“What, with you as bait?” Corben asked somewhat incredulously. “We’re trying to keep you out of the spotlight, remember?”
Mia nodded. Still, she felt it was a strand she wanted to pull at some more. He’d seen her, and he should trust her. That had to be useful, in some way. Her mind traversed back to her conversation with Evelyn. What had her mom said? Her colleague. He was with her.
“There’s an archaeology professor. Ramez. He works with my mom. A young guy. He’s the one who took her down south yesterday, to check out that crypt. She said he was with her when this man — Farouk — showed up.”
“You didn’t mention him back at the hotel,” Corben noted.
She scrunched her face apologetically. “I’m sorry, I should have. But I was thinking, maybe he knows something. Maybe Evelyn told him something about what was going on.”
Corben processed it for a beat. “You know this guy?”
“I met him once when I went to her office, on campus.”
“Okay, good.” Corben logged the name into his notebook. He checked his watch and frowned. It was past nine. “He won’t be at the university this late.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out Evelyn’s organizer, then had another idea, picked up his phone, and hit a speed-dial key. He got up and crossed to the glass doors leading out to the balcony. Mia heard him connect with someone and ask him to check Evelyn’s cell phone for a “Ramez.” He waited a few moments, then said, “Hold on,” and crossed back to the table. He scribbled a number down in his notebook, shot a quick “Got it” to whoever it was he had called, and redialed quickly. Mia could hear it ringing, but no one seemed to be answering. Corben let it ring a few more times — cell phones in Beirut, annoyingly, hardly ever had a voice-mail service — then put the phone down with a frustrated look. “He’s not picking up,” he informed Mia.
“You don’t think he’s also been…?” She hesitated to vocalize the rest of her question, suddenly sensing she was letting her imagination loose again.
Worryingly, his look didn’t dismiss the suggestion outright. “No, I think I would have heard something. He’s probably just tired of fielding calls from people who will have heard about your mom’s kidnapping and know he works in the same department.”
She frowned with concern. “Can you get his home address?” she asked, surprising herself with her tenacity before wondering if her question had an irksome teaching-your-grandma-to-suck-eggs ring to it.
Corben didn’t seem to mind and checked his watch again. “I don’t want to flag him to the local cops, not at this hour. And there’s no reason he’d be on our database for us to have that kind of information on tap ourselves. I’ll try calling him again in a few minutes.”
Mia studied him as he processed the information. His face was still almost hermetically unreadable, but she could definitely sense some concern there. She flashed back to standing with him outside her mom’s front door and raised her eyes to meet his. With a slight hardening in her voice, she ventured another question.
“Outside Mom’s apartment. You said I already knew this was serious. And of course, it was, I know that, but the way you said it…” She paused for a moment. She knew she was right, and the conviction within her came through with blinding clarity. “You still haven’t told me everything. There’s more to this, isn’t there?”
He sat back and ran a hand through his hair, giving the back of his neck a small rub, then looked at her and seemed to reach a verdict. He leaned in, reached into his case, and pulled out his laptop. He flipped it open and powered it up, then placed his index finger on the small finger-print scanner before tapping some keys. The screen lit up. He navigated through it in silence, found the folder he needed, and turned to her.
“This is classified,” he informed her with a raised finger before pausing to take a breath, seemingly still debating whether he was making a mistake in sharing this with her.
He turned the screen to face her. It showed a photograph of what looked like a wall inside a narrow, cell-like room. Something circular, the size of an open umbrella judging by the scale of the light fixture overhead, was scratched into the wall. Mia recognized it instantly.
“I was stationed in Iraq in the first years of the war,” he explained. “One of our units got some intel about a doctor who was close to Saddam, but by the time they raided his compound, he was gone.”
A barrage of questions rose within Mia, but Corben wasn’t through.
“What they did find in his compound was pretty horrific. There was a huge lab in its basement. State-of-the-art operating chamber, the works. He was running experiments there, experiments that…” His voice drifted off for a moment as he chose his words, and a fleeting look of pain crossed his face, a pain Mia could hear in his voice. “He was experimenting on humans. Young and old. Male, female. Kids…”
Mia felt her blood chill as horror and concern for her mother consumed her in equal measure.
“There were holding cells in the compound, but everyone in them had been executed shortly before they were raided. We also found dozens of bodies buried in a field not far from the house,” he went on, “dumped in mass graves, naked. Many of them had been operated on. Some were missing body parts. There were stashes of organs, gallons of blood, stored in fridges. Some of their wounds, where he’d cut them open, weren’t sutured. He didn’t bothering closing them up once he’d taken out what interested him. There were other…more disturbing discoveries in the lab that I’ll spare you. He just used them like guinea pigs and tossed out what he didn’t need. It seems Saddam supplied him with them, along with everything else he needed.” Corben paused, as if to purge the images from his mind and collect himself. “This”—he pointed at the image of the Ouroboros on the laptop’s screen—“was carved into the wall of one of the holding cells.”
Mia felt a sudden wetness on her mouth and realized she’d unconsciously caught her lower lip with her teeth and bitten into it hard enough to draw blood. She released her bite and dabbed her lip with her finger, then rubbed the droplet away. “What kind of experiments was he running?”
“We’re not sure. But given Saddam’s interest in finding efficient ways to commit mass murder…”
Mia’s eyes rocketed wide. “You think he was working on a biological weapon?”
Corben shrugged. “The secrecy surrounding his work, the dead bodies, Saddam’s championing him…put it this way. I don’t think he was looking for a cure for cancer.”
Mia stared at the shot of the cell again. “But why the carving on the wall?”
“We don’t know. We managed to track down some people in Baghdad who came across him. I spoke to a dealer in antiquities, as well as a guy who used to be a curator at the National Museum. It seems this man, the hakeem as they called him, was fascinated by Iraqi history, turn of the millennium specifically. They said he knew a lot about it and had traveled extensively in the region. Once they felt comfortable opening up a bit more, they separately told me he’d asked them to look for any local references to the Ouroboros in ancient books and manuscripts.”
“Which, presumably, they did.”
“You bet,” Corben confirmed, “but they didn’t find anything. So he asked them to look some more, and to widen the search, even outside Iraq’s borders. And to keep looking. Which they did. They said he was completely obsessed with it, and they were both terrified of him.”
“And they found nothing?”
Corben shook his head.
“And now he wants this book…” Mia connected the dots in her mind. “So this…this doctor. He’s still out there.”
He nodded.
A devastating sense of dread choked Mia’s heart. “And you think he has my mom?” The words almost dried in her throat as she uttered them, willing the answer to be negative.