Instead, she heard a man speaking in English. An American. She couldn’t really make out what he was saying, but he seemed to be in solid health.
And now she heard a tussle and realized they were taking him away. The man had resisted.
Her mind flooded with panic. She wasn’t sure what to do. Part of her wanted to cry out, to make her presence known to the other prisoner. If he escaped, if he was freed, he’d let the world know she was still alive. But another part of her was terrified. Terrified of getting the man into trouble, terrified of being punished herself for the insubordination.
She couldn’t let the opportunity pass.
Screw the consequences.
“Help me,” she shouted at the top of her voice. “My name’s Evelyn Bishop. I’m an American citizen. I was kidnapped in Beirut. Please let the embassy know.” She banged her hands repeatedly against the solid, unyielding door. “Help me. I need to get out of here. Please. Tell someone, anyone.”
She stood still for a moment, her nerves frazzled by the effort, her weary body taut with fear and tortured by desperate hope, and listened for a reaction.
Nothing came back.
She slunk down to the floor, a nervous quake in the corner of her lips, and wrapped her shivering arms around her.
Corben froze at Evelyn’s screams. He turned and cast his eyes over the series of doors on either side of the long corridor, wondering which cell she was in. She sounded as if she was close by, but the muffled sounds could have come from any of the adjacent rooms.
Not that it really mattered anyway.
He wasn’t in a position to do anything about it.
He glanced at the hakeem. The man was unflustered. He seemed to be studying Corben’s reaction.
A thin smile broke across the hakeem’s thin lips. “It’s up to you,” he said sardonically. “Do you want to be a hero? Or do you want to live forever?”
Corben let the words sink in. He hated that this freak, this insanely evil monster, could mess with him like that, goad him, tempt him. He hated the hakeem for it; more than that, he hated himself for succumbing to it. A pact with the devil. It never worked out, did it? If he had the opportunity, there and then, to gain the upper hand on his captors, to blow their brains out and free Evelyn and the rest of them, would he have done it?
He wasn’t sure.
But if he had to choose, he had to admit he probably didn’t think he would.
Too much was at stake.
The prize was too big.
Corben scowled at the hakeem, and gave him his answer. He slipped the hood over his head. And in the darkness of the shroud, he hoped that the haunting sound of Evelyn’s scream wouldn’t remain branded into his consciousness for too long.
Forever was far too long for that.
Chapter 54
The Beechcraft King Air skirted the lush Mediterranean coastline, its twin turboprops powering it north towards Turkey.
Mia hadn’t had much trouble sneaking out of the hotel unnoticed. Kirkwood’s car was parked around the corner. At the airport, there were no formalities to go through; she and Kirkwood were driven straight to the small plane that was waiting for them, its props spinning. Its wheels lifted off virtually as soon as they reached it. Clearly, the UN held sway in Beirut, even more so since several thousand of its troops were currently keeping the peace in the south of the country.
Diyarbakir was northeast of Beirut, and the direct flight path would have cut across Syria diagonally, but Syrian airspace was tightly controlled. Kirkwood had decided on a more discreet, if slightly longer, course. They would fly north, keeping well out of Syrian airspace, until they reached the Turkish coast. There, they’d bank right and head east, inland, to Diyarbakir.
She turned away from the distant coast shimmering along the horizon as Kirkwood came back from conferring with the pilots. He sat down opposite her and opened up the map in his hand.
“Farouk’s friend is called Abu Barzan,” he informed her. “He crossed the border point here, at Zakho, and drove into Turkey yesterday.” Kirkwood pointed at the map, showing her the border crossing that was close to the tip where Turkey, Syria, and Iraq met. “He’s in Diyarbakir.” He indicated a town that was around fifty miles north of the Syrian border.
“Is that where he’s meeting his buyer?” she asked.
Kirkwood nodded. “We’ve got a couple of private contractors meeting us there. They’ll take us to him.”
It was happening too fast. She wasn’t sure what to make of the sudden development. “How did you manage to track him down?”
Kirkwood hesitated. “He wasn’t too hard to trace,” he offered as he folded up the map. “Mosul’s much smaller than Baghdad, and he’d boasted about making a big score.”
“How are you going to get the book from him?”
Kirkwood seemed uncomfortable with her questions. “He’ll hand over the book and the rest of the pieces, in exchange for us not shipping him back to Iraq for prosecution.”
“What about his buyer?” Mia asked. “He could be part of this, couldn’t he?”
Kirkwood shook his head. “He’s probably just some antiquities dealer from London or Frankfurt,” he speculated dismissively. “Hardly our concern. We just need to get the book to trade for Evelyn.”
Mia frowned. She hadn’t heard anything on that front since making her televised plea, and she wasn’t hugely comfortable with being out of touch with the embassy — or even with Corben. “We don’t know if the kidnappers have made contact yet,” she noted.
“They will. We can set up another press conference, say we caught some smugglers, make sure the book’s front and center.” Kirkwood looked at her with fierce determination. “Don’t worry. They’ll call. I’ll make sure of it.”
Mia nodded and looked out the window, lost in her thoughts.
After a moment, Kirkwood’s voice brought her out of her daze. “What is it?”
Weariness lined her face. “It’s hard to imagine. That we’re doing this. That something like this could actually exist.” She shook her head and scoffed, but it was more out of tiredness than anything else. “It’s like Frodo’s ring. Tempting man with its power over nature, with its promise of long life. Toying with our easily corrupted hearts.”
Kirkwood pursed his lips doubtfully. “I wouldn’t call it a corruption at all. Dying is such a huge waste of talent. And wisdom.”
As the King Air skimmed the thin wisps of cloud, they discussed the profound changes a potential “magic bullet” of longevity would trigger, the seismic shifts in the way we live. Overpopulation was the obvious problem. From the hominids’ first appearance on the planet, it had taken us 80 million years to hit the billion mark in the early 1800s. It took well over a hundred years to hit the second billion in 1930, but ever since, we’ve been addding a billion more every fifteen years or so. This increase comes almost entirely from less developed countries; the more developed countries, in fact, are barely producing enough babies to maintain their current population levels. Still, having five or ten generations of the same family surviving concurrently would cause all kinds of upheavals. More natural resources, food, and housing would be needed. The welfare and pension systems, among others, would require even more of an overhaul than the one they already need. And human relations would be drastically, dramatically different.
Marriage — would the institution still mean anything when no one would really expect to stay with one other person for a couple of hundred years? Children — how would they age and behave relative to their parents? The changes would also extend to work. Careers. Retirement. Would people have to work throughout their longer lives? Probably. Could they cope with that, mentally? What happened to the notion of the old moving on so the young could find their place in life? Would there be room for anyone to ever get promoted? And what about less obvious implications, such as on prison sentences, for instance? Was the threat of a thirty-year sentence as much of a deterrent to someone who expected to live a couple of hundred years?