Chapter Thirty-Four

Nomad

Nomad took the rental car to the Marrakech airport. He wasn't missing anything. With the mic on Elena's phone open, he could hear her snoring lightly in her sleep. As long as her phone held some battery life and there was a bit of WIFI, Langley would record her continuously, and the AI would pull out the conversation pockets.

Besides, it fit their cover better that Nicholi went to collect his wife, Cassie.

After Red made it through exit security, Nomad took the handle of her suitcase and wheeled it out. "Hey Cassie, how was your flight?" He laced her fingers with his.

"Good. And yours, Nicholi?"

"I survived," he laughed. "Elena is taking a siesta. And I thought it would be nicer for you if you didn't have to navigate to our place on your own."

He was mission-focused.

So, the fact that he missed her and looked forward to being with her was pressed to the recesses of his awareness.

"Much appreciated." Red climbed into the left-hand passenger seat while he put the luggage in the back. As soon as Nomad slid under the wheel on the right-hand side, she asked. "What have you found out?"

"We're in a riad around the corner from Elena's hotel."

"Her hotel is in the Medina? That's a surprise." Red twisted in her seat to better face him. "At the ball, Joel said it was a five-star. Mmm, maybe he didn't say five-star, but it was implied."

"It is." Nomad reached onto his dashboard to grab the parking ticket and headed toward the booth to pay. "Once you get inside, the hotel is luxurious. I had breakfast there this morning to check it out. I considered signing up for a spa day." He sent her a grin.

"So now you know why I became a spy." She adjusted his button-down shirt and flicked her hair out of the way.

Something about her wearing his shirt made him feel possessive of her. Like he'd planted a flag for other men to see. She chose me. Which wasn't true at all. But the flash told Nomad where he was with his thoughts about Red, and he needed to watch that he kept those ideas internal.

Lives were on the line. His heart and libido be damned.

"All the spa treatments I get when following people around," Red lifted her hand to cover a fake yawn. "It's almost to the point of losing my appetite for pampering. So, the hotel—you were saying something about getting back there?"

"It's buried in the labyrinth of alleys in the Medina. I can see how someone might like to experience the Medina's color and bustle and then be able to wend back away from the crowds to luxury."

"Hmm," Red wrinkled her nose. "The way you say that tells me ours—"

"Is not quite as luxurious, no." He offered a wry smile. "It's a riad, so the typical set up of rooms surrounding an open courtyard. Our riad has an orange tree in the middle with ripened fruit. Orange and green against cobalt blue tiles."

"Picturesque"

"Also loud. We're going to have to be extraordinarily careful in maintaining our cover. Those tile floors and walls are great for dealing with the heat and cleaning up the dirt and sand, but the hard surfaces coupled with the old doors that don't quite sit into their jambs correctly—"

"The sounds travel. Yes, I remember that from my previous stays in Morocco. Okay, so does that mean we should stage some tiff to sell our cover? Maybe I can be angry at you that you left your socks on while you were seducing me."

Nomad's eyes glittered. "An infraction I couldn't imagine." Scooters roared up and dodged around their car to speed off into the distance. "Elena is meeting with Joel and Kamal at the garden tomorrow."

"You have the time?" Red asked.

"Fifteen hundred."

"Right after nap."

"Ha." Nomad adjusted his rearview mirror. "Now, as to what I've found out. There's a married couple that Elena met up with for breakfast this morning."

"That's right, breakfast. Did they spot you?"

"I was drinking my Turkish coffee behind a column with a large palm."

"Nice. And the couple—"

"Is pretending to be Parisian tourists. But their French is Lebanese."

Red closed her eyes as an elderly woman stepped off the curb and walked out into the six lanes of traffic that were going forty miles an hour. It was a Moroccan skill crossing the street, and every time it felt death-defying. "You recorded their conversation?" she asked, blinking her eyes open again.

"I did. The two women will visit the Mouassine Hammam before Elena meets Kamal."

"Interesting." Red looked at her lap as she focused on that information. "Her hair's going to be wet."

"Why is that interesting?"

