Desert Kings Boxed Set: The Complete Series Books 1-6 Read online

  Sam shook her head and got a faraway look in her blue eyes. “I love Osman more than I ever thought was possible. And now I love Ubar, too. I could never leave either of them.”

  Zadir took a deep breath as he walked into the locked room where the suspect was being held. If he was the pilot who’d crashed their plane in the desert, he was pretty sure he’d recognize him. They hadn’t had a good look at him—by design, no doubt—and he’d been wearing big aviator sunglasses and a captain’s hat, but he’d been short and slight, with quick, sharp movements. A normal-sized man couldn’t have fit out of that small plane window to leave them to die.

  He’d spend a lot of time reconstructing the image of that pilot in his mind, waiting for the opportunity to come face to face with him. Hopefully that moment was now.

  Seated in a chair, with his back to the door, the suspect was chained to an iron ring on the wall. The ring had probably been there for five hundred years, nestled in the mosaic tile of the walls and floors. Zadir couldn’t help but imagine that blood had been shed on that black-and-white patterned floor, and he hoped he had the self-control not to add red to the design today. He wasn’t normally roused to violence, but he’d never been this angry with anyone in his life.

  “Your highness,” one of his men spoke behind him. “We have his driver’s license and we’re doing a full forensic analysis, but here’s a copy.” He handed him a colorful sheet of paper bearing the image of the large drivers license, usually carried folded in four, used in neighboring Satya. “It appears to be a legitimate license, but the name listed has no history either in Satya or here.”

  “So it’s fake?” Zadir wished he had the original, but hopefully they’d find some useful fingerprints or microscopic evidence on it tying this man to other crimes.

  The man shrugged. There was a lot of shrugging in Ubar. No one worried too hard about getting to the bottom of things. There was a lot of quiet acceptance of the unsolvable mysteries of life.

  “Never mind. We’ll figure out the details later. You can video my interview with him. I don’t want the government of Satya to think anything improper took place.” They’d maintained a cordial, if distant relationship with Satya, which sat on the other side of steep, largely impassable mountains and could only be approached by road through another neighboring country, Tabriq.

  He walked toward the man, who still sat with his back turned.

  “Tell me your real name.” He didn’t expect a truthful answer, but it seemed like a place to start.

  The suspect still sat facing the wall. His body didn’t rule him out as the pilot of the crashed plane. He wasn’t tiny, but he wasn’t huge, either. He could fit through that cockpit window.

  He turned slowly, and Zadir’s breath stuck at the bottom of his lungs as he waited for a sight of his face. High, pinched cheekbones shadowed by a two or three day beard. A thin mouth, lips pressed together, and finally small dark eyes that stared hard into his own. With a sharp pinch of disappointment, Zadir realized he couldn’t be a hundred percent sure if it was the same man.

  “Your name?” He barely recognized the sound of his own angry growl.

  “You have it right there.” The man tipped back his chin and jutted it toward the paper in Zadir’s hand. Arrogant. He had a slight accent, but Zadir couldn’t pin down where it was from.

  Zadir read the name off the license: “Nasrat Bin Salman.” He peered into the man’s eyes. “Except that’s not you if there’s no other record of your existence.”

  “I’m from a small mountain village. No one saw my birth except my relatives and they’re all dead.”

  “How convenient.” Good to keep him talking, though. He spoke the Ubar dialect but with the accent of someone from the northern hills outside the border. “So you’re an itinerant goatherd who just got a driver’s license”—he peered at the date—“three weeks ago and now you’ve branched out into torching aircraft.”

  A tiny smirk twisted the man’s narrow mouth. Zadir fought the urge to punch him in it. “You could have killed an innocent woman. Was that your goal? Did you want to hurt her?” He cursed the raw emotion in his voice.

  “Is she really so innocent?” His smarmy question shocked Zadir. It was almost a confession. He strode closer and loomed over him.

