by Terry Toler
“I specifically remember giving it to her,” MJ said. “Can you look through the file again?”
“It’s not here,” the lady said in an exasperated tone like they were bothering her. “Do you have a guardian’s certificate giving you permission to leave the country?”
“They said I didn’t need it if I had my birth certificate. Today’s my birthday. I turned eighteen today. So legally, I’m old enough to get my passport without a guardian’s certificate.”
“That’s true,” the woman said tersely. “But you don’t have a birth certificate. You’ll need a copy before I can give you your passport.”
MJ could see the passport laying there in the file. Opened. It had her picture on it. They were so close. For a moment, she thought about snatching it out of the file, but she thought better of it.
“Can I act as her legal guardian?” Auntie said.
“Are you her legal guardian?”
“I’m her aunt.”
“That’s not what I asked you. Do you have a court document showing that you are this girl’s legal guardian?”
“No.”
“Then I’m going to need your birth certificate.”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Then step out of line and let the next person in.”
MJ started to object, but Auntie pulled MJ’s arm and practically dragged her away from the counter. “We’ll go back to my house and get the birth certificate and bring it back here,” Auntie said.
MJ looked at the clock on the wall. It read 10:05.
“What about father? He’s expecting me to be at your house at noon. That’s when he’s picking me up to take me to the mosque to marry Abdul.”
MJ saw the hurt on Christopher’s face as he grimaced, and his lips contorted.
“If we hurry, we can get there before he does,” her Aunt said.
“I’m coming with you,” Christopher said.
“No!” Auntie exclaimed. “You can’t go anywhere near my house. If her father sees you, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”
“What do you want me to do?” Christopher said.
“Wait here,” Auntie said. “We’ll be back in about two hours. Maybe I should just go. MJ, you stay here with Christopher.”
“You’ll never find where I hid the birth certificate,” MJ said.
“Tell me where it is.”
MJ tried to explain, but Aunt Shule didn’t understand.
“I’ll come with you,” MJ said. “I know right where it is.”
“If your father sees you, we’ll act like everything’s normal and then sneak away when he’s not looking.”
Christopher started to hug MJ, but Auntie pushed him away. “Don’t Christopher! You kids have to be careful. No public displays of affection. You can hug and kiss all you want once you’re safely on that plane. Until then, don’t do anything to draw the attention of the authorities.”
Several police officers were standing around. One looked their way.
“Let’s get out of here,” Auntie said.
“We’ll be back soon, I promise,” MJ said to Christopher.
As they walked out the door, MJ looked back and waved.
I’ll be back soon.
13
Abu Dhabi International Airport
Brad, my CIA handler, wasn’t supportive of me going back to Abu Dhabi. We’d just landed so he wouldn’t be able to talk me out of it now.
“You’re going to all this trouble and risk for one girl!” He’d said it with a rare show of emotion.
“It’s two girls,” I argued.
“You don’t even know if the second girl’s still alive.”
“I meant Amina. Three girls if you include Odille.”
Odille was the girl from Canada who disappeared off the face of the earth after refusing to have sex with the Sheikh. I didn’t know if I could find her, but I was going to try.
“What can you do for Amina?” Brad said. “She might be in jail by now for all we know.”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. I’m going to assess the situation and come up with an MSO, and a plan.” MSO was Mission Success Odds. I had no idea what the plan would be.
But I wasn’t going to argue with him. I did want to assure him that I wasn’t going to run off and do something stupid. He was right. Strategically, it didn’t make any sense. Objectively, the rewards didn’t merit the risk involved.
It costs thousands of dollars just to fly the plane back across the Mediterranean to get there. Something Brad never would’ve never let me do if the CIA were footing the bill. Since AJAX was covering it, he didn’t have any say in it. And with the forty-million-dollar profit on the painting I stole from the Sheikh, Alex, my husband and business partner in AJAX, could hardly make a financial argument. Not that he tried. He was supportive of whatever I wanted to do.
Besides, the skeleton plan I had swirling around in my mind might bring a windfall to AJAX that would make the heist of the forty-million-dollar painting look like change for a parking meter. I wasn’t ready to share that plan with anyone just yet. Not even A-Rad. Not even Alex.
“There may be more girls,” I said to Brad as A-Rad walked into the center section of the plane after bringing it to a stop at the hangar.
“Don’t expand the operation, Jamie,” Brad said. “We have no way to extract dozens of girls.”
I wanted to respond, but I knew he was right.
“If you need a fix, go down to the southern border wall. Now that we have an open-border policy, you can rescue four or five girls an hour down there.”
What he said almost sent me into a rage. If I cussed, now would be the time I’d let one fly. I didn’t rescue girls for kicks. Or for a fix. This was my life. While Brad cared about the girls in a weird and different way, for him, rescuing girls was wrapped up in missions. Operations. Strategic interests.
Rescuing girls from a horrible life of slavery was my passion in my life. My obsession. I cared about every single girl the same.
No man left behind.
Curly’s words were drilled into me during training. It didn’t apply to this situation in the way Curly meant it, but I had adopted it as my motto.