"Kamal wanted to make a video of the exchange. Joel told Elena about that at the ball. And she put her foot down, no video."

"That's a shame because I spent quite a bit of time today in the Secret Garden making sure every square inch is covered with audio-video equipment so no one and nothing would be lost. What has that got to do with wet hair?"

"Joel wanted her to be beautiful. If she put on a headscarf and he forced her to remove it, she'd have dripping wet hair. It wouldn't look nice for the video. That particular hammam is right outside the garden entrance, which may be a minute's walk away."

Nomad thought that listening to a spy go through their thought process would be a valuable opportunity for him to learn. "There's a hammam at the spa in her hotel. Why would staging at the Mouassine make sense?"

"Elena could completely transform her look. And it might be a way to arrive at the garden early so she's not being tracked. The Mouassine Hammam has been women-only since the fifteen hundreds. A man wouldn't be allowed to enter." A smile slid across Red's face, "And then there's the wonderful experience of a hammam that isn't about spa treatments but the opportunity to be in a comfortable women's space. Hammams are part of a cool economic eco-structure."

"How's that?" Nomad asked.

"Morocco can be insanely hot, a hundred degrees, with no air conditioning available. Nobody wants to cook in their houses in the heat and make it unbearable, right? So, it all works symbiotically. It starts with the men who work a wood-burning oven."

Nomad nodded.

"The oven heats the floors and walls of the hammam so people who are naked and wet while getting clean are warm and comfy."

"I'm following."

"A woman makes her bread dough for the day and prepares a tangia— a tangia is an earthen vase-shaped cooking vessel—which she packs with beef, garlic, oil, and preserved lemons, and she takes the tangia and her dough to the oven guy. The man with the wood-burning oven bakes the bread. Then he rakes the ashes out and piles them around the tangia, where the beef slowly cooks all day. Fresh and clean from the hammam, the woman gets her bread and meat and goes home. Her house is cool, and the guy with the oven earns his pay in three ways."

"And they're getting cleaned at the bathhouse because their houses have limited running water like in your hotel in Lebanon?"

"Some have no water at all. In the Medina, they can get their water from the public fountain by filling jugs."

"We have water at our place," Nomad reassured her.

"Good to hear." She leaned back to look into the side mirror, then turned back to Nomad.

"What's it like to go to the hammam?" he asked.

"Men go, too."

Nomad sent her a one-sided smile. "Yeah, I've heard my mom talking about it. I'm not letting someone scrub me like I'm a child."

Red pulled her brows together. "Ego can't handle it?"

"Nope, gotta draw the line somewhere." He entered the crazy driving of a six-lane roundabout with bumper-to-bumper traffic trying to get to the street they wanted.

"Well, it's one of my favorite experiences because it normalizes the human body."

Nomad kept his eyes on the traffic flow. Morocco had a reputation for traffic accidents, and he thought they'd had enough of that the night of the ball. "Go on."

"You remove your clothes and put them in the locker."

"What will Elena do with her ring?"

"Good question. Probably keep it on. The married women wear their wedding rings. So you walk into the cleaning area naked, and an attendant takes you to her section of the floor where you lie down. These attendants are usually grandmotherly types with big bellies with their breasts draped over the top. They're usually dressed in briefs, and that's all. And just so beautiful . When I'm there, and I look at these women with their lives etched into their faces with creases and wrinkles, I think someone should be painting them, capturing the glory of these women."

"You lay on the ground?" Nomad was trying to picture this, and he was thinking about a car wash with vehicles parked in a row for the owners to vacuum them out. That couldn't be right.

"Marble," Red qualified. "Heated by the fire guy. It's comfortable. The attendant rubs you with black soap. This sets for five minutes and loosens all the dead skin cells. Not to gross you out, but it's pretty wild. They take a special mitt and scrub, and as they scrub, the skin comes off in rolls of white. And when you think that's done, there's more and more. I feel very snake-shedding-my-skin-like when I do this. They scrub until you are pink from the friction. The women are working hard, their breasts swinging like pendulums, as they rub up and down the woman's limbs. A fabulously different cultural experience. Absolutely magnificent. One of my favorite things in this world is the public hammams. The care one receives is almost spiritual, you know? No, you don't know. Well, I could take it or leave it in the spa hammams. I get clean. It's just not the same experience. But that's not the end of it."

