by Glen Craney
“If you think you’re going to get away with something,” she barked with false bluster at the guy pushing her along, “you’ve got another think coming!”
The brute just laughed as he whisked her into a dark hallway at the rear of the joint. He punched a series of numbers into a lock screen. A steel door opened, and he pushed her inside, past the slits of a black shower curtain.
In the thick smoke, she saw a half dozen fat men, older and well-dressed, sitting around a large black table cluttered with cocktail glasses, bottles of booze, weapons, and a pair of shisha pipes. She could barely breathe in the thick haze. Was that apple-flavored tobacco or opium they were inhaling? The goon at her elbow slammed her into a chair. She wiggled like a worm on a hook as they duct-taped her to the seat.
“So nice of you to come, Dr. McKinney,” a thick-accented voice said through the pipe smog. “You are visiting friends in the United Arab Emirates, yes?”
She froze.
Her interrogator enjoyed a cynical chuckle, apparently amused by her sudden silence. “You’ve come with our old acquaintance, Mr. Fielding.”
Her headache worsened. What difference would any answer make?
Draped in a black-and-white ghutrah bound with a black cord, the obese man scooted closer and snapped his fingers to regain her attention. “Oh, you watch a lot of American movies, I suppose. You must see many films in which the, how do you say it, ‘damsel in distress’”—he held up fingers the size of kielbasa sausages—“keeps her mouth closed. But in real life, the quiet ones pay the steepest price.”
Her eyes slowly adjusted to the shadowy darkness cloaked in shisha fumes, and she made out the man’s yellow-stained smile floating in a face of sweat and oily fat. Was that a line of gold glittering from his teeth?
“We will make this simple.” He rubbed his enormous paws across his black thawb. “A reliable source tells us that you and Mr. Fielding are on a mission to Mecca. I trust you know that the Saudis do not to look kindly on infidels in Islam’s holiest city.”
She heard laughter behind her.
“And yet, Dr. McKinney, rules do not seem to apply to you and your”—the interrogator took another drag on his cigarette—“friend?”
She wasn’t surprised that the fat slob knew her name. Hell, Avram Isserle had known who she was, and so had the Malibu Screwball. Her popularity seemed to have gone global, for no apparent reason. “First off, mister—”
“Please, call me Aziz.”
“I don’t give a rat's last fart what your name—” She stopped, surprised by her own spontaneous vulgarity.
Fielding was already rubbing off on her, and not in a good way.
The fake hospitality faded from the interrogator’s tone. “Be very careful with your language, my dear doctor. The Saudis will not hesitate to arrest a foul-tongued woman.”
“Maybe I should give the cops here a try,” she said. “Dealing with the Saudi police has got to be a hell of a lot better than hanging out with you buffoons.”
The men behind her laughed again, this time with more gusto, apparently impressed with her bravado.
But this muttonhead who called himself Aziz didn’t appear to be amused. He glanced around the room, cowing his subordinates to silence. “Perhaps we should leave now, if our lady guest here insists on being so vile and unhelpful. She refuses our warm Emirates welcome.”
The thugs rustled around their boss, as if preparing to leave her sweating in this foggy oven.
“What is it you want from me?” she demanded.
“Why don’t you tell us what we want.”
She huffed in exasperation. Whatever they were after, it probably had something to do with Fielding.
“I suspect,” Aziz continued, “that if we give you some time alone, you may reach an understanding of our needs. If not? Well, then …” He puffed on his pipe and waved toward the door. “We know several customers in the bar who would be very happy to make your acquaintance.”
The smart thing to do would be to remain quiet and act dumb, avoiding doing and saying anything that might get her into more trouble, or worse. But she didn’t feel particularly sane or compliant. With no weapon but her strong voice, she exploded into a paroxysm of maniacal laughter.
The goons turned, confused. They squinted at her through the smoke.
She kept shrieking, belting out a long hyena-like cackle. In the midst of this hooting chaos, she pushed one of her taped hands into the left back pocket of her jeans and pulled out the book of Oceans Restaurant bar matches she had kept.
