Countdown, page 23
“I’m dying!” she screams.
Holy shit, Walter thinks, and he grabs his Motorola radio.
“Quinn, Hope, we’ve got a medical emergency in Cell Two!”
Walter grabs a first-aid kit and heads for the stairwell leading downstairs as he flicks on the light. The rules and regulations for being bad babysitters here in this hidden CIA safe house are few and far between, but the big one is to protect the prisoner. Mistreatment and torture and waterboarding and starvation are all fine, but by the end of the day, the prisoner still has to be alive.
And this one—on his watch!—has just slit her wrists.
Damn her!
Walter skids to a halt before one of the four solid and keypad-locked doors in the basement. He drops the first-aid kit and punches in the access code, and the door swings open.
The air inside the cell is cold as it washes over him. Must be at the low point of the thermostat control.
The woman is on her knees, sobbing. Blood has pooled on the floor in two puddles near her bloody wrists.
“Hey, get up!” he yells.
The woman doesn’t move.
“Get up, damn it!” he yells again, wondering why in hell Quinn is taking so damn long to get here. He needs to bandage those wrists up, now; Walter knows from experience just how quickly someone can bleed out from severed wrist arteries.
She’s gibbering now, making no sense, and he steps forward, ready to grab her hair if need be, when the woman springs up and, with the heel of her right hand, breaks his nose.
Chapter 76
IN THE movies and TV shows, nailing a guy’s nose with the heel of your hand will drive bone fragments into his brain and instantly kill him. But real life is always messier than the movies: I’ve hurt the heel of my right hand and only stunned one of my captors. Still, I use those key few seconds to punch him in the throat and kick out his legs.
He thumps to the concrete floor. I grab his radio and strip him of his pistol, then stomp on his throat with my bare foot.
There’s the crack and crunch of bone and cartilage shattering; obscene gurglings strain out of his mouth, and I drag him into my former cell, then return to the hallway and slam the door shut.
There.
Short hallway and a stairwell, heading up up up and the hell out of here.
So far, no shooting.
I’m pleased.
I start moving on bare feet, the rear of my head hurting something awful. As I get to the stairs, a heavyset guy in jeans and a black turtleneck sweater rolls out, holding a pistol in one hand and a white case with a red cross in the other.
He looks surprised.
I’m not.
I expected it.
But he moves fast, throwing the case at me and swinging around to grab his pistol with both hands to assume the proper shooting position. Me, I’m not in the mood to be proper, so I start shooting with my right hand extended. At least two shots nail him in the chest and drop him in a jumble of arms and legs.
I keep on running.
Right up the stairs.
Out into a small room. To the right, a kitchen. To the rear, another narrow set of stairs, going up. To the left, a living room transformed into a control center for this little slice of black sites.
To the front, a blessed door.
I make it to the door, open it up, and run outside, dropping the radio, just in case it has a tracer device on it.
So there has been shooting after all—and that’s fine by me.
The innocent-looking cottage with an old-fashioned thatched roof looks like something out of a Jane Austen novel, but I take only two seconds to admire it before running into the woods. A dirt road leads out, but I don’t take it; that stretch of lane must be surveilled and bugged from one end to the other.
The same thing for the parked dark-green Land Rover near the front door. I could waste a few moments trying to jump-start the darn thing and get it going, only to have it blow up because I didn’t know the phone number to call to disable the plastic explosives hidden under the front seat.
So into the woods I go.
After I’ve run a few minutes, the adrenaline and endorphins begin to fade, and various aches and pains make themselves screamingly known. The back of my head hurts something fierce—a burning sensation that has left blood pooling in my hair. Earlier in my cell I had tugged my smelly blouse over my head, the better to gain access to my bra and its underwires, and trust me, you haven’t lived until an underwire has unexpectedly snapped free and poked into your ribs during an office briefing.
I had then used the sharp end of the underwire to cut into the back of my skull, causing a head wound that bled like a torrent. With that blood smeared on my wrists—well, it had worked.
So now my head is burning and my feet are raw and bleeding as well, but I don’t care.
I’m free.
I run away from the cottage, but I run with a purpose. Most people in an escape situation blunder and propel themselves into being captured again: human nature is to run in a circle, and you end up right where you started.
But I pick out landmarks—a birch tree, a rock outcropping, a trio of pines—and run in a straight line. Then I do the same, but at a different angle. And again.
