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blame him because he couldn't return her love? It wasn't his fault that he loved Margo and still
considered himself bound to her by invisible bonds. It wasn't fair to make him feel guilty because of
something he couldn't help.
She turned back to him, her eyes wide and sad and apologetic. "I'm sorry," she said before she lost her
nerve. "You did what you could to protect me, and I'm grateful."
He was surprised at her change of attitude. He stared down at her intently, curiously.
She forced a smile to her lips. "There's absolutely nothing to worry about now," she assured him. "I'm
on the pill, and thanks to you, Philippe Sabon won't ever be a threat to me again. We don't owe each
other a thing. We're quits."
That was only half true, but why bother him with something that might never happen? If it did...well,
she could lose herself somewhere in the world and he'd never have to know.
"Quits?" he asked, and his voice had roughened.
"We'll get out of this," she said with conviction. "When we do, I'll go away to college
and you can get a quiet divorce. No one even has to know that we were ever married."
This was moving too fast. He wanted to slow down, to look back, to think about this muddle they were
in. She was running for the border and he hadn't even looked at the evidence yet. He scowled and
searched for the right words to express what he was feeling.
But before he could speak, there was a movement aboard the ship and he saw Tate Winthrop coming
down the gangplank, grinning from ear to ear.
"Comrades," he told his companions, "we have friends in the strangest places, it seems!"
He gestured over his shoulder at the man coming down the gangplank. It was a tall, strangely familiar
man. When he got closer, Brianne recognized nun. It was Mufti, one of her captors!
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Chapter Ten
Mufti grinned at Brianne. "You are surprised, yes?"
"I am surprised, yes!" she parroted. "What are you doing here?"
"I am spying for the government of Salid," he told her, with a flash of yellowed teeth.
"That's the neighboring country that this attack is going to be blamed on," Tate informed her. "We
have to get Mufti out because he's just become our star witness." He didn't tell her the rest of the story,
that Mufti had been captured and almost assassinated by one of Tate's men before he threw himself on
their mercy and told them who he was and why he
was in the compound. His story, easily verified with the appropriate authorities in Salid via
shortwave, panned out and Mufti became an unexpected ally. Tate had sent him ahead to find the
captain of this boat and make the travel
arrangements.
Tate spotted the captain coming quickly down the gangplank. He excused himself and went to meet the
man. There was a brief conversation and the captain ran back up onto the ship, shouting orders and
waving his hands.
"He just had a shortwave call. Sabon's mercenaries are on their way here," Tate said quickly. "The
captain says he can't possibly sail today, anyway. He'll wait for us tomorrow, but we have to find a
place to lie low for the
night."
"Where?" Pierce asked, glowering as he looked around them at the busy port. "Even in this garb,
we're not going to look like natives. We can't just book into a hotel and blend in."
' "That wasn't what I had in mind,'' Tate told him. He motioned to his companions. "Mufti has relatives
near here, in a tiny village that's off the beaten track. I've got an idea."
Two hours later, Brianne was sweating and calling Tate vicious names in her mind as she
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Diana Palmer
Once in Paris
toiled to milk a cow in a makeshift stable of adobe and straw a few miles out of town in a village that
looked as if it had remained unchanged since the first century A.D. The men were busily pitching hay
and cleaning stalls. Mufti, his graying hair covered by the same wound cloth as his companions, was
carrying sacks of grain from a dilapidated truck into the stable. They weren't getting paid for all this
labor, but they were going to have a place to sleep on the clean hay in the loft.
Brianne's derriere was still smarting from the camel ride to this isolated village where Mufti had led
them. It was the last place Sabon and his men would think to find them. No doubt he was still scouring
the seaport, looking for them. All they had to do was stay hidden for the night and sneak back into
town and onto the boat in the morning.
Presuming that they weren't discovered first.
As Brianne struggled with her first attempt at milking, Sabon's quiet words about the plight of his
people came back to her. She looked around at the primitive way the people in these outlying areas
lived and felt guilty for her silk dresses and leather sandals back home. The
poorest family in America lived ten times better than this, she thought. The women looked much
older than their chronological ages. The wear and tear on them from this sort of existence was
obvious.
The men were stooped and malnourished, and most of the young women were bearing babies on their
backs as they went about their chores. The lack of proper clothing was painfully obvious. Some of the
young children had the trademark bloated little bellies that denoted lack of adequate food. The older
ones drew water from a deep well with a metal pail, which, according to one of the women Mufti
translated for them had been a gift from the West. This village had its own metal pail and didn't have
to use the animal skin bag that most villages did.
Brianne marveled at the pleasure such a trivial thing gave to these poor people. She marveled as well
at their acceptance of the lives they led. No one seemed to complain or blame anyone for the poverty
that was so obvious. Nor did they seem to mind that just across the border in a rich neighboring
country was a city modern enough to compete with any in Europe. Many villagers had gone there, she
learned,
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Diana Palmer
only to return with crushed hopes of finding prosperity. People who lived under primitive conditions
had no computer or literacy skills to better themselves in a city. The very lack of education defeated
them in the end, just as Sa-bon had said.
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