This time Laynie was ready and waiting. When Sayed’s right hand flashed out to slap her a second time, Laynie’s left hand was faster—faster than Sayed expected, faster than Bula or the guards could react. She grabbed, twisted hard, and felt the satisfying snap of Sayed’s fingers—his index and middle fingers—before she let go.
To top it off, she wanted to leave him with a memorable and visible token of their encounter—something all his men would see and remark on. No sooner had the audible snap echoed around Sayed’s salon than Laynie delivered a right hook.
He gasped as Laynie’s knuckles connected with his left eye and kept going to crack the nasal bridge—ensuring copious amounts of bleeding and a wicked shiner.
Seconds later, Laynie was on her back on the floor, Bula’s boot on her throat. She couldn’t breathe, and the torque on her neck told her that even an incremental transfer of his weight would shatter her cervical spine.
Sayed’s servant and his soldiers crowded around him until Sayed screamed for them to get out. Everyone but Bula and Sayed’s personal servant fled the salon. Laynie couldn’t see much with Bula’s boot and leg in the way, but she caught a glimpse.
Sayed’s left eye was quickly swelling closed. He held a towel and some ice to his streaming nose while his servant had his right hand in his, applying ice to it, attempting to straighten the broken digits.
Sayed cursed and spit, his rage enough to terrify the hapless soul who might unintentionally get in his way.
Too bad his focus is on me, huh?
Laynie quivered and choked as Bula waited Sayed’s instructions. Any moment, she expected Sayed to give the word for the swift thrust of Bula’s boot to sever her spinal cord—or an even quicker bullet. And . . . she was strangely all right with either prospect.
Lord Jesus, thank you, Laynie prayed with wide-open eyes, her soul at peace. Thank you that I won’t die with that man’s hands around my throat after he’s abused me. I belong to you, Jesus, and I thank you for saving me from Sayed’s plans.
A shadow hovered over her. Sayed, burning with red-hot hatred, his eye swelling closed. Blood from his broken nose dribbled through the towel and fell on Laynie’s face and hair.
Intentionally.
Sayed slowly pronounced, “You have interfered in the holy work we have undertaken for Allah, Anabelle Garineau. For that you will never leave this mountain alive. But before I allow you to die, you and I have much to discuss. You will suffer greatly at my hands as I extract what I need from you, and you will beg for death. So you see, you may count yourself already dead.”
He dabbed at his nose. “Take her back to her cell until I determine how I wish to proceed,” he ordered.
As an afterthought he added, “And douse her with water.”
Bula hauled Laynie to her feet. She hadn’t regretted her actions until now. Douse her with water? The temperature in the caves, while not freezing, was uncomfortable. Soaking her would create real hardship—but first it made Laynie mad.
“You are a bitter, little man, Sayed,” she said to him. Loudly. She used Russian because it was better known in Sayed’s militia than English. Her words would be heard in the passageway outside his salon and repeated among his soldiers a thousand times.
“You are a sniveling coward. Only spineless men torture defenseless women.”
Sayed shook with fury. He would have killed Laynie himself, then and there, if he’d had both hands to do it—but Laynie had effectively deprived him of the ability to strangle her.
For now.
“Strip her before you pour on the water,” he shouted. “Let her suffer and freeze!”
Laynie’s taunts echoed down the passageway as Bula and two other soldiers dragged her away. “Spineless coward! Weakling! You are not a real man, Sayed—you are pathetic!”
She shouted until Bula shook her so hard that her teeth cracked together.
HOURS LATER, SAYED coddled his fingers and waited for his servant to bring him the satellite phone. His militia’s medic had set the digits and bound them together to stabilize them, but Sayed’s hand had swelled and purpled, and it ached. His mottled face, too, bore testament to the Garineau woman’s fisted hand.
When his servant delivered the phone, Sayed scowled at the brick-shaped device. He was not in the mood for the call scheduled minutes from now. Nevertheless, he would handle it. Needed to handle it.
