by Mike Bond
His phone throbbed. “We have some images,” Feist said.
“What you got?”
“Fixed stuff.” Feist cleared his throat. “We always keep an eye on the Palestine, that area. Somebody that could’ve been her went out the front door at four-twenty-two, turned right, crossed the street and headed for the market.”
“The market.” Jack fought a surge of hope. “What was she wearing?”
“Looks like a brown coat, can’t tell.”
“That could be her.”
“Then at the corner a white van pulls over, three guys leap out and throw her inside and it drives off with her fighting all three of them. No one there seemed to see; next to a broken wall and an empty lot, parked cars on both sides blocking the view.”
Jack said nothing, seeing it. “Where’d it go?”
“Out of view.”
“A white van –”
“Could be a Ford, can’t tell. Even one of those fucking Russian Furgons.”
“You sent those images home?”
“Of course.”
“When will we hear?”
“It’s after hours, over there.”
A red Fiat had plodded up the street and halted gasping in front of the old man’s bungalow. “Wait,” Jack said softly to Feist, “I have a license plate for you.”
A youngish man with a full Islamic beard and a .45 holstered on his hip got out of the Fiat and entered the house. “It’s a white passenger car plate, 97351,” Jack said.
“Where are you?”
“723 Al Attar. Staking out the hotel clerk’s house. He knows who did it.”
“You’re out there on your own? You’re crazy.”
“Our chances of saving her get worse every minute. Just ID that plate.”
“You’re going to end up dead, Jack. And her too.”
High Noon
“DEATH IS THE SENTENCE for spying.”
“I’m not a spy.” Her mouth wouldn’t work right, from having been gagged. Her teeth felt twisted, her tongue scraped and swollen.
“In almost every country in the world the sentence for spying is death.” His voice coming from above her, him and two others.
“I’m a journalist,” she mumbled, trying to shift position on the wooden chair they had tied her to. “Not a spy.”
“Aren’t they the same?” He had a lisp that expired on the last consonant.
“The Independent is independent. Objective –”
“There is no such thing as objectivity, you know that.”
“Can’t you please please loosen this cord on my wrists? Please, they are dying.”
“We are all dying. Some go to Heaven, others like you go to Hell.”
“What do you want of me? Get it over with.” She could see Jack clearly as if he stood before her, in a future they would never have. He wore a red wool shirt, hands in jeans pockets. Silver-haired. A silvery log gate behind him against a far valley of dark firs and granite.
“We want you to tell us about your work with MI6. We will learn, as you know, one way or the other.” He gripped her shoulder. “You know the rules – You talk, they pay, you go home.”
“Then I’m dead. For there is nothing I can tell you about spying. I will tell you what I know about MI6, but that is from their media and available to anyone...” She waited for the slap but it did not come. “I can tell you about my stories but not all my sources. I can –”
It came so hard, her cheek screaming in pain, her jaw and skull thundering, blood spurting down her lips and chin onto her thigh. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her across the floor, her tied hands scraping along concrete. “Do it here!” he said. “Use the silencer.”
“Just cut her throat.”
“Please, I’m not a spy, please... I’ll tell you anything I know but I know nothing –”
“She’s got nice tits. Feel her cunt, too. Let’s do her first, then cut her throat?”
“We kill her right now. Give me the knife.” He twisted her into position on her knees, a steely hand yanking back her chin. “Feel this?” he whispered, “feel it? It’s the blade that will rip through your throat and jugular and larynx so your brain dies as you choke on your own blood... Can you feel it?” He slid it along her skin, a hot wire. “Answer me!”
She tried to nod, moaned through her gag. He dropped her head, knocked her down. “Stand, you! Stand!”
She tried to stand but couldn’t with bound hands and ankles. He pushed her over with his boot. “You still can’t remember MI6? Fine, have it your way. I sentence you to death. At noon.” A rustle of cloth as he stood and checked his watch. “Yes, let’s do high noon. Like in the movies.”