Nomad chuckled, charmed by her enthusiasm.

"Then they coat you with clay infused with herbs, and you sit in another room. The clay draws out impurities. After that, they rinse you off by throwing bowls of warm water on you. And the funniest part is when the women stand with their heels together and do a plié so the attendant can swing the bowl, sending the water up to clean a lady's nether regions."

"Huh."

"A surprising sensation, I grant you that. Yes, a hammam is one of life's great good things."

"Sounds like you want to go and hang out with Elena tomorrow," Nomad said.

"You know, I just might. So that's the end of it? These two women are going to the hammam in advance of the Secret Garden exchange?" Red reached up and scratched the nape of her neck. "Where's the Parisian's husband going to be? What else did they say?"

"I have nothing on the husband's plans," Nomad said. "And as to the other, nothing read as important. But you know how passing information goes. You hide it in the stories." He exited the traffic circle. "Another ten minutes ‘til we get to the wall."

They drove in silence down the road, and just because he felt like it, maybe to test the waters, Nomad reached for Red's hand. They weren't in character here, so he would know her genuine reaction.

When Red turned her hand to lace their fingers, something eased in his body. "You look like you're plotting," Nomad said as they continued down the palm-tree-lined street.

"I was thinking about which techniques for following these women would be applicable in the Medina. You've been there. You know what we're facing."

"It's disorienting. There are a thousand ways to slip out of sight. If I was being tracked, it's where I'd want to be. Doing the tracking, it's going to test my skills."

"Is this your first time in Marrakech?" she asked.

"I was here as a little kid. I thought it was a storybook come to life—the colors and all the people. I remember a big square with men playing music. They had monkeys, but my mom wouldn't let my brother or me near them. She was afraid they'd bite us. Then, there were the snake charmers with their fake cobras set out for tourist pictures and their little garden snakes to put on the tourists' heads. We'd go up on the rooftops and look down at the activity at night, the fire dancers, and those men playing the gimbri ."

"The string instrument where the man wears the hat tassel and spins it round and round? Okay, that's one thing I don't like. They make me seasick." And when she said that, Red lifted the back of his hand to her lips and pressed a kiss there that felt like gratitude. Nomad wondered if she remembered that he'd been holding her as they went out to sea during her rescue.

He didn't ask.

He let her have the moment, and then she settled their linked hands on her lap. "I like to sit up on the rooftop and have a drink, watching the sun go down. All that hustle and bustle going on below. I like feeling like I'm floating above the fray. But it sounds like you enjoyed the fray."

"Sometimes. So you're the spook, and I am not. What conclusions did you reach about the best ways to follow our rabbits?"

"With just the two of us. We have the advantage of having control of her phone and the DARPA micro-tracker on the ring. We still need to figure out why the friends are here getting involved. Are they staying at Elena's hotel?"

"Yes."

"It'll be harder to do handoffs without blowing our cover, especially with your height. The clothing, in my case, will help. I can keep changing the colors of my scarves. No makeup. Present as a generic Moroccan woman in the market. What's in our favor is that Elena thinks she ditched me. She'll be focused on the task at hand, figuring out how the billionaire wants to make the exchange."

"I think that Kamal's eccentricities are a challenge for Elena. She wanted a clean pass."

"Right, and that's also to our advantage. Don't sleep on the idea of the modern distaste for inconvenience."

"I think I'm going to need more there." He slid across three lanes of tightly packed traffic to make his next turn.

"Have you tried to tell anyone a story lately?" Red asked.

"In general, I'm not a storytelling guy."

"Fair. Well, this is observational, anyway. Many people get their information in sips, from starter plates instead of whole meals. Memes and social media posts are all synthesized down for the biggest dopamine hit in the shortest amount of time. If you don't like it, scroll on by. If you really don't like it, block and move on. It's too much work to try to understand a divergent opinion. People are overstimulated and overworked, and they just want to get through their day feeling somewhat okay in their skin. Again, observational."