No girl left behind.
I didn’t expect Brad to understand. It took Alex a long time to get it, but he finally did.
He gets me. It’s who I am.
I was under no illusion that I could save the world. But I could do my small part. Bianca. Anya. Odille. Amina. They needed me. I didn’t seek them out. They came across my path. Maybe by divine providence. I didn’t know. All I knew was that I could help them. If it meant risking my life, then I would.
“I have to go,” I said abruptly. “My plane’s arriving.”
Then I hung up the phone. Roughly. Brad would never know I’d done it in anger, but it made me feel like I was hanging up on him, and I felt better afterward.
Brad was right, though. I had to limit the operations. While I was able to extract Bianca easily enough, there was no way I could’ve gotten dozens of girls out of Abu Dhabi without getting caught. Not feasible. While Brad made me angry, I gave him grace. It’d been a long time since he’d been in the field. Looked in a victim’s eyes. Watched someone die in front of him.
To his credit, he wasn’t like a lot of the suits at Langley who treated girls like they were statistics. Numbers to be played with and manipulated. Brad genuinely cared. He’d been departmentalized. Meaning, his job was to analyze resources and allocate them where they made the most sense. Sometimes he said the wrong thing and sounded callous and uncaring. I knew his heart. He’d do the same thing if he were me and in the field.
What made the most sense to me was being exactly where I was. We had flown over the city of Dubai, and I could see the majestic skyline of Abu Dhabi as we were landing. Two majestic cities. By almost every measure, the richest cities in the world. Grand. Opulent. The towering skylines were monuments to extravagance.
I almost wept.
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I’d read the threat assessment Brad had sent me. The report said Dubai now led the world in prostitution per capita. The information was staggering. I almost didn’t believe it. Here was a country that would arrest you for holding hands or kissing in public but looked the other way when it came to illegal prostitution.
Sickening.
Something Brad couldn’t understand without being here. He never saw Amina’s face after being severely beaten and brutally raped by men who would probably face no consequences for their actions. I saw it firsthand. Amina’s image was seared in my brain. How could I leave her here to be further abused by the legal system?
“What’s the plan?” A-Rad asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“I’m going to the hospital,” I said.
I had to see how Amina was doing.
I prayed to God she was still there.
***
Amina and MJ
Samitah dozed off in the chair in her daughter, Amina’s, hospital room. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep when she was suddenly awakened by a commotion at the door.
A bolt of panic shot through her veins. At first, she thought it might be the police coming to arrest her daughter. It’d been two days since Amina was gang raped repeatedly by four men, brutally beaten, and then left alongside the road to die. While Amina was better, she was still in no condition to be hauled off and put in a prison cell with abhorrent conditions, no medical care, and scant food and water.
Samitah breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that the first person through the door was a nurse maneuvering a hospital bed through the doorway. An orderly on the other end steered the bed into the room, and a woman with a distressed look on her face entered behind them. Her eyebrows were furrowed, her lips pursed, and her shoulders as tense as a crane straining to lift a heavy load. Her eyes were red from where she’d obviously been crying.
From Samitah’s vantage point, the person in the hospital bed was a girl. About Amina’s age. Seventeen or eighteen. She couldn’t be sure because the girl had bandages all over her. On her legs, hands, arms, and neck. Mostly on her right side. Each time the bed hit a bump the girl let out a moan. Even though she appeared to be heavily sedated, it evidently hadn’t completely muted the pain.
They got the bed in position, and after the nurse left, Samitah offered the woman her chair.
“I don’t want to take your place,” the woman said with a sorrowful tone.
“I need to stretch my legs anyway,” Samitah replied. She surmised the woman to be about her age.
The lady slumped in the chair like the weight of the world was on her shoulders. She rubbed her eyes roughly as tears began to trickle down her face. Samitah wanted to offer her some comfort but didn’t even know her name. Instead, she just walked over to the sink and got the woman a glass of water from the tap.
“Thank you,” the lady said, managing a smile. As quickly as the smile flashed across her face, the pained look returned.
“What’s your name?” Samitah asked softly.
“Shule,” she said.
“Is that your daughter?”
“My niece.”
“This is my daughter,” Samitah said, pointing at Amina, who had somehow managed to sleep through the commotion. She was still sedated as well. The swelling on Amina’s face had diminished slightly but now had turned into an array of black and blue, almost purple colors. Samitah winced each time she looked at her daughter. Amina’s right eye was still closed shut, and they wouldn’t know if her eyesight was impacted until the swelling was completely gone.
“What happened to her?” Shule asked with obvious concern.
“Four men savagely beat her,” Samitah responded bitterly. She wouldn’t tell the lady about the rape. The rape by the married man was what could get Amina thrown in jail. Possibly even stoned to death. The woman in front of her seemed to be a kind and gentle person, sympathetic to Amina’s plight, but the tribal authorities had a way of extracting testimony out of the most well-intentioned bystanders. Samitah could see this woman being dragged into court to discuss their conversations if she said the wrong thing. Saying Amina was raped aloud was almost like a confession.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said. “What’s her name?”
