by Jack Du Brul
“What?” Rufti snorted.
“It’s Tariq, Minister. He’s at the hospital where they took Khuddari.” Tariq was one of Rufti’s own people.
“Allah be praised.” Rufti snatched up the phone, shooting a meaningful look at his other men. “At least someone shows a little initiative.”
Into the handset his voice was sharp and authoritative, not petulant as it had been a moment before. “Tariq, tell me you have great news and the jackal has died from his wounds.”
“No, Minister. Khuddari’s still alive, but his condition is listed as critical. When I arrived, an orderly was still mopping his blood from the emergency room lobby.”
Rufti knew that Tariq was speaking to him over an unsecure cellular phone and admonished him for the use of names, then continued as if his own misgivings didn’t pertain to himself. “Listen to me. Stay there at the hospital, but do not approach Khuddari. I can’t have your presence linked to me. What’s security like there?”
“Lax, so far. I don’t believe they know who Khuddari is.”
Tariq put as much nerve into his voice as possible. “I can get to his room easily. What will one more bullet matter?”
“No. Just stay close. I need some time to think. I may send this Kurdish idiot to finish Khuddari once and for all.” Rufti snapped off the phone and pointed at the Kurd still kneeling. “Lock him up for now. I’m not finished with him yet.”
Rufti wished Abu Alam was with him. He would have stormed Khuddari’s room with his shotgun blazing and escaped long before the authorities realized what had happened. Rufti didn’t have the same confidence in his second lieutenant. Tariq was good but cautious. He lacked Alam’s psychotic fever. Yet Alam was needed in Alaska to guard against treachery from Kerikov and to oversee the kidnapping of Aggie Johnston, to make sure her father didn’t get any ideas about backing out of his part of their bargain.
Agony tore at Khalid Khuddari, etching his features so deeply that the pain lines would never fade, dulling his eyes so much that they would never be bright again. The pain. It started at his buttocks and traveled up his back, radiating from his spine along the thousands of nerves that branched away like tangled roots off a plant stem. The pain wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, crushing him flat to the bed. But it especially centered on his head. His head ached with an unholy agony, as if his brain had swollen and pressed against his skull. His face felt as if it had been stung by an entire nest of desert wasps.
Khalid moaned and a voice said, “Aha!”
He heaved one eye open, fearing that his eyeball would roll out of his head. The owner of the voice was an Indian man, about fifty, with salt and pepper hair and an almost white mustache. His skin was the color of strong tea, and his eyes appeared unfocused behind a pair of wire frame glasses. He wore hospital greens. A stethoscope coiled around his throat like a dead snake.
“I am thinking,” the Indian doctor said in that peculiar blend of snobbish English arrogance and generations of inbred servitude, “that you are in a great deal of pain right now, but I am not knowing if you wish the use of morphine to ease it, most certainly. I am thinking that you are Muslim and your religious beliefs may not allow the use of such drugs, no?”
“Give me the shot,” Khalid managed to croak through gummed lips.
“Oh, most assuredly, I will give you the medication, sir.” The doctor got busy injecting morphine into the plasma bag dangling over Khalid’s bed.
Oh, God, Khalid thought. My life is in the hands of a cliche.
“You are a lucky man, most assuredly. But first, my name is Dr. Ragaswami. I was your emergency room physician. You came to me bleeding most heartedly, I assure you. But not once were you shot through. No, most certainly not shot through. Three bullets grazed your person, some leaving very long scars requiring many stitches, but none of them caused more than superficial harm. I also took nearly forty grams of concrete from you as well, fragments kicked up by the shots fired at you, I am guessing.” Ragaswami watched the heart monitor next to Khalid, satisfied that it was reporting a man on the mend.
“How long?” Khalid gasped.
“It is now ten in the evening,” Ragaswami said in his high-pitched voice, studying the face of a cheap digital watch. “You have been here for more than five hours. It is most amazing that you are even awake right now. You are a very strong man, most assuredly. A lesser man would be unconscious until tomorrow at the earliest.”
