Sarai

by Lilya Myers

  Omar let the phone ring at least eight times before answering it. His phone rarely rang and when it did, it was almost always Aswad calling. Omar was neither in the mood or position to talk to him. He’d answer the phone. It was better than the alternative. Aswad wouldn’t give up until he answered, no matter what the time was.

  “Alo.” He used the informal greeting in Arabic with his father.

  “Omar, I have something very important for you to take care of immediately.”

  “I am very busy right now, father. Can it wait? Why not have Saib –”

  “No!” Aswad’s voice boomed over the phone. “I trust only you to do this and you will do as I say. Listen carefully. It’s Hashim. He is creating problems for me. It’s time to show him that he cannot touch me but I will touch him. The girl, his daughter, Sarai. She is now the closest to his heart. She must die! And quickly. I don’t have time to deal with that imbecile Saib.”

  You don’t own my life anymore! That’s what Omar wanted to scream into the phone.

  Aswad continued, “Listen. The child is well guarded by her grandparents who travel back and forth to their villa in Italy. They have the child with them right now in Switzerland. There is no room for mistakes. An accident. You decide, as long as there is no cause for the authorities to think it was anything more than an accident. Do you understand? Hashim will know the orders came from me but he must not be able to prove any of it.” Aswad finished with his instructions and hung up.

  As much as Aswad’s sons hated him, there was plenty of collateral damage to their psyches that made it nearly impossible to completely break free of the hold he had on them. Almost, but not completely.

  CHAPTER 9

  Cairo, 1983

  “I AM COMING TO Alexandria. I will meet you in El-Agamy, Street 27 at nine o’clock tonight. It’s a beach neighborhood, homes owned by foreigners but there are only shipping storage buildings on that street. No street lights. I will be parked by one of the buildings on the east side but you will not see me. Enter the street from the north, slowly. Stop and flash your lights once. I will return the flash and you will park your car there. Wait until I pull up beside you. Get out quickly and quietly. Lock your car and get in with me.”

  Hashim spoke in rapid Arabic and didn’t wait for a reply. Ten seconds to get this call completed, otherwise it could be overheard or intercepted. Most homes in Cairo and Alexandria had phones that could only receive calls made and routed through a central phone center. Had he known that danger before his wife, Hasne, was… it was a painful, still-raw reminder.

  Nowhere was really safe to talk. Even less so in Cairo. There was someone around every corner who would give up their own mother if they could sell that information for money, especially if it involved anything political.

  Hashim let out a snort of disgust as he put the car in drive. The road to Alexandria was no better than a cattle path filled with potholes. His next three hours would be spent avoiding those and whoever might be following him. Such a game of cat and mouse. He was getting much better at it though. Hashim hoped his tail would report that they lost him in Cairo traffic, never considering that he’d travel to Alexandria at night. One quick turn after another in Cairo traffic could almost assure him that his car would become the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack, especially since he drove a Mercedes. There was an abundance of them in Egypt. It was the car of choice for the many oil rich Arabs visiting or living there. But one could never be too sure. Being sure could get one killed.

  It was imperative that tonight’s meeting be taken out of Cairo. Alexandria attracted foreigners from Europe who flooded the Mediterranean seaside city and outskirts for holiday and tourism, providing a little more cover than the capital. Under the dark cloak of Cairo, evil and deception could be the proverbial fly on the wall. Of every wall. He’d worry about that later because his concern was for taking every precaution now.

  Hashim considered that it might be impossible to protect President Sadat. A year after signing a friend treaty with Russia, it was revoked, as Egypt re-oriented its relationship with the U.S. and the West.

  Then, after signing a peace agreement with Israel in 1979, Sadat himself became the enemy of the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. The new peace accord between Egypt and Israel was not popular with most Egyptians. Hashim had received reports of a Jihad being formulated and that put Sadat in danger. What he heard was more than just rumor. If anything happened to Sadat, Hosni Mubarak would step in to fill his shoes.

