His next words surprised her. “Have your agency travels over the past seven years ever brought you to the Middle East?”
Tracie blinked in surprise. “Well, yes,” she said slowly. “I’ve spent a small amount of time there. But nothing significant. My lack of familiarity with their languages and customs makes me a less-than-ideal choice when it comes to field work in that region.”
Brickley nodded, then sat quietly.
“Are you saying you think these papers were written by someone from the Middle East?”
“Yes,” he answered simply.
Tracie sat back, stunned. A Middle Eastern connection to the kidnapping of a sitting U.S. secretary of state? That possibility had never even crossed her mind. Certainly there was no shortage of countries in that troubled region that would like nothing better than to attack the United States, but who would have the capability? The technical expertise?
She pushed her surprise aside for the time being, and asked Brickley, “What leads you to the conclusion this was forged by a Middle Easterner?”
“Speech patterns,” he said, as if no further explanation was necessary. When Tracie didn’t respond, he attempted to explain. “I can’t really be too specific without getting into an in-depth discussion of the history of each language and culture, a scenario that would require a considerable commitment of time to the subject, which you say is something you cannot spare. Judging by the photograph I see in front of me, I’m inclined to believe time is of the essence. To put it as succinctly as I can, there are patterns in the phrasing of speech that are unique to each language, something you should remember from your own linguistic studies.”
Brickley looked at Tracie expectantly and she nodded. “Well then,” he said. “Suffice it to say that although I would have preferred a larger sample to work with than just one newspaper headline, the few sentences of text below it that I was able to make out, and a short, handwritten letter, I am confident that the phrasing patterns in the samples you provided me are most closely aligned with the speech patterns that would belong to a person of Middle Eastern culture.”
Tracie shook her head, thinking hard. “Could you hazard a guess as to which Middle Eastern country we’re talking about? Which language?”
“Middle Eastern cultures are among the oldest in the world, which means of course that their languages are ancient as well. Aramaic, for example, dates back more than three thousand years and survives to this day in the form of Neo-Aramaic languages. Now, over the centuries, these Neo-Aramaic languages have splintered into two distinct formats: Eastern Aramaic, which has long been dominant, and Western Aramaic, which has more or less died out, with one significant exception: the Ma’loula dialect. When you consider—”
Tracie had studied under Professor Brickley long enough to know that if she didn’t refocus him on the topic at hand, she would be treated to a detailed treatise on the history of the Aramaic language. As a former linguistics major, she thought the subject might be interesting, perhaps even fascinating, but the CIA covert ops specialist in her knew it was a subject for another time.
She cleared her throat and said, “Uh, professor, the documents? You were going to give me your best guess as to which Middle Eastern dialect the speech patterns most resemble?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Brickley said, pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and blinking owlishly behind the thick lenses. “As I was saying, the languages in that part of the world are among the oldest in recorded history. Of course they’ve all developed differently, and adjusted to changing times at different rates—”
“Professor?”
“Uh, yes. I was doing it again, wasn’t I? I’m sorry, Tracie, it’s just that I so rarely get the opportunity to discuss these types of things with people who are actually interested in them that sometimes I get carried away. I’ll get right to the heart of the matter. In my opinion, the speech patterns in both of these documents most closely resemble Iraqi Arabic.”
“Iraq?”
“Yes. Now bear in mind, I am not as confident in that assessment as I am in stating that these documents were not authored by a Russian. If you hadn’t asked for my best guess, I would never even have mentioned it because I don’t want to be responsible for pointing you in the wrong direction. But you asked my opinion, and that is it.”
Tracie tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn as she began gathering up the papers and shoving them back into her briefcase. The ache in her still-healing shoulders was now a constant throbbing, the pain radiating into her neck and igniting a headache that threatened to spiral out of control. She needed sleep.
She rotated her shoulders in an effort to loosen them, and Professor Brickley, who had been watching her closely, said, “You look exhausted, Tracie.”
She smiled wanly. “I’m okay. Give me a few hours of uninterrupted rack time and I’ll be fine.”
“I heard you were injured recently.”
“Where did you hear that?”
He smiled. “Grapevine. You know how it is.”
“I can’t talk about it,” she answered too quickly, thinking of Shane. At the thought of him tears began to fill her eyes and she wiped them away angrily with the back of her hand.
Brickley raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I understand,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to pry. I was just wondering if perhaps you should have taken a little more time off before returning to operational status.”
“The doctors cleared me, so I came back” she said, keeping quiet about the real reason she had returned to work so quickly. Hanging around doing nothing, thinking of Shane and how much I miss him, was killing me. This job is all I have.
Brickley got up from his overstuffed chair and walked around the coffee table. He shoved some more magazines and newspapers from the couch onto the floor and sat next to Tracie. “If you ever need to talk,” he said, “my door is always open.”
She smiled gratefully and said, “Thank you, Professor.”
“Peter,” he said.
“Okay, Peter. I’ll take you up on your offer, too; that’s a promise. But it can’t be tonight. I’ve got a lot of work to do. You’ve given me plenty to think about and I have to map out some kind of strategy for moving forward. Thanks for all your help.”