THE BEARDED GUY came out of the old man’s bungalow with an AK and cartridge belt. He tossed them in the Fiat’s trunk and started the car as Jack ran to the Vespa and followed him, no headlight, a block behind.
The Fiat scuttled along Al Mahdi trailing a tail of black smoke. Half the guys in Baghdad, Jack reminded himself, carry AKs and wear sidearms. I’m chasing phantoms.
The road was filling with smoking trucks, tilting buses, scurrying cars and blaring motorbikes. The sun began to burn through the ooze of exhaust, damp fires and burning trash. A body lay at the roadside, blood- and dust-cloaked. Dead fronds drooped from the palms like hanged men; workers in dirty undershirts and rolled-up trousers were lining up at job sites; black-veiled women trotted along the roadsides. Oily water glinted in the potholes and splashed up when cars ran across them.
The Vespa stuttered, caught, jerked forward and stuttered again. A truck had moved in between Jack and the Fiat; the bike backfired, died. Coasting, he stamped on the clutch, released it and the engine caught. The red Fiat turned down an alley, picking its way carefully between potholes and avoiding a flooded oil-shiny trench that may have been a sewer.
The Vespa died. No matter what he did it wouldn’t start. He tipped it against a wall and ran after the red Fiat as it turned right at the end of the alley and when Jack got there it had disappeared down a narrow long street curving left at the end. He ran several blocks each way but could not see the red Fiat down any side streets.
From a seller on the curb he bought a tin of gasoline, ran to the Vespa and drove a grid check on every street and alley, working his way farther and farther outward.
It was a wide low street with sagging wires, burnt-out cars, shell holes and shattered windows, bones of houses. And at the cul-de-sac a white-painted car repair shop, its three bays shut by rusted metal doors, a one-window office on the left side, the red Fiat parked beside it.
Next to a white van.
“IT’S A REAL PLATE NUMBER,” Feist said. “Halab al-Ismaili, Baghdad Central says. A Special Forces unit captured him way back in 2007 after an IED attack. We put him in Bucca, where he hung out with all these other fucking terrorists, the Al-Qaedas and ex-Baathists, got out when we handed over Bucca to the Iraqis and all these dangerous guys got released. We’ve found links between him and al-Baghdadi.”
“I’m moving in on this white van.”
“You can’t go in alone, Jack.”
“What else they tell you, Baghdad Central?”
“They say leave him alone.”
“Which means they’re warning him, right now.”
“Maybe not.”
“We need to hit this place.”
“On suspicion of having a white van? You know how many white vans there are in Baghdad? We’d have fifty thousand suspects.”
“This guy with the Fiat, he’s tied to the old man. The old man knew what was happening, maybe helped out.”
“Still doesn’t give you the right to bust in, shoot everybody. Let’s put a post on it and we’ll bring up some gear and see what we hear.”
He hated the idea but it made sense. To listen on conversations first, because once you hit them they shut up. And everyone knows you’ve hit them. “I’ll find somewhere and get back to you.” He found another gas seller and topped up the Vespa. Back at
the garage neither the red Fiat or the white van had moved.
He glanced at himself in a dusty storefront window. Just like any normal Iraqi guy, tanned skin and bristles, a worn, hard-bitten look, faded jeans and shirt, scuffed running shoes. An older guy who’d come down in the world, looking for a construction job, any job.
The street was packed dirt, tails of sand twirling away in the wind. But there was no one there, no movement among the close-packed cars. He’d stick out no matter what he looked like.
The next street was narrower and the buildings dirtier and taller, clotheslines and utility lines slung between them, battered cars crouching along both sides, people walking and kids running down the middle, one kicking an empty plastic bottle like a soccer ball before him.
The front doors of most apartment buildings were open. Many of the apartments were broken-windowed and empty. He walked purposely up one’s front stairs and down a darkened dirty hall of peeling wallpaper and loose linoleum. The stairs creaked as he climbed to the third floor, where a window on the stairwell looked down on the garage.
