Rick Mofina - Six Seconds

“Thank you for coming for me, Sergeant.”

It was that sudden.

Jake thanked Samara and the relief workers then climbed into the Hummer. She stood there watching him as they pulled away. Not smiling, not waving, just watching him pull out.

Jake looked back at her.

The woman who’d saved his life. He looked at her until she’d vanished in the dust, leaving him to doubt whether he would ever see her again.

“You know, sir, it’s a miracle any way you cut it,” Cash shouted to Jake, who nodded. “When word got to us that a relief agency was ensconced up here and had saved an American, well, no one believed it.”

“Why?”

“Intelligence says this zone is rife with death squads.”

Cold Butte, Montana

At that time, their kiss meant nothing, Samara remem bered now, as she got ready to leave the bungalow for the clinic.

Samara had sworn to heaven it meant nothing. In the moment after it had happened, she’d begged her husband’s memory for forgiveness and her heart hardened toward Jake Conlin, the American, who’d beguiled and tempted her. Afterward they never spoke of the kiss.

But Samara kept Jake’s contact information along with his offer to help her when she arrived in the U.S.

He could become an asset.

Unexpectedly, the U.S. military brass in Baghdad gave Samara’s group an official letter of appreciation from the U.S. government for helping a U.S. citizen to safety.

That letter, along with Samara’s British passport, and other documents, helped her gain entry into the U.S. to work temporarily.

In Montana, Father Stone, the local priest who’d chaired Lone Tree County’s hiring committee, was im pressed with Samara’s application, which was received in response to the county’s online employment notice.

“You come highly recommended and highly quali fied,” he’d said. “You’re like an answered prayer. Cold Butte is always desperate for doctors and nurses.”

Stone said Samara’s duties would include a backup role with the tricounty on-site medical response team that would support the papal visit to Lone Tree County.

The pope was coming to Montana.

Samara now knew her target.

At the outset of their papal security checks, federal agents were guarded about Samara because she was a foreign national who’d spent time in Iraq. But her ref erences, doctors with aid agencies, confirmed that Samara was a British subject who’d helped injured American personnel and should not be deemed a security risk.

Samara’s name, or fingerprints, did not appear in any classified databases, or indices searched by U.S. in telligence and security agencies. No red flags, black notices, no attention at all, when they checked her back ground. Just a letter of appreciation from the U.S. gov ernment for aiding a U.S. citizen in Iraq.

In the beginning, Samara’s life in Montana was a solitary one. While she’d been instructed to blend in, she was not one to socialize by visiting the local bar.

Many nights were spent alone with her laptop, watching for updates on her operation. At times she would risk a call routed through secured channels to an old friend from the camp.

Samara missed Muhammad and Ahmed. Although she kept to herself, she started to yearn for company. For the sake of her operation, she needed to work harder at trusting people if she was going to blend in.

When the county sent her to Los Angeles to take a three-week course on event planning and emergency response for the papal visit medical teams, she e-mailed Jake Conlin, using his secret Internet account.

He’d been thinking of her.

“Your timing is good,” he said.

They met privately for dinner and by dessert he’d confided to her that he’d been deeply confused and hurt since his return from Iraq.

“I am convinced my wife has been unfaithful.”

Sitting across from him, Samara was again overcome by how much Jake reminded her of Muhammad, his eyes, his voice. His presence was strikingly similar.

During her three weeks in California, she met Jake several times. They’d had long conversations about life, with Jake appreciative of how Samara had saved his.

“Maybe it’s some kind of sign for us,” he said.

On the last visit before she left, they hardly spoke.

Samara left him a key to her room.

Their night started with a long, deep kiss.

In the morning, Samara studied Jake as he slept beside her in bed, enjoying his skin next to hers. When he woke, she invited him into the shower.

“Come live with me in Montana,” she said. “Bring your son. We can start new lives there.”

Jake searched her eyes for a long moment.

“All right.”

He needed time to make arrangements.

That’s how it happened.

That’s how Samara had succeeded in blending in.

Samara shifted her thoughts, glanced out her window at the wide-open prairie and checked the time.

She had to go.

As she finished her tea, she moved to shut down her computer, when it beeped.

Using an array of passwords, she clicked along a complex network of Web sites to check one of her Internet accounts.

The e-mail she’d been expecting had arrived in Arabic.

Grandmother sends her love. Her gift has arrived. Cousin will call with details about picking it up and the next stage of planning for the big day. All love and kisses — Uncle.

Samara’s stomach lifted.

She’d been activated.

Her operation was now in motion.

She looked at Ahmed and Muhammad, her mother and father.

Nothing would stop her now.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Africa

At dawn a muezzin climbed to the minaret of a central mosque and issued the day’s first call to prayer.

It echoed over the schools, the government buildings, the monuments and the high stone walls surrounding the luxury hotels.

It mingled with the haze of the pungent cooking fires rising from the tin-roofed shanties, jammed into the slums that nearly engulfed the capital.

His cry carried to Addis Ababa’s Mercato and its vast grid of streets overflowing with kiosks, stalls and shops, the largest market between Cairo and Johannes burg.

As his call died over Mercato, roosters crowed at the rising sun while caged chickens awaited slaughter. The smells of goats and spices blended with coffee, tea and baked bread as merchants opened stalls and shops to sell products such as vegetables, fruit, furniture, clothing, handicrafts, jewelry, DVDs and coffins.

The streets teemed with sellers, shoppers, pickpock ets, prostitutes and would-be guides hustling the faranji tourists in English, Italian, French, Arabic, Amharic and other languages as local folk, reggae and hip-hop music throbbed from radios.

African fabrics were abundant in Mercato. Block after block of tables, stalls and shops brimmed with handwoven cloths in a spectrum of traditional and modern colors. They cascaded in sheets from stall walls, spilled from shelves or teetered in towers of bolts on tables where women in burkas, or men in long robes, beards trimmed, heads covered with small caps, beck oned to shoppers.

Deep in the labyrinths of the fabric district, Amir, a soft-spoken middle-aged merchant, reflected on the market and the world.

His heart broke a bit more each day at the common cruelties he’d seen. Ragged crippled beggars slept in the street amid animal feces. Alongside them were tiny children orphaned by AIDS, flies flecking their faces, death looming like a vulture.

Yesterday, he had discovered a live newborn wrapped in bloodied newspaper. The infant girl had been abandoned in an alley next to a sewage trough crawling with rats. Two dogs stood over her, their ribs pressed against their mange, saliva dripping from their yawning jaws before Amir chased them off and urged the local women to take the child to a hospital.