Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Brilliant.

She looked left, right, adrenaline coursing through her and clearing her mind, the urgency and absurdity of what she was thinking battling it out for control, the cacophonous, confusing offers of the taxi drivers crowding her mind even more — then she grabbed the driver closest to her, shouting, “Where’s your car?”

In broken English, he told her his taxi was just there and gestured towards another Mercedes — there had to be more of them in this town than in Frankfurt, Mia had thought when she first arrived — that was parked a few cars back and across the street from the hotel.

Mia pointed at the receding BMW. Two other cars had now slipped in behind it. “You see that car? We have to follow it. We have to catch it. Okay?”

The driver didn’t seem to get it and shrugged while sliding an amused glance at his pals—

But Mia was already hustling him over to his car. “Come on, let’s go, yalla ,” she insisted forcefully, “we have to follow that car, do you understand? Follow? The car?” She was gesticulating wildly and enunciating the syllables slowly, as if that would magically make her foreign words comprehensible.

Something, though, did the trick, as the driver seemed to get the message that whatever she was rambling on about was pretty urgent. He led her to his car and ushered her into the backseat while he slid behind the wheel, and within seconds the car was barging out of its parking spot and into the chaotic evening traffic.

Mia was leaning far forward, practically sitting on top of the driver as the taxi stop-started its way across the narrow, congested streets of West Beirut. They drove all the way down Rue Commodore, Mia rapiering looks at each intersection to make sure Evelyn’s taxi hadn’t turned off into another direction, finally catching a glimpse of the distant Mercedes as it veered right and headed up towards Sanayeh Square.

The black BMW, trailing by a car or two, followed suit.

Mia’s head was spinning. She was struggling to get through to the driver, trying to get him to maintain a delicate balance between making sure he didn’t lose Evelyn’s car and not making it obvious to the android and his pals that they were tailing them — not an easy thing to communicate when you’re basically miming your instructions through a rearview mirror.

Concurrently, a barrage of questions was pummeling her mind. Why was her mom being followed? Who was following her? Were they just keeping tabs on her? After all, this was a “secret police” kind of place, and with the recent war, foreigners were suspect, weren’t they? — though what threat a sixty-year-old woman could possibly pose escaped Mia. Or were they out to harm her? Kidnap her? There hadn’t been any kidnappings of foreigners in Beirut since the Wild West days of the 1980s — Mia had done her homework after the rep from the foundation had first approached her — but the whole region was careening out of control, extremists on all sides of the great divide were dreaming up new ways of inflicting pain and causing outrage every day, and nothing, really, was unimaginable.

All right, now you’re being ridiculous. Calm down. She’s an archaeology professor, for God’s sake. She’s been living here for years. It’s probably just some routine formality. You’ll give her back her phone, she’ll be off to her rendezvous, and you’ll be back at the hotel in time for Jon Stewart.

She didn’t buy it.

This just felt very, very wrong.

Flashing over the evening in her mind, and despite that Mia didn’t really know her mom that well, she’d still registered the discomfort and feigned reassurance in her voice the second they’d first sat down that evening.

In fact, it was a small miracle that their bond was anywhere near as strong.

Mia had really been raised by her mother’s sister, Adelaide, and Adelaide’s husband, Aubrey, in Nahant, a tiny island north of Boston linked to the mainland by a causeway, since the age of three. She only got to see her mom at Christmas, when she visited, and during the summers, when Mia would travel to whatever sweat-hole she was digging up.

Shortly after Evelyn had given birth in Baghdad, it had become apparent to her that bringing Mia up in Iraq was going to be far from ideal. Being a single mother in the Middle East, at the time, was an invitation for whispered disdain. The political situation wasn’t great either. A year after Mia’s birth, Saddam Hussein had grabbed power in a bloody coup, plunging the country into fear and paranoia. Iraq had severed diplomatic relations with Syria, and skirmishes along its border with Iran led to a ten-year war that started in 1980. Evelyn’s digs were a source of pride for the new regime, and so she was safe. But the conditions around her grew bleaker by the day, and before long, she was on a plane to Cairo. Egypt embraced Evelyn, and the work was hugely rewarding. The schools and the health care were another matter. Evelyn struggled through her first year there, juggling motherhood with her digs, trying to provide a decent life for Mia while knowing that sooner or later, she’d have to make a choice. A cholera epidemic that hit the country when Mia was three convinced her that she couldn’t keep her there. Medicine was scarce, children died, and Evelyn had to get Mia to a better, safer place.

The thought of leaving the region had gutted Evelyn. Her sister, Adelaide, provided her with a difficult compromise. She and her husband had one child, a girl who was five years older than Mia. Complications during the birth meant that Adelaide couldn’t have more children, even though she and her husband desperately wanted them. They’d been considering adopting when Evelyn visited that Christmas. And one evening, as the snow blanketed the beach outside their house, Adelaide made the suggestion. They were a caring, solid couple — both were college professors — and Evelyn knew they could provide Mia with a loving home and a sister.

They’d been true to their word and had given Mia a great home. She’d gone on to college, and as was often the case with the onset of adulthood, she’d drifted away from Evelyn.

And then this project had come up.

Mia’s DNA snooping was closely linked to the more traditional research and stones-and-bones sleuthing of historians and archaeologists. The project had a couple of local Phoenician experts on board, but a lot of the information she needed was second nature to Evelyn. And so they’d hooked up the day of her arrival in Beirut, more as tentative friends than as mother and daughter.

Mia would have liked to warm up to her, but Evelyn was hard work. Whereas she had an explorer’s instinctive curiosity about people’s lives, she rarely invited them into her own. Mia shared the fascination, but was far more forthcoming — too much so, if you believed her mother. And so Mia had initially found Evelyn distant and aloof, and her initial feeling was that they’d collaborate cordially and that would be it. But after a few long drives to distant archaeological sites, and a couple of arak -fueled dinners in traditional mountain tekhshibis , Mia was pleasantly surprised to discover that the efficient and coldly rational excavator that was Evelyn Bishop was powered by a big, human heart.

A big, human heart that was now being shadowed by men with uncertain intentions.

Keeping her unease in check, Mia concentrated on the road ahead. For a moment, she lost sight of the Merc, then it reappeared half a dozen or so cars ahead, rushing across town, its stealthy shadow close behind.

Evelyn’s taxi led the way off the Ring and descended towards the downtown area. Gutted during the civil war, the heart of the old city had been rebuilt with no expense spared and was now teeming with shopping arcades and restaurants. The Merc and the BMW made it through before traffic closed in around Mia’s taxi, with cars from three different directions converging on the intersection just ahead of them in a frenzied free-for-all and cutting them off.