Iris Johansen - Eight Days To Live

If anything about this nightmare was ordinary. “What happens now?”

“Nothing radical. I do a little tentative probing, then I go talk to him. You don’t have to-” He stiffened, staring at Faruk.

Her gaze flew to his face. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He left the hangar. “Stay here. I should be back in a few minutes.” He strolled across the tarmac. “Captain Faruk, may I have a word with you? I spoke to the receptionist at the front office, and she said that you might be just the man I need to fly a very valuable shipment of rugs to Rome.”

Faruk turned and smiled. “Nasra is a smart woman. I’m the best, and I could give you a good price.”

“I’m sure we’ll be able to come to an agreement. I already feel a closeness that you-” Caleb bent double, his face contorted with pain. “No!”

Jane stiffened. What on earth was-

Faruk was staring at Caleb in bewilderment. “What’s wrong? Are you ill?”

“Stomach.” Caleb was stumbling back, his face white as a tombstone. He gasped, “Later.” He turned and half ran, half reeled across the tarmac. The next moment he lurched into the hangar and fell against the wall where Jane was standing.

“Make sure-he’s not following. Mustn’t-see you.” His face was beaded with sweat.

Jane tore her gaze away from Caleb to glance quickly across the tarmac. “Faruk’s just standing there, looking confused. What the hell is wrong?”

“Can’t talk-give-me a minute.” He slid down the metal wall and leaned back, breathing hard.

Agony. The muscles of his neck were distended, his teeth clenched.

She grabbed his hand. “Shall I find a doctor?”

He shook his head.

“Dammit, what can I do?” She started to get to her feet, but his grasp held her locked to his side. “Let me go. I’ve got to-”

He shook his head. “No good.”

“There has to be some-”

“Be quiet.” He was shaking. “Quagmire.”

“What? I don’t-” Then she remembered what he had told her on the plane when she’d asked him if he ever ran across anyone he couldn’t mentally manipulate.

Quagmire. Intense pain. Smothering.

I went too deep and was unconscious for two days .

“Quagmire,” she repeated. “Faruk?”

He nodded jerkily.

“Dear God.”

“A minute. Give-me a minute.”

She didn’t know if he could stand another minute of that pain, she thought desperately. The skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones as he fought the spasms. She had never felt so helpless.

She couldn’t help him.

She had to help him.

She had to do something.

She slid her arms around him and drew him close. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” She stroked his hair back from his face. “I can’t take this. Tell me what to do.”

He didn’t answer. Lord, he was cold. She held him closer and tried to share her warmth. “Relax. We’ll stay like this for a while and you’ll be okay.” She prayed she was telling the truth. “Just relax…”

Five minutes passed.

Fifteen minutes.

He was no longer shaking.

Thank God.

Twenty minutes.

He lifted his head and looked down at her. “Hello.”

“Hi.” She drew a relieved breath that came from the depths of her being. “You scared me.”

“I can tell.” The corners of his lips quirked. “At the moment I don’t feel in the least bit shunned. But I don’t believe I want to go through that again. We’ll have to work on some other kind of solution.”

She rolled away from him, sat up, and gazed at him searchingly. He might be joking, but he was still very pale. “I didn’t know what to do. Are you better?”

He nodded. “It wasn’t bad. I got out soon enough.”

“That wasn’t bad?” She shook her head. “It seemed damn bad to me.”

“Maybe I was just making a bid for sympathy,” he said lightly as he slowly sat up. “You know you can’t trust me.”

He still wasn’t entirely normal. She wanted to touch him, stroke him, make all the pain go away. “Stop joking. This isn’t funny.”

“No, part of it was hell but the last part was kind of nice. There’s always a balance.” He put his hand out to the metal wall and levered himself up. “But I think I need a drink. Let’s go find a bar.”

“We don’t have a car.”

“Of course we do.” He took her elbow and headed for the entrance. “One of the mechanics I talked to insisted that he lend me his car while I was in the city.”

“How convenient. Another long-lost best friend?”

“You’ve got it. I think I saw a little coffee bar about two miles down the road. Let’s see if they have anything stronger under the counter for the Westerners.”

THE COFFEE BAR WAS SMALL, with only a few tables and almost empty except for four Arabs who stared at Jane coldly when they walked through the door.

“Prejudice seems to be raising its ugly head,” she murmured. “The locals don’t approve of women outside their homes. So much for freeing the masses.”

“Do you want me to have a talk with them?”

“No!” She sat down at a corner table. “I don’t want you to hunt, and I don’t want you to manipulate. I just want you to rest and have your drink.”

“How protective you sound.” He motioned for a swarthy, young waiter, who was glaring at Jane. “It wouldn’t hurt me. Faruk was one of those freakish exceptions. What do you want?”

“Just a coffee.”

A few minutes later the waiter set a whiskey in front of Caleb and a tiny glass brimming with steaming black coffee before Jane.

“That looks stronger than my whiskey,” Caleb said. “Want to switch?”

“No.”

He downed the whiskey. “You’re smart. Foul stuff.” He motioned the waiter for another one. “But it keeps the blood going.”

“Is whiskey a cure-all for this…” She searched for the word again. “This quagmire.”

“No, it just causes the chill to go away.” He looked down into his whiskey. “I’m sorry, Jane. I told you it would be no problem. It was a big problem.”

“You’re sorry? How could you help it? You’re the one who went through more pain than a victim of the Spanish Inquisition. What if you’d gone into shock?”

“I didn’t.” He frowned. “And there has to be a way to control it and do the job. I’ve just been too wary to play around with it. It’s so rare, and it was easier to walk away.” He grimaced. “Or crawl away. I wasn’t a very admirable specimen, was I?”

“Play around with it? That’s like playing Russian roulette with every chamber filled with bullets. You just have to wonder which one is going to kill you.”

“There has to be a way.”

Dear God, he was actually serious. “The way is to use Faruk like a normal person would do it. Maybe we can bug his plane when he takes those other members to the temple.”

“Millet will kill Eve as soon as he knows the temple is under attack. We’ll still need the layout of the temple if we’re to get to Eve before he knows we’re there.”

She knew that he was right, and the alternative of blundering around searching for her was terrifying. “I thought about trying to get Roland to give me the information as part of the deal, but I couldn’t trust him.” She paused. “But there’s something else that could work.”

He studied her, then smiled faintly. “The other reason why you came to Damascus after me. You need me to help you dream.”

“I can’t take a chance on doing it on my own. What if my sleep isn’t deep enough to dream? You kept me asleep for a long time. We have to do it together.”

He shook his head, still smiling. “And is this your idea of how a normal person would handle the situation? My, how your viewpoint has changed.”