Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

He needed to know where the threat was coming from. Even an accent would have gone a long way in identifying where the shooter hailed from and, possibly, lead him to his target, who he knew had hired the hit team. Sadly, the shooter’s vocal abilities had been seriously compromised by, well, death. Corben also knew these guys had already screwed up twice. A third time was unlikely. He’d have to be more than careful from here on.

Corben reached for the file he’d taken from Evelyn’s desk and went through it. Possibly more information was tucked away on the hard drive of her laptop, but given how dated the sheets and the photographs in the file seemed, he suspected that it was where he should focus. He read Evelyn’s notes more thoroughly and examined the photographs again. From his days in Iraq, he knew that Al-Hillah was a short drive south of Baghdad.

He imagined the underground chamber she had discovered and thought back to the lab he’d investigated.

Both in Iraq, within a hundred miles of each other.

Both featuring the Ouroboros.

Coincidence sat right up there with altruistic politicians, free lunches, and a democratic Middle East in his fantasyland hall of fame.

He went over the notes from his chat with Mia. He focused on the words Iraqi fixer , and drew a circle around them. He mulled it over, then took another look at the Polaroids from Evelyn’s handbag. An idea was coalescing in his mind, and he gave it some space. Everything seemed to fit. A man from Evelyn’s past in Iraq, this “fixer,” appears unannounced. Shortly after, she disappears. In her handbag are shots of highly prized Mesopotamian relics. He was pretty sure the fixer had come to see her to offer her the goods, the book in particular. She had a previous connection to the snake-eater — a connection he needed to know more about. But he knew his target was still alive and well and operating with the same ruthless abandon he’d displayed in Baghdad. He knew that same ruthlessness had dispatched men to kidnap Evelyn and search her apartment.

He was close.

He could feel the hakeem, out there, chasing after his elusive dream. He needed to flush him out, and the obvious route involved the Iraqi fixer. Clearly, he had what the hakeem was after. He was the key to tracking down the pieces, and he was still out there, probably in hiding. The question was, how to find him? Before the hakeem did.

The fixer had to be lured out — assuming he hadn’t skipped town already, which was a distinct possibility, given how precarious his presence here seemed to be. Corben thought about it and reached for a second look at the file he’d taken from Evelyn’s flat. Several old snapshots were in it, mementos from the dig in question, and some of them showed Evelyn standing with men who were clearly Arab workers. There was a good chance that one of them could be the missing fixer, but Corben didn’t know what he looked like.

Mia, on the other hand, did.

He mulled it over. He’d need to talk to her about it. He preferred not to involve her — she’d been through enough already in less than twenty-four hours — but the stakes were high, and she was already caught up in it. He just had to make sure he handled it with great care. Which wouldn’t be easy, given whom he was dealing with.

His desk phone buzzed and interrupted the state of play unfolding in his mind. He checked the caller ID display as he reached for the handset. It was the ambassador.

Despair settled onto Evelyn like a thick winter mist as she stared at the walls of her cell.

Outwardly, the small room was better than what she was expecting. It wasn’t anything like the grimy, decrepit, rat-infested hellholes her recall had conjured up from the accounts she’d read of the kidnapped hostages back in the 1980s. This room felt more like something you’d find in your average Middle East hospital. Well, maybe not any hospital. More like a mental ward.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were painted white. The bed, though narrow and bolted to the floor, had an actual mattress on it, as well as the added luxury of a pillow, sheets, and a blanket. There was also a toilet and a small sink, and both worked. The lighting was on the harsh side, courtesy of two neon ceiling fittings that buzzed annoyingly at the very edge of her hearing threshold. Two features, however, undermined any sense of relief that she could glean from the relative civility of her accommodation. The only opening to be found wasn’t on any of the walls. Instead, in was a small, mirrored observation porthole — using one-way glass and allowing her captors to look in, she guessed — in the thick, metal door to the room, a door that, she also noticed, lacked a handle. Beyond that, the room was as unsettling as any cesspit she’d read about, but in a different way. Its relative comfort alluded to an extended stay, and its clinical, cold austerity was even more subtly threatening than the cells she’d read about. A palpable malice was in these walls, and she could feel it in her pores.

The burning pain that had seared through her veins was all gone now. She rubbed her bare arms slowly, still thrown that there was no aftereffect from the — what had he called it? She couldn’t remember. She thought back with anger at how the words couldn’t come out fast enough once she started to tell him what she knew. She felt weak, helpless, and, worst of all, humiliated. She’d faced adversity and difficult situations many times since moving to the area all those years ago, and she prided herself on her inner strength and the resolve she knew she could draw upon when needed. The last few hours had bulldozed clear through any perceptions she had of her own courage. Her captor had effortlessly reduced her to a cowering, terrified wreck, and the thought burned through her as fiercely as the demonic liquid he’d brutally injected into her.

The worst part of it, the most frustrating and maddening part of it all, was that she didn’t even know what she was caught up in.

The discovery of Al-Hillah had ultimately led to nothing. The trail had abruptly ended in the very chamber where it had begun, and with it had ended their affair.

After Tom had left, after the cyclone in her mind had settled, she had chided herself for allowing herself to be swept up by him, for avoiding the signs. But then again, he had been maddeningly tough to read. Throughout their brief liaison, she had sensed a deep-seated unease, a conflict deep within him that she just knew he was struggling with. She had no doubt that he’d been keeping things from her, and her being here in this cell proved it. At the time, she’d felt — she’d hoped, anyway — that it wasn’t the kind of dreary deception one would expect: a wife somewhere, a mundane life he was briefly escaping from. This seemed to cut deeper. But when she’d dared to bring it up, he’d skirted around it and moved the conversation on with deft charm. She knew his feelings for her were genuine — he’d said so himself. Of course, she knew that men lied, but deep down, she knew she wasn’t wrong about him, and her instincts had proven more than reliable over the years. She remembered, even today, the honesty that shone through his eyes when he’d told her how he felt about her, but his ability to move on with such clinical commitment was something she’d never gotten over.

She could still hear his parting words as if he were standing beside her now, whispering them into her ear.

I can’t stay with you. We can’t be together.

It’s not someone else. I wish it were that simple. But it’s not something I can talk about. Just know that if there were any way in the world that we could be together, I would do it.

And with that, he was gone.