  That would be a political game-changer, in more ways than one. Mubarak would at least maintain relations with the West whereas Aswad was a murdering, unbalanced radical who would declare Sharia law shortly before unleashing a terrorist regime across Egypt. Hashim’s sources told him that Aswad was also positioning himself to oust Mubarak in a coup. They managed to thwart Aswad’s efforts once, which only fueled Aswad’s rampage and cleared a path for revenge. Aswad had once been a general, unethical and ruthless, but highly successful. Hashim shook his head. The month of Ramadan was almost upon them. A usually festive time of tolerance and togetherness for Muslims was shaping up to be marred by the deep-running political rift. Along with this came the severe economic pressures consuming the country whose human rights were being socially engineered.

  The instability of the government and the unpredictability of the people may risk the success of a revolution and pave the way for Aswad without his lifting a finger. This was the consensus of the revolutionaries’ council and rightly so, Hashim thought as he put his key in the ignition.

  The traffic in Cairo was always intolerable and he abhorred having to pay bribe money to pass the barricade that had been erected by a corrupt policeman. Tonight, he hoped that traffic would provide him the cover needed to put thirty or forty cars between him and the tail Aswad had placed on him.

  Hashim was totally alone with his thoughts as his car ambled along the black ribbon of road that cut through the Sahara. Scant moonlight to reflect off the desert in order to see potholes and the roadsides made driving this dangerous stretch of road even more tedious. Yet, headlights against the darkness assisted him in knowing whether or not someone might be following far behind him.

  With the lights and chaos of Cairo behind him, he allowed his mind to stray, for just a moment, from his immediate worries. He didn’t practice the Muslim faith, but he was deeply connected to the country of his birth through its history and rich heritage. As he kept his focus on the road ahead, his thoughts carried him away for longer than he realized. Suddenly, there was a flicker of light in his rearview mirror. The light was in the distance but it hadn’t been there before. Perhaps a Bedouin who pulled out onto the desert road? Unlikely at night. Better odds indicated a pursuer.

  Hashim had driven this road hundreds of times during the day. Maybe more. There was a place about a mile or so up the road that he could use. It led to one of the old limestone quarries. He looked in his mirror again to get a sense of the distance between him and the other car. Five miles back at best. If someone had picked up his tail lights, they’d stay back at a cautious distance until he got close to Alexandria.

  The turnoff came up sooner than he expected. It was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it, or you didn’t know it was there. Just before he took the turnoff, Hashim clicked off his headlights and let the level sand slow him to a stop. Brake lights would be a dead giveaway. With the engine still running, he grabbed his handgun off the passenger seat and hopped out. Hashim used the butt of the gun to smash out both taillights then started the engine.

  Because of the quarry, the turnoff became an incline well above the main road. He made a wide sweep to face the highway and pulled to a stop where the darkness made it impossible to see the road. And vice versa, he hoped. From this vantage point, he could see the headlights of the other car getting closer. Glancing at his watch, he picked up his handgun off the seat again and listened to the rhythm of his heart.

  He held his breath as though it would sus
pend the nearing headlights and make them disappear. The vehicle passed in frantic pursuit, hoping to catch what they could no longer see. The only thing Hashim could do now was wait. When he was confident that they had at least a twenty minute lead on him, he’d get back on the road. That’s if they assumed he had tried to out run them. Or, they pulled over up ahead somewhere, waiting. It was a chance he’d have to take. The odds stunk but he knew that was about as good as they were going to get. He eased back onto the main road before flipping on the headlights.

  Hashim’s mind wandered to history and politics. During the Nasser years, many young Egyptians studied in Soviet universities and military schools. Among them was Hosni Mubarak. Sadat would be killed, a pathetic attempt to hold a democratic election would follow, and Mubarak would be elected President. The idea that the same failed socialist ideology could somehow fix the problems it created in Egypt, or that it could somehow be made to work now if imposed through democratic processes was ludicrous, at best. The socialist ideology that permeated Egypt would continue to make it vulnerable to the ever-downward spiral from its tower of ancient legacy as a great civilization.