“Amina.”
To Samitah’s surprise, the woman stood from her chair. walked over to Amina’s bedside. put her hand on her daughter’s head and stroked her hair. Mumbled a few words under her breath. Then sat back down.
“What’s your niece’s name?” Samitah asked.
“Majahammaddan, but we call her MJ.”
“What happened to her?”
Shule’s hands began shaking and her upper lip quivered. She clutched her hands to get them to stop.
Her voice cracked as she said, “Her father poured kerosene on her and then… set her on fire.”
14
Gaziantep, Turkey
A steady rain beat down on Roha Zamani’s head. Standing in the rain was unnecessary. The bomb would go off. He had no doubt about that. But Zamani liked to view his handiwork. Particularly when he’d been paid $100,000 in American dollars for it. Normally, he demanded less for his services. But the target was a mob boss in the Turkish mafia. Zafa Rafiq—second in command and a high-profile target.
The bombing would bring a lot of attention. Rafiq was a general in the White Wolves and a man of considerable power and influence. Whatever he’d done to deserve elimination from this earth was of no concern to Zamani. Sheikh Saad Shakir of Abu Dhabi wanted him dead and was willing to pay good money for him to make it happen. His line of work was an unemotional exercise. People hired him because he was the best. Methodical and ruthless. He didn’t leave a trail. Things couldn’t be traced back to him. As far as the White Wolves were concerned, Rafiq would be killed by a phantom ghost.
But for whatever reason, Shakir wanted his signature on the killing. He wanted the White Wolves to know it was him. Normally, the Turkish Mafia were not ones to be messed with or to be taken lightly.
Great care had gone into the planning. For two days, he followed his target. Learned his routine and watched for vulnerabilities. What he found was that the man had a penchant for the ladies as most men do. Bars and strip clubs were his main vices.
The Turkish man was careless. That happened to men of power as they begin to think they’re invincible. Almost anyone in the world could be killed at any time if someone had the motivation and ability to do it. Even Rafiq, with four bodyguards and a driver, had vulnerabilities of which he was unaware.
He followed the same routine every night. That made Zamani’s job that much easier. Eleven o’clock, the man said goodnight to his wife and kids and got into his car and his driver took him to a local club. Since Zamani knew when and where the man would be at that time of night, all he had to do was place the bomb in a trash can next to the car. Why the bodyguards were dumb enough to leave it there, was beyond Zamani’s understanding. Not that it mattered. He could kill Rafiq in any number of ways. He just liked it when the target made it easy for him.
As soon as Rafiq walked past the dispenser to get in his car, Zamani would push the button, and the man would be history. The four, armed bodyguards were helpless to do anything about it. They couldn’t protect him from a bomb. They couldn’t even protect themselves. The bomb was so powerful, they’d all be killed.
The light in the upstairs children’s bedroom flickered off. Zamani’s heart raced faster. He took several deep breaths to slow it down. His only concern was the timing. If he pushed the button too soon, the target might not take the full force of the blast and would survive. Too late, and the man might be in the car. While it didn’t appear that the vehicle was armored or built to withstand the blast, he didn’t want to take any chances that the reinforced steel doors and windows of the high-end luxury limousine might blunt the force of the attack. The bomb needed to go off before the man entered the vehicle.
The front door opened, and the bodyguards app
eared first. They looked in every direction. Instinctively, Zamani slinked back into the shadows, even though he was certain he couldn’t be seen.
The first bodyguard walked down the steps and opened the car door. Two more men stood at the bottom of the stairs ahead of the target. As Rafiq neared the car, he looked around and tightened his jacket. Pulled the sleeves to the suit down on his wrists. Like he was a movie star. A big shot. His last act of arrogance on this earth.
Zamani pushed the button with perfect timing and precision. Not that there was ever any doubt. A second before to allow for the signal to travel the distance necessary to communicate with the bomb.
A fireball erupted.
The blast blew out the windows of the surrounding houses. Overkill perhaps. But Zamani didn’t want to take any chances. When the smoke cleared, he observed five bodies on the ground. Rafiq and his four guards. The car had been lifted off the ground and moved several feet from the curb. No movement from the driver. He was probably dead as well. Obviously, not an armored vehicle.
Zamani pulled a mask down over his head and calmly walked across the street to the site of the bomb blast. He found the body of Rafiq, though barely recognizable. The remnants from the suit jacket and the expensive jewelry on his hands and around his neck gave him away. The man was obliterated. For good measure, Zamani took out his gun and fired three shots into the body. Unnecessary, but satisfying. If anything, the man was thorough. If he was paid to kill the man, he’d make certain the man was dead.
He then dropped a note From Sheikh Saad on the body and calmly walked away. He got in his car and drove away slowly in the opposite direction of the sirens that began to blare in the distance. He took off the mask and threw it in the back seat once he was several blocks away.
Then he dialed a number.
Sheikh Saad Shakir answered on the first ring.
“It’s done,” Zamani said.