Page 50 of Acting on Instinct
“Ty and I are dating, Pam. He knows I’m not interested in getting married. I don’t think he’s concerned about the peace in his home. And I’m going to chalk this conversation up to raw nerves because, as you said, it never gets easier when the team just vanishes.”
Kira’s eyes hadn’t left the note. If Ty were on a mission, she wouldn’t be able to ask him what to do.
“Kira, that was so rude of me. I’m drowning in pregnancy hormones.”
“Go take care of yourself. I really do appreciate this phone call.” Before Kira started crying, she hung up.
Ty wasn’t coming home. She’d known that too. She knew that this morning was the end. And that was probably why she was so angry about Ty and the robbery. It would have been good to end on a happy memory.
Lula came to mind. Maybe she was still in the area.
That she’d come to visit today didn’t feel like a coincidence.
Maybe Lula was the reason why Ty wasn’t coming home. After all, Lula was CIA, and the CIA often tapped special forces teams, and The Unit in particular, to head out into the wide world and do the thing that needed to be done.
Kira called Lula’s line, and it went straight to voicemail just as she’d suspected it would.
“Nadir said he will send someone to get you so they can ask you questions, and then you will no longer be his problem.”
Get her.Get her? What did that mean? Not confront her here, but get her.
Getting her meant taking her somewhere else.
Did it make sense that her uncle would send a man who was not in their family to get her? She’d assumed it would be a man because her leaving would require force.
Qatari women didn’t travel alone. They would be escorted by a family member called aMahram. In that role, the Mahram was the woman’s guardian, and it was his duty to ensure her safety and that her honor was not compromised.
This could be a life-threatening practice for women in many ways. Kira had two friends from Afghanistan who were studying in one of Tehran’s many famous universities. When bombs started dropping, their Mahram went immediately to Iran to escort them home. Many women from Afghanistan and other countries on the peninsula couldn’t make the flight tosafety because they had no Mahram to conduct them. So they stayed and faced the uncertain future.
Kira was American, and she didn’t fall under those traditions. But that didn’t mean that she traveled alone from the United States. As a child, she accompanied her mother when they traveled to the family compound to spend Kira’s summer vacations, and once Kira went to university and her mother moved to Qatar to live with her in-laws, Kira would travel with London.
It was on one of these holiday visits that London met William, fell in love, married, and had a party in Tanzania that Kira helped plan, and where Ty entered the picture. And so it was embroidered, the tapestry of Kira’s life.
Would Uncle Nadir send a Mahram—one of her younger uncles or older male cousins—to fetch her? Perhaps they’d make up some reason that would have her tossing clothes into a suitcase and scampering for the airport. If they told her that her mother was ill in the hospital, possibly on her last breath, that is exactly what she’d do had she not been warned.
But she’d been warned.
Was London safe?
London was such a smart person. So clever and imaginative that hearing about London’s day-to-day struggles was hard on Kira’s heart.
How was it that William had allowed London to get pregnant under such circumstances? Get a vasectomy, wear a condom, give London a Plan B pill. He had to have chosen to knock her up.
London was a beautiful woman.
Archie was a gorgeous baby.
And William was an old man working in a cutthroat world of young ambition.
It might serve William’s vanity to feel virile enough to make babies in his sixties.
Kira’s mind was looping, and she needed to be strategic.
Baseline, if confronted, Kira simply wouldn’t go to an airport. What could they possibly do to get her onto a plane and take her to Qatar? So someone would come, and they’d try to convince Kira to cooperate. And she’d have opportunities to stay safe. After all, what would induce her to leave America?
They could use the threat of harming someone she loved.
Her mother, her aunt, her cousins.