  The many achievements of the ancient Egyptians included quarrying, surveying and construction techniques that supported the building of such lasting monuments as the Pyramids, a system of mathematics, a practical and effective system of medicine, irrigation systems and agricultural production techniques, the first known ships, glass technology, new forms of literature, and the earliest known peace treaty, made with Hittites. The list was impressive.

  Hashim had long-embraced the American Revolution ideas of inalienable individual rights, personal and economic liberty, and a limited government. He wasn’t just fascinated by Samuel Adams, Father of the American Revolution. He was in awe of the great American statesman and architect of the American Republic. Hashim modeled his studies in philosophy after those of Sam Adams. This included studying the works of John Locke, an English philosopher who promoted the ideas that all men were politically equal and that they held three basic rights: life, liberty, and property. Locke’s claim that the government had no right to tax the people without their consent and that the people should resist bad government was not lost on young Sam Adams. It was certainly not lost on Hashim. He silently thanked his father for every opportunity given to him that allowed him to understand what liberty really meant.

  In the distance of the long flat stretch ahead of him, he could see the glow coming from the city against the dark night sky and his thoughts returned to the present. Hashim had not seen anything suspicious on the road since his earlier encounter. His pursuers must have long since gotten to Alexandria. He would be there soon himself. He had already given thought to taking some alternate routes to get to his destination. It was a simple precaution to satisfy himself that his tail hadn’t spotted him driving into the city. His thoughts snapped back to the dilemma that had been plaguing him. The one which he could no longer put aside. He kept coming back to the final outcome – it was always the same. The problem he had to overcome was just how to get there.

  He’d managed to keep his daughter hidden away and safe until now but that was becoming riskier and more difficult to sustain. Aswad had no scruples when it came to another human being and it had recently been confirmed that he also had ties to a terrorist group who were deadly hunters. It saddened Hashim that the kind of life he had been able to give his beloved child was an existence as a fugitive. Even if he parted ways with the revolutionaries, she would never be safe from Aswad or his sons. Hashim understood that Aswad wouldn’t kill him. Not at first. Not until his soul was destroyed before his body.

  Aswad’s name had also become attached to slave trade, brutal rapes, beatings, and torture of underage girls from Sudan. There was no proof and no one was willing to chance the wrath that could befall them and their families if they reported it. Even though recently, the bodies of too many young girls were being found. This was Cairo. Young boys defecated next to parked cars, women were openly raped on buses or in taxis. The police were generally corrupt or lazy, which helped propel Aswad into establishing a flourishing and profitable business that provided him with an opulent lifestyle and, in turn, would also help to further fund his pursuits.

  He had long been preying upon the poverty in Sudan that left single mothers in an unimaginable situation. If they weren’t widowed, they’d become that way. A man could be conveniently kidnapped and killed, if necessary, leaving the woman unable to provide for her family. She’d then be approached with a choice. Either sell her children into a life of service to a family where they would be clothed, fed, and housed or watch them starve to death.

  The money the woman would receive for each girl was merely pennies. So scant the payment, yet it was significant enough to sustain the rest of the family for some time. The amount Aswad paid couldn’t even be measured against what the girls would bring when they were sold. It wasn’t that the Sudanese women didn’t love their children; it was because they did. The lie they were told was that the child would have a better life working for a wealthy Saudi family. There the girl would be well-fed, given housing, and an education. They would be able to send some of their wages home and visit their families.

  The truth was that while the girls were ultimately destined to become servants of wealthy Saudi families, or used to bribe an Egyptian official, their lives would become a hell far worse than that from which they came. They would send no money home, nor visit their families. It was as though they never existed. Not a single girl would ever be seen or heard from again.