So I’m escaping, but not in a straight line and not in a circle—but instead in chance bursts of direction that will get me away in an escape mode that’s random and can’t be predicted.
My attention is fragmented—being all alone, Rashad Hussain, Tom taking my Ticonderoga warning seriously—but I’m trying to stay focused on putting as much distance as possible between me and the CIA black site before daylight ends.
And what day is it?
No idea.
I know they were screwing with my food, temperature, light and dark, and—
The woods and brush end.
I’m on a narrow country road.
There’s a stone wall nearby.
I go over to it and sit down, examine my feet, wince, and put them back on the dirt.
Somewhere out there, it sounds like someone is mowing a lawn.
I catch my breath.
Pistol in my lap.
I touch the back of my head.
My hair is a bloody, thatched mess.
My wrists and hands are stained with my blood as well.
The lawnmower sound gets louder.
I just sit.
And wait.
A truck ambles by, its horn honking.
I wave.
Not a truck, I chastise myself.
It’s a lorry.
I wait.
A black Lexus comes down the road, slows, and stops.
The driver’s window—still on the wrong side, my American mind complains—slides down, and a smiling Jeremy Windsor calls out to me.
“Looking for a ride, Luv?”
I stand up, grimace, and hobble across the road to the car.
“You know it,” I say.
Then I hold up my pistol.
“Just don’t try anything funny.”
Chapter 77
THE INTERIOR of the Lexus is soft, warm, and oh so comfortable, and I know I’m going to collapse and maybe even doze off, but I manage to squeeze out a few questions before I do. Out to the west, the sun is setting.
“Good to see you,” Jeremy says, looking at my bloody wrists and hands. “Your blood, or someone else’s?”
“Mine,” I say. “Bit of a sacrifice to get me out.”
“Want to tell me about it?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
Several seconds pass and I ask, “How long has your little drone been looking for me?”
“Since you were snatched outside of Perky’s care home,” he says, passing over a soft white towel and a plastic bottle of water. I unscrew the cap, take a long drag of the water, splash some on the towel, and do my best to clean up my bloodstained flesh.
“You guys know where the CIA has its secret black sites?”
Jeremy says, “What kind of intelligence service would we be if we didn’t?”
“Are Winnie and Felicity around?”
“No,” he says, speeding up as we get onto a highway called the M1. “There’s been a big blowup at home. Winnie and Felicity have been called off…and if I answer my phone, I’m sure the same’s going to happen to me. Still, this is where I knew you were.”
He taps on a screen about twice the size of an iPhone that’s attached to the dashboard. There’s an overhead view in black and white of where I had just been. Nice view, especially since I’m not there.
I take another drag of the water. Cold and so very refreshing. “Why?”
“Your boss and my boss had a fight over Rashad,” he says. “My boss lost.”
“Here? On your home turf? Why didn’t your boss tell my boss to go to hell?”
Having been in solitary for a few disturbing days and nights, it’s great to be out in the open, among the happy, innocent, and ignorant civilians speeding by in their vans, buses, and cars.
“Your boss controls the purse strings for a lot of our operations,” Jeremy says. “Losing that funding over a possible terror attack, not based on actionable intelligence…a nonstarter.”
I give out a big yawn. “Okay,” I say. “You’re alone. No Winnie, no Felicity. What, you were just going to keep an eye on the black site until you saw my remains hauled out in a body bag?”
“No,” Jeremy says, speeding up the Lexus. “I had contacted some of my mates in the regiment.”
“You were going to bust me out?”
“Yes,” he says. “You know how it is in the military: steel-hard friendships, always ready to do a favor for a mate.”
Another yawn, and my eyes get heavy. “Jeremy…what’s the date?”
“May twenty-eighth.”
“Then we have one day left before the attack.”
“We do,” he says.
Then, just as I predicted, I doze right off.
What else could I do?
Later that early evening, we’re in a small house on the outskirts of one of those perfect little English villages you think exist only in a Julian Fellowes screenplay, and I’m happy to be at Jeremy’s place. It’s one story—white exterior with gray shingles—and surrounded on three sides by gardens. Inside there’s a big kitchen, an even bigger living room with wide plank floors, a stone fireplace, and lots of books packed into bookshelves. The old-style windows are made of small glass triangles.
