely remembered some pushy Eastern European guy coming up to him, inviting him to a dog fight. The punk had short-cropped, bleached hair that stuck straight up. “Big money to win! Free taxi both ways, da?”

Nick could tell the little thug was Ukrainian because of the telltale tattoos on the back of his hands and fingers. They were the only images he remembered clearly from that night. One tattoo was of a man with a pig’s nose and horns jutting from his forehead, another was a broken cross, a skull with an X behind it. Nick could tell from their black-only ink and style that they had been made in prison, the kind made with ballpoint pen cartridges and stretched out springs from staplers. Each symbol had a specific meaning behind it, mostly to do with the crimes they had committed.

“Come to dog fight. Very exciting, gambling, beeeeeg money.”

“Get out of my face,” Nick snapped, turning away and taking another shot of vodka. He was angry at the world, but especially angry at anyone who mistreated dogs. He loved dogs. And in his weepy state, he decided that his beloved Romeo and Juliet were the only godly creatures who really cared for him. At this drunken moment he was acutely aware that those dear creatures were among the few that gave you unconditional love. Unlike women.

Unlike Elaine.

He would take the two dogs away from her—she didn’t deserve them.

“Nick, you’ve had enough,” Isabella scolded, yanking the glass from his hand. “Let’s go. Please? You promised you would take me to Germany tomorrow to find my cousin.”

Nick didn’t want to think about Germany or anything else.

The Ukrainian thug persisted, now trying to be friendly. The kid, who was maybe twenty five years old, actually smelled like dogs. He was wearing a filthy black jogging suit with rips in the legs that were undoubtedly from handling the ferocious animals. He put his grimy hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Hey, you American, da?”

Nick grabbed the little prick’s hand and bent his wrist backwards.

The guy screamed like a little girl.

“You broken my hand!” he bellowed, yanking his arm away, then doubling over in pain. “You broken my hand!” He started cursing in Ukrainian. Another young thug who looked just like him, tattoos and all, pushed his way over.

Nick thought the first punk was just being a pussy. He knew what it felt like to break a man’s wrist—he was sure he had only sprained it, and maybe not even that.

The second thug pulled his fist back, preparing to strike Nick. Isabella yelled something and wedged herself in between them.

Before any real violence broke out, two hefty Moroccan bouncers grabbed Nick by the collar and roughly pushed him through the crowd. The Ukrainian guy was still yelling at him. “I will fucking kill you!”

“Why did you do that?” Isabella cried, trying to keep up with him.

“He wouldn’t get out of my face,” Nick blubbered.

He vaguely remembered Isabella helping him into a taxi that was parked outside the bar. After they got into the back seat, he slumped on top of her.

His thoughts drifted back to Ryan, and he started crying. “Ryan is not my shun! He doesn’t even look like me!”

“Nick, stop talking this nonsense! You’re drunk, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Yes I do! He’s Catto-Catto-Cattoretti’s shun...I know it.” Nick nuzzled his face into Isabella’s soft breasts. “You shmell good.”

“Stop it,” she said, and she shoved him to the other side of the seat.

 

* * *

The next morning, Nick woke up on the floor of the shabby little hotel room in the center of Tangier, with a monster hangover. He dragged himself into the bathroom and started his recovery, first taking a shower and then waking Isabella so they could go eat breakfast and have some coffee.

He felt horrible.

As they ate, Nick decided that going to the beach again would put him in a better mood and frame of mind. He and Isabella checked out of the dumpy hotel and into one of the high rises not far from the bar they’d been to last night.

By early afternoon, when the awful black feeling that consumed him would not go away, he understood that it wasn’t just the result of a hangover. He was seriously depressed.

The only time he had felt this low was when he had run away from college, when he had fled from the superficial relationship he’d had with Sherry Mathis after rescuing her from the top of the ski slope in Colorado. He had drifted aimlessly across the state of Texas, drinking and staying in flophouse motels and performing stunts at stock car races, having no idea what to do with his life. Except he was twenty then...

The dark, helpless feeling he had now was similar—there was nothing to live for except his two children...and he was deathly afraid that he would lose them to Cattoretti, too.

Nick understood that his spirits were also low about something else, something that had only come to him this morning in full color. He hadn’t been able to extract himself and Elaine from the black site. Extraction—that was his job, the only thing he was truly good at, for god’s sake! He had failed miserably, in a situation where his own wife was the one who most needed his help.

Nick was tempted to start drinking again, but he used all his willpower to fight the impulse, at least for the first part of the afternoon. He rented a catamaran and took Isabella on a wild ride up and down the shore in the nearly gale-force winds that channeled through the Strait of Gibraltar, showing her how to use the trapeze harness to hang off the side while he “flew the hull” and raised one of the pontoons into the air. He pushed the boat to its limits and tipped it over a couple of times, but quickly righted it again. Isabella was terrified but he didn’t care.

