chandelier plunged to the floor, shattering into a million pieces and throwing a rainbow of broken crystals across the marble tiles. The huge double doors at the far end of the long hall crashed open, and a phalanx of palace guards backed into the room, hard pressed in hand-to-hand fighting. The line slowly buckled, and Nick glimpsed the distinctive green camouflage of the Army rebels pushing inexorably forward through the light-brown khaki of the Baraqi royal guards.
Resolutely he turned around and walked up the shallow steps to his father’s throne. My throne, dammit. He pivoted deliberately and sat down. Time to die like a king.
From his excellent vantage point, he watched the fight, mesmerized by the slow-motion collapse of the last line of defense standing between him and death. He was startled out of his reverie when Kareem grabbed his arm with surprising strength and bodily dragged him off the throne.
Nick shouted over the din, “What are you doing? If I must die, I’m going to die on my throne!”
The older man put his mouth to Nick’s ear and shouted over the screams of soldiers, machine-gun fire and clash of bayonets, “Your Highness, there may be a way to avoid such a fate….”
Chapter 1
Katy McMann ached from head to foot. But then, twelve hours and counting in an airplane seat had a way of doing that. Thankfully this was the last leg of her journey from Washington, D.C. to North Africa and a postage-stamp kingdom called Baraq. Near Morocco somewhere.
She’d tried to sleep on the flight from D.C. to London, but her nerves pretty much shot that plan. This was her first mission as a humanitarian relief worker with InterAid, and she was terrified that she was going to blow it. Every newbie to the organization probably felt that way. But not every newbie lived with paparazzi camped on her doorstep, ready and waiting to catch the tiniest screwup on her part and splash it across the tabloid headlines.
It wasn’t that she’d ever done anything the slightest bit newsworthy in her twenty-six years to date. But her brothers had. The McMann clan had burst onto the legal scene a few years back as the spectacularly successful lawyers to the rich and guilty. And ever since, the press had been laying in wait for them, sniffing like bloodhounds after any morsel of dirt to smear on her brothers’ names—including the private life of their little sister.
The InterAid team leader, Don Ford, a marathon runner and all-around intense personality, stood up in front of the clustered team with a clipboard in hand, effectively distracting her from disparaging thoughts of her brothers and their lack of moral spine.
Ford read off a list of assignments for when they arrived in the country. She would be working on prisoner interviews with a guy named Larry Grayson. She’d met him briefly last night. He was a barrel-chested man with short, gray crew-cut hair, a fleshy face, small eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and no lips to speak of. Rather, a white line of habitually compressed flesh marked his mouth. He’d struck her as a pompous ass who could probably quote large chunks of the Geneva Convention from memory and who took as his personal responsibility enforcing it down to the last t crossed and i dotted.
She caught a few smirks around her. Yup, she’d been stuck with Grayson intentionally. Note to self: Don Ford wasn’t above putting the notorious rookie in her place. She sighed.
Prisoner interviews, eh? She pulled out her training manual and reviewed what it had to say on the subject. The job mostly involved verifying identities, ascertaining the prisoner’s state of health, examining living conditions, delivering letters and care packages to prisoners and making sure no illegal interrogation methods were being employed. None of it sounded too hard.
A flight attendant came around to collect the last trash and check that everyone’s seats and trays were in their upright and locked positions. Katy’s ears popped gently as the plane began its descent into Baraq. She looked out the window at the barren mountains below, brick red beneath a beige layer of haze. A few pockets of green dotted the rocky landscape, but for the most part the forbidding terrain looked startlingly like Mars. And human beings lived in that? Ugh.
The plane planted itself hard on terra firma at Baraq International Airport and taxied up to a modern glass-and-chrome terminal. The ramp was conspicuously deserted. Theirs was the only plane visible on the entire field, in fact. Not exactly a teeming metropolis of activity. Of course, a coup d’état no doubt put a severe cramp on travel-related activity.
A commotion outside caught Katy’s attention. She leaned forward to look out her window and saw a line of soldiers run up, surrounding the airplane. They all had machine guns at the ready, pointed at the plane. Whoa. Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
What sort of idiot escaped an enemy by putting himself into that very enemy’s hands? An idiot with no other options, apparently. Kareem’s plan was audacious. Certainly unexpected. Arguably insane. Doomed to failure. And here Nick was, going along with it like a lamb to the slaughter. Even his natural optimism was stretched to the breaking point on this one. For the first time in his life his family’s money, power, prestige and sheer fame weren’t going to buy him out of this mess. He was utterly without defenses or resources other than his own brains and guts. Lord, he felt naked.
Nick hitched up his bloodied khaki pants and took the machine gun Kareem handed him. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
The advisor nodded solemnly and started to move forward but then froze, looking over Nick’s shoulder. Nick registered some sort of commotion behind him. Not good. Their plan wasn’t in place yet. He opened his mouth to urge Kareem to hurry.
He never saw the blow coming. One moment he was looking into the eyes of his father’s friend and the next pain exploded in his head like a starburst. The marble floor rushed up to slam into him, and then his world went black.
Their plane sat on the ramp with no one entering or leaving it for long enough that Katy finally dozed off. How long she slept, she didn’t know. But it was morning when she woke up to the sounds of a commotion. A portable staircase had arrived and the front door of the jet had just opened.
A scowling soldier boarded the aircraft as if he owned it. “Everybody out!” he shouted.
The team disembarked onto the tarmac while machine guns followed their every movement. Surely this wasn’t a typical welcome for relief agencies! She glanced around, and even the team’s veterans had their shoulders up around their ears and looked tense. Not good.
They were herded down the stairs and into a tight group, with soldiers pressing in on them from all sides with those darned weapons. Katy didn’t know about anybody else, but she was intimidated.
And then they stood there and waited some more. The tension built like a Beethoven symphony, rising higher and higher until she felt as if it might explode any second. If her brothers had been here orchestrating this confrontation, she’d accuse them of intentionally creating a crisis atmosphere in order to throw their opponents off balance.
Something incongruous struck her as she stood there. The smell of orange blossoms. It hung in the air, light and sweet, perfuming every breath she drew. And then something else struck her. The blinding blue of the sky overhead. This was actually a lovely little corner of the world. The sun already shone with an equatorial intensity that promised to burn her fair skin when it got a little higher in the sky. She sincerely hoped she lived long enough for that to be a problem.
When the standoff had reached the breaking point, a Baraqi Army officer strolled out to the tarmac and perused them scornfully. In Arabic he gave his troops a short order to stand down. At least that’s what Katy, with her rusty college grasp of that tongue, thought he said.
The machine guns finally rose up and away. Along with the whole InterAid team, she sighed in profound relief.
The officer snapped at them to get their bags. She filed over to the British Airways jet and duly took her place in the bag brigade that passed their gear from the belly of the plane to the big pile of suitcases beyond the wing.
A large, heavy-duty Army truck drove up. It could’ve pulled up right beside the luggage, but no. It