And no television.
He points me to a bathroom and I say, “Great place. Must have cost you a bit.”
“Some,” he says. “But I’ve never regretted it.”
I yawn once again, feeling my legs quiver. “Bet you have lots of good parties here.”
“No,” he says, heading to the kitchen. “No one ever comes here.”
“Not even female friends?”
“Especially female friends,” he says, opening up a stainless-steel refrigerator. “Amy, nobody knows about this place. Even my coworkers, even my boss. I bought this through a variety of cutouts and offshore real estate companies. It’s my little nest.”
I head to the bathroom.
“Thanks for inviting me in,” I say.
He doesn’t say a word, and then, neither do I.
After a shower—and after Jeremy trims some of my wet hair to bandage the deep scratch I’d given myself—I’m surprised to see my clothing laid out on his bed, freshly washed and dried.
He offers me a pair of soft leather moccasins. “Best I can do at the moment.”
“One of these days you’ll make someone a perfect husband,” I say, sliding them on. A bit too large, but they’ll work. “Or wife. Depending on your mood and the current language of gender.”
“One of these days,” he says. “Come along, before our meal gets cold.”
The meal is a hot omelet with cheese, veggies, and bits of sausage. There’s also hand-sliced toast made from a white-bread loaf. We’re drinking cold orange juice; at Jeremy’s elbow is an open laptop computer.
As we eat on his butcher-block dining table, I say, “We’ve got to get across the pond. More resources available to us over there.”
“Even with you smoked?”
“Not a problem,” I say, trying to slow my chewing, because with the smell of the freshly cooked meal, my appetite’s dial is pegged at 11. “I’ve got a source I’m sure will help us at the right time.”
He says, “I might be able to get us both over there, using some of my friends to grab us tickets on a transatlantic flight without getting too particular about passport control. Tricky, but we could probably get there before midnight tonight, New York time. But then what?”
“Rashad wants to be there, don’t you think?” I ask. “He wanted to kill you and Ollie, up close and personal. It’s certain he was at the airport runway with that fake nuke. And he was on the scene with you when you flew to Saudi Arabia after your father was killed.”
He nods, dabs a napkin on his bearded chin. “Good call. Hold on. Let’s see if I can get some transport lined up.”
Jeremy grabs the laptop, swivels it around, and starts working the keyboard. I say, “If you think no one from your agency knows about you and this place, you have a funny way of showing it, going online like that.”
He stays focused on the screen. “I use two encrypted systems that rotate among servers in the Baltics and the Caribbean. Sometimes it’s slow, but I’m confident that…hold on.”
I hold on.
I keep on eating.
His brow furrows.
Something is wrong.
He works the keyboard again.
Shakes his head, looks up at me.
“Hurry up and finish your meal,” he says, powering down the laptop.
Shoveling the delicious omelet into my eager mouth without really tasting it, I ask, “What’s going on?”
He gets up from the table and walks his plate to the sink. He doesn’t even bother scraping off the half-eaten meal.
Jeremy quickly washes his hands. “You have a saying over there about being Gitmo’ed. A verb meaning that you’ve been sent to your Guantanamo Bay, with no hopes of ever coming out again.”
“Yes,” I say, eating faster, growing concerned about where this conversation is going.
Jeremy heads out of the kitchen, going to his bedroom. He calls out, “We got something similar: getting Faroe’d—being sent to our black site up in the Faroe Islands, at the northern tip of Britain.”
I get up and take my plate and glass to the sink. “Never heard of it.”
“Other times I’d say that was a good thing, Amy, but not today,” Jeremy tells me, opening a closet in his bedroom. “All of my computer access has just been removed, and a tracking program I have on my PC says somebody has cracked my online program and is tracing it back here.”
I go into his bedroom and suddenly wonder where my stolen Beretta is.
“They’re coming after you,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, “and we’ve got to leave, right now.”
Spotting my Beretta on the other side of the bed, I go over to pick it up and stick it in my waistband. “Any idea where we’re going?”
“Eventually to the States,” he says. “But for right now I’m happy the two of us aren’t in the back of an unmarked lorry, heading north.”
I turn out of the bedroom. “I’ll get the car started.”
“But I’m driving,” he says.
“Oh, you know it,” I say.
