The Blowback Protocol: A Sam Jameson Thriller

by Emmerich, Lars

  Another sound snatched her attention. Sirens in the distance. They demanded a decision. In a flash, she made her choice.

  Sam had a rule about surviving extreme circumstances. Observe, orient, decide, and act—the famed “OODA Loop” hatched by an old fighter pilot named John Boyd. He was irascible, cocky, foul-mouthed, opinionated, and smart as hell, and Brock quoted him all the time. It had rubbed off on Sam. And those four words popped into her head with clockwork regularity whenever an exigent situation arose.

  Such as, for example, finding herself handcuffed and lying in a pool of someone else’s blood with a gaggle of unfriendly police headed her way at a rapid clip.

  Step one: remove those handcuffs. Not an easy task. The jerk who was riding shotgun had placed them on her, which meant the keys were in his pocket. A cage divided the backseat from the front, so there would be no crawling over the seat to reach the dead cop in the passenger seat. There were no door handles, at least not in the backseat, so she couldn’t let herself out.

  But as the attack had clearly demonstrated, the cruiser wasn’t protected by bulletproof glass. Sam clambered out of the foot well, earning a severe shoulder cramp in the process, and slid onto the backseat. A heavy, sweet, sickening metallic taste assaulted her mouth and nose as her movement disturbed the pooled blood covering the seat.

  She held her breath, clenched her teeth, and lay down across the seat. She felt her hair dampen with warm blood as her head contacted the vinyl. Her stomach turned, but she pressed on. No way was she going to place herself at the mercy of the Libyan cops again. She twisted her body and raised her legs, feet together, and steadied herself.

  Then she unleashed her best kick. Her feet hammered the window glass and both feet rocketed through. Sharp pain tore up her left calf and she grunted. Her leg had been cut, and she wondered how bad it was, but she didn’t have time to stop and check. The police sirens grew louder by the second.

  She kicked away the glass remaining in the window frame, shimmied forward feet-first, and wedged herself through the window. Tiny shards assaulted her legs and buttocks, leaving her body covered with dozens of scratches. She became high-centered, balanced on her waist atop the doorframe. Glass remnants dug into her midsection. “Goddammit,” she opined through gritted teeth.

  Two more mini-kicks propelled her body forward of the sticking point. Her heels fell to the earth outside the car, scattering shell casings left over from the assault. A strange contortion of her neck was required to avoid smashing her forehead on the doorframe as gravity dragged her body the rest of the way through the shattered window.

  She was free of the car, but a long way from out of the woods. Police lights reflected off nearby buildings and trees and they seemed to be converging from a couple of different directions. She was running out of time.

  She dashed around the back of the car, stumbling over the spent shell casings littering the ground. She nearly lost her balance as she rounded the car’s rear quarter panel. She caught herself with an awkward step and a sharp pain registered in her knee and hip. I’m getting too old for this.

  A siren’s wail grew suddenly louder. Sam looked toward the source. A police cruiser had rounded the corner, maybe a quarter-mile away. Sam cursed. Just seconds and the cops would be on her and they’d have a hell of a lot more on their minds than just seditious acts against the teachings of the prophet.

  Sam reached the passenger door, wheeled around, fumbled in the blind, and finally closed her fingers around the door handle. She gave a mighty tug. Her blood-slicked hands slipped from the handle.

  The police car drew nearer, now less than a block away, siren wailing.

  Sam regrouped, re-gripped, and pulled again. The latch gave way. The door hinge groaned. The dead man spilled halfway from the passenger seat, suspended in place by his shoulder harness.

  A second cop car appeared behind the first, and then a third siren wailed in the distance, this one coming from the opposite direction. Come on, she coached. Faster!

  Sam cursed, turned, bent forward, sat on the dead man’s lap. Her hands found slick gore, a hard leather belt, and soft, pudgy thighs.

  And a keychain in his pocket.

  “Goddammit!” she howled. She gripped the corner of his pocket with one hand, positioned her feet squarely on the ground below, leaned forward, and thrust her body upward. The fabric of the man’s pants gave way in a satisfying rrrip. The keys tumbled to the ground.