He wondered should he find a building closer to the garage then decided to stay where he was. He climbed one more flight to the roof, which was flat and sticky and dropped straight off on all sides. He called Feist and told him where he was.
“I’ll have a guy there in fifty minutes.”
“Who?”
“Name’s Darius. Ex-Iraqi Army elite, hates Sunnis and shiites. An LP guy.”
“More and more cars are showing up at the garage. We got a big meeting. I need him.”
“It’s an insane lead.”
Jack thought of Owen McPhee years ago in the World Trade Center. “Show me a better one.”
Prepare Yourself
THEY’D KILL HER in four hours. She had to face it. Live the rest of her life in four hours.
Does your brain keep working when your head’s cut off? Do you know what’s happened? How horribly does it hurt?
No one would save her. No one knew where she was. Jack going crazy trying to find her – all lost. Jack, all their future lives together, kids and grandkids – all lost.
How could she make it not happen?
Tell them the truth?
They’d kill her anyway.
You are going to die in four hours. Prepare yourself.
DARIUS was short, grizzled and rugged. He glanced around the roof carefully, then at Jack. “You alone here?”
“It’s fine.”
“I would not say so.”
Jack nodded at Darius’ backpack. “What you got?”
Darius took out a device the size of a thick cell phone. It sat on four thin legs and had a small probe he pointed toward the garage. He plugged in ear buds and set the device carefully on the roof edge, listening to it and altering the probe till he had it where he wanted. He handed one ear bud to Jack. “Bunch of guys talking. Don’t seem very happy.”
Jack hurriedly plugged in the ear bud. The conversation was astonishingly clear, as if he sat in the next room. “It’s not our problem,” a man said.
“They must make it five million,” another said, older, with a harsh voice.
“She is a spy, they say. She is to be killed.”
“Anyway, it is not our problem.”
“They asked us, should they kill her –”
Jack felt an awful presence behind him, pulled out the ear bud. “Stand up slowly,” a voice said. “Hands behind your heads.”
He had not watched his back, Jack realized, and now he couldn’t save her any more. He scanned the roof edge for a way down. Nothing. He glanced at Darius, who seemed sad and alone.
He’d been so caught up in finding her he’d destroyed himself. And her too. He stepped to the edge. Straight down.
“What are you doing?” the man said, pointing an AK back and forth between Jack and Darius.
“We are just waiting,” Darius said, “on this roof.”
Jack turned the corner and looked down again. A steel ladder bolted onto the concrete edge descended the wall into darkness. “You’re going to kill me, I’d rather jump.”
“Get back here!” the man yelled.
Jack leaped over the side grabbing the ladder that popped loose from the wall as he slid straight down it; he grabbed at a third floor window and squeezed through it into what seemed to be a kitchen, scrambled over a counter and waited behind the front door. The man came racing down the stairs and Jack hit him hard in the forehead with the butt of his gun, and hard again on the temple as he knocked him to the floor.
Darius came downstairs. “Thank you for this. He was going to kill me.”
“Let’s gag and tie him. Then we go find those guys in the garage.”
“There are many –”
“Doesn’t matter.” Jack took the man’s AK, dragged him into the apartment and tied his wrists behind him to an iron radiator. The man’s head was bleeding heavily. Jack took seven bullets and a thin wallet from the man’s pockets.
“You take this.” Jack handed Darius his revolver and checked the AK. Full clip.
He called Simon and Feist and gave them the address. “These guys don’t have her,” Simon said, “but they know where she is?”
“They are in contact with the people who have her.”
Simon exhaled, exhaustion and defeat. “If we go in on them we won’t be able to make them talk in time to save her, in time before whoever has her moves her somewhere else –”
Or kills her, Jack reminded himself. If I don’t get there first. “If we can find the phone they’re using, can we trace the call?”
