A Deceit to Die For (19 page)

They knew nothing of the power of
shahadah
—the confession of faith in the Creator of the Worlds. Allah had not deemed the infidel worthy of such magnificent faith. The Mongols had destroyed the Abbasid caliphate, but the chastened
mu’min
reformed their ways and eventually many of the invaders were won over. Genghis and the Mongols were great warriors. They were also fools led astray by Satan. They were not rightly guided and so did not understand the politics of religion. They had allowed religious freedom and equality for all their subjects. This had allowed Muslim missionaries to wield influence, thus ensuring their downfall, not on the battlefield, but where it mattered—in the hearts and minds of the people. Once they converted to Islam, there was no need for war.

Yes, the Dragon would rise again. He knew the East would be a formidable foe. Still, it was the spirit of the crusader that posed the greater threat right now with its secular atheism, immorality, and economic exploitation of Muslim peoples . . . Salih’s blood boiled just thinking about it. Yet, like Genghis Khan, they allowed freedom and equality in religion and Muslim missionaries were pouring into every Western country, raising large families and winning their neighbors to Islam. The West was being led astray just as the Mongols had been. It was only a matter of time. Their ideologies would crumple in defeat before the onslaught of Mohammed’s divine message.

They were not “rightly guided.” Satan had deceived them with nonsense about equality and liberty. Arguments a five-year old could refute. Their delusion was powerful. They were incapable of understanding why humans could never be equal. The Qur’an and the
ulema
had decreed that there was freedom of religion for monotheistic belief systems, but equality? That was beyond absurd.

Under sharia, Christians and Jews were second-class citizens subject to onerous taxes, forced to wear special clothing, banned from striking a Muslim, bearing arms or even testifying in a court of law against a Muslim. This was, of course, the wisdom of Allah, a heavy burden in this life to persuade them to abandon the error of their ways and embrace the way of submission in Islam in order to attain eternal life. It had worked well for centuries. True, there were still pockets of Christians and Jews in the Middle East, but they were submitted minorities and inconsequential. A neutralized threat. They were nothing compared to the pockets of Muslims in the West. There were millions in Europe and America. He smiled to himself. The way of God would be victorious.

Salih looked back down at his watch. For all the fanfare about how important this job was, he was tempted to be unthankful. He had taken his second wife last week. It almost made him faint with desire to think that he could be with her instead of sitting here in the office. They were close to getting the British government to recognize their right to govern themselves by sharia law, but to avoid drawing attention to himself, the ceremony had been a clandestine one led by an imam at the local mosque. A small notification popped up in the lower right hand corner of the screen. He had mail.

The sun approaches the horizon.

Their man was back. Soon this would all be over.

><><><
 

Ian read over his notes for tomorrow’s presentation. Then he remembered his cell phone battery was dead, retrieved it from his coat pocket and plugged it into the charger. It lit up, and he turned it on to see if he had any messages. The screen read:
1 New Voice Mail
. He would listen to it in the morning on his way to the university.

He felt too tired to even brush his teeth, but persevered anyway. Then he slipped into his pajamas, switched off the lamp and turned back the beautiful patchwork quilt that his wife had inherited from her grandmother. It was funny how some traditions outlasted the necessity which had birthed them. Her family had, by no means, been so poor that they needed to piece together tattered old rags to keep warm, but it was a tradition. Its true value lay in the fact that it was a labor of love with birthdays and anniversaries embroidered on every square. It was a true Southern masterpiece she had treasured and carried around the world for years.

Ian’s head hit the pillow with the same prayer on his lips he had said every night for the past two years, except that tonight he asked for a repeat of last night’s dream and it was answered.

CHAPTER
17

W
EDNESDAY
  
At 01:00 hours, the door to Ian’s apartment swung open noiselessly on freshly oiled hinges. Three masked figures clad completely in black slid through the door like shadows. Ian awoke with a hand over his mouth. He was secured before he was even fully awake. They left him lying on the bed gagged and bound hand and foot while they searched the house.

It had not been found in the search of the apartment, so the first place they looked was his briefcase. When that turned up empty, he was carried into the living room, roughly forced down into a chair and secured with a soft cotton rope around his waist. His hands were untied while one of the shadowy figures held him in a choke hold around the neck. In the darkness, he could sense their presence, but could not make them out. One of them walked up to the chair he was sitting in, leaned down to his ear and whispered,

“Old man, you may have no idea what we want from you, and then again you may know very well, but right now what you need to understand is how determined we are to get it back. What you found belongs to us. I have killed men for information not nearly as valuable, so save yourself and me the trouble of breaking you and tell us where the document is.”

He thrust a notebook and pencil into his hand. Ian’s mind was reeling. He took the pen and paper, but sat there motionless.

“Mr. O’Brien, I cannot risk allowing you to scream so please write down the location of the document. Once we have the document, we’ll leave, and you can go back to bed.”

Ian wrote slowly and deliberately, all the while trying to place the subtle, but distinct accent. He was fully awake now and desperately trying to buy time, so he could figure out what was happening. He held the notebook out for the man to read.

