well. Does this man look familiar?
As the waitress arrived with a pot of coffee and a menu, his phone hummed. He took the menu and checked his messages. There was a text from Heller.
Not sure, Heller had written. The image isn’t clear. Can you track? Get a better shot?
Will try, he texted back and set his phone on the table in front of him, peering through his reflection at the door of the restaurant down the street.
* * *
PANIC BURNED IN her chest, stealing her breath. She forced herself to slow her breathing, to concentrate on staying calm. Thanks to the pregnancy, her blood pressure was a little higher than normal, so she had to deal with the stress for the baby’s sake as well as her own.
Don’t think about Connor. Don’t think about anything but the job.
“Are you okay?” Darya’s voice startled her, setting her nerves rattling. Darya had been born in Cincinnati and spoke Kaziri with an American accent.
“I’m feeling a little tired,” Yasmin answered, her own Kaziri as authentic as a native’s, thanks to her mother and those years spent in Kaziristan, first with her mother’s brother and his family, and then undercover with the agency.
Her gaze drifted toward the VIP table. Maybe that’s why she’d thought one of those men looked familiar? Had she seen him before in Kaziristan?
Darya followed her gaze and lowered her voice to a soft hiss. “Pigs,” she said with a viciousness that caught Yasmin by surprise.
The younger woman’s parents put great stock in tradition and they had raised their daughter to observe their customs, but perhaps Darya had a rebellious side. Despite her flirtations with the VIPs earlier, Yasmin now noticed a pinched look around the girl’s eyes and mouth that suggested she had found her role vexing.
Not worth the tips they would leave when they departed?
“I think that handsome customer you served earlier liked you,” Darya added, her voice back to its normal, teasing tone. “The one with the leather jacket? Very manly.”
“I am pregnant and hardly looking my best,” she countered, trying to forget the look of betrayal in Connor’s eyes. A pain began to throb behind her forehead. “You were right. I am not feeling well.”
She had to get out of here. Go somewhere to think. Figure out what to do next. Try to reach Dal again.
“Go. Your shift is nearly over. I will tell Farid you became ill and left.”
Yasmin glanced at her watch. It was eight forty-five. The restaurant closed at nine. “I’ll tell him,” she said, already heading toward the kitchen. Farid would probably dock her the final hour of her pay, but money was the least of her problems at the moment.
How had Connor located her? What kind of game was he playing?
She found Farid in his cluttered office behind the kitchen and told him she was feeling unwell.
“You’ll get an hour less in your paycheck this week,” he warned her. “Unless you can pick up an hour later this week.”
“I will do that,” she said, not at all certain she’d be back to the restaurant at all.
Instead of going out the back door into the darkened alley behind the restaurant, she chose the relative safety of the well-lit front exit. As she left, she spared another glance at the two men sitting at the VIP table. They leaned toward each other over the table, deep in conversation. The older man’s demeanor seemed angry, while the younger man looked tense and worried. From her vantage point, she couldn’t see the older man’s face, but there was something vaguely familiar about the way he held himself erect, about the shape of his head and his slim but masculine build.
Flicking her gaze toward the front exit, she realized she could see the older man’s reflection quite clearly in the window. Clearly enough that she was now certain she’d seen him before. But not in person.
Where had she seen him?
It might have been on Dalrymple’s office wall, she realized a few moments later. There had been several surveillance shots tacked up on a corkboard behind Dal’s desk in his Washington office. She’d asked about the photos once, but Dal had brushed her questions aside. “They’re wins,” he’d said with grim satisfaction. She’d assumed that Dal meant they were bad actors who’d been killed or captured by the agency.
One of the photos on the wall had looked a little bit like one of the two men Darya had been serving earlier, hadn’t it?
But those men on Dal’s wall of wins were dead or locked up somewhere they’d never escape.
So how could one of them be sitting at table six in The Jewel of Tablis?
And was it a coincidence that Connor had shown up at this restaurant at the same time as the mystery man? Maybe he hadn’t come to Cincinnati looking for her at all.
Maybe he was here looking for the mystery man.
She exited the warmth of the restaurant, the shock of frigid air sucking the breath from her lungs. Pulling her coat more tightly around her, she started walking down the street toward the bus stop on the corner. The restaurant was close enough to her apartment to walk there most days, but she was cold, tired and feeling hunted. She could splurge on the bus fare after the evening she’d just had.
Light from the storefronts across the street illuminated her way between the circles of light sporadically shed by streetlamps. On a Wednesday night, the crowd of pedestrians was lighter than it would be on the weekends, but there were enough people to make her feel safer as she walked to the corner. A few of them gave her curious glances, their gazes directed either at her head scarf or her swollen belly. A couple of the women flashed her sympathetic smiles. One of the people sitting on the bus stop bench rose to let her take his place.
She took the seat gratefully and sat to wait for the bus, letting her gaze take in the people walking past. Finally, the bus appeared amid the light traffic moving toward the corner, and she reached into her purse to make sure she had exact change. As she gathered the coins in her hand, she heard a deep voice speaking Kaziri.
“The serving girl was beautiful, no?”
Looking up, Yasmin spotted the two VIPs from the restaurant, walking together alone. She looked away as they neared her, covering her surprise so that no one around her would notice and remember. Then, as the men passed by, the bus arrived, and the people waiting with her at the bus stop moved at once to board.
Yasmin remained where she was until everyone else had started toward the bus. She rose, too, but turned to follow the men instead.
She was far enough away that they weren’t likely to hear her footsteps following them. They were certainly showing no signs of stealth themselves, the older of them walking with a confident swagger, his colorful payraan tumbaan rippling in the cold breeze with each step.
The men walked two more blocks before turning onto a cross street. The lights here were fewer and spaced farther apart. While she’d been on the main drag, she had been accompanied by a scattering of fellow pedestrians, but once she took the turn to follow the Kaziri men, she was alone, and her sense of vulnerability increased.
