Page 30 of Kiss Her Goodbye (Frankie Elkin #4)

I frown, once more confused. “Then why would Sabera be approaching you all these years later? There must’ve been something more going on. What did she want?”

“The name of her mother’s handler,” Kurtz provides.

“Why?”

Both men exchange glances.

“Oh, come on, I thought we were over that!”

“Sabera implied she might have come across some valuable intel after her mother died,” Kurtz concedes slowly. “She was willing to pass it along, but only to her mother’s original contact.”

“Valuable intel? After the old government is gone and the Taliban is once again in charge?” I’m not buying it. “What could a woman have possibly learned at a cocktail party a decade ago that would still have relevance now?”

Beside me, Daryl nods with matching skepticism.

Interestingly enough, both men shrug in agreement.

“We pushed,” Westwig states. “Sabera demurred. She’d talk to her mother’s handler and her mother’s handler only.

In the end, we agreed to at least ask around.

If we could come up with a name from our own contacts, and that person felt like reaching out to Sabera, that would be on them.

No harm, no foul. She agreed. We started making inquiries. ”

“And that’s when things got more interesting,” Kurtz interjects. “Sabera Ahmadi wasn’t exactly telling the truth, the whole the truth, and nothing but the truth.”

“Sabera’s mother wasn’t actually a spy? Or a spy for the British?”

“Oh, Maryam Shinwari checked out. What Sabera failed to mention is that she hadn’t just observed her mother’s activities, she’d gotten into the game herself.”

“Sabera is also an MI6 agent?” I can barely contain myself.

Westwig shakes his head. “She didn’t work for the Brits, but for us.

Sabera approached the US embassy with her language skills.

In turn, they recommended her to the US military.

Though very quickly, the powers that be recognized she had an even more interesting and valuable skill. She was a natural-born cryptanalyst.”

I blink my eyes several times: “A code breaker?”

“She created ciphers, cracked ciphers, invented new ciphers,” Westwig explains. “The people we talked to said they’d never seen anything like it. She could remember almost anything, and seemingly recognize complex patterns in a single glance. Her skills quickly became the stuff of legend.”

Daryl gives me a meaningful glance. Suddenly the condition of the townhouse walls made much more sense. Sabera wasn’t just a linguist. She was a riddle master. Meaning…?

“Hang on a second,” I interject. “If Sabera was working for the US military, why wasn’t she evacuated when Kabul fell? Or on your radar screen now? You said you had no previous knowledge of her.”

Westwig sighs heavily. Kurtz gives up the ghost.

“Which would be the second detail Sabera omitted. She had been working for the army’s military intelligence corps. Until fourteen months later, a fellow cryptanalyst found an error in one of the messages she decoded. Further review revealed several more mistakes.”

“She wasn’t the wunderkind everyone supposed?”

Kurtz arches a brow. Waits.

My eyes go round as a second explanation comes to me: “They thought it was intentional. Like she was a double agent or something?”

“Let’s go with ‘or something.’ The errors were random enough she could pass them off as slipups.

But by then, doubt in her skills had turned into suspicion of her motives.

She was officially dismissed. No one would tell me anything more on the subject.

Then again, military intelligence never likes to admit when they’ve been less than intelligent. ”

Kurtz rolls his eyes, while Westwig nods in agreement.

I sit back, more flummoxed than ever. “So basically, Sabera’s mother was a spy for MI6. Her daughter knew, but no one else. Then Sabera approaches the US military to offer her services in decoding. Except maybe she wasn’t really there to help? She had another motive entirely? But what?”

Kurtz spreads his hands. “No one would comment.”

“But maybe she was up to something,” I try on. “Which earned her some enemies. Who may have then followed her to Tucson? Four years later?”

The men go from shrugging to open skepticism. Yeah, I can’t exactly blame them for that.

“You said someone with a ‘British-adjacent’ accent was looking for Sabera,” Westwig speaks up. “What did you mean by that?”

“That’s the problem; we’re not certain. The witness was a young boy.

According to him, the man who tried to kidnap Zahra Ahmadi sounded like he had a British accent, except not exactly.

I was thinking maybe Australian? Or maybe,” now that I think about it more, “South African? Would a South African have a reason to be pursuing an Afghan refugee?” I inquire.

More exchanged looks.

“Some of the best mercs in the world,” Westwig comments.

“And they’ve long been interested by Afghanistan,” Kurtz comments. “Given the mining potential.”

“Mining potential?”

“South Africa is one of the top mining countries. From diamonds to chromium, if it’s in the ground, they can get it out.

Which makes the South Africans very keen on Afghanistan, which is sitting atop some of the largest mineral-rich deposits in the world.

Copper, iron, lithium, coal, gold, gemstones.

You name it, they got it. And then there’s the matter of rare earth elements—REEs. ”

“Which everyone wants,” Westwig adds. “Especially to reduce dependence on the Chinese.”

“But what does that have to do with Sabera Ahmadi?” I ask in total confusion.

“I don’t know that it does.” Westwig shrugs.

I feel ready to tear out my hair. Instead, I give up completely and rise to standing. Fascinating family legacy aside, learning Sabera’s mother’s past work isn’t helping me with the present circumstance. After another second, Daryl pushes out of his own chair.

“One last question,” I say as we turn toward the door. “Sabera’s mother’s MI6 handler. Did you find him?”

“We found her.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“We can make you the same deal we made Sabera: we’ll pass along your name to her. As for what happens after that…”

“Fair enough.”

“You’ll keep us posted on Sabera?” Kurtz requests.

“Sure. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Sabera doesn’t just create riddles, she’s become one. And I’ll be damned if I can decode what she’s gonna do next.”