Ragaswami would have continued, most assuredly, had Khalid not cut him off. “I need to make a call.”
“Oh, yes, I was just going to come to that. Your identification was lost before you were brought here. We have no way of contacting your family.”
The morphine was starting to kick in. Khalid felt the flames licking at his back subside, the fires slowly extinguishing.
“I have no family here,” Khalid muttered thickly, “but I have a friend, Trevor James-Price. He’s having dinner tonight at Les Ambassadeurs.”
It took a few minutes for Ragaswami to tell a duty nurse to track down James-Price, during which time he examined the superficial wounds that peppered Khalid’s back, mumbling to himself and once exclaiming proudly about the tightness of the stitches he’d laid.
“I’m sorry, but the restaurant didn’t have a reservation for a James-Price,” a haggard nurse said, poking her head into the doorway of Khalid’s room.
“Wait, it’s not his table.” Khalid played back his meeting with Trevor, remembering the woman with him. It didn’t seem as if they’d known each other long, and the dinner was her idea, not his. There was no way someone like Trevor could get a short-order reservation at Les A.
“The table is under Millicent-” He paused for nearly a minute, the morphine taking a stronger hold of his mind, blanking out not only the pain, but his entire consciousness as well. His world was turning… gray. “Millicent Gray, she got the reservation. Tell Trevor I need him.”
Five minutes later, Khalid was on the edge of blackness, a deep void that beckoned him in, one that he desperately wanted to enter but fought off like Saladin against the Crusaders at Ghalali. The nurse finally returned with a portable phone, holding it to the bed so Khalid could speak without moving and possibly tearing the stitches that ran in every direction across his back.
“I say, old fruit, this goes beyond the pale,” Trevor said somewhat sharply. “I thought we were meeting later tonight. It’s not often I get taken out by a bink like Millie.”
“Shut up, Trev,” Khalid moaned. “I’m in trouble.”
“What else is new? You bloody wogs are always in trouble. It’s the Koran, you know, all that jihad rot. It’s too violent by half and you’re all reared on it like it was a children’s story.”
“Trevor, will you shut up?” The drugs were making speech easier, but he was losing track of what he was saying. “I’m in a hospital with an Indian quack, most assuredly. I need you here. And I need your girlfriend too.”
“What are you talking about?” Concern cut through Trevor’s normal cavalier airs.
“I’ve been bloody shot, you ass. I need you to get me out of here. It hasn’t ended. It won’t ever end.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Khalid. Let me speak to the doctor.”
“No,” Khalid said. Ragaswami had left the room with the promise of returning in just a few moments. “Not tonight. I won’t be able to make it. Tomorrow morning you’ve got to come here and bring Millicent Gray. She’s tall enough.”
“What are you talking about, Khalid? Jesus, you’ve got me spooked. Are you all right?”
“They have me on drugs. I can’t talk for much longer.”
Khalid’s speech slurred as he drifted back into oblivion. “Tomorrow morning, I need you here with Mrs. Gray. Dress her in a chador, full veils. She must be covered from head to toe like a devout Muslim woman. Tell them she’s my wife. You understand?”
Trevor heard the desperation in Khalid’s voice. “Trust me, my friend, we’l
l be there as soon as they let us. Christ, for you, I’ll wear the fucking veil.”
Khalid had slipped into a drug- and pain-induced unconsciousness. Had he been awake he would have heard those last few words and saved his friend’s life. As it was, he was out, the phone dropping to the floor so hard that the battery pack snapped out from its concealed cradle, cutting the connection as if Khalid had hung up the phone.
Back at Les Ambassadeurs, Trevor handed the phone back to the hovering waiter and turned to his libidinous hostess. “Do you remember my friend at the Savoy? Well, it seems he needs our help.”
“Don’t tell me he knows my husband is a member of Parliament?”
“My dear,” Trevor took one of her slim hands in his, pushing aside a plate of fine Scotch beef to get to what he really wanted. “Nothing so pedestrian. Tomorrow morning, you are going to be a harem master. And I shall be your harem.”
