“Mom’s waiting for you back at the house.”
“Eh?”
“She’s in the basement. She has something she wants to tell you.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, now.”
“Dammit, Marko! We’ve got work to do.”
“I’m quitting.”
A moment passed. Marko sensed a blow might be coming, but he just stared at his father, not backing down. Though they were about the same height, Marko didn’t yet possess his father’s strength.
“I don’t have time for this, Marko.”
“By the way, don’t forget about the boys. Someone needs to pick them up from school.”
“No one’s picked them up?”
“No. Mom can explain it. Like I said, she’s got something to tell you.”
Marko turned and began to walk away.
“Marko! Get back here! You gotta watch the pumps while I talk to your mom!”
Marko broke into a run. His father, he decided, was as dead to him as his mother was. From this day forward, as far as he was concerned, he was an orphan.
“Hey!”
Mark heard the voice, but was too absorbed in his thoughts at first to respond.
“Hey! Get up here. We’re leaving.”
Mark opened his eyes. He looked at the sun, and guessed it was around five in the afternoon, which would mean he’d been in the desert for four hours. He stood up slowly and stiffly, then walked back up the embankment to his abductors.
They returned to the main road they’d been on earlier and continued south. But they hadn’t been going long before they turned down a dirt road and pulled up to a little maintenance shack that sat near a cluster of oil pumps.
“Get out,” the driver ordered in English.
In case Mark hadn’t gotten the message, the older Saudi gestured to the door with his gun. Mark stepped out of the car.
44
Rad Saveljic was hungry, thirsty, panicked, lonely, lightheaded, and deeply depressed. On top of all that, his right leg was killing him. He couldn’t put any weight on it; hell, he couldn’t even touch it without flinching. It throbbed like a second heart down by his shinbone.
What had happened? And why had it happened to him? Where was he? How much time had passed? Was it about a ransom? Had someone contacted his boss, or his dad back in New Jersey, asking for money?
But these guys hadn’t said anything about money. They hadn’t said anything about anything. They’d just blindfolded him, stuffed him into a car, bundled him onto a plane, and then brought him to… Rad didn’t even know where he was.
Someone removed his blindfold.
He appeared to be in a shack of sorts. The floor was sandy and the air smelled of diesel fuel. It was hot. A few bags of dry concrete lay in a corner. He was seated on the floor, still wearing only his underpants and undershirt. From somewhere outside the shack, he could hear a rhythmic creaking, as though a baby were being rocked in a cradle. He wondered whether he was still in India.
Ten feet in front of him, a single guard, dressed in civilian clothes and armed with a large pistol, sat on a wooden packing crate. He didn’t look Indian.
Rad’s hands were cuffed behind his back with plastic ties that cut into his wrists. His stomach was still a hard knot, but at least he no longer felt like vomiting; the pain in his leg had cured that. He asked the guard what was going on, and where he was, and for something to drink.
The guard ignored him.
Rad heard voices outside, then what sounded like men walking across gravel. He fixated on the nimbus of weak sunlight leaking in from around the perimeter of a metal door. Strange, he thought, that it was still daytime; it should have been past dark in Delhi by now. Maybe he’d lost track of the time, and hadn’t been traveling for as long as he’d thought. He heard footsteps outside. As the door handle rotated, and then the door opened, his stomach did a little flip.
Light spilled in. Squinting, the guard stood up and aimed his pistol at Rad’s head.
“Don’t!” Rad put his hands up to shield his head. “Please, don’t do it!”
Before Rad turned his eyes from the bright low sun, he caught a glimpse of a bleak desert landscape and a line of telephone poles that seemed to extend out into infinity.
The guard lowered his pistol, aimed it at Rad’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. The shot was so loud Rad felt as if he’d gone deaf. At least he didn’t really shoot me, Rad thought, confusing — for a brief moment — the pain in his shoulder, and the fact that he’d been thrown back against the wall, with a bad dream. This whole thing was a bad dream.
Damn, his shoulder hurt. The ringing in his ears subsided a bit, and he blinked his eyes. He could see now.
He had been shot. He was bleeding, and his chest was wet. Oh God, he thought. Oh God.
Rad couldn’t move his left hand, so he put his right hand up to his chest, thinking he’d try to stop the bleeding. It wasn’t his chest though, it was his shoulder. He squeezed where he thought he’d been shot and then screamed as the pain rocketed up into his brain.
A man of average height with unkempt hair appeared in the doorway to the shed. Rad couldn’t see the man’s face all that well because it was backlit by the sun.
“Who is this?” Rad heard the man say in English, in a voice that was hard and mean, but somehow strangely familiar. And then, “Why did you shoot him?”
Someone shoved the man into the shed. Then the door slammed closed.
Rad tried to see through the darkness but by now his eyes had partially adjusted to the bright light outside so he still couldn’t see the man’s features.
“I’ve been shot,” said Rad.
“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”
“Who are you?”
The man didn’t answer. Instead, he quickly knelt down. His hand darted out, snakelike, toward Rad’s shoulder.
Rad screamed in pain again, and tried to pull back, thinking that maybe this guy had been sent into the shed to torture him.
“Listen,” said the man, “I’m going to try to help you, but I need you to calm the fuck down.”
45
Mark grabbed the man’s good hand. “If you don’t want me touching your shoulder, then you’ll have to do it yourself. Stick your hand up there and apply some pressure, for Christ’s sake.”
He didn’t know who had just been shot, or why, but working on the assumption that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, he figured he’d try to patch the guy up before he bled out.
Mark leaned in and used his teeth to start a rip in the guy’s wife-beater undershirt.
“What are you doing?”
The voice was panicked.
“Trying to help you, like I said.” Mark ripped the undershirt into strips to use as bandages, then turned his two front pockets inside out and ripped them out of his pants. “Stay still.” He slid a strip of the undershirt beneath the man’s armpit, quarter-folded his ripped pockets, placed one over the entry wound and the other over the exit wound, and began to wrap the shoulder. “I said stay still!”
“It hurts!”
“I don’t care.”
Labored breathing, then, “Am I going to die?”