Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Mia looked at him, bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

He studied her for a beat — his little cynical mannerisms were really grating on her now — then held up the stack of photographs. “These,” Baumhoff said. “They’re stolen goods, Miss Bishop.”

Mia’s jaw dropped. “What?”

“Stolen,” Baumhoff repeated. “From Iraq. You must have read about the little war going on over there.”

“Yes, but…” Mia’s daze came back in a rush.

“Thousands of relics of all kinds have been stolen from museums there. They’re still trickling through, finding their way into the hands of collectors who don’t care too much about their origin. They’re worth a lot of money…if you can smuggle them out, and,” he said pointedly, “if you can find the right buyer.” He gave her a knowing glance.

Mia’s face clouded as she struggled for words. “You think my mom had something to do with this?”

He gestured at the photos. “They were in her bag, weren’t they?”

“How do you know they were stolen?” Mia fired back. “They could be legitimate, couldn’t they?”

Baumhoff shook his head. “There’s been a ban on exporting any Mesopotamian relics ever since that whole mess started. I can’t say for sure that these are stolen, I haven’t yet had time to have them checked — I won’t know until I make inquiries with our people there tomorrow — but the odds are, they’re smuggled. Which could explain what happened tonight. It’s not a good crowd to mess with.”

Mia flashed back to her chat with Evelyn at the Lounge. “Wait a second,” she said excitedly. “She said someone came to see her that day. A guy who worked with her years ago. In Iraq.”

This piqued the detectives’ interest, and they asked Baumhoff for some clarification. Mia filled the three of them in on what Evelyn had told her, and they noted it with interest. Baumhoff shrugged and tucked the Polaroids into his attaché case. “Alright. Well, it’s late, and there’s nothing more I can do here. They’re going to need to keep you here overnight until an administrative officer can take a formal statement from you in the morning,” he informed her casually as he got out of his chair.

Mia went ballistic. “I just witnessed my mom being kidnapped and you’re leaving me here?”

“They won’t release you before they get that statement,” Baumhoff reported glumly. “It’s part of the French bureaucracy they inherited, and it can’t be done this late. You’ll be fine here. They’re going to let you stay in this room overnight, it’ll be more comfortable for you than a cell, believe me. They’ll get you some food, and a pillow and some blankets. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“You can’t leave me here,” she burst out at him, clambering to her feet. The ferret spread out his arms in a calming gesture and blocked her off. “You can’t do this,” she insisted.

“I’m sorry,” Baumhoff said with clinical detachment, “but a man’s been killed, another’s fighting for his life, and, like it or not, you’re part of it. We’ll clear it all up tomorrow. Don’t worry. Just try and get some sleep.”

And just as he gave her a parting, helpless half-smile, a cell phone warbled somewhere in the room.

Baumhoff and the detectives instinctively went for their phones before quickly realizing that the ringer wasn’t any of theirs. The ferret — no surprise there — was the first to sniff it out. He reached into Evelyn’s handbag and pulled out two cell phones, Evelyn’s and Mia’s own. Mia didn’t recognize the ring tone. It was Evelyn’s phone.

The ferret instinctively hit the call button and picked it up. He was about to say something into the phone, then stopped. He stared at it for an instant and glanced up at Baumhoff. The embassy’s man shot him a quick and low “Give it to me.” The ferret turned to his partner for direction. The taller detective nodded and said something clipped that obviously allowed it, before Baumhoff, anxious not to lose the call, grabbed the phone and pressed it to his ear.

“Hello,” he ventured with a forced, casual tone.

Mia watched Baumhoff’s face tighten with seriousness as he concentrated on the call. She could hear faint echoes of the voice on the other end of the line — it was definitely a man’s voice, and sounded American. Baumhoff listened for a moment, then said, “No, Ms. Bishop isn’t available right now. Who is this?”

Mia heard the caller answer briefly, and when it wasn’t to Baumhoff’s liking, he then said irritably, “I’m a colleague of Ms. Bishop. Who is this please?”

The man on the phone said a few more words, which caused Baumhoff to take on a surprised expression. “Yes, of course, she’s fine. Why would you think otherwise? Who is this?” His patience eroded quickly, and he suddenly raised his voice huffily. “I need you to tell me who you are, sir.”

The room froze into silence for a second or two, then Mia saw Baumhoff frown and move the phone away from his ear. He stared at it with an annoyed expression, then looked up at the detectives. “I don’t know who that was. He hung up, and there’s no caller ID number showing.” He used hand gestures to confirm what he meant.

He glanced at Mia. She gave him a look that said she was clueless about it too. The ferret reached for the phone. Baumhoff handed it back to him, nodded, and turned to Mia. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

And with that, he was gone.

Mia glared after him, but it was pointless. The detectives walked out, locking the door behind them. She paced around the room, staring at its grim, bare walls. The anger that had swept through her and cleared away her physical discomfort was subsiding, and with it, the fatigue and the nausea came rushing back.

She slumped down to the floor and shrank back against the wall, clasping her face in her hands.

Her no-brainer was turning into Midnight Express .

Pain seared through Evelyn’s head with each bump in the road.

The trunk of the car was lined with several folded blankets, but that didn’t help much. Not only was the road surface rough and riddled with potholes that felt like veritable crevasses at times — more of a mountain trail than a paved road, Evelyn imagined in her fleeting moments of lucidity — the journey itself felt like an unending series of tight bends that veered left and right and climbed up and down hills and mountains, tossing her body around without warning like a bottle adrift in a storm, and squashing her against the insides of the trunk with each change of direction.

Her suffering was intensified by the duct tape across her mouth and the cloth sack around her head. The sensorial isolation would have been bad enough without the long and winding road from hell. She could hardly breathe, struggling to suck in faint wisps of the dank, stale air through her nose. She worried about what would happen if she got sick. She could suffocate on her own vomit, and they wouldn’t even hear her. The thought sent a bracing shot of anxiety through her veins. Her bones ached from the constant battering of the ride, and the zip-tie nylon cuffs around her wrists and ankles chafed against her thin, wrinkled skin.

She wished she could find relief by losing consciousness. She could feel herself spiraling into the darkness, but each time, just as she was on the verge of blacking out, another bump would send a jolt of pain quaking through her and jar her awake.

The car hadn’t traveled far from the downtown area when it had pulled into a deserted lot behind a heavily damaged building in the southern outskirts of the city. Evelyn had been dragged out of it, tied, gagged, hooded, and stuffed into the trunk of a waiting car with practiced efficiency. She’d heard her abductors discuss something briefly, their words unclear in her confused and muffled state, then the doors were slammed shut and the car had lurched onto its journey. She couldn’t begin to guess how long she’d been in here, but she knew that hours had already passed.