A cable attached to the phone snaked across the floor to a tapestry hanging beside his bookshelves and an alcove cleverly hidden behind the tapestry. From the alcove, the cable ran one hundred thirty feet up a narrow stone “chimney” and emerged into the open air from under the metal plate that capped the chimney, sheltering it from rain. Close by the chimney, the cable attached to a directional antenna.
Buried as he and his militia were in the mountain, the satphone was an invaluable tool. Setting it up had been a feat of incredibly dedicated work.
His men, led by a jihadi geologist and Sayed’s technical advisor, had settled on a protruding “shoulder” of the mountain to drill. They had bored straight down, sculpting a chimney six inches in diameter to a point not far from the large cavern where Sayed’s militia had initially lived. His men had carved a tunnel from the cavern in the direction of the chimney and, at the point where the tunnel broke through to the chimney, had hewn Sayed’s living quarters around it.
At Sayed’s direction, they had completed a second challenging and labor-intensive task—the construction of an escape shaft. The narrow shaft, designed to accommodate a single man, entered through the alcove, then straight up. His men had bolted a ladder inside the shaft. Where the ladder ended, the tunnel took a sharp turn and wended gradually downward, ending on a slope above the valley. A metal plate covered the shaft’s opening, and a small pile of rocks hid the plate itself.
Allah most certainly blessed our efforts, Sayed told himself.
To reach a handful of his less-accessible generals, including General Arzu Labazanov, Sayed used an HF radio he also kept hidden in the alcove. It, too, had required an antenna. It had been but a simple matter to attach an HF antenna to the rock near the satphone’s antenna and feed a second cable down the chimney to the radio.
Sayed needed the HF radio, but it was the satphone that was his true lifeline to the outside world—to his stateside commander, Khasurt, to his arms dealers, to a handful of his generals, to his contacts in other jihadi networks, and to the Ukrainian mob whose cooperation was so vital to Sayed’s plans.
It was, of course, important to maintain a harmonious, symbiotic relationship with the Ukrainians while simultaneously disguising AGFA’s true objectives. A piece of that complicated dance was hiding the timeline of AGFA’s attacks in the US without raising the godless Ukrainians’ suspicions. He could not, for example, give the Ukrainians what they wanted most too soon.
The fact that they are desperate for the information favors us—as long as every delay is convincing.
Sayed composed himself. “Good morning,” he answered in Russian, one of two languages they held in common.
“And good afternoon to you, General Sayed,” the elderly head of the US Ukrainian crime syndicate answered. “Have you news to report?”
“Yes, we have received the woman. She arrived in a fragile, dehydrated state, I am sad to report. However, it is nothing a week of food and water will not cure.”
Sayed purposely inflated the recovery period.
“A week you say?” The old man’s disappointment was clear.
“You know how doctors are. They are concerned. When she is recovered, we will interrogate her. I doubt it will take much to break her, but the doctor did caution me to wait. We wouldn’t want her to expire before we extract the information you need, would we?”
“No. We would not want that—as long as we receive the information before your next shipment is due.”
Sayed smiled to himself. “Very good. In that case, I do not foresee a problem. Until then?”
“Yes. Goodbye.�
�
BULA DRAGGED LAYNIE into her cell and ordered her to strip off her abaya, the shift she wore under it, her stockings, and her sandals. He tossed the items of clothing into the passageway one by one. She was surprised that he kept his eyes averted as she undressed.
“Stand with your back against that wall,” he said, pointing to the end of her cell, just past the end of her bed. A guard outside the cell handed him a bucket. Bula looked only at Laynie’s feet when he tossed the bucket’s contents on her.
The water was so cold that it knocked the breath out of her chest.
“Turn and face the wall.”
Laynie turned, and Bula poured the contents of a second bucket over her head.
He said not another word, but Laynie heard the key turn in the lock—and the tiniest of clinks as the key was left hanging from the passageway wall.
Bula had left her the blanket from her “bed” but nothing else. Maybe he felt it indecent to leave her naked before the eyes of anyone peering through the bars into her cell. Regardless of the reason, she was grateful.
