The Sanctuary (13 page)

He led her briskly to his car, a charcoal gray Grand Cherokee with dark-tinted windows and diplomatic plates that was parked among the Fuhud’s patrol cars and SUVs, and helped her in before jumping behind the wheel. He negotiated his way out of the station’s lot and, with a quick nod to the guard manning the gate, slipped into the
midday
traffic.

Corben glanced in his rearview mirror. “There are a couple of reporters outside the station. I didn’t want you to get caught up in that.”

“They know about me?”

Corben nodded. “There were a lot of witnesses last night. But don’t worry. So far, we’ve managed to keep your mom’s name out of it, and you haven’t been mentioned anywhere either, which is how I’d like to keep things, at least as far as you are concerned. The guys at the station have their orders. They know what to say and what to keep to themselves.”

Mia felt as if she were coming out of hibernation. “Mentioned—you mean in the news?”

“Your mom’s kidnapping made the morning papers. Right now, they’re just talking about a nameless American woman, but they’ll get her name later on today, the embassy’s going to have to make a statement. We’re trying to play it down, but it’s picking up steam. The government isn’t too keen on publicizing it either. It’s bad press for the country, and things are a bit sensitive right now, as I’m sure you know. They’re going to spin it as a deal for stolen relics that went bad, smugglers fighting over the spoils, that kind of thing.”

“That’s bullshit,” Mia protested. “My mom wasn’t a smuggler.”

Corben shrugged sympathetically, but he didn’t seem convinced. “How well did you know her?”

Maybe it was because she was exhausted and hungry, or maybe it was because there was some remote validity to his insinuation, but Mia didn’t really know what to think anymore.

“She’s my mother,” she shot back regardless.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Mia frowned. “I’ve only been here for three weeks, alright? I was in
Boston
before that. So I can’t say we’ve been two peas in a pod, but she’s still my mother and I know what she’s like. I mean, come on. Have you met her? She’s messianic when it comes to archaeology.” She heaved a tired sigh,
then
added, “She’s a good person.”

A good person.
She knew how vacuous that sounded, but, bottom line, she believed it.

“What about your dad? Where is he?”

A distant sadness clouded Mia’s face. “I never knew him. He died shortly after I was born.
A car crash.
On the road to
Jordan
.”

Corben glanced at her and nodded, seeming to process her words. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.” She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

She stared quietly out her window. People were out in the streets, getting on with the routines of their lives. A pang of envy tugged at her heart. She coveted their insouciance—before remembering that they probably weren’t as carefree as they seemed, given what they’d just been through, and the fragility of the country. She didn’t know what was going on behind their affable façades, and it made her think that maybe when it came right down to it, when it came down to the crisis points that define who people really are, maybe we didn’t really know as much about others as we thought we did. With a twinge of guilt, she found herself wondering if maybe Baumhoff and Corben could possibly be right. She didn’t really know her mother that well. She didn’t know what was really going on in her life. And that was where gut feelings and hard truths could easily diverge.

The car slowed and stopped, caught up in traffic in the narrow, single-lane road. She turned to Corben. “You can’t seriously think she could have been trading in looted relics?”

He met her gaze straight on. “The way I understand it, they were after her specifically, and unless she’s the first in a campaign targeting foreigners, which our
intel
suggests is highly, highly unlikely, it’s the only angle we have to work with right now.”

Mia’s spirits sank visibly as she digested his words. Corben studied her thoughtfully. “Look, it doesn’t matter why they took her. The fact of the matter is, someone’s got her, someone’s grabbed a woman, an American woman, off the street, and the reason behind it only matters if it’ll help us get her back. ’Cause that’s what we’re after, that’s the endgame.
Getting her back.
The rest we can deal with later.” A gentle reassurance had crept into his voice.

Mia managed to find a half-smile. Her eyes brightened with his resolve, and she nodded appreciatively.

“I know you’re tired,” he added, “I know you’re probably desperate to get back to your place and jump under a shower and wash the whole experience off, but I really need to talk to you about what happened last night. You were there. What you tell me could be crucial in helping us find her. Time is always against us in these situations. Do you think you can handle that right now?”

“Absolutely.”
She nodded.

A
n acrid, bitter smell speared Evelyn back to consciousness.

She jolted upright, shaking its sting away. Her eyes shot open, only to be assaulted by the fierce neon lighting in the room. It seemed to be coming at her from all sides, as if she were sitting in a white box. She squeezed her eyes back shut.

Slowly, hints of awareness broke through her daze. For one thing, she wasn’t stuffed in the car’s trunk anymore. She was sitting on a hard, metal-framed chair. She tried to shift her position and felt a burning pain from her wrists and ankles. She tried to move them, but couldn’t. She realized she was cuffed into place.

She sensed movement around her, and warily she opened her eyes. Inches from her face, a blurry hand was pulling away. Its fingers held something, a small cylinder of some kind. As she regained her focus, she realized it was a capsule. She thought it must be the smelling salts. She caught a final whiff of it as she followed the hand up. A man was standing there, facing her.

The first thing Evelyn noticed
were
his eyes. They were an unusual blue, and utterly devoid of any emotion. The word
arctic
came to mind. They were fixed on her, scanning her with detached curiosity, alert to every twitch in her body.

They never blinked.