Tacking fast back and forth across the rough water, with the salty sea spray in his face, and being occupied with sails and cleats and righting lines improved Nick’s state of mind considerably. By the time they went back to the hotel and changed and had dinner, he finally felt more grounded. And much more relaxed.

As the sun sank low on the horizon, he and Isabella took a long walk along the beach, both of them pleasantly sunburned and worn out from the intense sailing trip. Nick slowly sipped a beer, his first alcoholic drink of the day.

The salt air was warm and felt wonderful on his skin—the strong wind had dissipated into a light breeze. He and Isabella followed the gentle crescent of the shoreline around towards the high rise hotels, walking barefoot in the sand.

Every now and then Nick was tempted to reach for Isabella’s hand—the situation seemed to call for it. He had told her that he was too hung-over to take her to Germany today, but that he would take her tomorrow. Now he was having second thoughts about that.

About midway along the beach crescent, his phone started ringing.

For a second he felt a tiny flicker of hope, thinking that maybe it was Elaine. But when he looked at the display he frowned—the call was from some number in the United States.

He considered not answering it, thinking it was probably just a wrong number, but then remembered that he’d given Steve, his old friend in D.C., this number. He had almost forgotten about making the call to Washington, asking Steve to check on calls from the cell phone that Isabella had been using back when they had been living together in his townhouse. Now he wished he hadn’t made the call.

Holding the still-ringing phone in his hand, he glanced at her. “I need some privacy...if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, no problem.”

Isabella walked ahead on the beach, leaving Nick standing there alone in the sand. From the look on her face it seemed she thought it might be Elaine calling.

Fat chance of that, he thought glumly. Elaine was out of his life for good.

He turned in the other direction, squinting into the sunset, and quickly answered the call, afraid that Steve might hang up. “Yeah?”

“Leon, it’s me.”

“Hey, man, how’s it going?” Nick said casually. Being called Leon was strange and made him feel like he was traveling back in time.

“I’ve got the information you asked for,” Steve said.

“That’s great,” Nick replied, pretending to be enthusiastic. Now he wished he hadn’t answered this damn call—why had he done it? Verifying that Isabella was just the lying bitch he already knew her to be would only depress him even more. He would be totally alone then.

Steve said formally, “There were a total of six calls made from the cell number on the date you gave me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, all the calls were made in the morning. You want to write down the numbers and the exact times?”

“No, I just need the numbers sh—that were called.” He wondered if Steve noticed that he’d almost said “she.”

“There were only two numbers called, total. Three calls made to one number, and three to the other, alternating, all over a period of two hours.”

“Uh-huh,” Nick said, as if he were writing it all down.

“The first call was to another cellphone.” Steve read off the number.

The skin on the back of Nick’s neck tingled—it was his own personal cellphone number, the one he’d used the entire time he’d lived in Washington. Nick had not really expected this. He glanced over his shoulder at Isabella. She was fifty feet away now, slowly walking along the sand, her bare feet bathed by the warm, breaking waves, the wind blowing through her hair.

“You got that?” Steve said.

“Uh, yeah, I got it.” Apparently Steve didn’t recognize the number as Nick’s old one.

“The other number that was called is a landline in D.C.” Steve rattled it off. Now Nick was floored. The number had been for the phone at his townhouse in Georgetown.

When he didn’t respond, Steve said, “By the way, isn’t that the number of the landline at your house? I mean, the house where you used to live in Georgetown with—what’s her name—?”

“Yeah,” Nick said, cutting him off. He turned around again and looked at Isabella, a lump in his throat. He had been totally wrong about her—she really had tried to call him and stop him from going on the suicide mission.

“Leon, are you there?” Steve said.

Nick finally came back to his senses, and he looked up at the sunset. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here.” The pastel hues splashed across the sky were all at once inspiring, and he was suddenly filled with hope. “Are you sure about these numbers—I mean, no more calls were made except those that day?”

“No, no other calls, just those.”

 

* * *

When Nick caught up with Isabella, he tried to keep his elation in check. He could hardly believe it, but cellphone data did not lie. She actually tried to stop him from going on that mission, just like she’d said she had!

Isabella glanced over at him, looking concerned about the call—there was no doubt from her expression that she thought it had been from Elaine. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, fine. It was just Luna calling. I told her that we’re going to Germany tomorrow.”

Isabella nodded. “Oh. That’s great. Thank you, Nick, I really appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

He silently walked along next to her, his beer bottle in his hand, thinking about what he had just learned on the phone.

Isabella noticed his change in demeanor. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” Nick stopped walking and faced her. “Hey, are you in the mood to go dancing?” He motioned up the beach. “There’s a decent disco in that hotel next to ours. It has a live band, I’ve been there before.”