Aziz shook his head and muttered, “Crazy American woman.”
The men walked off to the far end of the room to resume their bantering over the pipes and drinks. One of them leaned his gun—looked like it might be an Uzi—against the wall, about ten paces away from her chair.
She struggled against the tape and finally managed to strike one of the matches. Nearly suffocated by the thick, fragrant cloud of hooka smoke, she could hardly smell the sulfuric after-breath rising behind her. She kept several matches ignited, dropping them on the carpet behind her. She punched her fingers back into her pocket and fingered one of the tiny plastic cocktail swords she had kept from the bar.
Working methodically but quickly, she punched a series of holes through the tape on her wrist to tear through the adhesive and the silver polyethylene coating. Now, with just enough wiggle room, she punched through to the tape’s cotton fabric. She sniffed fresh smoke rising behind her. She couldn’t see any flames, but she screamed anyway
“Fire!”
Her exhaustion vanished in a surge of adrenaline. She pushed up from the chair and thrust it outward with her thighs. Swinging her seat toward the men, she leaped up and backwards in the chair, at the same time giving her wrists a violent twist and ripping the hole-punched duct tape. In midair, she grabbed the bottom of the chair and crashed through the middle of the table.
Glasses, ashes, magazines, papers, bottles, water pipes, weapons—a tornado of debris flew everywhere, smashing everything.
She dived for the Uzi leaning against the wall.
Six hundred rounds a minute, you rat bastards!
Raging, she aimed the Uzi at the ceiling and tugged the sensitive trigger. A rattling burst chattered around the room—her hands felt as if she were trying to control a jackhammer. Casings spewed in undulating arcs as the bullets flailed chunks of plaster and drywall everywhere. She heard glass shatter and felt water spraying from the demolished shisha pipes.
Through the haze, shouts erupted. Footsteps pounded for the back door.
She burst through the table’s wreckage firing willy-nilly—until she noticed that the carpet had finally caught fire. Flames raced toward the walls draped with flammable tapestries and Palestinian flags.
The smoke dissipated … the puffing thugs had fled.
She grinned. Damn that felt good!
She dropped to a crouch and duck-waddled past the plastic curtain hanging from the door’s header. She popped out the Uzi’s cartridge, slid it into her front pocket, and jammed the gun into her belt under her shirt.
Just beyond the covered windows, sirens blared down the streets.
She marched through the darkened hallway. The police were already rushing into the bar. Nobody in the roiled sea of drunken men and Asian prostitutes seemed to notice as she walked outside.
She jumped into the backseat of a cab and rolled down both windows, gasping for air. The driver turned on her with a look of fright. Only then, looking at her reflection in the rear-view mirror, did she realize that her hair, face, and clothes were covered black with smoke. “It’s Halloween back in the States,” she explained to the panicked driver. “I’m going to a party at the Le Royal Méridien as Fantine in Les Miserables. Do you think I pull it off? It cost me two hundred dollars to get to look like this.”
The cabbie shook his head, muttering something about crazy Americans as he slapped the meter on and drove off.
Faking a French accent, sh
e gave him directions, “Drop me off at the front entrance of the hotel, will you, comrade? I want to make a statement for the local fashionistas.”
While the cabbie raced her through traffic, she straightened her hair, flicking shards of glass and bits of debris from her clothes. Working carefully, so not to alert the cabbie, she quietly pulled the Uzi’s cartridge from her front pocket, checking it to make sure that she had kept one round or two for her next target—Cas Fielding’s Speedo-girded crotch.
* * *
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mecca, Saudi Arabia
MARLY FELT A LIGHT BUZZING on her shoulder, but the black abaya veil she was wearing as her disguise was so heavily meshed that she couldn’t see who was pestering her. To chase her worsening vertigo, she tried to keep her eyes closed while she waited on a street corner for Cas to return from scouting the Masjid al-Haram mosque. Her scalp itched like hell, and she couldn’t reach it. Had she caught some exotic psoriasis from this desert heat? Then, she remembered: Cas had forced her to chop off most of her strawberry-blond hair and dye black what remained of it.