Chapter 78
NADIA KHADRA takes a moment to look around her in awe at the tall and forbidding buildings of southern Manhattan. What a city! Paris is a jewel—the City of Light, a center of civilization—but never has she seen such buildings, standing proud and conceited around her.
She is on the corner of Fulton Street and famed Broadway, having spent a long and uncomfortable hour on the disgusting, clattering subway system that has finally brought her here to fulfill her destiny and achieve her long-sought-after revenge for her papy and mémère.
Horns are blaring from the crowded traffic on Broadway, the sound snapping her back to her task. With the precious metal briefcase in her hand and her carry-on luggage at her feet, Nadia makes the call.
It’s answered on the first ring.
“Mike,” the confident man says.
“I’m here,” she says. “Just got off the train.”
“Well done,” he says, and the tone of pride in his voice nearly makes her shiver. “Walk north now, two blocks, and you’ll come to a park. At the south end of the park there is an outdoor fountain. I’ll be waiting there for you.”
“I…I so look forward to meeting you,” she says.
“As do I,” he says. “But you’re wearing the black dress and belt, correct?”
“Yes, yes, I am,” she says.
“Wonderful,” he says. “I’ll know you when I see you. But if for some reason I don’t show up in two minutes, call me again. Just to be sure.”
“I understand,” Nadia says. “We must be sure.”
“Goodbye,” he says.
Nadia slips the phone back into a pocket in her luggage and starts walking, allowing herself a moment to fantasize, to dream. This man…he sounds so strong, so confident, so fearless. After she delivers him the valuable case that represents nearly a year of fine and deadly work, well, what then?
It will be too dangerous to stay here, in the United States.
Go north, she thinks. To Quebec. Yes, there, in that French-speaking province, she will be able to fit in.
And…
A tingle of excitement nearly makes her shiver.
Perhaps this strong man will accompany her?
After all, he, too, will need a place of shelter.
She pauses at a street corner, and for some reason she turns her head. At the sight of One World Trade Center rising arrogantly into the sky, she smiles.
Freddie Farrady watches Mike take a phone call, then walk across Broadway to the southern end of City Hall Park. For more than an hour he has followed Mike all around this part of Manhattan, a boring stretch of time. But now he’s no longer bored.
Holy shit, Walter thinks, and he grabs his Motorola radio.
“Quinn, Hope, we’ve got a medical emergency in Cell Two!”
Walter grabs a first-aid kit and heads for the stairwell leading downstairs as he flicks on the light. The rules and regulations for being bad babysitters here in this hidden CIA safe house are few and far between, but the big one is to protect the prisoner. Mistreatment and torture and waterboarding and starvation are all fine, but by the end of the day, the prisoner still has to be alive.
And this one—on his watch!—has just slit her wrists.
Damn her!
Walter skids to a halt before one of the four solid and keypad-locked doors in the basement. He drops the first-aid kit and punches in the access code, and the door swings open.
The air inside the cell is cold as it washes over him. Must be at the low point of the thermostat control.
The woman is on her knees, sobbing. Blood has pooled on the floor in two puddles near her bloody wrists.
“Hey, get up!” he yells.
The woman doesn’t move.
“Get up, damn it!” he yells again, wondering why in hell Quinn is taking so damn long to get here. He needs to bandage those wrists up, now; Walter knows from experience just how quickly someone can bleed out from severed wrist arteries.
She’s gibbering now, making no sense, and he steps forward, ready to grab her hair if need be, when the woman springs up and, with the heel of her right hand, breaks his nose.
Chapter 76
IN THE movies and TV shows, nailing a guy’s nose with the heel of your hand will drive bone fragments into his brain and instantly kill him. But real life is always messier than the movies: I’ve hurt the heel of my right hand and only stunned one of my captors. Still, I use those key few seconds to punch him in the throat and kick out his legs.
He thumps to the concrete floor. I grab his radio and strip him of his pistol, then stomp on his throat with my bare foot.
There’s the crack and crunch of bone and cartilage shattering; obscene gurglings strain out of his mouth, and I drag him into my former cell, then return to the hallway and slam the door shut.
There.
Short hallway and a stairwell, heading up up up and the hell out of here.
So far, no shooting.
I’m pleased.
I start moving on bare feet, the rear of my head hurting something awful. As I get to the stairs, a heavyset guy in jeans and a black turtleneck sweater rolls out, holding a pistol in one hand and a white case with a red cross in the other.