“I thought all members of a harem were virgins?”
“True, but after tonight I fear that you’ll have corrupted me.”
MV Hope
The heat coming from the central system had a dry, ozone tang that made the cabin smell like an electrical appliance that had just shorted. The antique system rattled every time it cycled water through the creaking pipes, popping so loudly that Aggie, already edgy, jumped when a pipe sounded off like a pistol shot. Outside the porthole, the late afternoon sun was hidden by layers of clouds and a wispy fog. Icy rain pelted the glass, driven by a stiff wind blasting down from the barren reaches of the Arctic Circle. According to the digital thermometer hanging near the cabin door, the outside temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but with the windchill it hovered in the midteens.
It was only the middle of October, and winter had already begun to grip the Land of the Midnight Sun.
The interior of the cabin was a comfortable seventy, but to Aggie it seemed much, much hotter. She’d just finished fifty sit-ups and was now lying on her back, her long legs held at a thirty-degree angle above the floor so that the rippled muscles of her stomach quivered. She’d been working out for two hours doing isometrics, aerobics, and step exercises, using a metal footlocker. She’d done two hundred advance lunges from her fencing lessons, each attack so focused she could almost feel an imaginary blade striking an opponent. Perspiration glossed her body and held her hair plastered to her head. Her sweat shorts and T-shirt clung like a second skin.
Getting up to begin her warm down, Aggie caught her reflection in a wall-mounted mirror. Used to seeing herself after exercising, she wasn’t much concerned with her hair or her clothes or the sweat that dripped from her chin. But her eyes… they still burned with a cold emerald fury. The hours of exercise hadn’t dimmed any of the anger that burned within her.
“Men,” she spat at her reflection.
She’d spent her entire life proving her independence, taking on challenges, facing them and more often than not vanquishing them with relative ease. Her master’s degree was her own, her sleek body, once gawky and angular, was the result of her own effort, her personality validated years of fighting the influences of her parents and their warped lives. She had earned the respect that was her due, paid for it with time and dedicated work. But in the past twenty-four hours she’d been treated as if she were just a piece of furniture, or maybe a pet.
“Screw them both!”
Jan, with his mysterious errand and his ravings about making oil so repugnant no one would want to use it ever again. Mercer, with his patronizing order to leave Alaska for her own safety. This wasn’t the nineteenth century, and she wasn’t some simpering damsel needing to be rescued. They both acted as if they knew what was best, as if her wishes and her opinion meant nothing. Jesus Christ!
For all practical purposes, Jan had raped her last night. The man who wanted her hand in marriage had forced himself on her with little regard for her feelings at all. She could have been an inflatable doll for all he cared, a masturbatory toy. She’d thought she loved him — his mind and feelings were so similar to hers — but now she saw, for the first time, how different he was. She’d known all along about his ego and self-absorption, but now she saw how driven he was by them. Even thinking about him made her uncomfortable, as if some multilegged insect was crawling across her flesh.
And what of Mercer, with his testosterone-charged assault this morning, guns drawn and orders shouted, as if they were storming some highjacked airliner? And his threatening to arrest everyone on his authority? He should have done it; everyone on the Hope was willing to go to jail for their beliefs. This was just another way for him to patronize her. A little slap on the wrist for the trust-fund environmentalist. Be careful, Aggie, she could almost hear his voice. You’re playing with grown-ups now, and we don’t want you to get hurt.
Hey, I’m an adult too, she thought bitterly. I know what I’m doing. A month shy of her thirty-second birthday and he was treating her like a six-year-old. So many men in her life had taken that attitude with her, treated her like some precious object that must be protected at all cost. Her father, especially, had hidden his problems with her mother until it was too late, fearing that a divorce or even a separation would hurt Aggie too much. That was a laugh. Like her mother’s suicide wouldn’t bother her?
And what in the hell did Mercer mean by “I want to be able to say I hate you too, but I can’t”?
To her amazement, Aggie saw her eyes soften in the mirror, the tension in her face easing, and the scowl almost but not quite becoming a smile.
She knew what he meant.