She rose from the couch and began walking quickly down the hallway. Professor Brickley got up more slowly and followed, struggling to match her pace. He started to say something else and she turned and flashed him a bright smile.
Then she opened the front door and walked into the night.
15
Wednesday, September 9, 1987
Time unknown
Location unknown
J. Robert Humphries was having trouble concentrating. His vision was blurry and he was thirsty beyond all reason. He wondered if he had been drugged, and if so, with what. He tried to determine approximately how long he had been held captive in the room that had been constructed to resemble a spare bedroom, but could not.
He had not been mistreated, not exactly. Not unless you considered being dragged out of your own home in the middle of the night at gunpoint and held in some undisclosed location by unknown assailants for some unknown reason, being mistreated.
J.R. changed his mind.
He had been mistreated. Badly.
But he guessed he had been fortunate, all things considered. The men holding him here had knocked him around a little—he had the bumps and bruises to prove it—but for the most part they seemed to be handling him with kid gloves.
He supposed that made sense. It was patently obvious, even in his confused and frightened state, that he had been taken for political reasons, undoubtedly by representatives of a foreign government hostile to the United States, and any leverage his captors might expect to exert over the Reagan Administration was dependent upon his continued good health. Killing him would be counterproductive, and injuring him badly would be nearly as much so.
J.R. thought he should be thankful for that
small bit of good fortune, as well as for the fact that the kidnappers had stopped covering his head with the cloth sack. After his last bathroom break they had left it off. Still, he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the concept of gratitude. His joints ached from being held in the same position for hours on end, he was queasy, he was suffering from a headache that refused to back down, and he had managed to doze for only a few minutes at a time. He was exhausted.
He tried to recall his American history, and whether a sitting U.S. secretary of state had ever been kidnapped and held for ransom. He didn’t think so. If it had ever happened, it certainly wasn’t in the modern era.
His body hurt and his head throbbed. His mouth was scratchy and dry.
After a while he fell into an uneasy slumber.
* * *
The door opened with a loud crash and J.R. Humphries awoke with a start. One of the kidnappers had apparently kicked it open after unlocking it, and it slammed back against the wall. The doorknob blasted a small crater into the sheetrock, sending powdery white residue floating into the air. It looked like confectioner’s sugar.
J.R. blinked rapidly, trying to regain his senses. He couldn’t tell whether he had been dozing for ten minutes or three hours, and although it didn’t make a damned bit of difference to his current situation, it bothered him that he didn’t know.
But what happened next bothered him even more.
A new man was here, someone he had not yet seen. The new arrival glanced in J.R.’s direction for a moment as he strode into the room. His eyes were filled with both disdain and amusement. In one hand he carried a plastic bucket, like a housewife might use when mopping her kitchen floor. He moved to a point directly in front of J.R. and dropped the bucket. It landed with a thud, and spun on its edge and stopped. Then the man left the room without a word.
J.R.’s sense of disorientation began to turn to alarm when the same man returned a moment later carrying first-aid supplies. Gauze pads of varying sizes. Adhesive tape. Antibacterial cream.
These supplies he dropped on the floor next to the bucket. He stood and stared wordlessly at J.R. It occurred to J.R. that he should ask the kidnapper why he hadn’t just carried the supplies inside the bucket and saved himself a trip. Then he began to suspect that the man hadn’t wanted to save himself a trip. He had wanted to drag the moment out, to build a sense of tension.
And it was working. J.R. felt his pulse quicken. He tried to return the kidnapper’s steady gaze, but after a moment he looked away. He hated himself for doing so but he couldn’t help it.
The kidnapper left the room again. This time when he returned he was carrying just one item, but that single item was enough to turn J.R.’s alarm into full-fledged panic.
The man was carrying a hedge trimmer.
It was a heavy-duty professional model, big and sturdy, with thick wooden handles featuring rubber handgrips so the user could avoid slippage when sweating in the hot summer sun. Its cutting jaws had been sharpened to a razor’s edge. J.R. could see them glittering in the dim light even as the kidnapper carried the tool across the room.
In almost any other setting the clippers would look utterly benign, but at this moment, to J.R. Humphries, they were dark, deadly, threatening.
Or maybe it was the look in the kidnapper’s eyes. He sauntered across the room, hedge trimmer in one hand, held down at his side, swinging it casually as he walked. When he reached the spot where he had dropped the other supplies, he stopped and stood directly in front of J.R.
The man still had not said a word, and J.R. knew he had to quell his rising panic or risk a heart attack or stroke. John Robert Humphries was in decent shape for a man who had done no significant amount of manual labor in more than three decades, but nevertheless, given the current stress on his sixty-three-year-old heart, it wouldn’t surprise him if the organ simply exploded inside his chest.
He swallowed heavily and forced himself to look into the kidnapper’s eyes. They were dark. Hooded. Threatening, like the sky before a thunderstorm. J.R. tried his best to keep his voice steady as he said, “What’s the meaning of this? What are your intentions?”
