CHAPTER 3
Moves and Countermoves
Hardison led them past the market and into the twisting alleys of the Medina. Quinn slowed a little and they all turned to watch him.
"None of you smell it?" Quinn asked with his eyes still closed.
"Oh, I smell all kinds of things." Hardison shuddered. "But if you've found some particular nastiness, I'm not sure I want to know."
"Is it the same thing you picked up in the hotel?" Eliot walked a little closer to Quinn but still wasn't picking up anything unusual.
Quinn nodded.
"Is it stronger in any direction?" Eliot watched Quinn who seemed enthralled.
Quinn pointed to his left at a small shop.
Eliot moved past Quinn and headed into the shop.
A moment later they all heard him over their earbuds. "There's a door that leads to a wider back alley."
Quinn waited by the door keeping an eye on the alleyway they were in. Once Parker and Hardison were safely inside, he followed them into the shop.
There was a young man behind a long counter who kept an eye on them but didn't seem to be alarmed by anything they were doing. Quinn nodded at the boy as he followed his pack out the opposite door.
"You guys smelled it in the shop, right?" Quinn asked as the door closed behind him.
"Yah, I smelled it. You're right someone who spends time in that shop isn't human." Eliot scowled.
"What are you looking for?" Hardison asked as he watched Eliot wandering in circles around the alley.
"I smell Sophie." Eliot shoved a crate to the side.
"What?" Quinn looked around the alley.
"That perfume that she wears?" Hardison closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. "That high-end stuff that smells like lighter fluid?"
"It's a very…
distinctive smell." Parker and Eliot finished together.
Quinn frowned as he watched Eliot and Hardison search for a moment. "What do you think you're going to find?"
"This." Hardison held up the bent remains of a cell phone.
"And what are you going to do with that?" Quinn looked face to face, and they all seemed to know something he didn't. "What?"
"I'm hoping that the phone still has the last audio clip stored." Hardison was looking into the cracked part of the phone body to see if he could assess internal damage. "Let's see if we can find Nate's phone, just in case I can't get this one to work the way I hope."
Eliot shook his head. "I didn't catch Nate's scent on anything here." He gestured around the alley.
"Let me try." Quinn looked around the alley. "You said that they carry your scent like any pack member would, right?"
"Right." Eliot didn't think that it mattered. He knew what Nate and Sophie smelled like and if he couldn't pick up Nate's scent, he didn't know how Quinn would do it. Especially since Quinn hadn't been around Nate in the last eight years.
"Okay. Let me give it a try." He made a shooing gesture to move them farther down the alley.
Eliot shrugged and they all started to move in the direction that Quinn had indicated. Quinn put a hand out and stopped Eliot. "Just a second." He pulled Eliot into a hug.
At first Eliot was caught a little off guard and he would have pulled away, but he could hear and feel Quinn sniffing along the back of his neck. After a brief moment Quinn let Eliot go and stepped back with a sneeze.
Eliot shrugged and resettled his shirt as he headed for the end of the alley with the others.
"What was that about?" Parker asked when Eliot got close.
"Scent loading." Eliot smirked at the confused look on Hardison's face. "When you are tracking something by scent it helps to have a strong fresh scent to compare to as you encounter scents that might be similar or old."
Parker leaned a little toward Eliot and he chuffed a laugh as he pulled her into a sideways hug and kissed her temple before letting her go. He knew she'd been trying to sniff him and just hadn't bothered with subtlety. "It's not something a human can do very well. Humans compare scents to memories of scents, but memories can be swayed by time or other influences. A dog or a werewolf can simultaneously compare scents not just memories."
"Why does he think he can find something that you didn't?" Hardison watched as Quinn moved up the alley.
"He seems to have a better sense of smell than me. You're faster than me. Parker will probably outshine us all." Eliot smiled while he watched Quinn work. "Pretty soon I'll have nothing to stay ahead of you guys with."
"Cooking."
"Music."
"Fighting."
"Grumpy wolf faces."
"The hair."
Eliot smirked as they took turns listing things. "Can it."
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The brothers had been fairly sure that their plan had worked. Koré had written the letter to her father, she'd cried a lot, and both brothers had felt very guilty over that. But all three of them had agreed on the plan. And for a little while it looked like it had worked.
Then the American tourists from the third floor went missing. Rumors had flown through the hotel and the police that handled tourist's issues had come and searched the room.
Koré had been able to make a few calls and her suspicions had been confirmed. Her father had taken the tourists because he believed they were werewolves. She had been debating with herself and with the brothers about what to do about the tourists.
