The Kafir Project

by Lee Burvine

  Morgan didn't know if what she was feeling at that moment was genuine optimism or just excitement. In truth, she looked forward to the next confrontation. This time she wouldn't be chasing someone with a head start on a dark roof, or watching helplessly through a Plexiglas wall, or limping stunned from a car wreck.

  This time she would be armed and ready. Filled with a cool and calculating fury.

  She'd been betrayed by agents in her own department. People she cared deeply about had been threatened, attacked, and injured.

  They wanted Kazemi and all the rest of it? Fine. That would be the bait. Let them come. She was going on the offensive now.

  And they were all going down.

  CHAPTER 45

  REES FELT SICK. Every time he opened his eyes, the room spun crazily. Closing them didn't help much either.

  He had been abducted. That much was clear. Sometime after their car was rammed.

  He was seated, bound and gagged. Something like a washcloth or handkerchief wadded up and stuffed into his mouth. He felt his gorge rise at one point and had the terrifying thought that if he vomited now, he would probably choke to death.

  A cheap motel room. His best guess at the location. Small. Grubby. It had a smell like scented cleaning products and old socks.

  He'd been duct-taped to a sturdy, wooden chair. He could see a set of flocked, olive and brown drapes in front of him. Closed right now, but bright rays of sunlight cracked in around the edges.

  He couldn't turn his head far enough to see behind him at all. But he could hear someone moving back there. It sounded like just one person. It had been quiet for a while.

  Then, whoever was back there started moving again.

  He walked into view.

  It was the man who crashed the BMW into Louis's car. A big man. Six foot three or four. He had a broad face, the nose slightly hooked. Brown skin. Dark, thick brows and extraordinary eyes. Emerald green.

  He smiled in a way that made Rees think of a doctor or dentist greeting a client. "Ah, you are awake already. Feeling dizzy, though. Mmm, fuzzy. Correct?"

  Rees nodded carefully. The man's accent sounded Middle Eastern.

  "We can take care of that," he continued. "We want you clear-headed."

  The green-eyed man turned away and bent down over a low coffee table. Rees couldn't see what he was doing. His body, broad like his face, blocked the view. There was a toiletry kit on the table down there. Next to that a gun. And another weapon. Maybe a Taser. Rees had never seen one up close.

  The man turned back around holding a hypodermic syringe.

  Rees cried out involuntarily. The sound leaked through the gag as a muffled, high-pitched note.

  The man smiled warmly. "No need to worry, Dr. Rees. This is not dangerous. Not dangerous at all. I have here only a cocktail of stimulants and certain cognitive enhancers. As I said, we want your head clear. In any case, I think you will find this quite pleasant."

  The man approached Rees, holding the syringe daintily, pointing it upward.

  Panicked, Rees tried to rock in the chair. He felt the windings of duct tape pull against his ankles, arms and neck. He could shake the chair, but couldn't turn it away from the needle.

  "You don't want to make this difficult." A note of concern now in the man's voice. "Here is why. If you won't be still and let me inject you there, in the metacarpal vein," he dipped the needle toward Rees's wrist, "then I will instead inject you in the eye. You understand? One or the other. It is your choice. A free choice."

  He hadn't said it with any malice. More like someone offering you the option of Coke or Pepsi.

  He continued, saying, "I am making you this choice not because the eye is such a good candidate for an injection site. It is in fact a very poor one, as I'm sure you know. I do this because I'm very confident of your selection. So, which shall it be, hmm? The wrist, yes?"

  Rees tried to nod with enough amplitude so that the man could distinguish it from all the fear-shakes he had going on.

  "Yes, I thought so. Good. Very good."

  Rees watched the injection process. Not painful. But the green-eyed man didn't disinfect the site first, and Rees counted that as a bad sign. Something perversely meticulous about this guy. If infection didn't concern him at all, Rees thought he knew why.

