Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

Besides, the arms deal had been the only way to get to the big prize-Andrew Kane, who was planning some major event with Islamic terrorists. The idea was for him to meet and win Kane’s trust, then, like a worm in an apple, destroy the plot from the inside out.

The meeting with Kane had finally been arranged. He’d been taken to a private airfield in Dade County, Florida, where he’d boarded a Learjet. But that’s when his predicament began. After he was seated next to Azzam, he’d suddenly been grabbed from behind, his arms pinned back, and she’d produced a hypodermic needle that she stuck in his thigh.

The next thing he knew, he was waking up with an intense headache, blindfolded with his wrists and ankles tied together, in what was a small dark room or closet. There he’d been kept for what he estimated to be several days-his only company, rough guards who entered on occasion to give him a drink of water and stuff a few handfuls of tasteless rice in his mouth.

Finally, he’d been dragged from the room, after which his soiled clothes had been cut from him, as had his bonds-though he was warned not to remove the blindfold-and allowed to shower and dress in sweat clothes. His guards had refused to answer any of his questions or talk at all except to give him curt orders in broken English.

Now, as his eyes got used to the first light since his abduction, he tried to focus on the features of the man in front of him. A confused look crossed his face. He closed his eyes and shook his head. The knockout drug must be causing hallucinations, he told himself. But when he looked again, he realized that what he had seen was real.

“What the hell,” he said as boldly as he could muster, knowing that for all intents and purposes, his life was over. “You look like me.”

“Very observant, Agent Hodges,” Kane replied. “Yes, thanks to Dr. Buchwald, the little gnomish man standing behind you, I am nearly the spitting image of you. I do have to compliment the good doctor…” he said, turning to the doctor, “…for working from nothing but photographs, you did an incredible job.”

“Thank you,” the doctor said nearly bowing in delight at the rare compliment. “I am rather-”

“Shut the fuck up, Buchwald,” Kane said mildly. “Nobody cares what you think.”

The doctor stopped and shut his mouth while trying to manage a smile to let everyone know that he understood that everybody was just a little tense. Hodges, however, still wanted answers. “What’s this all about?”

“Tut, tut, Vic…may I call you Vic?” Kane said as he circled around his prisoner, noting the cleft in the chin, the broken nose, the thin, white scar below the brown eye. “That’s need-to-know information, and you don’t need to know. However, I do need to know some things from you-such as everything about you and your job. Your code words, how the Homeland Security operates, your contacts with the agency. That sort of thing.”

Hodges knew he was doomed, but tried to talk his way out of it anyway. “I don’t know what your bullshit is about, punk,” he bluffed. “But if you don’t let me go, my boys back in Mississippi will kick your ass.”

Kane laughed and slapped Hodges in the back of his head. “When I told the boys in Mississippi that you were a federal agent and had been spying on them for years, they begged me to ship you back to them so that they could…let’s see how’d that moron who leads the group put it…‘skin that asshole alive and then use an acetylene torch on him.’ Sounded absolutely painful, so I’m sure you’ll be willing to help me in exchange for keeping you right here. So what about it, Agent Hodges? You going to tell me what I need to know?”

The agent hung his head. “Go fuck yourself, Kane.”

Sighing, Kane walked over to the desk and picked up a remote control for the big-screen television in the bookcase. He turned the television on and then pressed a button on the desk intercom and said, “Barak, would you please get me the satellite feed now?” He turned to Hodges and said, “I’m really sorry that it’s come to this, but since you insist on being difficult, you leave me no choice.”

The picture on the television screen was fuzzy at first, but then it cleared. Someone was videotaping a woman and a little girl walking some distance in front of the photographer at a shopping mall. Hodges gasped audibly.

“So you recognize your wife and darling daughter?” Kane giggled. The agent gave no reply so his tormentor went on. “Looks like they’re out spending some of that meager civil service pay, Agent Hodges. Girls can be such drains on the old bank account. Isn’t that right, Samira?”

Hodges glanced over at the young woman. She stared back with a look in her eyes that told him there would be no mercy shown here.

“Anyway, Vic, see that man walking about ten feet behind your lovely family? Oops, now that was poor directing, he looked right back at our cameraman,” Kane said. “I’m afraid he’s not a very nice man, and certainly not one you’d want following your wife and daughter. His name is Liam, and he used to be a Catholic priest until some spoilsport teenager reported him for raping her at a church camp. Turned out, he’d raped quite a few women and little girls, the younger the better, in the neighborhood around his parish, so I had to help him out of the mess he’d made. Now he works for me-putting his, how shall we say it, ‘passions,’ to use when I need to persuade someone like you. Oh, and I regret to inform you that he’s been getting more brutal…his last young victim didn’t survive his attentions.”

“Bastard,” said Hodges, as his mind screamed, How? How did Kane find them? Even the Aryans, who’d checked out his undercover identity, had not.

“I’ve been called worse,” Kane laughed. “But there’s no reason for this to go any further. You cooperate and that bad man doesn’t rape your daughter in front of your wife. Oh, and I’m sure we can provide a videotape of his antics for your viewing pleasure.”

Defeated, Hodges asked, “What do you want?”

“Like I said, I need to know everything you do,” Kane said. “Believe it or not, but I want to be just like Mike. And we don’t have much time so we better get busy.”

Hodges lunged for Kane but was slammed to the floor by his guards. At Kane’s command the guards picked the agent up.

Kane leaned forward until his lips were just inches from Hodges’s ear. “You are a dead man,” he said. “Your mind knows it. Accept it. However, make this easy and your ugly little wife can look forward to whatever miserly survivor’s pension your grateful but cheap government provides her and your brat. Make it tough, and you’ll still die, but not before you watch your family go through hell. So what’s it going to be?”

Hodges knew that he should refuse-that many people, not just himself and his family might die if he cooperated-but he didn’t know or love those people. “I’ll do what you ask,” he said.

“That’s wonderful.” Kane beamed. Another weakling, he thought. No wonder the West will lose this War on Terrorism. They don’t have the stomach for what it’s going to take to defeat religious fanatics like Samira, who will stop at nothing and aren’t afraid to die.

Things were going so well. In the months he spent in jail since his arrest the previous August and his escape in February, Kane had hatched a plan that was part revenge and part the beginning of his “new career,” as he’d taken to thinking about it.

The plan was brilliant and efficient because it fit both his own purposes and those of al Qaeda. Through his lawyers, he’d managed to convey the general outline of the plan to the group; Kane’s requirement was that they first had to help him escape and then allow him to accomplish his personal goals regarding Karp et al.