“Hmm, good one.” He scratched his head and smiled again. “I have no idea.”
She supposed it was good that he didn’t know the answer to that one.
Raising his voice, he called out, “Avery. Some help, please.”
Avery had dropped her attitude since their little bonding episode at the house, and while it wasn’t as pleasant as shopping with her best girlfriend, Jess almost enjoyed learning the simple method of wearing the white hijab Avery selected to cover her hair, and the long-sleeved black abaya over whatever she wanted to wear beneath it. It was lighter-weight than she’d expected, and not nearly as full as she feared, going a long way toward imparting that elegant look she was supposed to achieve.
She stood on tiptoe to see as much as she could in the plane’s tiny bathroom mirror. “I thought it was going to be more loose and shapeless,” she said.
Avery tilted her head from her position at the open lavatory door, studying Jess from the back. “Most of them are. But you are high class and confident, and your husband is proud of his beautiful wife. This cut is high fashion. Speaking of which, where are your rings?”
She pulled them out and slipped the diamond-encrusted bands onto her finger. Between the clothing and the rings she felt disguised, as if she’d become an entirely different person.
She looked at Avery’s military-style khakis and shirt. Even with her fake tan and newly darkened hair, she didn’t look Middle Eastern. “What about you?”
“I’ll be in an abaya and hijab at first, too, covering my short hair and making me just your anonymous companion. First thing is to scout the city and see if our assumptions about an island in the Nile might be true. Then Kyle, Mitch, and I will scout out the street scene and try to locate Wally’s usual contacts to see if we can figure out where he went and who he met with. You and Tyler will work on figuring out what his story represents.”
The familiar panic hit her again. “But I don’t know any more than you do.”
Avery squeezed her hand. “You think you don’t. But we’re hoping when you get there, something you see or hear will click in your head. Something we probably wouldn’t understand, or else Wally would have just told us instead of involving you. Keep that in mind, Jess, it’s something you know about that we don’t.”
It wasn’t reassuring. They’d had to instruct her about everything. She knew nothing.
Brian’s voice came over the intercom, announcing that they were making their approach to Cairo. Jess returned to her seat, passing Donovan who had his head next to Kyle’s and Mitch’s as they bent over a map. He glanced up, then abandoned any pretense of interest in the map. The others followed his gaze.
She turned a circle, hands at her side, giving them all a good view. “So what do you think?”
“Perfect,” Kyle pronounced.
“Absolutely,” Mitch agreed, as the two of them turned back to the map.
Donovan still watched wordlessly, making her a bit nervous. “How do I look?”
“Exactly as Ahmed Hassan’s wife should look to the rest of the world,” he told her, his expression and voice serious. “Untouchable.”
It should have been reassuring. She sat down and fastened her seat belt, her budding sense of adventure crushed beneath an overwhelming feeling of disappointment.
Untouchable. It wasn’t how she wanted Tyler Donovan to see her.
Chapter Nine
Donovan was silently thankful for the black abaya. It didn’t make Jess any less feminine or desirable—his hands had already noted the curves of her body and his mouth remembered the taste of her kiss, and he wanted more of both—but he was familiar enough with the Islamic world that the all-encompassing garment worked as it should, marking her as a woman he was not permitted to be familiar with. No matter how much he wanted to reignite that flame he’d accidentally kindled at the house in Chicago, he had to keep his hands to himself. She was off-limits, another man’s wife as long as they were in public. He ground his teeth in annoyance at their cover story.
The bribe he passed to a particular customs official was probably unnecessary as far as their papers went. Jess’s passport was a perfect fake, and the rest of the team was legitimate. But the slip of paper bearing the number of a private bank account ensured that none of the customs officials got too thorough when checking the plane’s cargo hold, where they might find the hidden compartment packed with guns and ammunition. It was the only reason they stopped in Cairo first instead of going directly to Luxor, where Omega did not have a customs official on their payroll.
Jess looked a bit nervous, but played her part well and without calling attention to herself. That was all they needed. That, and whatever memory Wally had counted on Jess recalling that would reveal the meaning of his allegorical story.