He looked at her, as if trying to suss out how she was feeling. Somehow, she didn’t feel devastated. She didn’t feel scared, she didn’t feel like crying. She felt different.
She felt angry.
And right there and then, standing in the middle of that dusty road, with blood pooling under the dead killer and steam pouring out of the SUV’s engine and stunned civilians emerging from every corner and converging on them in shocked silence, what she wanted most in the world was to make sure the bastards that did this, the bastards who had kidnapped her mother and killed those soldiers and had now also taken away Ramez, the pathological psychopaths who destroyed lives and rode roughshod over this city as if it were their little fiefdom, meting out pain and suffering with galling indifference, were stopped with — to use an expression for whose meaning she now had a whole new appreciation — extreme prejudice.
Chapter 35
Corben had just finished checking the dead killer’s body for anything that would lead back to the hakeem, or for a cell phone — neither of which he found — when the Fuhud detectives barreled in.
With them there to arrange for carting off the dead body and the wrecked Cherokee, he was good to go. He didn’t want to hang around there any longer than he had to, and he didn’t have to. Filling in the detectives was a courtesy, to keep them sweet, but the clock was ticking. Farouk would be calling Ramez in less than four hours’ time, and with Ramez in the hands of the enemy, Corben had to move fast.
He recovered his briefcase, and not holding out much hope, he checked the back of the Cherokee for Ramez’s phone in case it had fallen out of his pocket in the chaos. It wasn’t there. He dropped to one knee and swept his eye under the car too, but there was no sign of it there either. He made sure the weapons cache in the trunk was solidly locked, and after giving the two detectives a clipped briefing of what had happened and telling them to clear the area as quickly as possible and not to release anything to the press just yet, he turned down their offer of a ride and, instead, hailed a passing taxi to take him and Mia up to the embassy in Awkar.
Mia looked back at the receding scene of the shoot-out through the rear windshield of the taxi as it drove off towards East Beirut and the hills beyond.
She was still dazed by what had erupted around her only minutes earlier, and a tangle of frenzied, jarring images flooded her mind. She settled back into the subdued normality of the comfortable car — the driver, who hardly spoke any English, had his radio on, piping mind-numbingly upbeat Arabic music around her, while Corben was on the phone with someone at the embassy — letting her mind settle down, until she found herself processing what had happened with more clarity. As the tightly packed, somewhat shabby stucco apartment buildings streamed by, she wondered where Ramez was being taken to. She pictured him in some grimy, windowless room somewhere — perhaps where Evelyn was being held too — and flashed forward to Farouk’s imminent phone call. She felt a sudden upwelling of worry as she played out its implications in her mind.
She heard Corben end his phone call, and given that the taxi had been picked out randomly off the street and that the driver’s failed attempt at casual conversation had clearly shown how virtually nonexistent his English was, she felt it was safe to talk. She turned to Corben.
“We need to find a way to warn Farouk,” she urged him. “If he calls Ramez, he’ll be walking into a trap.”
“You’re assuming they know he’s expected to call him.”
She hadn’t thought it through, but it seemed to make sense to her. “Why else would they grab him? The timing’s a bit too perfect for it to be just a coincidence, don’t you think? I mean, Ramez calls in to say he’s in touch with him, and boom, they show up and grab him?” The idea seeded her with more unease. She lowered her voice, feeling more aware of the driver’s presence. “Last night, you said you didn’t want to flag Ramez to the local cops. You must think the kidnappers have a mole at the station, right?”
Corben glanced at the driver. Mia followed his gaze. The driver seemed to be uninterested.
“I’d be amazed if they didn’t,” Corben said in a muted, unfazed tone.
“Which means they know Farouk’s going to call him,” she pressed, whispering conspiringly now. “You need to do something to warn him. What about putting something out on the news? Get the main local stations to say that Ramez’s been kidnapped, maybe even give Farouk a signal to come in, to call the cops or — no,” she quickly corrected herself, “to call you, to call the embassy directly.”
“If he finds out that Ramez’s been kidnapped,” Corben countered, “he’ll run. He’ll be so scared he won’t trust anyone. He’ll just disappear. And if he does, we’ll lose our only link to your mom.”
“But he’ll be walking into a trap.”
Corben’s expression suggested he had already thought of that. “Maybe we can use that.”
Which took her aback. “What do you mean?”
Corben hesitated. “I mean we might have a chance to get Farouk and flush these guys out at the same time.” He darted another glance at the driver. “Let’s not get into it right now.”
She got his drift. She still didn’t think there was any risk in discussing it, but she relented and sat back in her chair and looked out her window, uncomfortable with the notion of using Farouk as bait.
The taxi cruised along the seafront, past the new marina where gleaming hundred-foot yachts mingled uncomfortably with rickety wooden fishing boats, and onto the highway that led to East Beirut. The city bubbled on regardless, turning a jaded eye to the not-so-infrequent acts of violence that would have caused huge outrage in other countries. As the fruit and vegetable vendors rushed by, something kept nagging at her, the question that wouldn’t go away and that, once you got past the priority of getting Evelyn back, was really at the heart of everything that was happening.
She turned to Corben again. “What is he after? What the hell does he want with some moldy old book?”
“I don’t know,” Corben simply answered.
“But you must have researched it. You must have some theory about what it’s about, what he’s looking for, don’t you?”
Corben slid another glance in the driver’s direction, then looked at Mia. “Like I said. It’s not necessarily relevant.”
“Not relevant?”
“You’re trying to apply your logic, your way of thinking, to what maniacs like this guy are about,” he clarified. “But that’s not how it works. We’re talking about some very sick people here, guys who are certifiably insane. Saddam, his sons, his cousins…these guys lived in their own fantasy world. People’s lives had no value for them. You know those kids who get their kicks plucking wings off butteries or blowing up frogs with firecrackers? These guys are like that, only for them, humans are much more fun than frogs.”
“Okay, I understand that, but I still don’t get his interest in ancient relics.”
“It could be anything,” Corben replied. “Remember Mengele’s experiments? Hitler’s obsession with the occult? Maybe it’s some cult from history that he feels connected to. The key word here is insane. Once you factor that in, anything’s possible. There was a scientist working on a biological weapons program in South Africa a few years back, in the days of apartheid. You know what his pet project was? An ethnospecific bioweapon. He was developing a virus that would only kill black people. And that was after they’d started putting stuff in the water to make them infertile. And it’s doable. Anything’s doable when it comes to killing people. So you tell me. Is our guy after some ancient recipe for something, some virus, some old plague or poison that holds some poetic appeal to him? Or is he just some demented nut whose obsessiveness will help bring about his downfall? I’d go with the latter.”