“That thing you asked me about,” his contact at the UN said. “This hakeem. I think I’ve got something for you.”
The contrite words coming out of Omar’s mouth inflamed the hakeem.
“He got away, mu’allimna. The American has him.”
The hakeem seethed with disbelief. How could Omar have failed him — again? The man had all the necessary advantages. He had the resources, the contacts, the firepower, and still he failed.
Omar rattled off his explanation and his excuses, but the hakeem silenced him with a ferocious rebuke. He didn’t need to hear the details. He only cared about results. And he needed people who could provide him the ones he wanted. When this was over, he’d have to see about having Omar replaced. They’d need to get him someone more reliable. More capable. Someone who would get the job done.
He allowed his breathing to settle and focused on his next move. He knew he still held a trump card. They’d give him what he was after in exchange for the woman, he didn’t doubt that. But the trade would carry risk, and given Omar’s track record of late, pulling it off without leaving a trail was by no means assured. The hakeem was loath to take unnecessary risks, but Omar’s ineptitude had made a big one unavoidable. Hostage exchanges were never foolproof, not for either party.
Something else was coursing through his veins, something far more poisonous than the looming threat of the exchange: The American had humiliated his men yet again, which meant he’d humiliated him. It was a personal affront, a grave insult, one that the hakeem found intolerable and unforgivable. The transgression had to be punished. Order needed to be restored.
“Call your contacts. Do it now. I want to know everything there is to know about this American,” he rasped. “Everything.”
Chapter 47
Cocooned inside her hotel room, Mia watched herself on TV with subdued detachment. She stared through the screen as her own face loomed bizarrely back at her, reciting the carefully worded plea that Corben had given her before handing her over to the embassy’s press attaché. The image on the screen wasn’t registering. It felt like an alternate reality, a surreal parallel universe that she was watching through a tear in some Matrix-like continuum, except that it wasn’t. It was real. Starkly, unquestionably real.
With a heavy heart, she’d called her aunt’s house back in Nahant just before the news conference. Her aunt had picked up, her sunny voice indicating that she hadn’t yet read anything about the kidnapping. Mia built up some courage with a brief exchange of banter, then, with great care, she told her aunt what had happened. It was a hard conversation to have, but her aunt was a strong woman who, though hugely concerned, took it stoically. Mia alerted her to the press conference while assuring her that every effort was being expended to find Evelyn and get her back safely, adding that, yes, she would be careful too. She’d hung up, feeling a constricting ache in her chest.
She turned the volume down and brooded over Corben’s grim update. With Farouk dead and his stash missing, there was nothing to trade for Evelyn. Which was really bad news. She’d thought about going back to Evelyn’s apartment, looking through her stuff, seeing if she could find another book, something with the tail-eater symbol on it that they could use, something to entice the kidnappers into a barter, but Corben had shot that idea down pretty quickly. He’d been there, done that. He’d found nothing in her apartment that they could substitute for the book.
Besides, it was all moot right now. The bastards hadn’t made contact.
She silently hoped — prayed — they would. They had to. What was the point of taking her, if it wasn’t to trade her for something?
The news moved on to some other uplifting event. She clicked the TV off and looked around the room. She hated the utter loneliness of it and thought back to the previous night, to being at Corben’s apartment. Even though she barely knew him, his presence was comforting. She realized she’d been through more with him, in the brief hours she’d known him, than she had with most men she’d dated. She wondered whether to call him, to see if there was anything new, but she buried the thought, certain that it would be a bad idea.
She glanced at her bed and knew that sleep, if it was to come, needed to be coerced, bribed, enticed.
She picked up her key card and her cell phone and headed for the door.
In his darkened living room, Corben switched off his TV and made his way to his bedroom. It had been a ferocious day — probably his most challenging, ever. He’d been fueled through it by a torrent of adrenaline, but that well was now bone-dry. He felt the weariness of battle in every pore of his body, which was crying out for a respite. He wasn’t about to argue with that.
He climbed into bed and killed the lights. The blackout blinds blotted out the outside world, and he let his mind drift. It resisted for a while, stubbornly churning over the tasks ahead.
His thoughts settled on Evelyn Bishop’s call to Tom Webster. Corben had asked a data-mining analyst at Langley to feed the name into the system. There were too many hits — the name was surprisingly common. Corben had given the analyst an estimated age and some target backgrounds to narrow the field, but pinning the name to an identity, if it happened at all, would take time.
He moved on to the more pressing matter at hand. The last update from Olshansky showed the Iraqi dealer to have settled in for the night in Diyarbakir, a small town in southeast Turkey, around fifty miles from the Syrian border. Corben had thought the man would go for Mardin, which was a couple of hours closer to the Iraqi border. Both had airports, but Diyarbakir’s was larger, the town bigger, and visitors didn’t risk drawing as much attention. Using triangulation, Olshansky had the dealer pinned down within a radius of fifty yards, which, in a remote place such as Diyarbakir, was as good as it got.
Corben needed to figure out how to get there without alerting his colleagues to what he might find there. The Agency had people in the general area, but he didn’t want to delegate this. He wanted to be there himself and didn’t want Hayflick or anyone else, for that matter, to know the real reason. He thought he would use Olshansky’s phone tracking to justify the trip. Say it was someone Farouk had called from the café. A person of interest. Diyarbakir was only three hundred miles away. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to fly there in a small plane. He’d need to arrange it first thing in the morning if he wanted to get there in time for when his mystery buyer showed up.
The thought of that encounter pleased him and lulled him into a desperately needed sleep.
Two floors up from Mia’s room, Kirkwood glanced up from his laptop and half-watched her statement on his TV. He’d already seen it on one of the other local channels. The embassy’s press handlers had done a good job, as had Mia; her mom’s kidnappers would definitely get the message.
His attention was mired elsewhere, and his eyes dropped back to the screen of his laptop and to the baleful file that his contact inside the UN had e-mailed him. He’d read it once already, and he was about to read it again.
It was the hakeem’s file.
The file shed light on Corben, as the agent assigned to track him down. Corben himself was solid. His assignments had been bread-and-butter Agency fieldwork in the Middle East, nothing too vicious or too wet. It was the information relating to the hakeem that had shaken Kirkwood.
His contacts in Iraq had mentioned someone asking about the Ouroboros on a few occasions in recent years, but he was never able to find out who was behind the inquiries. People were scared to talk under Saddam.