seemed to think she might deliver late. First babies often took their own sweet time.
Rubbing her belly, she logged off and closed the laptop, hoping Dalrymple would respond soon. The last thing she needed in the final days of her pregnancy was this kind of stress.
Come on, Dal. Tell me I’m imagining things.
She settled in the rocking chair she’d picked up at a thrift store. Most of her furniture was secondhand. Her clothes as well.
She’d never been wealthy, and she could remember plenty of lean times in her life, both as a child and later as an adult. But life as a pregnant Kaziri refugee was proving to be a whole other level of needy. And there was no hope of ever going back to the life she’d once lived.
From down the hall, faint strains of an old Kaziri folk song added a discordant counterpoint to the Bing Crosby tune playing on the radio in the apartment next door. Refugees had taken over several of the empty apartments in the building, but there were a few native Cincinnatians who’d been living in Over-the-Rhine for decades, through bad times and good. Some of them eyed the newcomers with suspicion and even fear, at times signaling their defiance by shows of blatant patriotism in case the refugees forgot where they were living now.
Yasmin felt strangely caught in the middle, someone who knew all the words to both songs clamoring for attention. Her mother had sung “Nazanin” to her as a lullaby for as long as she could remember. And Bing’s “White Christmas” had always been one of her father’s favorite songs.
It would have been easier if Dal had placed her in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area, where another group of Kaziri immigrants had started to form their own small cultural enclave. Those Kaziris came from the small Christian community, with its more westernized habits and customs. She could have fit in there quite easily, given her mother’s background.
But she wasn’t going to find what Dalrymple was seeking in North Carolina. So there would be no Christmas lights this year. No holly wreath on her door or stockings on the mantel. Not if she wanted to fit in with the rest of the Kaziri community here in Cincy.
Still, as she rocked slowly in the chair, making herself wait a little longer before she checked for Dal’s return email, she found herself humming along with Bing, feeling a little melancholy.
Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. And this year, she’d be spending it alone.
* * *
“IS IT HER?” Maddox Heller’s drawl rumbled through the phone receiver, bracingly familiar.
Connor stepped away from the window. “I’ll admit, it looks like her.”
“But you’re not certain.” Heller’s voice was tinged with sympathy. A former marine, like Connor, he’d gotten in touch after the plane crash and Risa’s death, first to offer his condolences, and later, the new job that had eventually brought Connor to Cincinnati.
“No, I’m not certain.” Connor had come to terms with the fact that he wanted to believe the woman he’d seen was Risa. But self-deception during a mission was a great way to end up dead or captured. “The woman is definitely pregnant.”
“How far along?”
“How the hell would I know?” He heard a tinge of bitterness in his voice and quelled it. Stick to the facts. “Big. Probably last trimester.”
“If it’s Risa,” Heller said quietly, “then...”
Then the baby could be his. “I know.”
“Quinn has feelers out to some of his old contacts at the agency, but if she’s part of an ongoing operation, they’re not going to tell him anything.”
“Do you think...” Connor swallowed and started again. “Do you think she could have planned it all along?”
“What? Faking her death?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. CIA folks can be a little squirrelly, but...”
But she loved me, he thought. She loved me, and we didn’t have secrets.
Self-deception, he reminded himself. Always dangerous.
“I think she must live in this area. The Kaziri refugee community seems to be centered here near the new mosque on Dublin Street,” he told Heller. The mosque had once been a Methodist church, according to some of the locals he’d talked to earlier that morning. With the exodus of locals and the advent of the refugees, a lot was changing in the neighborhood. Longtime diners had become halal markets and restaurants. A boutique down the street from the mosque now sold hijab coverings for women.
“That’s what our intel says,” Heller agreed.
By intel, he suspected Heller meant an undercover asset. Maybe more than one. Connor was new to Campbell Cove Security and the academy the company ran. He had a feeling there was a lot about the company he had yet to discover. And other things, he suspected, he might never discover unless there was a pressing need to know.
Heller broke the silence that had fallen between them. “What’s your gut on this?”
How the hell was Connor supposed to answer that question? He’d spent the past three days since spotting the pregnant woman in the surveillance photos trying not to feel anything at all, in his gut or anywhere else. If he let himself feel, then he’d lose any chance of dealing with the situation with reason and logic.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t let my gut lead here.”
He wanted to believe way too much to trust his gut about anything where Risa was concerned.
“What are you going to do next?” Heller asked.
Connor checked his watch. Nearly two thirty. “The operative says she works the dinner shift at The Jewel of Tablis, right?”
“Not every night, but yeah.”
“So I guess I’ll wait a couple of hours and then go have myself a nice halal dinner.”
* * *
BY THE TIME Yasmin had to leave the apartment to get to her job at the restaurant, she still hadn’t heard from Dalrymple. Going on twelve hours since their last contact. Dal had always been the kind of man who lived on his own timetable, but he’d never taken this long to get back to her.
Unless something had gone wrong.
As she tied her apron above the swell of the baby, she glanced around the restaurant, trying to remember the feeling she’d had before while walking home from the doctor’s office. A tingle on the back of her neck that said, “Someone is watching.”
She supposed it was possible a lot of people were watching her. Pregnant women living alone weren’t the norm in a culture like Kaziristan’s. She had lived there with her mother for three years while her father was doing a tour of duty overseas. At least, that’s what her mother had told her, though she sometimes wondered if the Kaziristan years had come during a rough patch in her parents’ marriage.
They’d stayed with her mother’s brother and his family, and the experience had been eye-opening, not always in a good way. But during those years, she’d learned a lot about being a Kaziri woman. While a large swath of Kaziristan was cosmopolitan and culturally advanced, some of the rural areas were still deeply tribal, including the part where her mother’s brother lived. Those areas were patriarchal in a way people in the West couldn’t really comprehend.
But even in those parts of Kaziristan, women had ways of getting things done beneath the veil. It was a lesson she’d never forgotten, and she was banking on that lesson to get her through the next few months of her life.
“Yasmin?” The sharp voice of the restaurant manager, Farid Rahimi, jerked her back to attention. She turned to look at him, trying not to let her dislike show.
He was a short man, and lean, but she knew from observation that