  He began to feel it, whatever it was, in a matter of seconds. Rees had never touched recreational drugs, afraid of what they might cost him cognitively. But now he knew what they meant by a rush.

  He had a sense of motion, of hurtling through space. He sucked in a deep breath through his nose. It felt like strength flowed in rather than air. As if pure energy were filling his lungs.

  Moments later, transported via millions of alveoli, the power began singing through his capillaries, engorging every cell in his body, turning them all into glowing corpuscles of light.

  A clean, cold wind swept through his head at a thousand miles an hour, blowing away the grit and dust of confusion, scouring and honing the leading edge of his mind, until it was keen enough to cut bones.

  You've made a mistake here, Rees thought with some satisfaction. You're supercharging my best weapon. You didn't want to do that.

  The green-eyed man watched Rees closely and smiled again. "Yes. You see? As I predicted, you enjoy this part. And now, I am going to remove the gag. You may wish to shout or call out for help. I will tell you I have purchased the adjoining rooms. But still the sound might carry. And so again I give you a choice."

  From his shirt pocket, Rees's captor produced a silver pen and removed the black cap. Not a pen at all. An X-Acto knife, with a razor sharp blade. Rees's vision felt so heightened by the drugs, he imagined he could see the shining razor's stainless steel edge straight on. The neat rows of iron and carbon atoms vibrating and dancing.

  "If you cooperate and keep quiet until you're asked to speak," the man replaced the cap on the razor tip of the little hobby knife, "this shall live here in my pocket. Are we agreed? Hmmm?"

  Rees's shaking and quavering had stopped. His body was composed of some high-tech material now, like billions of layers of graphene. He gave a single and very precise nod. Fine, we're agreed. And I'm going to get that knife too. Don't know how, but you can throw that into the bargain.

  "Very good." The man returned the hobby knife to his shirt pocket and stepped behind Rees.

  Rees felt hands unwinding the duct tape from over his lips and pulling it painfully away from his hair. He tried to work the stuffed piece of cloth out of his mouth with his tongue.

  The green-eyed man came back around in front of Rees and pulled it free. "There." He opened the wet and crumpled washcloth, folded it neatly, then laid it on the table next to the gun.

  "Who are...," Rees had to stop to clear his throat. "Who are you and what do you want?"

  "My name is Faraj. You have information that I have been paid to extract. There are various ways of doing this. Torture, as you may know, is not the most reliable."

  "If I don't have whatever you're asking for, I'll say anything to make you stop. So how do you tell the good data from the bad?"

  "Yes, precisely. You are an intelligent man. I know your work."

  "Really? Maybe we could have you on the show. There's plenty of science behind what you do, I'm sure. By the way, what exactly did you give me there?"

  "Since you're interested, something a bit like MDMA-which is rightly called ecstasy-but with a much shorter half-life. And also some nootropics. Tianeptine and a few others."

  "You could make a lot of money selling that on the street, I bet. What are they paying you, anyway? Maybe I can outbid them."

  Faraj frowned. "I'm afraid not. That is a matter of honor for me."

  "Ah. So you're a man of principles."

  Faraj's green eyes flashed. "I am aware you're jesting, but yes. Very much so. More than you can imagine. And as much as I would enjoy discussing this with you, I'm afraid we must now proceed to business."
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  "One quick question."

  Faraj showed him a tolerant smile, like you might for a child transparently stalling to delay his bedtime. "All right. One."

  "You're going to kill me, Faraj. And I bet that's your real name too. Anyway, I promise I won't believe anything you tell me to the contrary. About killing me, I mean."

  "That is very forthright of you."

  "Yes, well, like they say in ... medicamentum veritas. I think that's right. My Latin is terrible. And you've already explained why torture is not your best option."

  "Yes, quite so."

  "So if it isn't to save my life and it isn't to make the pain stop, why exactly am I going to cooperate here? You must have some excellent reason to expect that I will."

