The Sanctuary (51 page)

The words tumbled incoherently out of his mouth, but
Kirkwood
quickly made sense of what he was saying.

Corben was gone.

And he’d taken the mokhtar with him.

T
he two horses charged up the ridge, their hooves kicking up the loose stones and echoing through the trees. The light was weakening with every second, and total darkness wasn’t far off.

Corben had no choice. They had to leave the village, there and then. He had to make his escape while the others were still preoccupied.
Before they turned their attention on him.

The mokhtar led the way up the mountain, careful not to venture too far ahead of his captor, who had him on a literal tight leash. Once they were outside the village, Corben had tied a rope around the man’s waist and strapped the other end to the pommel of his saddle. Corben had also relieved one of the hakeem’s fallen men of his AK-47. He’d wanted to get more gear from the Land Cruiser—the attaché case with the cash, for one—but they’d parked it on the approach to the village, and he thought it more than likely that Abu Barzan and his men would already have rifled through it on their arrival.

Their sudden interruption—with Mia, to boot,
whom
he’d also spotted alongside one of the shooters—was as irritating to him as it had been impressive. He was curious as to how they’d managed to make it there, but he had his suspicions. He chided himself for not having bothered to check the dealer’s body in that kitchen back in
Diyarbakir
, but then again, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. The burly man and his crew may well have saved his life.

All things considered, he wasn’t too worried about his current situation. Officially, he was brought here at gunpoint, and the hakeem was now, in all likelihood, dead. He and the mokhtar had seen the helicopter getting blown out of the sky. Evelyn was safe, as was Mia.

Mission
accomplished.

He didn’t think the two women or
Kirkwood
—rather, the man claiming to be
Kirkwood
—would be a problem. They wouldn’t want to create a stink about what really happened. That would risk exposing
Kirkwood
for what he really was, and he knew none of them would want that. They’d probably go along with any story he chose to tell.

The main thing, he reminded himself, was that the prize was now within reach. And once it was his, he’d be in a great position. It was the key to the kingdom. If things got sticky, in any way, he’d be able to negotiate from a position of supreme strength.

Either way, he expected to become a pornographically wealthy man reasonably soon. And, as an added bonus, he would enjoy those trappings for a very, very long time.

MIA CURSED INWARDLY as she struggled through the dusty trail of the horsemen ahead of her. This wasn’t exactly what she was looking forward to after her backbreaking, leg-numbing, four-hour mule trek earlier that afternoon.

Three others were accompanying her this time. The mokhtar’s eldest, his son, led the pack. He had—with anxious hesitation—admitted knowing where his father was taking Corben. The mokhtar had shared the secret with him at the onset of the
Iraq
war, in case anything should happen to him. Two other men from the village followed close behind him, with Mia bringing up the rear. The men were all armed. The villagers had also appropriated Kalashnikovs off the hakeem’s dead men, while the mokhtar’s son, whose name Mia learned was
Salem
—the boy was only sixteen—carried an old hunting rifle.

The decision to go after them now, and not wait for morning, was a tough call. The mountains would soon be forbiddingly dark. It would be hard for them to see where they were going, and the trails were steep and treacherous. The night also brought out other dangers. Wolves, hyenas, and jackals roamed the deserted, bleak ranges in search of scarce food.

The mokhtar’s son had been adamant about leaving immediately, and his feeling had been echoed and supported by his mother. Corben and his captive didn’t have that much of a head start, and if they kept moving at night, they’d be hard to catch up with come morning. Mia’s joining them was another issue. She’d insisted on going with them. She’d lived through this with Corben and felt she had to see it through. She thought that if it came to that, she might be useful, to mediate, to get through to him, given the time she’d spent with him. Beyond that, she somehow felt it was her responsibility now. The connection to it ran through her blood.

She had to protect it.

The hastily arranged posse had grabbed as much gear as they could: flashlights, torches, blankets—the temperature, in these high altitudes, dropped significantly after the sun set—and water. And as she caught one last glimpse of the village before it disappeared behind a ridge, the clipped words of her father rang through her head. Her father—the thought was still hard to countenance and would be, she suspected, for quite a while. He’d confirmed to her that, yes, the elixir was real. That one would also take a while to sink in. He’d then added the caveat that it only worked on men, but that the full formula was somewhere up in those hills, and that Corben was after it not to help the government suppress it, but to use it for his own material gain.

Which they couldn’t allow.

Kirkwood
—no, Tom, she corrected herself—and his colleagues also wanted the full formula revealed to the world, but it had to be handled with extreme care and with meticulous planning. It would be a daunting task to release this to an unsuspecting world; it would lead to a seismic change for all of humanity—perhaps the most momentous change ever. Every aspect of life would be affected.

Not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to entrust to a murderer with contemptible motives.

They pushed the horses as hard as they could, up a hidden trail that snaked up through clefts in the mountain and across passes through the craggy peaks. Mia turned to cast a nervous eye at the horizon as the sun slid behind the peaks behind her. The trail became harsher, steeper; the footing looser, more slippery. Ancient gnarled pines, beaten down by harsh weather over countless decades, loomed down on them, clinging to vertical rock faces that threatened to engulf them at every turn. Still, they pressed ahead, horses faltering on narrow passages, pebbles and loose earth skittering downhill under their heels, the last of the day’s light now surrendering to the onslaught of nightfall.

