Ryshia Kennie - Desire In The Desert

“Get in touch with Zafir. Now,” she said after a minute had passed.

She listened to the one-sided conversation as Emir laid out what had happened and what Zafir needed to do.

He put the phone down and ran splayed fingers through his hair before he looked at her. “He’s already on the way.”

“Let’s watch that video again. Can you? Is it too much...?”

“Start it,” he rasped.

They watched it through two more times before she turned it off and set the phone down.

“She was in the open. There wasn’t any shelter.” His words were like grim drumbeats of doom.

“Emir,” she warned as she shook her head, “don’t go there. None of that is relevant, not now. She’s not comfortable but she’s not injured and she’s not—” She bit off the last words.

“Dead.” He filled the word in for her. “And she’s not going to be, either.” He looked at his watch. “Where the hell is Zafir? It’s been...”

“Two minutes,” she noted. “Look, let’s review that video one more time. There was something I wanted to mention but I thought it was a nervous tic, considering what was going on. Where she was, what—”

“Tell me,” he broke in.

She looked at him, saw the pain in his eyes that he was struggling to contain and her heart almost broke. He was a strong man but even strong men had their limits.

“I think she’s trying to tell us something.”

She picked up the phone and pushed Play. The video no sooner began to run before she hit Pause. “Did you see that slight tapping of her finger on her left hand?”

He frowned. He leaned closer. “Son of a desert stray,” he muttered.

He hit Rewind again and again.

“This is difficult,” she said, thinking how hard it was to watch his sister being held captive like that—to see she wasn’t alone but surrounded by her captors. That much was evident based on the fact they could see the boots of two men obviously milling nearby. They were boots that, this time, gave them no clue. They were clean, generic, with no sign of sand or dirt—no evidence of any kind.

Kate turned her attention back to Tara. When she’d first noticed the thumb tapping on Tara’s left hand, she had thought it might be anxiety. The woman had much to be anxious about.

“I don’t believe it,” Emir said. “Why didn’t I see that before? Morse code.”

“Interesting,” Kate said as she thought of the eclectic collection of books on Tara’s shelves and looked closer at the video.

Emir said nothing but his presence seemed to fill the room even as his attention was on the video.

“Simplistic and yet—” Kate broke off. Tara was surprising her in ways she hadn’t expected. Morse code was not something a young woman of Tara’s generation would have any exposure to. “Or would she?” she asked softly.

Emir turned. There was a troubled frown on his face as he watched her, his eyes seeming to lock with hers. “What are you thinking?”

“The implausibility of this...” She remembered the bookshelf. Tara wasn’t just a modern girl with an attitude, she was also a serious student and an avid reader. The books on her shelves had been everything from contemporary novels to history. But one shelf had stood out. The section filled with procedural books and one, she remembered, labeled, “Code This.”

“She studied Morse code?”

Emir nodded. “Not so much studied as read some books she’d found in what had been our father’s private library. Like I said, it was nothing serious—goofing around, she called it. She was only fourteen or fifteen. Back then we often practiced it together in English and French. I didn’t think she remembered.”

Kate looked at the video. Now she watched the subtle, yet clear when you noticed it, up-and-down movement of Tara’s thumb. Because her hand was a bit behind her, it wasn’t something that caught your eye, or, she suspected, the eye of the cameraman. She narrowed her eyes, watching the furtive movements, the rhythm and the pattern in the long and short gestures.

Around Tara were the canvas walls of what seemed to be a tent but the video was edited enough that what was around her wasn’t clear. It could be a tent anywhere or, from what Kate could see, it could not be a tent at all. But one thing was now clear. She looked closer, but once she’d made the determination, the truth was inescapable.

Emir’s attention was solely on the video. Kate frowned at the thought of the obsolete code in a time when even cursive writing was almost extinct. But there was no denying that Tara was definitely trying to tell them something. The video cut off just as her thumb lifted again.

Emir looked at Kate with a frown ridging his brows. He rubbed the back of his hand across his cheek. “T-e-n e-t-e,” he said, spelling it out. “It makes no sense.” He ran the video again, as if going through the series of taps would change anything. The video cut off again before any more information could be divulged and before Tara’s kidnappers could see what she had done. “And there’s nothing more.”

The room felt suddenly close, as if there were no oxygen. Kate could feel the energy of the man beside her as the tension and fear for his sister seemed to pulse between them and something else.

“Été,” he said. “French for ‘summer.’ What summer? Where?”

“Ten,” she murmured, moving what he’d just said to memory for later consideration. “Could refer to anything, but my best guess is that it refers to something about her.”

“She wasn’t finished. She thought she had more time. That’s why it was cut off the way it was.”

“Possibly.”

Kate was quiet, thinking of what it all might mean. When she met his eyes she saw the silent strength and the determination in his chiseled jaw and, for a moment, it was like she forgot to breathe.

“Do you remember she gave a victory sign at the beginning?”

He frowned. “She used to do that as a kid on the first day of summer vacation or on the announcement of a family trip.”

There was silence for a moment before he spoke.

“Ten,” he repeated just as she had earlier. “Could she have mixed English and French? Tara is fluent in both. She’s stressed. She could have used the languages interchangeably.”

“Go on,” Kate encouraged.

“The year Tara was ten, the most notable thing was that that was the summer my parents took her and Faisal for a short tour of the Sahara.” He stood. “Could it be that easy?”

“She wouldn’t want to make it difficult, yet she didn’t know how much time she’d have. Thus the cut-off words.” She looked at him. Saw the hope in his eyes.

A thought came to her that, somehow, what Tara’s security, now so critically wounded, and what Tara had just tried to tell them were connected. “Could what Ahmed have been trying to tell you also have been a place?” She looked at him. “Emir? Where in the Sahara did your parents take Tara that summer? What was their final destination?”

“El Dewar.” He smacked his hand on the desktop. “I’d forgotten about it. I don’t know how I could have.”

“It was trivial detail at the time, especially since you weren’t involved in the trip,” Kate said. “Understandable.”

“That was the farthest they went before returning home. But is that the clue?”

He was quiet for a minute, considering what she had said. “Davar. Could Ahmed been trying to name the place and now she’s trying to tell us the same? That she’s near El Dewar, or there’s information to be had at El Dewar, the same Berber village she saw at ten?”

“It’s a possibility but it’s also a big stretch,” Kate said. She grabbed the map. “It’s a small place. I doubt if she’s there now. She couldn’t be hidden and there are enough people that not everyone would be complicit. So, could she be near there? Is that possible?”