Koré didn't want two innocent tourists to be harmed because of her, and Bouda had tried to assure her that it wasn't her fault. Since none of them had ever actually seen a werewolf before, how were they supposed to have known that the tourists really were werewolves?
It had been nine uneasy days since the tourists had gone missing when another set of Americans showed up. These four carried the same scent as the first two and Malik was sure that one way or another, they would find out that Malik and Bouda were responsible for the first two going missing. He'd left his cleaning cart in a closet and ran from the hotel. He'd sprinted through the streets along his brother's usual route.
He was half a kilometer from the college campus when he finally spotted Bouda. He'd run until he couldn't breathe, until he thought he might faint. He grabbed Bou's shoulder when he got close, nearly knocking the yoke for the tea off of Bou's shoulders. "Bou, Bou they're…" He gasped trying to catch his breath.
"Is it Koré? Did her father find her?!" Bou gripped Malik by the upper arms.
Malik shook his head. "Werewolves. There are more werewolves at the hotel." His chest was still heaving. "They… They smell the same… Same pack."
Bouda's eyes went round, and he looked back even though there was no way to see the hotel from here.
"What are we going to do?" Malik clung to his older brother.
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Quinn was able to find Nate's phone and wallet but not Sophie's wallet. "I hope your little techno thing works on Sophie's phone because it's not gonna work on Nate's." he held out what he had found. The screen was gone and there was very little left inside the metal body of the phone. The wallet hadn't fared much better with only Nate's ID but no cards or cash.
"Damn, I can't believe you found any of it." Hardison looked at what was left of Nate's phone.
"Now can we get food?" Parker leaned around Hardison's arm.
"Sure darlin'." Eliot gave her a half smile.
Hardison tucked away all the pieces into his bag, even though he didn't think they'd be useful. Lacing his fingers with Parkers he took a deep breath. "So what kind of food are you in the mood for?"
Quinn hung back with Eliot as they followed Hardison and Parker down the alley. "You aren't curious about whatever's been frequenting the shop back there?"
"Sure. But it's not important yet." Eliot tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. "If that changes, we can always come back."
They made their way to an area that had several food stands and everyone ordered their fill. Hardison and Parker continued to lead the way back to their hotel, but they were no longer holding hands as Parker had bought such a massive amount of food that Hardison was having to hold things for her.
"You sure Parker isn't a werewolf?" Quinn asked Eliot as he eyed the teetering stack of food Hardison was balancing for Parker.
Eliot snorted. "She eats like one. Although this is nothing compared to her in the cereal aisle at the grocery store. And I can tell you it's best to steer clear if she's been into the chocolate."
Quinn laughed around his bite of kabob.
Eliot's attention was suddenly caught by a woman with dark wavy hair. From her clothes and her body language she was definitely a tourist and for a split-second Eliot thought he recognized her. The woman laughed at something and turned to the man on her other side and Eliot blinked and focused back on the walkway ahead of him.
"What? Did you see something?" Quinn turned a quick circle to see if he spotted anything.
"No. It was nothing." Eliot moved a little quicker to close the distance between them and Hardison and Parker.
~~o0o~~
After their ad-hoc meal as they had walked through the market, they wasted little time heading back to their hotel.
"What does Hardison think he's going to get out of a broken cell phone?" Quinn asked Eliot, as he wiped his fingers on a napkin.
"You'd be surprised." Eliot shrugged as he took another bite of a kabob.
"You know that phones have active listening software, right?" Hardison asked as he turned around to talk to them while he walked backwards.
"Uhm, maybe." Quinn shrugged.
Hardison rolled his eyes. "Anytime you tell your phone to look something up or call someone you are using that software. It couldn't respond to commands if it wasn't listening for a keyword like its name." Hardison staggered a little when Parker pulled on his arm to stop him from walking into a stall that was in the path. He turned back around but kept talking. "So the software is always listening so it can respond to voice commands. I'm hoping that there is enough of the circuit board left that I can retrieve the last soundbite the phone recorded."
"What are the odds of it recording something other than the sound of someone stomping on it?"
"Slim." Hardison shrugged. "You got a better lead we could follow?"
Quinn smirked. "Not without shaking down the shop owners where we found the phones."
"That's not off the table but we'll see if we get something off the phone first." Eliot inhaled the scent of heat and sand and people.
The four of them made their way to Hardison and Parker's room to see what Hardison could do with the broken phone.
Hardison held his phone near the card reader on the door for a moment before they all heard the click of the lock releasing.
"How come our phones don't do that?" Quinn looked from the card reader to Hardison.
"'Cause you didn't ask." Hardison smirked. "Gimme yer phone and I'll fix it." Hardison held his hand out as he walked into his room.