  Sam fumbled in the dirt and found the keys. She twisted around and liberated the dead cop’s service pistol from its holster, then crouched low and scrambled around the front of the car. Steam rose from the radiator, the aftermath of the car’s collision with the palm tree, and Sam took pains to avoid a burn.

  The first police car came to a halt on the road above the berm, joined a moment later by the second. There was no way on earth that Sam would escape. They would run her down in a heartbeat. She wondered how in the hell she would explain her predicament to a hostile Libyan police investigator. But she took off into the ravine, dripping blood along the sand. She kept her legs pumping, heading deeper into the gulley, searching for someplace to hide, but it was all desert sand and a few sparse palm trees.

  Gonna take a miracle, she thought.

  Just then, a thunderous explosion rocked the ground beneath her feet. A hot wave of overpressure knocked her over in a flash. Flying shards of twisted metal whistled overhead.

  Light and heat came from the road atop the berm. She turned to look. The two police cars were a smoldering ruin. Black flames billowed from their cabins. The third cruiser had stopped several hundred feet away.

  Car bomb? Rocket-propelled grenade? Improvised explosive device? Sam had no way of knowing, and she had no clue who she had to thank for the fortuitous turn of events.

  She didn’t linger to find out. She tightened her grip on the keys and scrambled to her feet.

  Then she ran.

  20

  A white American woman with red hair and tattered, blood-soaked clothing wasn’t exactly an inconspicuous sight in Tripoli, and it could no longer be accurately said that Sam was even in Tripoli. Outskirts would be generous. She was basically in the desert, well west of the Gargaresh District and Natan El Anwar’s flat, where the Libyan police had arrested her hours before. She had no idea what kind of justice the three police officers had in mind as they drove her to the boonies, but she imagined it wouldn’t have been terribly just.

  Her flight from the scene of the road ambush, which she had somehow miraculously escaped with only the tiniest of injuries, had taken her even further away from civilization. There was plenty of physical evidence at the scene of the assault to indicate someone had escaped the bloody police cruiser, and it would take a seven-year-old approximately seven seconds to figure out that the survivor had dashed off into the wilderness, away from the road. Sam knew she was on borrowed time. Someone would be looking for her.

  She took inventory. Short list. The Libyan police had confiscated everything in her possession, and she had only the stolen police sidearm she’d taken from the scene of the assault.

  She thought of the data she’d downloaded from Natan El Anwar’s cell phone. She hadn’t had time to find the data drive after the assault on the police cruiser, and she wouldn’t be able to set Dan loose on the spoils. She shook her head and cursed.

  Sam kept the afternoon sun on her right as she trudged through the desert, taking her south, further away from the coast and from the bloodbath she’d just survived. She was thirsty, bloody, sore, and several notches beyond fatigued, all of which meant that she wasn’t going to be able to walk very far or very fast, which motivated her to decide on a rather extreme course of action.

  She came upon a two-lane hardtop road. She stood on the shoulder of the eastbound lane. Seconds turned into minutes. No cars appeared. Sam began to fight despair. The most important ingredient in any survival situation was a positive attitude and Sam felt hers flagging. She couldn’t muster the ener
gy for an internal pep talk. Her thoughts kept returning to the infernal playground in that infernal metropolis, and the look of pain and hatred on Frank McCulley’s face after his daughter’s funeral. Perhaps suffering an ignominious death in a North African backwater would be a fitting end. Karma. All even.

  Tire noise brought her back to the present. Soft at first, like a whispering wind, then louder. Engine noise joined the mix, and before long she saw the unmistakable gleam of sunlight bouncing off a windshield.

  She stepped out into the road, placed her feet shoulder-width apart, and leveled the dead Libyan cop’s pistol at the car. The odds of doing serious damage by shooting at a moving car with a handgun were slim, and the odds of injuring the driver were even worse. But the car’s driver was evidently not statistically savvy. He jammed on the brakes, squealed the tires, and came to a jerky halt twenty feet in front of Sam.

