Hear what? Lana couldn’t hear anything — at first. Then, above the SEALs’ heavy footsteps she heard the shouts of men chasing them, countless shoes pummeling concrete.
The SEALs veered left. In seconds, Lana saw that they were headed toward an older Japanese four-wheel-drive van with a notable amount of ground clearance.
“This oughta be fun,” the New Yorker said.
They were fifty feet away from the vehicle. She looked back over her shoulder. She couldn’t see their pursuers in the darkness, but it was definitely an unruly crowd that sounded like it was growing by the second.
They can’t know it’s me. How could they?
But the unwanted answer came to Lana the next moment when she realized that the mob would be looking at five men racing away with a lone woman.
Who else is it going to be?
The van doors were unlocked. One of the SEALs pushed her into the middle row. A hijab was thrown over her. Two SEALs garbed her so fast she wondered if they’d rehearsed those moves, too.
At the same time, the driver started speeding backward. She turned, frightened to find the van hurtling into blackness. But she saw why when the headlights revealed a thick stream of men — more than a hundred, easily — racing at them. They were so close the driver couldn’t have turned around right away without moving the van within easy striking distance of them.
But he can’t keep this up, she thought with another glance back, expecting at any moment to crash into a concrete column or wall.
She reached for her seat belt, but the New Yorker grabbed her hand.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “We don’t get caught in elevators or cars.”
Right then the driver whipped the wheel around. The tires squealed, and the van did a 180-degree turn, rising up—Oh, shit! — on two wheels and barely missing a formidable-looking post.
For a nanosecond she felt suspended in space. Then all of their weight shifted with the momentum, and the van smacked back down on all fours. With another squeal they were off, speeding through the cavernous realm with the headlights on.
The sound of the mob softened. But less than twenty seconds later a solid metal garage door, wide and high enough for a semitruck, appeared in the headlights in front of them. The commander, riding shotgun — and never had that term resonated more starkly for her — pointed a remote and clicked.
The door rose—slowly.
The driver braked till they rolled toward it at five miles per hour.
“They’re still coming,” announced the officer who covered the rear action. “Forty meters.”
The door clanked as it opened, creaky as an old man.
“Who designs these things?” she asked, anguished.
“This isn’t an emergency exit,” the commander replied. She read the tension in his jaw. “This is purely a service entrance, so we’d better hope the caterers, or whatever you people use this thing for, aren’t on the way down.”
“Twenty meters,” the officer in back yelled. “Getting closer. Fifteen.”
“Go, go, go!” the commander said again. “It’ll clear.”
“Ten meters!”
The driver hesitated.
“That was an order. Go, goddamn it!”
The driver shook his head, but floored it. When the van bumped over a raised metal plate, the clearance was so slight that the roof hit the bottom of the rising door. Lana looked up and saw a crease three inches above her head.
Even before they cleared the exit, the commander hit the remote again.
Without an order, the SEALs on either side of her tossed tear gas canisters out of the old vehicle. They rolled toward streams of men slipping under the door.
“They’re picking those things up and throwing them back at us,” reported the officer in the rear seat.
He no sooner spoke than one of the canisters banged down on the roof and bounced noisily off. Enough profanities followed to paint a prison blue.
“How many are there?” asked the commander.
“A helluva lot. That damn door didn’t go down any faster than it went up.”
“Ain’t democracy great,” the New Yorker cracked.
“They’re still slipping through there,” the SEAL behind them added.
“What’s ahead?” Lana asked.
“You tell me,” the commander said to her, gripping his handsome jaw. “Just joking. We hope pure fucking chaos. That’s our favorite medium.”
“You’d love the States right about now, then,” Lana said.
“Been there, done that,” he replied. “And now we’re getting a taste of it right here, aren’t we?”
Lana nodded as daylight opened up ahead.
“Head scarfs, glasses,” the commander ordered.
The SEALs had them on in seconds. The commander and the men on either side of her had prayer beads out, in a fair imitation of piety.
“You are not to say a word, no matter what,” the commander said to her. “Play the meek Muslim woman all the way.”
She nodded again, this time with her head down, assuming the part.
“That’s a good start,” he said. “As of now, you have five brothers.”
In arms, she thought.
They burst into the brilliant Saudi sunlight. Lana suddenly realized that she was perspiring profusely.
It was about to get a lot hotter: A sea of men and boys pounded on the windows, engulfing them in flailing fists. The driver was forced to slow down. The crowd shouted imprecations. She didn’t know the language, but there was no mistaking the mood.
“What are they saying?” she asked, keeping her head bowed.
“That we work for the Americans,” the commander said. “That we’re turncoats.”
“What do they want?”
“They want us to stop, and that’s the one thing we never do in a situation like this.”
The mob pressed in on all sides. The driver now slowed to the speed of a brisk walk: fast enough to display a sense of purpose, but not so fast that he’d run over anyone.
She wondered, though, how long before a cell phone delivered the daunting news: Those are Americans in the van.
Ruhi harbored a faint hope that Candace’s murder had been staged somehow, or rendered through the magic of digital production. He was staring at the darkened screen when Lennon spoke up:
“My men will take you to a shower. You will have clean clothes. Then we will talk. You may eat at that time, too. Do you like coffee?”
What? Ruhi was confused, still not as lucid as he would have liked. Finally, the question registered. “Yeah, sure.” But he didn’t believe a word of what he’d just heard.
The shower was cold, bracing, perhaps by design. It focused his thoughts quickly.
She can’t be dead. Never a religious man, he now found himself pleading to an Almighty as nebulous to him as dark matter itself: Please let her be alive. He remembered her brutal death and thought, Anything but that.
Ruhi turned his attention to his naked body. Lennon’s waterboarding had been far more punishing than the Americans’ torture. Even his dog bite throbbed almost as badly as it had when the local anesthetic wore off at the Farm. He didn’t remember them touching it, but he’d blacked out. Had they probed it, studied the ragged flesh to see if the bite was real?
“Get out of there,” ordered one of the guards outside the stall.
After dressing, the men led him to a cubicle in the same large room in which he’d been tortured, but at the other end — far from the board and bucket.
A plate of falafel and hummus, along with strips of roasted lamb, awaited him at a card table. So did Lennon.