"Observational."

"I've been doing my work for a while now. I was recruited in college and graduated from my university to The Farm. And in that time, I have to tell you, it's getting harder for me to find people willing to build a relationship and deepen—" Red's mouth pulled down, and Nomad was surprised to find her chin wobbling.

He waited for her to decide what came next.

"I'm thinking of an asset who just died. He had been an exception. He wanted our connection for friendship, and I had wanted the connection for exploitation." She took a minute to steady her emotions. "I very much enjoyed our conversations. My feelings for him were genuine." She exhaled. "He was only in harm's way because I created that connection. He's dead because I had an agenda." She turned to the window and said so softly that Nomad almost didn't catch it, "It's getting harder and harder to be okay with all that. Though, I get that my work has a bigger meaning."

Nomad understood. He squeezed her hand a little tighter.

Red swallowed loudly, sighed, and looked out the window, probably trying to find some privacy. After a moment, she took up the narrative again. "So if something is inconvenient to them, doesn't fit their narrowed worldview, or interrupts their life flow, it's ignored. Connection-making is harder. That's the downside. I've found that sometimes, this makes my job easier. Inconvenience is a powerful tool. And I've only seen it become that much stronger with time as algorithms are honed and people are popping their dopamine like popcorn at the theater."

"You were talking about people's stories …" Nomad squeezed Red's hand and then released. This swarm of motorbikes required two hands on the wheel, and it had been a while since he'd driven on the left-hand side.

"I can't tell a whole story with nuance and descriptors without eyes sliding toward the activity they want to do. Usually, a phone. Sometimes, it's a weight shifted to the foot closest to the door."

"It could be that you're a shit storyteller." He stole a glance her way so she could see his smile was teasing.

"Again, fair. I think my mother's Irish lineage is pronounced in my DNA because I enjoy the oral tradition of storytelling. I'm an epic-sagas gal more than a short story enthusiast."

He reached for her again, and her hand was right there, open and waiting. "Side characters, red herrings, descriptions, and backstory?"

"It starts out that way, then there's the shifting and sliding narrative, but I wrap it up in a neat little bow as fast as I can even if I find the abruptness dissatisfying."

"Can you listen like that?"

"It's my job to listen like that, right? I need to know everything. The longer the story, the more I understand what motivates the storyteller and what characteristics they express with the most emphasis for good or for bad. What makes a hero to them? What makes an evil-doer? What do they perceive to be a reward? For some, it's money and fame. For others, it's the safety of their family and a hug from a beloved friend. Listening to the story is my job."

"I like that."

"It's funny how things work. Stories in the real world can have a plot twist. And it's only a plot twist if the characters think that life will continue on like a normal day, but no. Something happens."

Like you're about to fly home with a delegation, get rerouted, get rerouted again, and meet someone astonishing.

"I see just how random fate is. Two people standing side by side. One is blown into mist, and the other is coated with the mist of his friend but otherwise unscathed. Or me—"

"Yes, you. You survived the bombing at the hotel. You had to have, or you wouldn't have been coated with plaster the way you were when we found you."

"I was supposed to be sitting at the table with an asset. But leading up to the bombing, I ate a random campsite meal that gave me a random bacterial overload that sent me to the random toilet clutching my stomach. My asset is killed, and I am protected by the collapse of the metal stalls taking the blow and the aftershock."

"Saved by the shits."

"That's what I said. Absolutely random."

"But someone has your back. We had you out of there within twenty-four hours, and the only heads-up anyone had was that you didn't check in."

"And had you not been in the area, no one would have found me, and I could well have died. Dehydration leading to sepsis or what have you." She lifted her chin. "Why were you in the area? How did you get to me so quickly?"

"I was fishing in the Mediterranean."

"As one does."

Nomad pulled into a dusty plot used as a parking area. "This is as far as we can go with a car." He shifted into park. "We'll act like tourists and hire a pushcart to take your bag to the riad. You ready, Cassie?"