She guessed that the man was in his fifties. He had a handsome, distinguished face. His features—the brow, the cheekbones, the chin and nose—were prominent, aquiline, and yet, finely sculpted. His skin was slightly tanned to a rich, golden hue. He sported a full head of undulating, salt-and-pepper hair, which he wore
suavely
gelled back, and he was tall, easily over six feet. What stood out mostly in her mind, though, was how slim he was. Not in a bulimic, waiflike manner.
Just skinny, which his height only accentuated.
He clearly looked after himself well and had his appetite on a tight leash and didn’t seem any weaker for it. His posture exuded confidence and influence, and his cold eyes presaged a steely, uncompromising disposition, which she found unsettling.

For some reason, her instincts were telling her he wasn’t Arab.
Which was confirmed by his accent, when he finally decided to speak up.
Not to her. To someone she hadn’t noticed, behind her.

“Give her some water,” he ordered calmly, in an Arabic that was definitely not indigenous but that, oddly, had an Iraqi tinge to it.

Another man appeared beside her and brought a bottle of cold mineral water up to her mouth. His features were dark and brooding, his eyes dead, like those of the men who’d grabbed her in
Beirut
. Her captor seemed to have a veritable private goon squad at his disposal. She stored the thought as she gratefully took in a few gulps, before this dark man pulled back and disappeared from view again like a ghost.

The man facing her moved to a low cabinet that ran along the wall and pulled open a drawer. She couldn’t see what he was doing, but she heard what sounded like a plastic packet being ripped open. With rising trepidation, she cast her eyes around the room. It was windowless and painted a harsh, acrylic white, all around. The shiny, white drawer cabinet ran the full length of the wall. The room seemed impeccably kept and meticulously efficient—harshly efficient, Evelyn suddenly thought. A reflection, she realized, of its master.

Several other worrying thoughts abseiled into her mind.

First and foremost was that she wasn’t blindfolded. Her kidnappers in
Beirut
—well, that was self-evident. They weren’t about to waltz through the crowded downtown arcades in balaclavas. But here…This was different. And this was no hired henchman. This man was clearly in charge. And that he didn’t mind showing her his face did not bode well at all.

Next was his attire. He was wearing a sports shirt and khaki chinos
,under
a dark blue blazer. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the white doctor’s coat he wore over them.
In the white room.
With the long white unit of drawers and cabinets.
And with, she now noticed as she glanced up, the kind of stark lighting you normally find in an operating room.

Evelyn swallowed hard.

She didn’t dare look behind her, to the rest of the room, but her mind filled in the surgical equipment that she imagined was lurking behind her back.

“Why did he come to see you?” the man asked with his back turned. His English had a European accent. If she’d had to guess, she would have said Italian, or possibly Greek. But she had more pressing concerns at the moment.

Her instinct was to ask him who the hell he was and why he’d had a bunch of murderous thugs pluck her off the streets, haul her into the back of a car, and bring her here, but she reined in her indignation. Her mind raced back, processing the events that had led to her being here. She knew it had to do with Farouk, with his murdered friend.
With the pieces from
Iraq
.
And, if she remembered correctly, quite possibly with the Ouroboros.
Which meant that the man in the lab coat probably knew exactly what he was after.
And pissing him off would therefore be the wrong move right now.

“Why am I here?”

He turned to face her. In his hand
was
a syringe and a rubber strap. He nodded to the man behind her, who pulled over a chair and a small table for him and set them facing Evelyn. The man in the lab coat sat down and calmly placed the needle and the strap on the table. He turned to her and, casually, reached out and clamped his hand around her jaw. His grip tightened harshly, painfully, around Evelyn’s face, but he didn’t flinch and his voice didn’t waver. “If we’re going to get along,” he told her, “we need to establish some ground rules. Rule number one is never to answer a question with another question. Understood?”

He kept his eyes locked on her until she nodded. He released his grip, a faint smile breaking across his thin lips.

“So,” he went on, “and I would very much prefer not to have to repeat myself again—why, exactly, did he come to find you?”

Evelyn felt her skin crawl as she watched him reach over and roll up her sleeve. She could smell a subtle, musky aftershave on him. Annoyingly, it wasn’t half-bad.

“I’m assuming you’re talking about Farouk,” she replied, saying it in a way so as not to make it sound like a question.

A smile flitted across the man’s lips. For such a handsome face, it was disconcertingly threatening. “I’ll allow you that one.” He tucked her sleeve into place. “And, yes, I am talking about Farouk.”

She studied him, unsure about where to begin. “He needed money. He was trying to sell some pieces from
Iraq
.
Mesopotamian artifacts.”
She paused, hesitating,
then
ventured, “Am I also allowed to ask questions?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Let’s see how we get along first,” he told her, his eyes fixed on her while he tapped two fingers on her forearm and beckoned a vein to reveal itself.

T
he hotel wasn’t far from the police station, and it made sense for them to have their chat there.

The bar—sorry,
Lounge
—was virtually empty at that hour. Mia consciously steered Corben away from the corner where she’d been sitting the night before with Evelyn, leading him to the patio terrace instead. October was a balmy, pleasant month in
Beirut
—not as stiflingly hot as the high summer months, and too early for the winter rain.
Perfect for a chat in an outdoor café.
Not so perfect when the chat meant reliving the most traumatic night of your life a mere few hours after the event itself.

She walked Corben through the events leading up to the kidnapping, starting with Evelyn’s preoccupied mood and her mention of meeting someone “from her past,” an Iraqi fixer from many years ago, his coming to see her “out of the blue,” how it was “complicated,” and—and this made her shiver with unease—the pockmarked android at the bar. With clarity slowly returning to her frazzled mind, she flashed forward to the man who was being kidnapped along with Evelyn and wondered aloud if that wasn’t perhaps the Iraqi fixer.