As they walked in Eliot noticed the tall four-poster bed with its thin muslin curtains. The bed had the same white comforter with red satin blanket and matching sheets, that had no doubt been artistically folded before Parker had bounced all over the bed. The room had the same plush rugs but instead of leather chairs there were two couches set up to make a comfortable sitting area. The coffee table between the couches was buried under Hardison's equipment.
Quinn sat at the end of one of the couches closest to the door. He ran a hand through his hair and seemed to relax in the air conditioning. Eliot sat at the opposite end of the other couch where he could keep an eye on the door and his back to the rest of the room.
Hardison noticed the choices the hitters made when it came to defensible seating and smiled a little in amusement as he grabbed a laptop from the coffee table and moved to the far end of the room. Parker followed him over and boosted herself up to sit on the windowsill. She watched until Quinn drew Eliot into conversation before, she whispered into Hardison's ear.
Almost too quiet for even a werewolf to hear. "You can't blame Quinn for wanting a seat close to an exit. He's been alone a long time. He's not used to having people."
Hardison quirked an eyebrow at her and whispered just as quietly. "He's had a pack even longer than we have. That man hasn't been alone in over ten years." He carefully reattached a couple of tiny wires on the circuit board and inspected the rest of it for other damage. The battery was gone, and he hoped that had happened when the phone was destroyed so that it wouldn't have had a chance to replace useful data with the sounds of an empty alleyway.
"I get the feeling he was owned by his Alpha, but he wasn't…." Parker blew out a breath while she tried to find the words to explain the picture in her head. "It's like working for one of those giant companies instead of like us, where we're more than just a team."
"I see what you mean babe." He turned his head a little and kissed the side of her nose. He could feel the rumble against his back that told him she'd giggled at him even if she hadn't made a sound.
"You two gonna keep whispering back there or are ya gonna get to work?" Eliot asked without turning to look at them.
"Cranky werewolf." Hardison muttered. His hands flew over his keyboard once he had the phone hooked up. "Okay. Here's what we've got." He hit a button and let the sound clip play from the computer speakers.
"…yidu Elhadad would be pleas…"
There was a crackle that distorted the start of the clip and a fuzzy staticy sound that cut through the end of the clip. The static turned to a shuffling sound just before the clip ended.
"The file was corrupted so I'm afraid that's all there was." Hardison frowned at the circuit board.
"Play that last part again." Eliot had his eyes closed.
"There wasn't nothin' but static at the end." Hardison shrugged.
"Dammit Hardison just play it." Eliot opened one eye briefly.
Hardison rolled his eyes and played the clip again. After the few words that were understandable Hardison turned up the sound. The static and shuffle noises repeated.
"There! Did you hear it?" Eliot asked.
"Hear what?" Hardison frowned at his computer and then Eliot.
"There was a beep just before the clip ended."
Quinn looked questioningly at Eliot. "What does it matter if there was a beep?"
"It sounded like the detectors they use at security checkpoints." Eliot looked from Quinn to Hardison. "Neither of you heard it?"
"I heard it. It just didn't mean anything to me." Hardison shrugged.
"I heard it too but I couldn't have guessed what it came from." Quinn looked at Hardison. "Play it again."
"Just a second. Let me scrub it a little." A moment later a beep played across the speakers.
"What does it mean?" Quinn asked Eliot.
"It means our kidnappers have money. Those scanners aren't cheap or easy to get." Parker leaned back in the window. "So it wasn't a kidnapping for ransom because they don't need the money. So what did they take them for? They haven't hurt them. Nate and Sophie aren't scared…" Parker closed her eyes while she thought.
"Let's see if we can find out who Elhadad is and we'll ask him." Eliot slouched down and let his head rest on the back of the couch. It had been a long time since he'd slept.
"That's not quite as bad as trying to track down a guy with the name of Smith back home but for around here it's still not awesome." Hardison complained as he started working through databases in his computer.
They all drifted into their own thoughts for a moment and the only sound was the clack and clatter of Hardison's keyboard.
"Well here's an interesting bit of trivia for you…" Hardison's gaze hadn't moved from his screen. "Did you know that Elhadad means the blacksmith?"
"Really?" Quinn leaned forward. "So maybe Will was right about the blacksmiths."
"Could just be a name." Hardison offered.
Eliot snorted.
"Sure and Nate and Sophie are just on vacation." Parker slid from the window. "I want chocolate and you guys should eat some more. I can tell you're hungry." Parker used the room phone to call down to the front desk and place an order. After her call she wandered the room picking up knick-knacks and decorations and putting them back. Eventually she settled again in the window behind Hardison.