She wasted a precious breath to curse his name again. After escaping from those goons in Abu Dhabi two days ago, she had been adamant about heading home. But Cas had finally convinced her that the dust-up in the bar had merely been a misunderstanding with some of his old intelligence cronies looking to recoup a little sourcing bribe money. More to the point, she didn’t have enough cash to buy a return ticket, let alone cover next month’s rent if she didn’t get paid for this “consulting” job. So, here she was, playing dress-up in the middle of the holiest city in Islam, where infidels were as welcome as bed bugs.
What could possibly go wrong?
The buzzing on her shoulder became a tapping. Someone was being either incredibly annoying, or desperately wanted her attention. Weren’t men forbidden from touching women in public here? She wanted to turn around and give the tapping imbecile one swift kick in the balls with the running shoes she wore under this sun-soaking black tent. At last, fixing her balance, she managed a pirouette in the suffocating medieval getup to confront the jackass.
Nobody was there.
She looked up into the haze and saw that the tapping came from drops of rancid condensation leaking from an old air-conditioner in a window of this abandoned concrete building that Cas was using as their staging base.
Geez, what a dump.
She didn’t even want to contemplate what would happen to them if they were caught here. The last infidel who had managed to sneak into Mecca was a crazy Polish Jew who later converted to Islam and went on to build the fledgling nation of Pakistan. At least she had learned something during their eight-hour bone-rattling jeep ride from Jeddah.
Across the street, Cas reappeared from his little sortie. Making a drinking motion, he pounded on a garish Pepsi machine that sat like a calliope under a date palm tree just outside the entrance to a seedy hostel.
Her patience in this heat was draining fast. Just beyond her veil, she heard the muffled rumble of feet shuffling toward the center of the city to get in front of the line for the Hajj, which would begin in a couple of days. Although she and Cas had been in the city for only a few hours, she was amazed at how quickly the dusty city had filled with pilgrims. The sky looked battered with dust and gloomy November clouds, polluted by too many vehicles and residents. Many of the devout who had traveled here were sleeping on thin plastic mats along the streets amid the herds of goats they had brought for sacrifices.
Cas finally convinced the Pepsi machine to cough up a free can. Pleased with having outwitted a machine, he walked over and handed the cold soda to her, waiting as if expecting praise for his cleverness.
“Don’t they cut hands off for that?” she asked.
“Depends on who catches you. If it’s the Saudi security police, they usually aim a little lower.”
She licked her parched lips and carefully threaded the can under the cloth until her tongue found its cool aluminum and tasted the sugar water inside. With her poached brain revived, all she wanted now was to get that damn residue sample from the empty Stone frame on the Kaaba—if there was any—and analyze it for its meteorite age and elements. Then, with her fee finally paid, she could get back home and put all this insanity behind her. No more Mossad agents, no more near-naked maniacs in her office, no more shisha-fogged thugs armed with rattling submachine guns.
“You just flunked your first test,” he told her.
“What are you talking about?”
“If a man talks to you, never turn around and look at him. We’re barely supposed to be together in public.”
“But I thought—”
“Doesn’t matter if we’re married.”
“You have that fake license, right?”
“Yes, dear. But it doesn’t become official until the conjugal night.”
“In your dreams.”
“Oh, you got that right.”
She thought about huffing, but she remembered that the forced exhalation would only bounce off her veil like a hot puff from one of those compressed-air duster cans. “Can we just get on with it?”
“Not so fast, Doc. A well-laid plan … or is that a well-laid planner? I forget.” He slapped his forehead. “Dammit, those impure thoughts again. And on the eve of Hajj. There’s just something about a hot chick covered from head to toe in a hot black gown.”
“Can we just collect your rock dust and get out of here?” She plucked at her robe, trying to fan air to her legs. “I feel like a broasted chicken in here.” Through the eye slits in her headdress, she saw a broad smile crease Cas’s face.
“Great idea! There’s an al-Bait fried chicken joint right up the street. You’ve never had wings like they make them here.”