  The driver’s hands disappeared below the wheel, fidgeting for something. Sam fired a warning shot. The driver’s hands shot back into view. Sam trained her weapon on him, advanced toward the car, and motioned for him to get out.

  The door opened. “As salam alaykum,” Sam said: Peace be upon you. She gestured with the gun for him to exit the car, which he did slowly and with pained reluctance. He wore a set of white man-jammies and an old tweed sport coat, the kind with patches on the elbows. He eyed her blood-soaked clothes, but kept his mouth shut.

  Sam stuffed a handful of cash in his coat pocket. “Shukraan,” she said: Thank you.

  Then she took his car.

  * * *

  Getting cleaned up, finding a set of unstained clothes, and laying hands on a burner phone required a series of crimes: trespassing, breaking and entering, and petty theft, though Sam wasn’t sure what the locals would call it, and she had no idea what the long-dead prophet might have had to say about it. She just knew that getting caught would be a bad idea. She took great care to remain unnoticed as she broke into an empty home, cleaned herself up, bandaged the worst of her scrapes, and found a change of clothes. The fit wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly passable.

  She ditched the stolen car as soon as possible. Its interior was covered in the dead police officer’s blood mixed with a little of her own. She contemplated liberating a bicycle to replace the car but recalled some recent story involving several women arrested in Iran and Saudi Arabia for riding bicycles. The wind had evidently caused their personal tents to conform to the outlines of their bodies in an unchaste manner. Was Libya as fanatically Muslim as those other two locales? Sam wasn’t sure, but erring on the side of caution seemed prudent. She concluded that grand theft auto, or whatever its Libyan incarnation might have been called, probably entailed less risk than bicycle riding, so she stole another car. This one came with a pay-as-you-go telephone resting in the center console. Sam was grateful for the stroke of luck.

  She drove her newly pilfered ride deliberately but conservatively. The urgency of her situation clashed with the need to remain low-key and inconspicuous, especially while driving a stolen car. Libya certainly had a long tradition of being a police state, but Gaddafi’s goons did it the old-fashioned way: brother told on brother, daughters turned in their mothers. They hadn’t spent billions to put surveillance cameras on every street corner like the Western world had done—ironically, out of xenophobic fear of the backward East—so Sam felt little concern the police would be sophisticated enough to track the stolen car in real-time.

  But she certainly felt a significant amount of concern. Her destination was pure insanity, but she was convinced it was the surest way to drive the situation toward a conclusion. She was going to pay another visit to her new friend, Natan El Anwar.

  Along the way, she used the new cell phone to call Dan Gable. He gave her a grim update on the status of her arrest warrant and on her status as persona non-grata in the local and national media. “I’ll learn to like life as an exile,” she groused grimly.

  “Just stay away from the civilized world,” Dan admonished. “It’s full of surveillance and extradition agreements.”

  “Luckily, I’m nowhere near civilization,” Sam said.

  She got to the reason for her call. She needed Dan to confirm a particular code word they had uncovered in the Doberman information file she had hacked from Mehmet Kocaoglu in Izmir. She thought she remembered the word, but needed to be certain.

  As it turned out, she was correct. The word was “jackrabbit.” It would become the centerpiece of her plan. She thanked Dan for his help, asked him to say good things about her whenever he got the chance, accepted his well wishes, and briefed him on her plan to visit El Anwar.

  “That’s among the crazier plans you’ve hatched,” Dan said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said with a small smile. “Let’s just hope it works.”

  Two minutes later, she arrived at a now-familiar site in the Gargaresh District. She bundled her stolen garb tightly around her head and face, parked the stolen car, entered the building, and rode the elevator up to the second-to-top floor. She reconnoitered the flats and noted one that appeared to be empty. She filed the apartment number away in her memory for later use. Then she composed herself and climbed the last flight of stairs up to Natan El Anwar’s penthouse.