He looks surprised.
I’m not.
I expected it.
But he moves fast, throwing the case at me and swinging around to grab his pistol with both hands to assume the proper shooting position. Me, I’m not in the mood to be proper, so I start shooting with my right hand extended. At least two shots nail him in the chest and drop him in a jumble of arms and legs.
I keep on running.
Right up the stairs.
Out into a small room. To the right, a kitchen. To the rear, another narrow set of stairs, going up. To the left, a living room transformed into a control center for this little slice of black sites.
To the front, a blessed door.
I make it to the door, open it up, and run outside, dropping the radio, just in case it has a tracer device on it.
So there has been shooting after all—and that’s fine by me.
The innocent-looking cottage with an old-fashioned thatched roof looks like something out of a Jane Austen novel, but I take only two seconds to admire it before running into the woods. A dirt road leads out, but I don’t take it; that stretch of lane must be surveilled and bugged from one end to the other.
The same thing for the parked dark-green Land Rover near the front door. I could waste a few moments trying to jump-start the darn thing and get it going, only to have it blow up because I didn’t know the phone number to call to disable the plastic explosives hidden under the front seat.
So into the woods I go.
After I’ve run a few minutes, the adrenaline and endorphins begin to fade, and various aches and pains make themselves screamingly known. The back of my head hurts something fierce—a burning sensation that has left blood pooling in my hair. Earlier in my cell I had tugged my smelly blouse over my head, the better to gain access to my bra and its underwires, and trust me, you haven’t lived until an underwire has unexpectedly snapped free and poked into your ribs during an office briefing.
I had then used the sharp end of the underwire to cut into the back of my skull, causing a head wound that bled like a torrent. With that blood smeared on my wrists—well, it had worked.
So now my head is burning and my feet are raw and bleeding as well, but I don’t care.
I’m free.
I run away from the cottage, but I run with a purpose. Most people in an escape situation blunder and propel themselves into being captured again: human nature is to run in a circle, and you end up right where you started.
But I pick out landmarks—a birch tree, a rock outcropping, a trio of pines—and run in a straight line. Then I do the same, but at a different angle. And again.
So I’m escaping, but not in a straight line and not in a circle—but instead in chance bursts of direction that will get me away in an escape mode that’s random and can’t be predicted.
My attention is fragmented—being all alone, Rashad Hussain, Tom taking my Ticonderoga warning seriously—but I’m trying to stay focused on putting as much distance as possible between me and the CIA black site before daylight ends.
And what day is it?
No idea.
I know they were screwing with my food, temperature, light and dark, and—
The woods and brush end.
I’m on a narrow country road.
There’s a stone wall nearby.
I go over to it and sit down, examine my feet, wince, and put them back on the dirt.
Somewhere out there, it sounds like someone is mowing a lawn.
I catch my breath.
Pistol in my lap.
I touch the back of my head.
My hair is a bloody, thatched mess.
My wrists and hands are stained with my blood as well.
The lawnmower sound gets louder.
I just sit.
And wait.
A truck ambles by, its horn honking.
I wave.
Not a truck, I chastise myself.
It’s a lorry.
I wait.
A black Lexus comes down the road, slows, and stops.
The driver’s window—still on the wrong side, my American mind complains—slides down, and a smiling Jeremy Windsor calls out to me.
“Looking for a ride, Luv?”
I stand up, grimace, and hobble across the road to the car.
“You know it,” I say.
Then I hold up my pistol.
“Just don’t try anything funny.”
Chapter 77
THE INTERIOR of the Lexus is soft, warm, and oh so comfortable, and I know I’m going to collapse and maybe even doze off, but I manage to squeeze out a few questions before I do. Out to the west, the sun is setting.
“Good to see you,” Jeremy says, looking at my bloody wrists and hands. “Your blood, or someone else’s?”
“Mine,” I say. “Bit of a sacrifice to get me out.”
“Want to tell me about it?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
Several seconds pass and I ask, “How long has your little drone been looking for me?”
“Since you were snatched outside of Perky’s care home,” he says, passing over a soft white towel and a plastic bottle of water. I unscrew the cap, take a long drag of the water, splash some on the towel, and do my best to clean up my bloodstained flesh.
“You guys know where the CIA has its secret black sites?”