She looked surprised. “Well, sure. But I thought you didn’t like dancing.”

“I like it tonight,” he said with a big grin.

He took her hand in his and they headed towards the hotel.

 

* * *

Nick danced his ass off that evening, drinking more beer, getting higher and higher on the alcohol, his spirits soaring from what Steve had reported to him about Isabella. Even though he was inebriated, he was thinking clearly enough to occasionally wonder why Brian had not told him about the phone calls Isabella had made. That bothered him a little bit.

After she had been taken into custody in Washington, Nick’s personal cellphone had been confiscated along with his desktop computer and all the other electronic equipment that had been seized from his townhouse. Surely Brian’s people had thoroughly investigated all of Isabella’s calls. Nick could only assume that Brian had not realized the significance of the six calls Isabella had tried to make to him that morning. Either that, or Brian did realize the significance and wanted to spare Nick further anguish. He sensed that Brian never liked Isabella and had been suspicious of her from day one. It would have been in Brian’s interest, as his CIA control, to want him to make a clean break with the woman who was betraying him.

He pushed his worries aside. The only thing that mattered now was that he knew that Isabella had cared about him, had maybe even loved him. Knowing that she had made those phone calls was enough for him to forgive her.

And to justify it, while they were dancing he kept asking himself: wouldn’t he have done the same in her shoes, if a bunch of jihadists had captured his family and held them hostage and forced him to get romantically involved with someone they considered their enemy? Just because she had been coerced into creating a honey trap for him didn’t mean that she hadn’t fallen for him for real. They were mutually attracted, got along great together—it was only natural. He was sure it happened quite often in such situations.

As they danced together, Nick pulled her closer and closer, spinning her around, putting his hand in the small of her back, grinning at her like an idiot.

He had not yet revealed to her what he had learned. He assumed that she just thought he was drunk.

“Let’s go back to the room,” he finally said, when they were both drenched in sweat and too spent to dance another step.

 

* * *

As they walked back down the beach towards their hotel, Nick kept his arm over Isabella’s shoulder, “for support,” because he’d drunk so much beer. He actually didn’t need any help walking, and he thought she sensed this. He enjoyed the sweet, familiar smell of her perfume.

When they reached the hotel, they took the elevator up to the fifth floor, where their room was located. Isabella unlocked the door and led him over to one of the twin beds, depositing him there.

“I need a shower,” she muttered, heading towards the bathroom. She sharply shut the door.

Nick just sat there on the edge of the bed, feeling dizzy and pleasantly sloshed, listening to the patter of the water. He drunkenly imagined what she looked like naked. Well, he didn’t have to imagine—he knew exactly what she looked like naked, knew every inch of her delicious body...

And then something occurred to him, one of those fleeting thoughts that come and go through the haze of intoxication without really taking root. Over the past two days, Nick had seen Isabella from every possible angle in a skimpy bathing suit, and there wasn’t a single scar on her—no cigarette burns, cuts, or any other evidence of harsh interrogation. Except for the gash she had shown him on her scalp, hidden by her thick black hair, every square inch he’d glimpsed of her beautiful, cinnamon-colored skin was completely unblemished. Was that possible, having been transferred from one CIA black site to another for five long years?

Isabella was in the shower a long time.

When she finally emerged, the troubling thought had long passed out of Nick’s mind, replaced by more base ones. She was wearing one of the white hotel robes. She looked heavenly, like a black-haired angel.

“You can use the bathroom now,” she said, and stepped over to the window. She gazed out to the darkened beach as she towel-dried her luxurious mane of black hair.

She saw Nick’s reflection in the glass as he came up behind her.

When she turned to face him, and she glimpsed the solemn, passionate expression on his face, she backed away.

“Nick...”

She dropped the towel she’d been using on her hair, moving back against the window, scared.

He gazed steadily into her eyes, unblinking. As he slowly reached out with his right hand, she tensed, and he pressed his warm palm against her pretty face. “You tried to call me and warn me from going on that mission, just like you said.”

She swallowed and grabbed hold of his hand, lowering it. “I told you I did,” she said defensively.

“I didn’t believe you, but I do now.”

“Is that what the phone call was about?”

“Yes.”

“Nick...” Isabella looked away. “It doesn’t matter anymore, that was all a long time ago. We can’t go backwards in time.”

She tried to pull his hand away, but he reached out with his left arm and drew her forcefully to his chest. He kissed her forehead, her temple, making his way down to her ear.

“You really did care about me, didn’t you,” he whispered.

“Nick, don’t!” she gasped, but within the tremulous sound of her voice he could hear pent-up longing.

“You’re married now...!” she blurted. “....and you have children...!”

Nick ground his mouth hard into hers, blotting out the unimportant words.