She grabbed up the filthy blanket and rubbed herself as dry as possible, lessons from her survival training shouting at her, warning her of the trouble she was in.
When you are wet, heat flows from your body into the water on your skin. Water is a higher heat conductor than air, thus your body will lose heat more rapidly when it is wet.
Dry. I must get dry, or I’ll freeze to death.
Her hair was her worst problem. No matter what she did, it would not dry for hours. At the cave’s temperature, perhaps days.
Unheeding of the blanket’s filth, Laynie chewed through its selvage and tore off a strip a foot wide. She wrapped the strip around her head, and tied the ends around her neck. She twisted the wet ends of her hair together and tucked them up into her utilitarian head covering. Then she huddled on the bench, knees pulled up to her chest, the remainder of the blanket wrapped as tightly around her as she could manage.
She had to preserve whatever heat her body made inside the folds of the blanket. She shook from the cold and from Sayed’s words clanging within her.
“You have interfered in the holy work we have undertaken for Allah, Anabelle Garineau. For that you will never leave this mountain alive. But before I allow you to die, you and I have much to discuss. You will suffer greatly at my hands as I extract what I need from you, and you will beg for death. So you see, you may count yourself already dead.”
Some bit of Sayed’s boast sounded familiar. “Lord God?”
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
“Oh. Y-yes. I-I-I c-can do that. I can do all things through Christ who s-s-strengthens me . . .”
I give you eternal life, and you shall never perish; no one will snatch you out of my hand.
“Yes, Lord. Whatever h-h-happens, I w-will conduct myself in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”
Laynie shivered and shook.
“Dear God, I’m so c-c-cold.”
Chapter 19
GROZNY, CHECHNYA, WAS only a middling city of less than a quarter million, but it did have one of the few commercial airports in the south of Russia. Wolfe’s agents had arrived from Italy two nights before. They now awaited Rosenberg’s arrival.
The flight from Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow via the Russian airline, Aeroflot, landed. When it had taxied to its gate, the passengers began to disembark, flowing into the airport proper, making their way to baggage claim.
“I’m not seeing her.”
“Patience, Jeff. Patience.”
The last passengers trickled through the door. They knew the men were the last passengers when the gate agent closed the door and locked it.
“We’ve been played, Stu.”
His partner cursed. “Phone it in, Jeff.”
“You phone it in. I’m not gonna be the one who tells Wolfe we blew our assignment.”
WOLFE WAS IN HIS DC offices holding a staff meeting when the call was routed to him. When he picked it up, he sensed immediately that it was bad news. Asking his deputy to finish, Wolfe shut himself up in his office.
“She wasn’t on the plane, Director.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
Wolfe hung up and called Jaz. “Rosenberg switched flights on us. This was your idea, Jaz. It’s probably too late to do anything about it, but figure it out anyway.”
“Yes, sir.”
JAZ RELUCTANTLY MET her teammates’ questioning eyes as they turned toward her. She swallowed.
“Seems our traitor switched flights mid-route. Did a runner.”
“Probably made the switch in Toronto,” Brian suggested.
Jaz nodded, bent her face to her laptop’s screen, and hacked into the airline where Rosenberg had tickets from Toronto to Moscow. It took her far longer than it should have to uncover Rosenberg’s new route—Toronto to Kiev, Kiev to Baku—but only because Rosenberg had swapped out identities, too.
She told the team and then called Wolfe back. “Sir. Rosenberg arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan, thirty minutes ago.”
“Baku. The backdoor to Dagestan and Chechnya. Long gone by now.”
“Yes, sir. I . . . I’m sorry, sir.”
Wolfe’s reply was tight. Cold. “I am, too, Miss Jessup.”
“Yes, sir.”
He’s right. I got distracted. Didn’t follow through. What is wrong with me?