If you mean the letter I found, it’s beyond your reach
.

The man read what Ian had written and turned as if he was walking away. Ian sensed movement. There was a blur as the shadow in front of him spun back around, and Ian doubled over in pain from a perfectly-placed blow to his solar plexus. The masked man stood for a minute looking down at the old professor gasping for air and then squatted in front of Ian.

“You old fool. A little cooperation would have gone a long way to resolving this.”

Physical coercion in a crowded apartment building was out of the question. One of the men spoke in a foreign language and moments later the chair Ian was sitting in was lifted and carried to the kitchen table. The kitchen light was turned on, and for the first time Ian had a clear view of the intruders. Three masked figures dressed in black from head to toe, all of them wearing surgical gloves. Ian felt an arm wrap around his neck and tighten into a chokehold while another man stretched out his arm on the table. The third man pulled a loaded syringe from a small bag and removed the plastic sheath to reveal the needle.

“Mr. O’Brien, I am going to ask you one more time. Where is the document?”

Ian shook his head side to side, affirming his refusal to cooperate. The threat of psycho-narcotic torture was far more effective than the drug itself. The man wanted to allow time for fear to set in and have its full-effect.

“Mr. O’Brien, I do not understand you. You are an academician. This document is of no consequence to you or academia, but very dear to us, so dear, in fact, that I have been given explicit orders to use whatever means necessary to persuade you to talk. Once this drug is injected, you will be telling me everything I need to know, but it has unpleasant side effects.”

Again, he paused for effect. Ian sat motionless. The man threw a large photograph down in front of him.

“This was one of my more interesting jobs.”

When Ian refused to look down, the man thrust it in his face. Ian stared in horror at a grotesque frontal shot of a man’s face with all of the skin removed from the left side. From the look in the man’s eye, he had still been alive when the picture was taken. Ian shut his eyes. His stomach did flip-flops. There was silence for a moment as the intruders waited for their private terror to take effect. The man looked at his watch.

“Mr. O’Brien,
I’m
not running out of time, but
you
are. What I
am
running out of is patience. Where is the document?”

Ian did not even open his eyes. He sat there in a daze while every clue he had pieced together over the last several days came into crystal clear focus. His captors waited silently for the gravity of the situation to sink in. They had seen it many times. Fear would squeeze every ounce of resistance out of him, the instinct of self-preservation would take over, and he would tell them whatever they wanted to know. Ian slowly raised his head. His eyes were bright and smiling. He said nothing. When the leader saw the look on Ian’s face, he breathed a sigh, shook his head and said,

“Mr. O’Brien, we will finish this conversation elsewhere.”

He immediately felt the grip on his arm and the hold around his neck tighten. This was followed by the prick of a needle.

Intelligence agencies around the world had searched for the holy grail of interrogation—a truth serum—since the 1930s. Billions of dollars later, the only real progress was a list of chemical concoctions that didn’t work. There was no fool-proof way to slip past the firewall of the human conscious, take control of the mind and read data off of the cerebral hard drive. However, many useful things had been learned, and sodium thiopental was often used as an adjunct to interrogation.

The drug would not only make him groggy and easy to transport, it would also prepare him for questioning. Part of the effect was psychological; if the victim believed that he had been given a drug that would make him talk, then, when faced with physical torture, it was easier for him to rationalize capitulation as he was able to soothe his conscience with the idea that the drug had made it impossible for him to resist.

The men continued to comb the house, and scan electronic media for digital copies of the document. These were found on both the desktop and laptop computers, so they loaded a secure deletion program to overwrite the files. They also found a copy on the thumb drive in his briefcase. They checked his “Sent Items” He had apparently not sent the files to anyone. Still, to be on the safe side, their computer specialist intentionally corrupted Outlook’s .pst file, and then did a recover to ensure that Ian had not executed a hard delete, which made normal recovery impossible while leaving the data in the .pst file. It was a long shot, but they had to take every precaution. Next, they recorded the professor’s internet history and then performed a secure erase on the temporary Internet files, so that no one could delve into what he had been researching.

They were rummaging through the stack of papers on his desk when Ian started having difficulty breathing and slumped over, tipping the chair to the floor. One man rushed to remove the gag while the other two lifted him back into the chair. His breathing became more and more labored. They carried him to the couch. His breath was coming in gasps. They spoke among themselves in a foreign language. The panic in their voices was obvious.

Ian beckoned to the man doing most of the talking. The man realized the professor was trying to speak. He walked over to him and said, “You must be having a reaction to the drug.”

Ian’s mouth moved but the sound was practically inaudible. The leader knelt down and put his ear up to the professor’s mouth.

“You have to speak up. I can’t make out what you’re saying.”

The man’s voice was less rough than it had been ten minutes earlier. Ian forced the words out, teeth clenched in a herculean effort to breath.

“Is this . . . how . . . George Sale . . . died?”

He paused, fighting for breath.