“Yeah maybe.”
“How soon?”
“You need to go back on the roof and listen,” Feist said.
“You guys don’t get here fast I’m going in. Me and my friend Darius here, we’ll make somebody talk.”
“Hang tight,” Feist said. “We’ll be there.”
THEY SEATED HER back in the chair and lashed her wrists and ankles to it. Someone yanked off the gag. “Say something.”
Her mouth was full of pain, her tongue numb. She gagged, tried to speak. The whip ripped across her neck setting skin and muscle afire, stung more than she could believe, could bear. “Speak!” he yelled.
“Kill me. Get it over with.”
“It’s only ten o’clock. You still have two hours. Or more if you tell us who you talk to. What do they say? How do you send it? Who are your MI6 contacts here? Easy questions, easy to answer. To save your life.”
Hands shoved her back against the chair, tugged off the blindfold. Cold light seared through her eyelids into her eyes. She shut them tighter then slowly opened them. A little room with yellow insulation on the walls, no windows, a concrete floor. Three men in tan camo and black balaclavas stared down at her. One held the whip, the others AKs. Straight before her, four feet away, on a black tripod and focused directly on her was a video camera.
The one with the whip bent to look through the camera, moved it slightly. “Now,” he said, “what is your name?”
“Who are you?”
His wrist twitched; the tail of the whip slid back and forth across the concrete floor. “Tell us your name.”
“Isabelle. Palmieri.”
“Who are you?”
“Correspondent. The Independent.”
“What is your real job?”
“That is my real job.”
“Why are you lying to us? Do you think we don’t know that your boss at MI6 is Simon Etheridge, that even at the so-called Independent they know you’re a spy? And you live like a whore with that American we’ve just killed –”
It was like a knife. Jack please don’t be dead. They’re only saying this, to make me break. “Show me a photo.”
“Photo?”
“Of his body. Then I believe you.”
“He was shot from a distance. We do not have a body.”
“Liar.” She waited for the whip but its tip just lay there on the floor, twitching.
> The man with the whip nodded to the others, who retied the blindfold round her eyes and gagged her. “We do not really need your information about MI6,” he said. “Much better, we are going to use you as a lesson. In an hour and forty-two minutes I will hold your severed head up before this camera. We will prop your eyes open so they look into the camera, into the eyes of millions of people around the world on social media – as you call it. And we will promise the same fate to infidels worldwide, Shiites and foreigners both.” He caressed the side of her face with the whip handle. “Everyone will listen.”
“If you need to excrete,” another said, “say so now. It’s disgusting when it happens after we cut off your head.”
Her body was intense, alive, nauseous, like a wire. But maybe a way to escape? Yes, she told herself. Anything is possible. “I need to.”
“Filthy woman,” one said as he untied her wrists and ankles and led her blindfolded from the room left down a short corridor into a stinking closet, its floor covered in feces and urine. “Shit here anywhere,” he said. “They all do, before we kill them.”
Liberation
IN THE KORAN liberation is freedom from non-belief. From the mind, from doubt. Giving oneself fully to Allah. Knowing that allahu akhbar – God is greater than any human comprehension.
So how do they think, Jack tried to imagine, these guys who took her? If anyone took her. If she’s not dead.
It’s their total submission to their own belief. There was no way he could reach them. No way to imagine them.
Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, the Islamic Brotherhood, Fatah, Hamas, Boko Haram, Al-Shebaab, the endless slaughter in Syria, the vast Islamic conflict and hatred of all else.
To not value life. To hate it.
It was useless. He sat cross-legged on the on the grimy roof, hands cupped over his ears listening to the voices in the garage discussing old debts and battles, servant girls, imams and enemies.
“Another one comes,” Darius said.
It was a dark-camouflaged Hummer making Jack think for an instant it was American till it stopped in the middle of the street and two men in balaclavas, tan shirts and khaki pants got out and went into the garage.