  “Yes. She is. When you abandoned that plane, leaving it to crash….” He watched closely for a reaction. Nothing. “I had never even met her before. She has nothing to do with Ubar or myself and my brothers. She was simply a passing stranger heading for the same destination.”

  “Yet she’s here now.” The man’s black eyes flashed.

  Zadir saw no need to explain the reasons for her visit. It was entirely possibly that this hostile stranger knew all the details anyway. He could have been tapping his phone or sifting through his emails for months.

  “Why?” That was the real question. The one they’d found no answers to. Maybe this man wanted to tell him as much as he wanted to know.

  The man shrugged. In a way it was similar to how the guard had shrugged.

  “Don’t bullshit me. You’re risking your life, and I mean that quite literally as the death penalty is readily practiced in Ubar.” He and his brothers had already agreed to abolish it, but there was no need for this scum to know that. “What’s your reason for wanting to hurt me—and her?” He didn’t want to say Ronnie’s name, though this jerk probably knew it.

  “Only you. She keeps getting in the way. Which makes her a better target in some ways.”

  Zadir was stunned speechless. “I could have you killed right here and now.”

  “Be my guest.” The diminutive suspect cocked his chin again and offered his neck to Zadir, as if he were barbaric enough to take a sword to it. “My life is worth nothing now you’ve caught me.”

  This man was a cool customer. Zadir could see how torture might sometimes seem like the only viable option.

  But he wasn’t that desperate. “You admit you torched the plane.”

  “You and your brothers should go back to America.”

  “We’re from Ubar. And I spent most of my time overseas in England and France, not the U.S. Is this your mission? To get us to leave?”

  “You’re strangers who don’t understand us.” The man stared at him, insolent as ever. Zadir wanted to protest that he was an Ubarite to the core, but that would just play into this man’s hands by dignifying his insult with a response.

  “I understand a lot more than you think. You crashed the plane.” He leaned in, until he could smell the man’s fetid cigarette-tainted breath.

  The man blinked, but his expression didn’t reveal a thing.

  Zadir turned. “Rifal. Could you bring me some cigarettes?”

  Rifal looked surprised. None of the brothers smoked, and they’d had to train the servants not to bring them daily hookahs of the mysterious substances their father had enjoyed. He turned and left the room.

  Zadir leaned against the wall right in front of the suspect, in his airspace, daring him to try something. “Would you like to die fast or very, very slowly?”

  “Makes no difference to me.”

  “Good. Then I could spend years asking you the same questions.”

  “And getting no answer.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you’re too arrogant to sit quietly for years on end. You’ll want to show off.”

  The man ignored him, though his steely gaze flickered a little.

  “You do realize that the man who hired you to do this is probably sitting down to a nice meal right now. Maybe he has his family around him, or perhaps he’s the type to prefer hired girls to do his bidding, but either way I’m sure he’ll enjoy a relaxing evening. All while you’re here, chained to a wall like a sad chimpanzee who let himself be trained and dressed up like a human, then got shoved in a zoo for the rest of his life.”

  He turned and walked away, as if bored. Damn it was hard not to wrap that chain around a sensitive part of the prisoner’s body and start threateni
ng him. That was not the direction they were taking Ubar, however. Rifal handed him a packet of Dunhills, and he tapped one out and let Rifal light it for him.

  Then he strolled back, letting the smoke waft toward the prisoner.

  “You think I’d tell you everything for a cigarette,” the man sneered.

  “I know you will,” said Zadir, with a grim smile. “Eventually.”

  Another knock on the door of Sam’s office made Ronnie jump. She was on edge, and Zahaina and Barbit weren’t helping with their fear-mongering about the protesters.

  It was Zadir. Her heart leapt at the sight of him. “Any news?”

  “He won’t admit his real identity or who he’s working for. It’ll take some time.”

  “I meant about the plane.” Was it so selfish of her to be concerned about getting back for the biggest meeting of her life?

  “Come with me. Let’s see what we can figure out.”

