I Am Pilgrim (24 page)

the air. He knew immediately it wasn’t a knife – that would have slashed his throat and sent the warmth of his own blood streaming down his chest. The thought had barely formulated itself when a ball of

fire burst into the muscle of his neck and started bullying into his bloodstream.

The pain staggered him, but he knew now what it was. A syringe, with the plunger being driven down hard. Given the circumstances, it was an impressive piece of reasoning – entirely accurate too.

Confused and terrified, Tlass knew he had to yell for help quickly, but whatever chemical was flooding his body suddenly meant the muscles of his mouth wouldn’t say the words that were screaming in his head.

The chemical flood hit his limbs – he realized with a wild rage that nothing could stop it now – and he saw his car keys fall from the jelly that used to be his hand. His attacker ’s fingers flashed out and caught them in mid-air and it seemed to tell Tlass, more than any other thing, that he was in the hands of a master.

Chapter Fifteen

TLASS BUCKLED AT the knees. The saracen caught him before he fell and half carried him towards his

vehicle – a black American SUV, the same one whose windshield he had washed so many times.

Halfway there, he stopped.

He smacked Tlass hard across the face and saw the prisoner ’s eyes spark with pain and fury.

During the planning, one of his major concerns had been that intravenous sedatives recovered from a body might contain a chemical marker that would allow them to be traced to a batch number.

Such a number would lead to the regional hospital he had been working at in Lebanon, and it wouldn’t take diligent investigators – a team from the Syrian secret police, for example – very long to start working through the list of employees and find that he was supposedly on vacation during the relevant period.

There were, however, enough donkeys hauling carts in Beirut for the city to have developed a large

and unregulated market in veterinary products. As a result, it was an ampoule of an untraceable horse tranquillizer that was ripping through Tlass’s body now, and the Saracen only hoped he had calculated the dose correctly – enough to inhibit any muscle control but not so much that it caused the victim to pass out. If Tlass’s eyes glazed over, the man would be useless – whatever else happened, the prisoner had to stay alert.

Whack!
The Saracen hit him across the face again for good measure, then resumed hauling him towards the SUV. Just as he had learned by observing Tlass while he washed the windshield, he used

the button on the key to unlock the doors, opened the rear one and bundled the prisoner inside.

The interior of the vehicle was like a cave. All through the searingly hot countries that extend from the Mediterranean down past the Arabian Gulf, there is one unfailing way to work out who has
wasta
and who doesn’t. The slang word for it is
makhfee
, and it means tint – as in the coating you put on car windows to keep the sun out. Restricted by law to 15 per cent, the more
wasta
you have, the more
makhfee
you can get away with.

Tlass had a great deal of
wasta
indeed, and the windows of his Cadillac were tinted to an intimidating 80 per cent – making the cabin almost completely private, ideal for what was about to take place within. The Saracen swung in behind his prisoner, slammed the door, climbed into the driver ’s seat, put the key in the ignition and turned the engine on. He wasn’t going anywhere, but he needed the air-conditioning blowing as cold as possible. He flicked the switch that operated the rear seats and watched the bench lie down until Tlass was flopping about on a flat platform like a tuna on the deck.

Working to the choreography he had planned for weeks, he pulled rolls of thick electrical tape out

of his pocket and scrambled on to the platform. Tlass watched in mute terror as the master grabbed

his wrists, taping them to grab handles on the doors, spreading him out face up, just as Tlass had once done to a naked woman he had taken great pleasure in ‘interrogating’ until she became too exhausted

to scream and he had grown bored and garrotted her.

The master then taped Tlass’s feet, thighs and chest to the platform, making sure he couldn’t move.

What happened next, however, was the strangest thing of all – the master taped Tlass’s forehead and

chin tight to the headrest, holding his head as rigid as if it were in a workshop clamp. Tlass tried to speak, wanting to know what the hell he was doing – after all, it wasn’t as if you could use your head to escape. But no words would come from his drooling mouth.

With quiet satisfaction, the Saracen saw him trying to speak, watched his terrified eyes dart about: he knew for certain that he had got the dose of sedative right. Certain that Tlass, spreadeagled, was incapable of movement, the Saracen opened the rear door, checked the surrounding area was clear, slid out and ran to his encampment.

In one crashing move he pulled the tarpaulin down from its anchors and piled his gas ring and other possessions on to it, leaving nothing behind to help the forensic analysts. He tied the tarp into a bundle, flung it over his shoulder and picked up his old cool-box, carefully packed by him earlier in the day, as if he were preparing for some bizarre picnic.

The last thing that he had stowed in it was what had caused him the most anxiety – a large bag of

ice. For weeks he had mulled over the problem of how to acquire it but when the answer came it was

disarmingly simple – he asked the friendliest of the security guards, the same one who had told him

about the practice of the guards disappearing for Eid, to help him keep some drinks cool for his own simple celebration of the festival.

‘Would it be possible to have some ice from the refrigerator in the staff kitchen?’ he had asked the guard, and the good Muslim had duly delivered it a few hours ago.

‘
Eid Mubarak
,’ they had said to each other as the Saracen stashed it in the cool-box – on top of two small plastic containers, some food scraps and several bottles of cordial, which were really just a blind. The real contents of the cool-box – the rest of the specialist equipment he needed – were hidden in a concealed compartment at the bottom.

With the cool-box under his arm and the bundle on his back, he ran to the SUV. Tlass heard a rear

door open, and his wild eyes swivelled to see the Palestinian load his possessions on board, swing himself in behind and slam the door shut. Ominously, the master reached forward and hit a switch, operating the central-locking system, sealing them inside.

The Saracen reached down and emptied the deputy director ’s pockets, setting aside his cellphone,

opening up his wallet, ignoring the money and credit cards and finding exactly what he needed –

Tlass’s security key card.