Jeremy says, “What kind of intelligence service would we be if we didn’t?”
“Are Winnie and Felicity around?”
“No,” he says, speeding up as we get onto a highway called the M1. “There’s been a big blowup at home. Winnie and Felicity have been called off…and if I answer my phone, I’m sure the same’s going to happen to me. Still, this is where I knew you were.”
He taps on a screen about twice the size of an iPhone that’s attached to the dashboard. There’s an overhead view in black and white of where I had just been. Nice view, especially since I’m not there.
I take another drag of the water. Cold and so very refreshing. “Why?”
“Your boss and my boss had a fight over Rashad,” he says. “My boss lost.”
“Here? On your home turf? Why didn’t your boss tell my boss to go to hell?”
Having been in solitary for a few disturbing days and nights, it’s great to be out in the open, among the happy, innocent, and ignorant civilians speeding by in their vans, buses, and cars.
“Your boss controls the purse strings for a lot of our operations,” Jeremy says. “Losing that funding over a possible terror attack, not based on actionable intelligence…a nonstarter.”
I give out a big yawn. “Okay,” I say. “You’re alone. No Winnie, no Felicity. What, you were just going to keep an eye on the black site until you saw my remains hauled out in a body bag?”
“No,” Jeremy says, speeding up the Lexus. “I had contacted some of my mates in the regiment.”
“You were going to bust me out?”
“Yes,” he says. “You know how it is in the military: steel-hard friendships, always ready to do a favor for a mate.”
Another yawn, and my eyes get heavy. “Jeremy…what’s the date?”
“May twenty-eighth.”
“Then we have one day left before the attack.”
“We do,” he says.
Then, just as I predicted, I doze right off.
What else could I do?
Later that early evening, we’re in a small house on the outskirts of one of those perfect little English villages you think exist only in a Julian Fellowes screenplay, and I’m happy to be at Jeremy’s place. It’s one story—white exterior with gray shingles—and surrounded on three sides by gardens. Inside there’s a big kitchen, an even bigger living room with wide plank floors, a stone fireplace, and lots of books packed into bookshelves. The old-style windows are made of small glass triangles.
And no television.
He points me to a bathroom and I say, “Great place. Must have cost you a bit.”
“Some,” he says. “But I’ve never regretted it.”
I yawn once again, feeling my legs quiver. “Bet you have lots of good parties here.”
“No,” he says, heading to the kitchen. “No one ever comes here.”
“Not even female friends?”
“Especially female friends,” he says, opening up a stainless-steel refrigerator. “Amy, nobody knows about this place. Even my coworkers, even my boss. I bought this through a variety of cutouts and offshore real estate companies. It’s my little nest.”
I head to the bathroom.
“Thanks for inviting me in,” I say.
He doesn’t say a word, and then, neither do I.
After a shower—and after Jeremy trims some of my wet hair to bandage the deep scratch I’d given myself—I’m surprised to see my clothing laid out on his bed, freshly washed and dried.
He offers me a pair of soft leather moccasins. “Best I can do at the moment.”
“One of these days you’ll make someone a perfect husband,” I say, sliding them on. A bit too large, but they’ll work. “Or wife. Depending on your mood and the current language of gender.”
“One of these days,” he says. “Come along, before our meal gets cold.”
The meal is a hot omelet with cheese, veggies, and bits of sausage. There’s also hand-sliced toast made from a white-bread loaf. We’re drinking cold orange juice; at Jeremy’s elbow is an open laptop computer.
As we eat on his butcher-block dining table, I say, “We’ve got to get across the pond. More resources available to us over there.”
“Even with you smoked?”
“Not a problem,” I say, trying to slow my chewing, because with the smell of the freshly cooked meal, my appetite’s dial is pegged at 11. “I’ve got a source I’m sure will help us at the right time.”
He says, “I might be able to get us both over there, using some of my friends to grab us tickets on a transatlantic flight without getting too particular about passport control. Tricky, but we could probably get there before midnight tonight, New York time. But then what?”
“Rashad wants to be there, don’t you think?” I ask. “He wanted to kill you and Ollie, up close and personal. It’s certain he was at the airport runway with that fake nuke. And he was on the scene with you when you flew to Saudi Arabia after your father was killed.”