A few minutes later a quiet knock was tapped against the door. "Room service." The voice was too indistinct to tell if it was a man or a woman.
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Nate was beginning to go crazy. He was sure of it. The heat was making him cranky, the food had been good but repetitious, but it was the boredom that was finally going to get him in the end, he was sure of it.
"Nate, you're doing it again." Sophie commented from her spot on the bed.
Nate stopped drumming his fingers and tried to relax back into his chair. "Full moon is tomorrow night. What do you think the odds are that he'll let us go with an apology and a ride back to town?"
Sophie snorted. "Something about icicles in hell springs to mind." Sophie turned onto her side to face him. "I'm hoping you have a plan for that."
Nate shrugged. "You know me, two or three plans. But I might die of boredom well before then."
A knock sounded at their door. "Come in." Nate called and sat forward in his chair.
"Alsayidu Elhadad, sent me to ask if you would join him for a game of chess." Kassem smiled as he stepped into the room.
"Of course." Nate rose.
Kassem glanced at Sophie but spoke to Nate. "Alsayidu Elhadad has also extended an invitation to visit his personal library if your wife would be interested."
Sophie straightened the skirt of her borrowed clothing as she stood. "That would be lovely."
They followed Kassem out the door and down the hall. He paused by a set of double doors that were held open by guards. "You are welcome to borrow whatever you like for the remainder of your stay here." Kassem spoke to Sophie and waited until she entered the library before continuing down the hall with Nate.
Kassem led him to a small porch with a shaded pergola surrounded by a variety of potted plants. A chess set was arranged on a table in the center and Elhadad stood to the side.
"Thank you for joining me Mr. Ford." Elhadad extended both fists.
Nate tapped Elhadad's left fist and Elhadad turned his hand over revealing a white pawn. Nate seated himself on the side of the table set up with the white pieces. He noticed that there wasn't a clock set up near the board, so he anticipated a slow game with time to talk. He waited until Elhadad was seated. "King's pawn to e4."
"King's pawn to e5." Elhadad smiled as he matched Nate's opening move.
"Pawn to f4." Nate slid a second pawn.
"The King's Gambit? A risky move wouldn't you say?" Elhadad took Nate's pawn.
"What is life without risk?" Nate slid his bishop to c4.
"You are right." Elhadad slid his queen to h4. "Sometimes one must be bold to get what he wants. Check."
Nate slid his king to safety in f1. "But not everything is that easy."
Elhadad moved a pawn to b5, and Nate took it with his bishop. Elhadad countered by moving his knight to f6, obviously targeting Nate's pawn on e4. Nate countered with his own knight to f3, targeting Elhadad's queen on h4.
"The queen is more powerful than the king but sometimes more vulnerable since she ventures out further on the board." Nate waited while Elhadad weighed his options.
"Is that what happened? Did my daughter venture too close to you?"
"I'm quite sure I've never met your daughter. If she is missing I and my team would be glad to help you find her."
Elhadad moved his queen to h6. "I'm sure that I'll be able to protect my own."
Nate moved a pawn to d3. Elhadad moved his knight to h5 and Nate matched him by moving his knight to h4. Elhadad brought his queen back into play on g5. Nate risked his knight on f5, anticipating that Elhadad wouldn't take the obvious move. It paid off and the game continued.
What made you think we had anything to do with your daughter?" Nate asked while he debated the merit of his next move.
"My daughter will be the next leader of our clan and as such she has been granted an unusual amount of freedom." Elhadad steepled his fingers and weighed his next words the same way that Nate was considering his next move.
Nate finally moved his king to e2.
"She has been spending a lot of time in Marrakech." Elhadad moved his knight to a6. "Ten days ago, I received a letter telling me that she would not be returning. The letter told me she would be joining a pack."
Nate noticed a red gleam flash across Elhadad's eyes, and he was sure it wasn't a trick of the sun. He moved his knight to g7. "I can assure you that I don't know anything about that. Check."
Elhadad all but slammed his king into d8. "My best trackers followed her trail to the hotel where you were staying."
Nate moved his queen to f6. "Coincidence. We came here because my wife is fond of Marrakesh. I don't know your daughter."
Elhadad took Nate's queen with his knight. "You have told me you are not a werewolf, but you don't smell human. You smell like a werewolf."
Nate leaned back in his chair with a sigh. "A very close friend of ours is a werewolf. It's his scent you smell. He tells me that he can smell a lie. I would think that other werewolves could as well. Can't you tell that I'm telling you the truth?"
"I am not a werewolf, and it isn't the bultungin way to take words or even scents at face value. Time will prove things out."
"Yes. It will prove me right. Check and mate." Nate moved his bishop to e7.