Feeling more confident by the minute, he knelt down, carefully positioned himself close to Tlass’s

head and took the lid off the cool-box. He unloaded the food and released the catch that allowed him to remove the false bottom. From out of the hidden compartment he took a heavy plastic pouch rolled

and tied with a cord and laid it down beside him. Next he began to fill the two plastic containers with ice – and there was something in the calm and orderly way he did all these things that Tlass recognized.

The fucker ’s a doctor! he said in his head, it being the only place he could speak right then. His eyes darted around frantically: the startling insight had made him more frightened than he would have ever thought possible.

What sort of sick fuck with all that study behind him – and a good career ahead as long as he kept

his nose clean – would sweep up a parking lot? he wanted to know.

Somebody with a plan was the answer he immediately gave himself. And, in his experience, men

with plans were usually fanatics, not the sort of people you could reason with – even if you could get your muscles to say the words you so desperately needed to.

The doctor took a pair of clear plastic gloves out of the secret compartment. They terrified Tlass in some even deeper place.
What are they for?!
he tried to scream.

As if in answer, the doctor spoke to him. In different circumstances, people had complimented him

on his bedside manner. ‘I’m going to take your eyes,’ he said.

Chapter Sixteen

WHAT DID HE say?!
Tlass screamed to himself.
What did the fucktard
say about my eyes?!

The Saracen watched as panic spiked in the two dark orbs – in truth, he had no interest in explaining to Tlass what he was doing, but he needed the rush of fear and adrenaline to dilate the pupils and engorge the organs with blood. The more blood in them, the longer the eyes would retain

the appearance of life after they had been removed.

‘I don’t know you,’ the Saracen told him, ‘so it’s nothing personal.’ But of course the Saracen did

know him – he knew him in the way that he was always imagining the men who had led his father into

a cell in Jeddah so many years ago.

Nothing personal?!
Tlass yelled inside his head. He was right, the guy was a fanatic – that’s what the fanatics always said. He tried to muster every hidden reserve, every ounce of energy, willing his muscles to act, trying to buck himself free. The Saracen watched a tiny ripple of movement shimmy

down the man’s body. It was sad, really.

Tlass’s eyes filled with tears – of fear, of frustration, of hate. The Saracen reached down, picked up the plastic pouch and untied the cord, allowing it to unroll. It was a surgical kit, and he was happy for Tlass to see it. Another spike of adrenaline and fear, he hoped. Out of one of the pockets he drew an instrument – a four-inch steel scalpel.

Tlass stared at it – a fucking scalpel? He had to do something! Anything! There was the spike, the

Saracen noted with satisfaction. ‘I think the right eye first,’ he said.

By marshalling every sinew in his diminished body, Tlass managed to speak. ‘No,’ he gasped in a

strangled whisper.

If the Saracen heard him, he made no sign. ‘Removing the eyes is a relatively easy procedure,’ he

said calmly, wrapping his fingers around the handle of the instrument

Tlass started climbing a black wall of terror and despair as he watched the scalpel slide towards what many people regard as the most vulnerable part of their body. The blade loomed huge in his right eye as the doctor ’s thumb and forefinger kept his eyelids apart. With one deft movement, the Saracen started cutting the lids away.

‘Technically speaking, it’s called an enucleation,’ he said helpfully. Tlass thought he was going to vomit – he wanted to vomit; anything that might stop the madman.

Blood ran down, half obscuring the sight in his right eye. He could feel the lunatic’s thumb working between the bridge of his nose and the side of the eyeball. The Saracen was pushing the eyeball aside, finding the orbital muscles that held it in its socket, slicing the sinew.

Tlass was drowning under cresting waves of pain. But still he could see out of the eye that was being operated on. Ha, it wasn’t going to work! The Saracen located the last anchor: the optic nerve and the blood supply which coiled around it. Then he cut it.

Half of Tlass’s visible universe instantly disappeared, sucked into a black hole. The eyeball popped out.

The Saracen had to work fast now, tying off the blood supply to the eyeball with a ligature, trying

to keep as much fluid as possible trapped within it, plunging the ball into the ice to slow its deterioration. It was the same reason the air-conditioning was blasting. He turned his attention to the left eye – as fast as he had been before, he worked at twice the speed now.

Tlass lost the other half of the universe in a few seconds, the pain so intense he was barely conscious enough to realize that he was totally blind now.

The Saracen opened the locks of the Cadillac, hit the parking lot running and sprinted for the front doors of the institute. In his hand he carried Tlass’s two eyes, firmly nestled in their separate containers of ice.

But they were only the first part of the jigsaw – the next problem was the question of weight.

Chapter Seventeen

THE ENCRYPTED KEY card which the Saracen had taken from Tlass’s wallet did its job instantly, and the front doors of the institute slid open.

Although the security desk was unmanned and the building deserted, the metal detectors were still

operating. He stepped through without any difficulty – hours ago, he had taken off his watch and emptied his pockets. He strode six more paces and stopped.

In front of him was a narrow corridor – the only way forward and blocked at the far end by an automatic steel door. Between him and that, the floor consisted of a long metal panel.

Through the plate-glass window, while supposedly enjoying the broken air-conditioning conduit, he had unlocked one of the building’s many security secrets: the floor was a hidden scale. Before stepping on to the metal you had to swipe your encrypted card through another reader. A computer

then married the name on the card to a database which checked the weight of the individual.

If it hadn’t been for that precaution, the Saracen could have grabbed Tlass by the scruff of the neck and walked through behind him. But two men of one-eighty standing on the floor would have shut the

building down.

Still wearing the surgical gloves, the Saracen ran Tlass’s card through the reader. He stepped on to the scale with no idea what tolerance for error the system operated on, half expecting shutters to fall from the ceiling, trapping him.