The air cooled down as vertiginously as they
climbed,
its chill seeping through Mia’s thin layer of clothing with ruthless ease. She tried to ignore it for a while, but it was soon clawing at her bones. She unfurled the blanket that had hastily been tied to her saddle and wrapped it around her. With the horses grunting against the incline, they eased their way up a winding, interminable pass that nature had cleaved through the mountain’s crown.

By the time they finally emerged on the other side, the darkness was firmly entrenched. A three-quarter moon hung low ahead of them, casting a pale, silvery glow across a long, deep valley that lay below. It looked like a big, black inkblot, its lower reaches lost in the shadows, protected by a bastion of soaring peaks beyond which lay an endless succession of undulating valleys and mountains. Mia strained her eyes, trying to see where the mokhtar’s son was leading them, but she was rebuffed by the faint light. He seemed to be having trouble too and soon pulled out a lighter and ignited the tip of one of the torches they’re brought along.

The small convoy slowed down, moving more carefully now, down the softly sloping trail and into a thicket of trees. The shadows of the bare branches scuttled and danced around them. Beyond the flickering glow of the torch, the stillness was oppressive. There was no wind, no cawing of birds, no goat bells. Nothing but the horses’ labored breathing, the drowsy clatter of their hooves, and the gunshot that rang out and tore one of the villagers off his mount.

The horses startled as another shot bit into a stone outcropping by the second villager. He leapt off his horse without managing to subdue it and took cover behind the rocks, while his mare charged down the trail, neighing furiously and disappearing from view. Mia slid off her saddle, pulling her horse to the relative safety of the tree line. The mokhtar’s son did the same, ditching the torch, which burned on regardless.

Mia scanned the darkness ahead. She couldn’t tell where Corben was positioned. Two more shots rang out, crunching into trunks, dangerously close to them. Corben was a good shot; she already knew that.

Corben’s voice bellowed through the choking silence.

“Turn around and head back. I don’t want to have to hurt any more of you.”

She heard the mokhtar start to shout something out before a thud muffled him and ended his outburst.

“Jim,” Mia called out after him, “let him go. They’re not going to abandon him.”

“I won’t hurt him,” he yelled back. “Once I’ve got what I came for, I’ll let him go.”

Whispers to her left snared her attention, and she spotted the mokhtar’s son and the villager conferring. They mumbled a few hushed words,
then
slipped out stealthily from behind their cover, fanning out in wide arcs. As he passed by her, the mokhtar’s son flashed
her a
parting gaze, the fear in his eyes unmistakable, even in the dying glow of the torch.

Mia’s heart sank at the thought of harm coming to the boy, of more blood being spilled.

“Jim,” she urged, shouting out into the darkness. “Please. Don’t do this.”

He didn’t reply.

He knew better.

CORBEN WATCHED the trees with hawklike concentration, alert to the slightest movement in the forest of shadows around him.

Mia’s presence troubled him. What the hell was she doing here? Hadn’t she risked enough already?

He gritted his teeth and pushed the thought of her from his mind. He needed to stay focused. The mokhtar had given away their position by shouting out his warning, and although Corben had sideslipped away by a few trees, he was still vulnerable.

They’d stopped for the night—the trail had become too dark for them to trudge on—when he’d heard his pursuers’ approach. He hadn’t expected the others to come after them that evening. He’d taken one out. He was pretty sure there were four of them altogether, including Mia.
Which meant he had two more gunmen to worry about.

The odds didn’t particularly bother him. Besides, it was always better to be the one holding the high ground. They would have to flush him out, and that meant they’d have to show themselves. He just had to be ready.

My kingdom for a set of night-vision goggles,
he mused.
And some thermals.
He shivered against the cold and tried to tune it out. Then he sensed movement to his left.

Careful steps, inching their way towards him.

A hunter’s movements.

He shut his eyes for a few seconds to sensitize his retinas, then opened them again and scanned the trees. Which was when he heard a step crunching against the gravelly
soil,
only this one was coming from his right side.

M
ia’s heartbeat thundered in her ears as she strained to see into the brutal darkness. She hated the feeling. She knew someone would soon be dead—again—and she couldn’t do anything about it.

The night suddenly lit up with flashes of muzzle fire, and gunshots echoed through the trees. She counted at least a dozen, irregularly spaced, different, and heard horses whinnying frenziedly and bolting, their hoofbeats clattering into the distance—then silence.

Not quite silence.

Groans.

Pained, injured moans.
Followed by shouts, in Kurdish.

Angered, furious, pained wails.

She bolted out into the open and rushed towards the source of the noise, dodging tree trunks and loose stones, trying to stay on her feet.

The first man she reached was the other villager. He was down, injured but still alive. He’d been hit in his side. He was in a lot of pain and was visibly scared. He beseeched her for some help, his eyes struggling to stay open. As she got down to have a look at his wound, she heard the mokhtar scream out wildly and turned her attention to the source of the shouts. She saw a shadow moving through the trees up ahead and heard more gunshots, then the distinct clicking sound of an empty magazine.

She gestured to the villager, indicating that she’d be right back, and heard the boy cry out to his father. The boy coughed violently, more of retch than a cough, clearly badly injured. She crept forward, closer to the skirmish, and found
Salem
, the mokhtar’s son, lying on the ground. He was bleeding from just below his shoulder, and the wound seemed dangerously close to his upper lungs. He coughed up some blood, confirming the probable puncture there, and its severity. The mokhtar was there, by his side, his face contorted in worry and anger, his trembling fingers clasped around a rifle. He held it aimed at a couple of thick trees that rose up around ten yards away.