“All right, Dr. Mercer, you’re going to get what you want.” Aggie spoke aloud, steel in her voice. “I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave Jan and Alaska and, most especially, I’m going to leave you. But not before I have my say and put a stop to this silly crush that should have ended years ago.”
When Jan and she had talked about marriage, he had not given her a diamond ring. He’d said that he could not condone the devastation caused by mining and thus would not help the industry by buying into their popularist notion that a diamond signifies a lasting love. The ring he had given her as an engaged-to-be-engaged present was fashioned from antler. It seemed quaint and appropriate for what they both believed. She dug it out of her luggage, its tiny velvet box too elaborate for the simple beige bauble.
“You’re a cheap bastard,” Aggie scoffed and left it on Jan’s desk, the lid open as if the little box was laughing.
She took a shower and dressed, hiding her wet hair under a baseball cap. She packed a few things into a knapsack, ignoring most of the clothing and “essentials” she’d brought with her to Alaska. She’d buy what she needed when she got to San Diego, the home of an old college friend. Aggie just wanted to leave everything behind: Jan, Mercer, PEAL, this whole wasted year of her life. She’d played close to the edge, and it was time to return to normalcy.
Aggie knew the name of Mercer’s hotel from the dinner receipt she’d found in his jacket pocket. She thought about calling him but decided surprise would be much more effective.
Mercer lay against the headboard of his hotel bed, the television bringing him a great college football game between Florida State and Georgia. It was the third quarter, the score only ten to fourteen, both defenses able to thwart numerous well-executed drives just short of field goal range. A beer rested within reach on the nightstand, a thick ring of condensation surrounding the smoky bottle of ale like a medieval moat.
Taking a sip, he flashed a look at his watch and hoped that the rest of the waning afternoon would pass quietly. Since the raid, Mercer hadn’t strayed more than a few feet from his phone, fervently wishing it wouldn’t ring but knowing it would.
He was having that feeling again. Something was very wrong. Jan Voerhoven not being aboard the Hope was just the most obvious sign, but there were others, things he couldn’t explain, even to himself. Mercer ran through the connections again, the little things that made him so certain. This kind of second-guessing was unnecessary and dangero
us, but it was also his nature to keep working at a problem, no matter how easy the solution seemed to be.
It started with tons of liquid nitrogen being smuggled into the state. Why? Who would do it and for what purpose? Second, the most radical environmental group in the world is already in Alaska, its leader missing on some mysterious mission that his girlfriend didn’t know about. Then there was Ivan Kerikov, an international terrorist or, more accurately, a terror broker. A man with no loyalty except to himself but with seemingly unlimited resourcefulness. He was in Alaska, too, with a couple of Arabs. What was their role in all of this?
Now what would a former KGB agent, a couple of Arab henchmen, and an environmental group do with liquid nitrogen on the eve of the opening of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge? The presence of even one of these elements was enough to give pause. But there was more.
Aggie’s disclosure about her father, for one thing. She asserted that Max Johnston knew what time she’d been at his house, the exact moment of a devastating attack that only Harry White’s timely interruption had prevented from turning into a massacre. Was Max connected somehow? Wasn’t it one of his tankers that had been late arriving at the Alyeska Terminal to take on her cargo of Prudhoe Bay crude? Was that even significant?
Mercer shifted on the bed to reach for the phone. He wanted to call Dave Saulman in Miami. He wanted the marine lawyer to give him an update on that tanker. It was a long shot, a potential wild-goose chase, but sometimes wild geese lay golden eggs. His hand was only an inch from the phone when there was a loud knock on his door. He got up, and when he opened the door, he took a quick pace backward. Aggie Johnston wore jeans, a sweater, and her olive anorak. A baseball cap covered her head, tendrils of hair as delicate as silk threads falling down past her ears. She carried his leather jacket under one arm. Behind her angry expression, he saw a deeper emotion, a secret place that she didn’t know existed, for surely she’d have tried to hide it from him. She was hurting, he knew, and scared. Mercer’s heart slammed in his chest.