She glared him back—as best as one could glare through a veil. “The plan? You’ve got twenty minutes before I start stripping this stuff off.”
He paused, as if visualizing that possibility. “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Listen very carefully.” Circling around to stand behind her left ear again, he spoke just loudly enough for her to hear, but quietly enough for his voice to be lost in the hammering drone of the city. “Go inside the hotel. Alone.”
“Alone? What are you going to be doing?”
“We can’t go in together. It’s an all-female lodging.” He pulled another one of those obnoxious Djarum cigarettes from a crumpled pack and lit it, sending nose-clogging clouds of clove smoke around her. “Tell the registry clerk that you’re booked for a room for one night, under the name of Busana. I picked that one myself! It’s a Chechen name for ‘girl of the moon.’ Perfect with all this space-rock stuff, right? I figured you might be able to remember that one.”
Feeling dizzy again, she reached out and found the wall. “Would you mind putting that cigarette out?”
He pulled another long draw and blew a puff of smoke into her veil. “All part of the training. You’d better get used to it, and fast. No Muslim woman would tell her hubbie to stop smoking, Busana Saidullayev.”
“What?”
“That’s your name, damn it. Come on! Focus! It’s on your passport and hotel reservation, if anybody happens to ask you.”
She reached into the rear pocket of her shorts and felt a passport there. How did that happen? She had no idea … how had he gotten into her pants?
Cas grinned, as if having given that puzzle a lot of thought. “Just so you know, Busana Saidullayev is something of a hero here. She’s the very young mother of two teenage Chechen rebels. They became martyrs when they blew themselves up, along with a few Russian soldiers. She’s handy with a submachine gun, too.” He winked at her. “I’m just a regular irony board.”
“Just out of curiosity,” she said. “Tell me again why I should listen to anything you tell me? You nearly got me killed back—”
“Here’s an idea. Next time I tell you to stay put somewhere, stay put.”
“It’s not like I had any choice. And I’m not the o
ne who ran off leaving me at a hotel bar.”
“Just pretend you’re walking into the Times Square Marriott for a special night on Broadway. Go straight to the front desk and ask for your reservation in broken, Russian-sounding English. Then get up to your room. Third floor, facing the Masjid. I got you a great view.”
“Why we can’t stay in the same hotel?”
“Reason Number One. We shouldn’t be seen together until absolutely necessary. Reason Number Two. Men here stay in more plush accommodations. If I were to bring you along to the Towers, you’d stand out.”
“Thanks for being so thoughtful. Once I get checked in, then what?”
“I’ll grab some of that tasty al Bait chicken. I’ll send your lunch upstairs with the bell boy. He’ll also bring you a suitcase with some new clothes for the main event tonight. There’ll also be instructions for your makeup.”
“Makeup?”
“You’re gonna need something more than that mustache you bleach.”
“Why do I put up with this?” She shook her head at the lunacy of it all. “And tell me again why we’re doing this at night?”
“Every advantage counts,” he said. “The artificial lighting makes it harder for the cops to see facial features. Besides, you’ve been bitching for an hour about the heat. It’ll be cooler.”
She nodded, her veil fluttering. “Makes sense, I guess.”
“You got until eleven tonight to freshen up, so get some rest.”
As he disappeared into the masses trailed by a plume of clove-scented smoke, Marly shook her head and wondered how she had managed to get herself into this mess.
AS THE ROYAL HOTEL CLOCK tower struck midnight, Cas crawled their rented black Mercedes through throngs of pilgrims who were surging toward the Kaaba. Wedged in by the procession of cars, trucks, animals, vendor carts, mopeds, motorcycles, and bicycles, he felt his adrenaline pumping, just like old times. The streets here seemed laid out by a crazed spider, with twisting boulevards and circling rings forming a haven for anyone who relished the idea of getting lost. He hated every inch of this Arabian Peninsula. Now, with each breath of stale air, he was pulled back to the searing memories of those Wahabi sonsabitches murdering Shada and taking Farid.