  She rose from her seat, glad of a chance to move, and headed for the door. She wanted to rush into Zadir’s arms but restrained herself in front of the other women. Out in the hallway, he took her hands. “You do know how sorry I am that this happened.”

  “I really do.” The sadness in his lovely blue eyes touched her heart. She could feel him wanting to hug her, too, but he held himself back. Maybe it wasn’t the right time for affection. “You smell like cigarettes.”

  “I was attempting to weaken our suspect into a confession.”

  “I’d think alcohol might work better than cigarettes.”

  His dimple appeared. “You could be on to something there. He’s pretty disciplined so far, but I think his pride will prove to be his weak spot. And cigarettes are more powerful than crack from what I’ve seen of my friends trying to quit.”

  She smiled. It was hard to be mad at Zadir. Still…. “I do have to be there for that meeting on Wednesday. And time is running out. Even if I left today I wouldn’t be back until tomorrow because it’s such a long way. How am I going to get back in time?”

  He punched something into his phone. “Now that we have the suspect in custody, I’d like to drive Veronica to Dasalam to put her on a commercial flight.” She could hear the voice at the other end but not make out what it was saying. “Twenty-four hours? But that’s too long. Can we charter a jet to come here and pick her up?” She listened again, nerves jangling.

  Zadir cursed softly. Not a good sign. “But I promised her she’d be back. It’s a very important meeting.”

  “It’s the meeting of a lifetime,” she muttered under her breath. Zadir hung up.

  “Osman says no one can come in or out of the country until the divorce proclamation is read and any resulting chaos contained.”

  “And when is that?”

  Zadir inhaled and looked grim. “Wednesday.”

  Her adrenaline spiked. “But that’s too late!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “You promised you’d put me on a flight. You’re breaking your promise.” Ronnie couldn’t believe this. They’d walked along the corridor and now stood at the entrance to the garden, where the fountain trickled away as if nothing was wrong in the world.

  “I’m only a man.”

  “But you’re a king! A prince, anyway. Surely you can do something.”

  “It’s a matter of national safety. We promised to back each other up on stuff like this, and I know Osman’s right. How would you feel if we put other people in danger?”

  “I’m not sure I’d care all that much at this point.” She let out a growl of frustration. “Okay, I don’t mean that. But this is the kind of opportunity architects dream of. I was totally prepared for that meeting until you came along and whisked me off to the other side of the world.”

  “I’m sorry.” He said it softly, and she could see in his eyes that he truly meant it.

  Her heart tripped. “I’m sorry. I’m being a brat. I know you brought me here because you couldn’t think of any other way to get my attention, but honestly, this is exactly why I didn’t think we should see each other again. Your life is on this side of the world, and mine is on the other. And now I’m stuck on the wrong side.”

  She’d tried so hard to be sensible, and things were more complicated and screwed up than ever.

  “You can teleconference in to your meeting. We have sophisticated facilities that we use all the time to keep on top of our various business matters.”

  “That’s hardly the same. Besides, they might not want to hook up with equipment from an obviously unstable country. Do you realize that the president himself will be sitting in on this meeting?”

  “We have an entire day to arrange it. Let’s get on to it right away. Why don’t you contact them to arrange permission, and I’ll make sure everything’s in good working order. We have excellent facilities for sharing images and even drawing on them live.”

  He looked so hopeful it was hard to cut him down. Though she wasn’t even sure if the electricity here could be counted on to work through a meeting. It was no joke that most of the light in and outside the palace came from flaming torches and lanterns with actual candles in them, though there were switches and outlets as well. “What if a goat gnaws through the power line and we’re plunged into darkness?”

  He must have seen the glint of dark humor in her eyes, because he smiled. “Then we’ll cook it and eat it.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Seriously, we have top-of-the-line generators so we never lose power at the palace. All of our communications are via satellite and very reliable. There’s pretty much nothing that can go wrong as long as they’re willing to open up a line for us.”