  "Just so. You have already said it yourself, hmmm? In your little wordplay just then. In drugs there is truth. You have been given something that allows you to think clearly and to remember well. That is important. But the drug combination is also disinhibiting."

  "A truth serum? Really? See, this stuff would be wonderful for the show. I have to be honest with you here-and this may just be the drugs talking-but I'm pretty sure I can still lie to you." Rees grinned. "Wow, how's that for a paradox, eh?"

  "Yes, with some subjects this is true. But this is also only the beginning. In part to assess your tolerance. Everyone is different. We don't want you dying on us just yet."

  "Oh, well thank you for that."

  "Also we are establishing a platform from which to begin the real work. There is one more drug to add to the cocktail. In small doses it is extremely short-acting."

  "Interesting. And what does this drug do?"

  Faraj had turned away again. When he turned back he had another syringe. He was loading this one with a red fluid from a small glass vial. He drew up a tiny amount.

  "That, I have found, is quite difficult to describe. Have you ever experienced DMT?"

  "Ah, no. Heard of it. Hallucinogen, right?"

  "Yes. A psychedelic. You will please be still again or..."

  "Or the eye, yes. I remember."

  Once again Faraj injected Rees. This time it stung a bit. Seconds passed. He felt ... nothing.

  No change at all.

  Perhaps he was immune to this drug's effects. Or maybe the dose was too small. There might be some advantage to be gained here. If he knew what the drug was supposed to do, he could pretend-

  Without warning the floor in front of him split in two.

  A dark and bottomless cavern yawned open, and a horrible stench spewed out, making him gag.

  The chair tipped forward.

  Rees fell in, screaming.

  CHAPTER 46

  DESPITE KNOWING THAT he might be minutes from his own death, Randolph Osborn felt strangely calm. He was armed, and that certainly helped.

  At the very least, the gun would prevent them from taking him alive. And though he'd be happy to avoid it, the prospect of dying didn't terrify Osborn.

  What these people might do to him if he were captured did.

  He was walking as well as he could, given his uneven legs, across the damp grass of an open field. Below the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. The gracefully arching, white-framed, glass structure up ahead looked like God's own greenhouse. Not a bad spot for the road to end, if that's how it all went down today. Not bad at all.

  As he approached the location he'd been given for the dead drop, Osborn had the gun in hand and ready, concealed within a wadded up green windbreaker.

  He picked his way past a group of youths playing hacky-sack. Nearby them a father held his son's feet as the boy giggled and attempted a handstand.

  He mused on how starkly indifferent life was to death. The world turns blithely on and on.

  Just without you.

  Amsel had fallen off a rooftop while attempting to escape arrest by the Israeli authorities. So the official story went. Black market antiquities smuggling, they said. At least he took two of the bastards with him.

  Behind Osborn, the hacky-sackers burst into laughter and applause over some exceptional run, he supposed. He didn't look back.

  He approached a side exit to the Conservatory of Flowers. An orientation point for the dead drop. Perhaps two hundred feet to go now.

  Close, very close to the end of all of it. One way or the other.

  He had stashed the leather valise that he brought from Jerusalem within a grove of eucalyptus trees several blocks away. Covered it up with leaves.

  He wasn't sure why. If he failed here, neither Kazemi nor anyone else would know where to find it.

  Perhaps he just didn't want the wrong people to have it. The contents were too important and too ... wonderful for evil men to possess. Better that what it held should be once again lost to the ages.

  Only steps away now from that exit door.

  Osborn looked around for anything that might tip him off to a stakeout. The thing was, he didn't know what that would be.

  A gardener with a suspicious bulge under his jacket?

  A homeless man with one of those curly, clear cords dangling from a radio earpiece?

  A new mother with a big green, military walkie-talkie in her stroller?

  He laughed out loud, and quickly stifled it. It wouldn't do to draw attention.

  Osborn reached the conservatory exit door, fairly sure he had the right one. From here, the dead drop would be approximately fifty feet west, behind a sprinkler control box.