Jaz was unaccustomed to failure. As its weight settled on her, she threw her phone down and hung her head over her keyboard. She knuckled her eyes hard, then harder, but it didn’t help. Sorrow and an aching fear collided with guilt and shame. When she tried to inhale, she shuddered instead. Then the tears she’d fought hard to contain . . . let go. Exploded. She buried her face in her arms to muffle her sobs, but it didn’t work.
Chairs rolled away from desks. Careful footsteps approached. Hands came to rest on her shoulders, back, and neck. Simple, soft pats or awkward but gentle little rubs.
Her team. Her friends. Wanting to console her. Doing their best to take her pain and make it their own.
Their care undid the little restraint she had left.
It’s my fault—it was my idea!
It was my idea, and now I’ve lost our only lead.
Not just a lead. I’ve lost her.
I’ve lost Bella.
She shuddered. And broke inside.
She wept until she had nothing left.
ROSENBERG LEFT THE airport terminal and hailed a taxi. Ordered the taxi to drive to the Teze Bazaar, one of Baku’s most famous open-air markets. After wandering for half an hour, constantly checking for a tail, Rosenberg located a pay phone and placed a call. She had chucked all her burner phones before she left the US.
“Baku Produce Delivery.”
Rosenberg, who did not speak Azerbaijani, replied in broken Russian.
“To whom am I speaking?”
“This is Emil. I am the owner.”
“Very good. This is Archangel. I request the transport of a shipment of pears and apricots.”
Emil sucked in a breath—the request was code. “I must check our delivery schedule.”
“I am calling from a pay phone. Here is the number. I will wait here until you call back.”
“It may take an hour or more.”
“Understood.”
Emil disconnected and dialed a memorized number. “I have a delivery for the general.”
“Oh? None was scheduled.”
“The request was properly worded.”
“Who was the requestor?”
“Someone named Archangel.”
“Stay near your phone. I will get back to you.”
The man disconnected. He unlocked a cupboard, removed a phone reserved for this purpose, and dialed. The satphone on the other end rang fifteen times before it was picked up.
“Yes?”
“General, we have received a properly coded request from Archangel for
transport to your location.”
Sayed stilled. Too soon by at least two weeks. Nothing, however, could stop the New Year’s Eve operation from going forward.
“Very well. Request granted.”
LAYNIE FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE to count the passing of time. No one came. No one peered into her cell. The passageway was utterly silent. But she didn’t wait passively. She made herself get up and walk. When her bare feet couldn’t stand the cold rock floor any longer, she walked back and forth on top of her bench, stopping to do squats at each turn. She exercised her arms and legs to keep the cold from stiffening her muscles. She rubbed her feet, the coldest parts of her body.
She kept up a continual conversation with God by talking aloud, singing, humming, repeating scriptures. Praying for her family members by name. Praying for her friends at Broadsword. Praying for Tobin. When she was tired, she huddled on the bench and slept.
As far as she could estimate, three days had passed. During that time, she’d received no food or water. She’d grown so thirsty that she searched out the little puddles remaining from Bula dousing her. She licked the water off the filthy, uneven stone floor and thanked God for it.
The lack of nourishment only heightened the exquisite pain the damp cold produced in her muscles, her fingers, her feet. She began to wonder if this was how Sayed would end her. A slow, painful freezing death. Alone.
He doesn’t know that I’m not alone. He doesn’t know that I have you, Jesus.
Laynie sat on the slatted bench, blanket clasped around her, counting off leg lifts and singing aloud to herself.
She didn’t hear the key rattle in her cell’s lock or the gate swing open. She looked up, and there was Bula. Observing. Listening.
The half-smile she offered him was part relief and part ironic humor. “Hello, Bula.”
He stared around the empty cell. Perplexed.
Did you think I’d be dead? Perhaps you expected to find a gibbering idiot.
Think again.
It was obvious he had not expected singing.
Laynie’s voice was ragged and dry from lack of water, but she had sung and then whispered the same songs again and again—surprised when her mind defaulted to old hymns, more surprised that many of the verses to the church songs she’d learned as a child came back so easily.
Laynie Portland, Spy Resurrected Page 22