  Ronnie marched back down the hallway with Zadir, heading for the bedroom she’d slept in the first night. She was frustrated, but also slightly hopeful that she could still go ahead with the meeting and present her project, which was the result of literally hundreds of hours of planning and drawing by herself and her assistant and the engineer.

  She dialed her assistant, knowing that it must still be early morning in Washington, D.C., “Libby? Hi. It’s Ronnie. I know my texts were kind of cryptic, but the truth is I’m still on the other side of the world…Ubar. Yes, I’d never heard of it either. It’s small. And remote….” Her assistant rambled on about how her family lived in Kuwait for a year when she was a teenager. “You’ll have to tell me all about it another time, because we have a bit of a crisis on our hands. I can’t get back for the meeting on Wednesday due to the borders being closed here. Can you contact the committee’s admin and see if they’ll allow me to teleconference? Great. Call me back as soon as you know anything.”

  She paced her room, adrenaline rushing. She couldn’t believe that she didn’t even have her trusty laptop with her. But who took that kind of thing to a charity gala? Still, she could see her luggage, and the iPad and camera Zadir had provided for her, were already in the room, so she might as well get familiar with them and figure out what she needed Libby to send her.

  Within the hour it was determined that she would be allowed to present by teleconference, and they would have a run-through to test the equipment tomorrow. She spent the next couple of hours on the phone with Libby, tweaking the order of images for the presentation and coaching Libby on how to deal with questions or comments that came directly to her. She barely noticed that she hadn’t eaten anything but tiny cakes since breakfast, but her stomach was starting to talk aloud when Zadir arrived to take her to dinner.

  “I haven’t changed.” She’d showered after getting back from the toxic plane fire but hadn’t put on more evening-y attire.

  “You look stunning.”

  She wore a simple black top and pants that hugged the contours of her body without being revealing. “I think I’m going to let you choose all my clothes from now on. You have excellent taste.”

  “I had excellent help.” He looked breathtaking himself in a long dark-gray robe. She liked how he wore the traditional garb as easily as if it were jeans and a T-shirt. The blue sash at his waist
only served to emphasize his broad shoulders and deepen the color of his eyes.

  “You really are too handsome to be anything but trouble. You know that, right?”

  “Are you looking for another apology? Because I can think of some very good ways to apologize.” His sultry voice made her insides twirl.

  “See what I mean?”

  The resounding clang of clashing swords meant it was time to head into the dining room. Ronnie had a hard time keeping a straight face as they walked through the arch of swords held by stone-faced guards. How did they all carry on as if this kind of behavior was normal?

  Another part of her enjoyed the pageantry. Here she was, on the arm of a gorgeous prince, being led into a dining room right out of the Arabian Nights. She’d be foolish not to savor the moment.

  They sat under multicolored glass lanterns that filled the room with sparkling shards of jeweled light. The servants passed dishes of spiced chicken and colorful vegetables, and filled their glasses with sparkling liquids.

  “Veronica, we truly appreciate how gracious you’ve been about today’s disastrous inconveniences.” Osman looked truly sorry.

  “At least no one was hurt.” She’d managed to relax a bit. “And I’m glad you caught the guy that torched the plane. I hope you can get to the bottom of the other disturbances.”

  “I don’t want you to think that Ubar is always like this.” Osman frowned. “We had centuries of total peace—and frankly utter boredom—before this recent round of incidents. I hope we’ll soon be complaining again that nothing ever happens in Ubar.”

  Amahd shook his head. “Maybe nothing will happen in your part of the kingdom, but mine is already a hive of activity. We’ve drilled four new wells this week, and things are humming. We’re training workers as fast as we can hire them. I don’t think there will be a single young man left to tend goats in the mountains soon.”

  Zadir laughed. “Not everyone wants to drill for oil, brother. Even if there’s money involved. I plan to invest in solar technology to power my part of the kingdom. Ronnie and I were discussing it earlier. My new home will be entirely powered by the sun’s energy.”