  The last time she’d been inside El Anwar’s apartment it had been in shambles, but now, as she silently picked the lock and opened the door, she saw that the mess had been cleaned. She found Natan El Anwar tidying up.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” Sam said, removing the covering from her face and taking a seat on El Anwar’s opulent couch.

  He was visibly surprised.

  “Expecting someone else, maybe?” she asked. “Another of your Eastern harlots?”

  The alarm left El Anwar’s face and was replaced by smugness. Sam took it as confirmation of her hunch: El Anwar had figured out that she wasn’t affiliated with the Doberman group. It now seemed more probable that El Anwar himself had been involved in arranging her arrest earlier in the day.

  But she had something up her sleeve. “I have instructions for you,” she said with a forced confidence she didn’t entirely feel. “You are to assume your new role as Tariq Ezzat’s replacement immediately.”

  El Anwar sneered. “By whose authority?”

  Sam rose. “By my authority,” she said, her smile overly cordial.

  “You’re exceedingly foolish to come back here,” El Anwar said, working at a tough-guy pose but not quite pulling it off.

  Sam chuckled as she regarded him. He was small-time, wrapped in expensive things that helped him feel a little less inconsequential, buying the affections of women who were otherwise above his reach, dabbling in a very serious game that helped him believe a little bit more in his own substance.

  “Natan,” she said, placing her hand on his shoulder and moving close to accentuate her height advantage, “you’re not the kind of man people worry about.”

  His face flushed. She’d hit him close to home, she figured.

  She turned her back on him and walked to the front door, her stride casual and unhurried. “One more thing,” she said, “and it must be done right away.” She turned to face him. “Are you listening?”

  El Anwar didn’t respond.

  “You are to initiate contact with Mercer,” Sam said, “and tell him to report to his superiors that Jackrabbit is denied.”

  “What?”

  “Trouble with your hearing?” Sam asked, opening the door. “Jackrabbit denied. Immediately, Natan.”

  She walked out of El Anwar’s apartment, summoned the elevator, then took the stairs down one flight.

  She returned to the empty apartment on the floor beneath El Anwar’s penthouse and listened at the door for signs the occupant had returned. Hearing nothing, she picked the lock and shut the door quietly behind her.

  21

  Sam sat on the floor and faced the front door with a gun in one hand, a burner phone in the other, and a pair of kitchen k
nives tucked into her socks for good measure. She surveyed the flat: one room, rugs on the floor, no furniture, a wooden divider that provided the illusion of privacy around a filthy toilet, a small hotplate in the corner plugged into the wall. The whole apartment offered little more than shelter from the elements. It was a stark contrast to El Anwar’s opulent penthouse just one floor above.

  She wasn’t sure how much time she had before the flat’s occupant came back, or how much time she would need. El Anwar would certainly sound the alarm. The responding goon squad, flavor to be determined, would undoubtedly post someone at each of the building’s exits, at the elevator on the first floor, and probably across the street as well.

  After a while, boredom would set in. Shortly after that, the team would lose patience and send people to search the building. Sam settled in to wait it out. It would be much easier to escape El Anwar’s building in the middle of the night, and she needed time to figure out where to go next.

  Darkness fell. Hallway noises came and went. Harsh male voices spoke in Arabic, which reminded Sam once again how much every conversation in that language sounded like an argument.

  The search party was as undisciplined as Sam had anticipated. They hadn’t bothered to corral the building super to let them into the apartments, and they didn’t even bother to knock on doors, asking residents for information about her whereabouts. The apartment’s occupant hadn’t yet returned, which was a small bit of good fortune that Sam was grateful for.

  Her burner finally vibrated with a text from Dan: “Tripoli–Izmir–Madrid–Cagliari.”

  The first two locations Sam understood. Natan El Anwar’s message, earmarked for easy eavesdropping by the word “jackrabbit,” left Tripoli and traveled through Izmir. Mehmet Kocaoglu had probably forwarded the message from Turkey, though Sam couldn’t be sure.

  “But Madrid? And where the hell is Cagliari?” she texted. She would have preferred a phone conversation, but she couldn’t risk speaking aloud.