Once again Harry was alone. There was a finality to the bolt slamming home that echoed. He heaved himself back up again, recovering his fake leg from under the bed and strapping it back into place under his pants.
They had drugged him late that night — that he did remember. Three men held him down while a woman slid a hypodermic needle into his arm. Of the trip to this new place, he recalled nothing. The room wasn’t any better or worse than his last cell except for the blessed relief that the DTs had not followed him. He had wakened, slowly, fearfully, but after twenty minutes realized that the flying monkeys weren’t going to bother him again. What a nightmare that had been.
As far as Harry was concerned, they could take detox and shove it up their collective camel-riding asses. He had spent the best part of forty years avoiding sobriety, and he wasn’t appreciative when it was forced down his throat. Apart from getting over the DTs, he was thankful they had left him his clothes.
Even to him, the sight of a naked, eighty-year-old man with one leg was pretty depressing, especially trying to piss into the little pot they had given him. His hands shook more than he ever realized, throwing off an already notoriously bad aim. God, will Tiny get a kick out of this story when I tell him.
For ten minutes he lay still, thinking. He had an advantage, two really, that his kidnapers didn’t know. One was that he didn’t fear death. He was too old for that. If they expected him to remain submissive, they’d made a big mistake. Thirty years ago, he knew, he’d be blubbering like a baby, but not now. That, he thought, was the one great thing about age. No one could hold death over you any longer. The fear just wasn’t there. His second advantage was his unshakable faith that if he couldn’t escape, he was sure that Mercer would come for him, someway, somehow. It was only a matter of time.
The locks barring his cell slid open again, and the door slammed back with a crash. The guard had his pistol in its holster, his hands occupied with a huge hunk of dark bread and a wedge of cheese twice the size of a pizza slice. And blessings of all possible blessings, he held a bottle nearly filled with a clear liquid. Even at the sight of it, Harry’s mouth flooded with saliva and his hands steadied. He looked longingly at the bottle. He wanted a drink so badly that Moshe was startled when Harry crossed the room with the speed of a man one quarter his age.
“I’ll give you a hand there,” he said, plucking the bottle from Moshe’s arms. He ignored the food the young Israeli had brought him.
Harry didn’t recognize the bottle’s blue label. With or without his glasses, the writing was an illegible scrawl, but he knew the smell as soon as he twisted off the cap and held its open neck beneath his alcohol-attuned nose.
“I have to say, I’m not much of a gin man myself, but under the present circumstances…” He tilted the bottle skyward, his throat bobbing rhythmically, gulping down three heavy swallows as if the harsh liquor had been mother’s milk. That first sip was the most pleasurable moment in Harry’s life and that included returning home after World War II. He sighed as the alcohol burned his throat and brought tears to his eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d want a snort?” He offered the bottle to Moshe.
Harry was shocked and more than a little intrigued when the dark-haired guard, no more than a boy with wide clear eyes and a face that had only recently seen a razor, took the bottle and took a long pull from it.
“I haven’t slept in two days,” Moshe said, proffering the bottle back to Harry. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” Harry was all charm. “It’s your booze. Take another pull, lad, you look like you could use it.”
“No, that is not permitted.” Moshe shook his head and left.
Harry sat back on the bed, the gin cradled in his lap. Damn. He’d hoped to get the kid drunk and escape but the little prick wasn’t going to fall for it. “Okay, Harry, old boy,” he said to himself, “what the hell is Plan B?”
Eritrea
Africa lolled tiredly below Europe, looking like the bowed head of some exhausted horse curled against itself as if struggling to draw life’s last breaths. Even its very shape was sorrowful, as bereft as the place itself. The red and white Ethiopian Airlines Boeing jet arced in off the Red Sea, taking an indirect route to avoid flying over Sudan. Even at twenty-nine thousand feet, the Boeing 737 was not safe from an errant missile from one of the world’s longest and bloodiest civil wars.
The eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley rose nearly vertically from the coast in a solid wall of rock that stretched over a thousand miles, a buttress that had protected Africa’s interior for millennia. Mercer was looking out the ovoid window of the plane when it crossed this threshold; one moment the aircraft was a mile above the dry scrubby desert that meandered along the coast and the next, they were barely a hundred feet above the ground, the jetliner bucking in the thermal updrafts created by the hot winds lofting up the sheer cliffs.
Though hammerheads of black clouds had gathered at the coast, lashing the shore with torrential rains, inland the air was clear. The sky was a particular shade of clear blue found only in nature; man’s pallet lacked the subtlety of light needed to create the effect. The African sky, Mercer felt, had an intimacy found nowhere else on earth.
The last minutes of the flight seemed to be a battle between gravity and the pilot’s desire to see his plane land where he intended. Even as the Boeing recovered from a last whimsical twist of wind, the aircraft lined up for its approach. The plane landed right-side heavy, stripping rubber from the starboard tires in a rancid puff of smoke before it settled onto an even keel, slamming the remaining tires to the earth with enough force to ensure they stayed.
Knowing he wouldn’t be able to enjoy ice until leaving Africa because it carried the same microbes as the water tourists were invariably told to avoid, Mercer swallowed the last cubes from his drink. He tucked the empty glass in the expandable magazine pouch on the seat in front of him and stood with the rest of the passengers to await his turn to deplane.
Because of the gunfire in Rome the day before, da Vinci Airport had been temporarily closed, canceling last night’s flight. Good to her word, the ticket agent had secured him a first-class seat on this morning’s, which was the next available. He carried only the two matching briefcases. The remainder of his clothes and nearly four hundred pounds of essential equipment had been express-shipped to Asmara and was waiting for him at his hotel. He was through customs in a few minutes.
Mercer noticed security in the terminal was high. No less than ten soldiers watched those stepping through customs and the people waiting to greet them. He hadn’t expected Habte Makkonen to meet him because of the delay, but a dusky youth leaning against one of the few cars outside the building approached as soon as Mercer exited.
“Dr. Mercer?”
“Yes.” There was a wary edge to his voice. “Are you Habte?”
The boy grinned. “Habte’s cousin. Habte wait for you at hotel. Much trouble yesterday. He tell you.”
On guard but with little option, Mercer shrugged. “Let’s go, then, Habte’s cousin.”
Three miles separated the airport from downtown, and the road was lined with a sprawling, ill-kept housing project built by the Chinese during the Ethiopian occupation. The air blowing into the car’s open windows was dry and pleasantly cool, spiced with the desert scent and the cleanliness of a city without industry. Asmara itself, a city of half a million, was not what Mercer had expected.
It was spotless. Old women meandered the hilly streets with brooms and rickety wheelbarrows, cleaning any rubbish from the gutters. The architecture was mostly Italianesque and because the capital had been spared during the war, the buildings were in excellent repair. Few were over four stories. The tallest structure was the brick bell tower of the Catholic church. If he could ignore the distinctive dome of a mosque nearby and the darker skin of the people, Mercer felt as if he had been transported to a Tuscan village rather than the capital of one of Africa’s poorest nations. Because there was little vehicular traffic, the roads had been turned over to a great many donkey carts.