The words sounded silly as he said them. They sounded too formal, out of sync with the setting and the situation, but he said them without stuttering or shaking too badly and he was proud of himself for that.
For a moment he thought his questions would be ignored. But then the man smiled thinly, his face devoid of any warmth. “We have a job to do,” the man said.
“We?”
“Yes. We. You and me. My contribution to this job consists of performing the manual labor, the ‘heavy lifting,’ as you Americans might say. And your contribution…”
J.R. knew the man was playing with him, drawing out the moment. He resolved not to fall for it. He would not give this clearly sadistic bastard the satisfaction he was seeking.
But he crumbled almost immediately. He couldn’t help himself. He was a career politician, a diplomat, a man more comfortable in the world of high-stakes negotiation accompanied by fine brandy served in crystal decanters than in the world of guns and garden tools. “Yes?” He was unable to keep the tremor out of his voice and he hated himself for it.
“Your contribution to the job,” the man continued, “is to endure the pain.”
J.R.’s breath began coming in short gasps and he felt as if he were suffocating. He was hyperventilating, his panic and fear choking him as the man dropped to his knees in front of the chair. Dimly, he realized the man had not just been carrying the hedge trimmers on his third trip into the room. He had been holding a roll of duct tape in his other hand.
He watched in dread fascination, unable to take his eyes off the silvery roll as the man ripped off a long strip. The sound of the tape pulling off the roll was abrupt and grating, and J.R. jumped involuntarily, causing his steel handcuffs to clatter against the chair.
The man slapped the strip of duct tape over J.R.’s right wrist and then quickly wound it around the chair arm. Not only was J.R. bound, but the minimal amount of mobility he had previously enjoyed in his arm was gone.
The man ripped off another strip and placed it over the knuckles of J.R.’s right hand, slipping it in the gap between his thumb and pointer finger before once again securing it firmly to the wooden chair arm.
His right arm was essentially useless. The best J.R. could do was waggle his fingers. He began to get a sense of the inevitable, and he started talking, babbling really, gulping just enough air to make promises he knew he could not keep, if only the unknown men who had taken him would just release him.
“Put the bag over my head and drive me away, drop me anywhere. I don’t know your names, so I can’t hurt you. Furthermore, I wouldn’t hurt you! All I want is to go back to my family. You needn’t worry about me; I won’t say a word to anyone. And I can get you money! All the money you could ever want. You’ll have to release me, of course, in order for me to access it, but I have it, plenty of money, and—”
Somewhere inside J.R. knew he was nearly incoherent, but he couldn’t help himself and didn’t care. He had held it together for much longer than anyone should ever have to, but now, in the face of…whatever atrocity was about to be committed, he just could not keep himself under control.
“Enough!” the man said, stopping the flood of words. “I don’t care about your money. There is nothing you can give me that I want, besides what you are providing right now.”
The man shut his mouth and went back to work, once again as stoic as ever. He doubled up on the strips of tape he had already placed around J.R.’s forearm and hand, and then quickly secured the secretary of state’s left arm to the other side of the chair. He didn’t bother taping down that hand.
J.R. had stopped talking because he didn’t want to anger this obviously dangerous man any further, and talk was clearly not going to accomplish anything anyway. But he couldn’t stop himself from hyperventilating again. He was panting, gulping air. He felt a tightening in his bladd
er and wished he could be escorted to the bathroom, but knew that was not going to happen.
Prep work apparently done, the man rose to his feet. He towered over J.R., who felt even more helpless than he had before, as senseless as that seemed. The man slid the bucket with his foot across the dirty tile floor until it was positioned directly under J.R.’s right hand.
J.R. was crying freely now. The no-nonsense United States secretary of state, a man who had stared down bloodthirsty dictators across negotiating tables around the world, who had drawn metaphorical lines in invisible sand on nearly every continent, wept like a child, ashamed of his weakness but helpless to stop his tears.
His captor didn’t seem to notice. The man appeared to take no pleasure in his work, but it didn’t seem to bother him much, either. He looked J.R. in the eye. “It is clear you know what is to come next. I would like to say I am sorry, but that would be a lie. You would not want me to lie to you, would you, Mr. Secretary?”
J.R. ignored the question. There was nothing to gain by answering.
The man shrugged.
He bent and picked the hedge trimmers up off the floor.
He placed the jaws around the little finger of J.R.’s right hand, snugging the razor-sharp cutting edges as close to the knuckle as possible. J.R. tried to resist, but his hand had been so completely immobilized the best he could do was waggle his fingers, accomplishing nothing but putting himself in danger of cutting off his own digit.
Without warning, the kidnapper violently snapped the hedge trimmer handles together. The high-torque, highly sharpened blades flashed, neatly snipping through J.R. Humphries’s little finger with little more resistance than would have been offered by a decent-sized twig.
J.R. watched in shock and disbelief, his brain unable to process the images his eyes were sending it. His finger disappeared. A half-second later a light thunk signaled it had reached the bottom of the bucket.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 34