  Finding the box presented no trouble at all. He looked around. Still no sign of anyone watching him. He knelt down on the wet grass, felt the water soak cool through his pants to his knees. A patch of dark brown soil behind the box looked freshly turned.

  Setting aside the windbreaker and gun, he dug in with both hands. The smell of rich, moist earth drifted up. Before long his fingertips brushed something hard. He found the edges and pried it up.

  It was a small, Tupperware container-muddy, but still well-sealed. Inside, a piece of paper, folded up square. It would have details for the rendezvous with Kazemi, and any important new developments.

  He resisted the impulse to open it right there. Instead, he quickly brushed the container off and thrust it into one of the windbreaker's pockets. He picked up the gun, and concealed that within the windbreaker as before.

  As he stood back up, Osborn half expected to see a dozen federal agents rushing in on him.

  What he saw was one man walking toward him. Middle-aged, white. Soft in body. Tall.

  Osborn began to walk toward the tall man. He needed to go in that direction, and anyway he didn't want the man out of sight behind him.

  He judged that the tall man would pass him maybe six feet away. There would be time to shoot if he made a sudden move. Osborn gripped the gun tighter under the windbreaker.

  He tried to keep his breath calm and even. If it was just this one man, he might have a chance. They could be underestimating him. Writing him off as a crippled academic. That would be their mistake.

  Osborn and the tall man made eye contact. Just a few steps away now.

  The tall man smiled. "Beautiful day for the park."

  Osborn returned the smile. "Yes."

  They passed each other.

  The tall man kept going.

  Osborn glanced back over his shoulder. The other man didn't turn around. Osborn walked steadily on.

  And that was that.

  No sign of anyone else nearby following or approaching. He felt his eyes begin to tear up. The stress, no doubt.

  He turned his mind to the long walk back to the eucalyptus grove, and the valise waiting there for him. In privacy, he could stop and read the note.

  He glanced behind one last time.

  The tall man had turned around. He was walking quickly toward Osborn, taking long strides.

  Beneath the windbreaker, Osborn cocked back the gun's hammer. He felt his heartbeat in his throat. He waited until he thought t
he man would be about ten feet behind him.

  With the gun still hidden from view, he spun around. I'll shoot him through the jacket, that way he won't try to dodge.

  The tall man must have seen something in Osborn's face. He froze where he stood.

  "I ... you dropped your wallet." He pointed behind himself. "Back there."

  Osborn kept his finger on the trigger. He tried to read the tall man's face.

  "I saw it on the grass," the man went on. "I recognized you from your driver's license photo. Maybe it fell from your jacket?" He held out a worn, black leather wallet toward Osborn.

  That was his wallet. He'd dropped it.

  Osborn accepted the wallet and apologized for appearing rude.

  The tall man understood he'd startled Osborn. He graciously offered that you really do have to be careful walking alone in a park these days, even in broad daylight.

  They both went on their separate ways.

  * * *

  AS HIS HEARTBEAT settled down to normal, Osborn made the trek back to the eucalyptus grove. He arrived about ten minutes later.

  The valise was gone.

  His first thought was that he'd picked the wrong grove. There were a lot of them around here. He quickly backtracked out to get an overlook of the whole area.

  Across a grassy field maybe forty yards away, a man with bushy, gray hair was walking into another stand of trees.

  He was carrying the valise.

  It wouldn't help to shout. That would only give him time to run.

  Osborn couldn't think of anything to do but follow in the faint hope that the man ahead of him would stop somewhere soon.

  He started across the field, and to his great surprise the other man had already stopped. He was standing within a copse of trees on the far side of the grass, still in view.

  The man's clothes were ragged and muddy. His hair and beard unkempt. Homeless. He probably lived in or around the park somewhere.

  Osborn had the gun tucked into the waistband of his pants under the windbreaker, which he was wearing now. He took it out and let the weapon drop by his side, out of view to the nearest street.