  The wealthy Saudi families didn’t question the ungodly sum of money they paid Aswad for each innocent girl. Not girls. They were children really – barely eleven and twelve years old. Once the girls were taken from their homes, they had to be broken and trained. By the time they left Aswad’s chambers, if they made it there, they were obedient, dispirited, and experienced. They had to be. Survival depended on it. Once they were handed over to their owners, the girls’ entire beings belonged to someone else to do with as they pleased. The families in Sudan would never hear from their children again.

  On rare occasions, a girl might go to a family where she was not beaten. She might even be given a pillow to use on the hard wooden floor where she was made to sleep. The culture made it acceptable for the young boys of the family to rape and gain sexual prowess from their youngest servants. The girls had no hope for marriage. There was no hope of ever escaping from their destiny. There was no hope.

  Of course, there were some that never made it to Aswad. From time to time, there were tenuous whispers of Sudanese girls being found in or near Cairo. Beaten. Brutalized. Dead. The finger was always pointed at Aswad. His reputation was well known and so was his swift and lethal retaliation, so rumors were stifled.

  One of Aswad’s sons was in charge of bringing the girls into Egypt. Sometimes a conflict would cause him to forfeit his journey to Sudan and he would offer it to one of his half-brothers. At times, it went outside the brothers to a third party for a cut of the proceeds. This was an arrangement always outside of Aswad’s knowledge. The motive was survival and not brotherly love. No word of it would get back to Aswad. The secret hatred each of his sons had for him was a bond stronger than the genes they shared. And the jobs always had dividends.

  Occasionally, a girl wouldn’t make it into the pool to be sold as a servant. There were times when the gift of a young girl would be given for a political favor. Not until the girls were taken to their temporary destination to be assessed and dispersed was a head count given. This allowed the collection of extra money for some, fringe benefits for others, and all of this outside Aswad’s knowledge. There were no missing person’s reports. There’d be no way for the families of the girls to even know if the girls were missing or dead. No one would look for them. No one made any attempt to find out how or why they died. No one would claim the brutalized bodies of young victims discovered in a dark corner of the city, or out in the desert.
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  This was the early 1980’s. When Abdel Nasser nationalized the country with his socialist ideology and policies in the 1950’s, progress had taken many paces backward. On countless levels, Egypt was trailing the Western world. The field of forensic science was one of the areas where they had fallen behind. And even if they had made some progress in that area, they would be hard pressed to make a dent in a place where the daytime population numbers of Cairo rose upwards of nineteen million. Many of the senior police officers were themselves corrupt.

  DNA was a science that had not yet come into its own in the U. S. Samples were collected at crime scenes and stored. It would be years before that DNA collection would be used to convict in a case in the United States. It would be more than a decade before a broad system and database was in place in the U.S. The Egyptian police were plenty busy collecting bribe money instead of DNA, and that was far safer than stirring up a hornet’s nest in a country riddled with corruption.

  Hashim made his way through the outskirts of Alexandria. He was tired but he had to press on. The road from Cairo had been hypnotizing, in spite of the earlier encounter. There’d still be the long drive back to Cairo during the night. He knew of a safe place where he could get a couple of hours sleep and strong Egyptian coffee before his return trip. Driving west past the harbor, the lights of the city were slowly obscured behind him by the blackness ahead. As exhausted as he was, his awareness was now heightened to other vehicles that could possibly be keeping in sync with his turns.

  It was getting close to 9 p.m. Hashim had made good time in spite of his layover on the road between Cairo and Alexandria. The outskirts of Alexandria were typical of most any place that had a beach. It was far more laid back than Cairo. There were lots of big homes, some with walls around them. Judging by the activity on the main streets as he drove through the town on the western edge of Alexandria, it must have been holiday for a lot of Europeans. There appeared to be more people, more cars. That was a good thing for Hashim. Less likely to be spotted. He envisioned that his tail was still driving around in circles. Or so he hoped.