He nods, dabs a napkin on his bearded chin. “Good call. Hold on. Let’s see if I can get some transport lined up.”
Jeremy grabs the laptop, swivels it around, and starts working the keyboard. I say, “If you think no one from your agency knows about you and this place, you have a funny way of showing it, going online like that.”
He stays focused on the screen. “I use two encrypted systems that rotate among servers in the Baltics and the Caribbean. Sometimes it’s slow, but I’m confident that…hold on.”
I hold on.
I keep on eating.
His brow furrows.
Something is wrong.
He works the keyboard again.
Shakes his head, looks up at me.
“Hurry up and finish your meal,” he says, powering down the laptop.
Shoveling the delicious omelet into my eager mouth without really tasting it, I ask, “What’s going on?”
He gets up from the table and walks his plate to the sink. He doesn’t even bother scraping off the half-eaten meal.
Jeremy quickly washes his hands. “You have a saying over there about being Gitmo’ed. A verb meaning that you’ve been sent to your Guantanamo Bay, with no hopes of ever coming out again.”
“Yes,” I say, eating faster, growing concerned about where this conversation is going.
Jeremy heads out of the kitchen, going to his bedroom. He calls out, “We got something similar: getting Faroe’d—being sent to our black site up in the Faroe Islands, at the northern tip of Britain.”
I get up and take my plate and glass to the sink. “Never heard of it.”
“Other times I’d say that was a good thing, Amy, but not today,” Jeremy tells me, opening a closet in his bedroom. “All of my computer access has just been removed, and a tracking program I have on my PC says somebody has cracked my online program and is tracing it back here.”
I go into his bedroom and suddenly wonder where my stolen Beretta is.
“They’re coming after you,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, “and we’ve got to leave, right now.”
Spotting my Beretta on the other side of the bed, I go over to pick it up and stick it in my waistband. “Any idea where we’re going?”
“Eventually to the States,” he says. “But for right now I’m happy the two of us aren’t in the back of an unmarked lorry, heading north.”
I turn out of the bedroom. “I’ll get the car started.”
“But I’m driving,” he says.
“Oh, you know it,” I say.
Chapter 78
NADIA KHADRA takes a moment to look around her in awe at the tall and forbidding buildings of southern Manhattan. What a city! Paris is a jewel—the City of Light, a center of civilization—but never has she seen such buildings, standing proud and conceited around her.
She is on the corner of Fulton Street and famed Broadway, having spent a long and uncomfortable hour on the disgusting, clattering subway system that has finally brought her here to fulfill her destiny and achieve her long-sought-after revenge for her papy and mémère.
Horns are blaring from the crowded traffic on Broadway, the sound snapping her back to her task. With the precious metal briefcase in her hand and her carry-on luggage at her feet, Nadia makes the call.
It’s answered on the first ring.
“Mike,” the confident man says.
“I’m here,” she says. “Just got off the train.”
“Well done,” he says, and the tone of pride in his voice nearly makes her shiver. “Walk north now, two blocks, and you’ll come to a park. At the south end of the park there is an outdoor fountain. I’ll be waiting there for you.”
“I…I so look forward to meeting you,” she says.
“As do I,” he says. “But you’re wearing the black dress and belt, correct?”
“Yes, yes, I am,” she says.
“Wonderful,” he says. “I’ll know you when I see you. But if for some reason I don’t show up in two minutes, call me again. Just to be sure.”
“I understand,” Nadia says. “We must be sure.”
“Goodbye,” he says.
Nadia slips the phone back into a pocket in her luggage and starts walking, allowing herself a moment to fantasize, to dream. This man…he sounds so strong, so confident, so fearless. After she delivers him the valuable case that represents nearly a year of fine and deadly work, well, what then?
It will be too dangerous to stay here, in the United States.
Go north, she thinks. To Quebec. Yes, there, in that French-speaking province, she will be able to fit in.
And…
A tingle of excitement nearly makes her shiver.
Perhaps this strong man will accompany her?
After all, he, too, will need a place of shelter.
She pauses at a street corner, and for some reason she turns her head. At the sight of One World Trade Center rising arrogantly into the sky, she smiles.
Freddie Farrady watches Mike take a phone call, then walk across Broadway to the southern end of City Hall Park. For more than an hour he has followed Mike all around this part of Manhattan, a boring stretch of time. But now he’s no longer bored.
