Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

But there were complications he needed to better understand.

The woman’s daughter, for one. She’d risked her life by interrupting his men and allowed the dealer to escape. Then there was the issue of the man who was with her at the archaeologist’s apartment. The hakeem had dispatched Omar and his men to go over it and bring back anything of interest — and anything bearing the sign of the snake. Not only had her daughter been there too, but the man she was with was clearly a professional. A well-trained player who’d outgunned Omar — who wasn’t exactly a slouch when it came to that kind of wet work — and killed one of his men. From what Omar had told him, he was American. Who was he, and what was he doing there with her? Was he a new player in this game — another one? Was he also one of them? Was it all suddenly coming alive? Or was he there for other, more trivial reasons, without knowledge of what the game was really about?

The hakeem tried to rein in his exhilaration. He’d waited for so long, tried so hard. He had devoted his life to this pursuit. And now, he felt with growing certainty, it was all coming together.

Finally.

He had to know who these new players were.

But until then, he had to tread carefully.

He would use his contacts to check up on Webster, though he suspected the man would be difficult to trace. Omar would call his contacts in the Lebanese police and intelligence services. Find out what he could about the American. Most pressing, the hakeem had to find the antiques dealer. He couldn’t lose sight of that. He glumly realized that there were no guarantees that the man would be found. Omar had really screwed up on that front, though the hakeem knew his man would do everything necessary to make up for his mistake.

His spirits rose as a realization broke through the questions swamping his mind. If the archaeologist wasn’t just another deluded victim, if this Webster did really harbor strong feelings for her…The hakeem might just be able to use her to draw him out.

The lure of the damsel in distress.

It always worked in the movies.

He just had to make sure that her cry for help was loud enough.

Mia pulled the shot closer.

The face belonged to a man who was standing aloofly, slightly apart from a group of sweaty, smiling workers. She concentrated, trying to marry it to the terror-stricken man who had been moments away from being stuffed into a car and carted off — along with her mother — to some unknown fate.

She held it up. “This guy here.” She handed it to Corben and pointed out the man she thought she recognized.

Corben examined it, then flipped it over. Names were written on the back of the photograph in pencil, in the same elegant hand as the notes in the file. He flipped it over again and back, assigning the names to the faces. “Looks like his name’s Farouk.”

“Just Farouk?”

“That’s it.” Corben pulled out his notebook and wrote it down. “No family name.”

Mia looked at him, deflated. “Is that enough?”

Corben put down his notebook. “It’s something.” He studied the face in the photograph, as if committing it to memory. “Go through the rest of them, will you? Maybe there’s another shot of him in there.”

She did so, without success. Still, at least they had a face and a name, which, presumably, Corben’s people could build on.

Mia set the photos down. Her thoughts kept getting drawn back to Evelyn. She’d been gone for almost twenty-four hours now. Mia had heard the cliché about the first forty-eight hours being the most critical in any missing person’s investigation — not from anyone actually in law enforcement, but from countless TV shows and movies. Still, it didn’t seem counterintuitive — clichés became clichés for a reason — and if it was true, half the window of opportunity to finding Evelyn was already shuttered.

“How are you going to find him?” she asked.

“I don’t know. We don’t have much to go on. There’s her organizer, although there’s nothing listed in this week’s diary entries. Now that we have a name, I need to go through it again, see if there are any contact details for him. We have her cell phone. We need to go through its log, see if any of the numbers on it are his. Same with her laptop, although it’s password-protected, so it could take a little while to break into.”

She nodded soberly and picked up Farouk’s picture again. She swept her eyes over it, frustrated and feeling helpless, then a conflicted thought blossomed in her mind.

“He saw me, I’m sure of it,” she said in a tentative voice, still looking through the picture, remembering that night. “He saw me when I got to that alley.”

Corben glanced at her uncertainly. He knew that already.

“He’ll recognize me. Which means he’ll trust me if he sees me again. Maybe we can use that. Maybe there’s some way we can lure him out.”

“What, with you as bait?” Corben asked somewhat incredulously. “We’re trying to keep you out of the spotlight, remember?”

Mia nodded. Still, she felt it was a strand she wanted to pull at some more. He’d seen her, and he should trust her. That had to be useful, in some way. Her mind traversed back to her conversation with Evelyn. What had her mom said? Her colleague. He was with her.

“There’s an archaeology professor. Ramez. He works with my mom. A young guy. He’s the one who took her down south yesterday, to check out that crypt. She said he was with her when this man — Farouk — showed up.”

“You didn’t mention him back at the hotel,” Corben noted.

She scrunched her face apologetically. “I’m sorry, I should have. But I was thinking, maybe he knows something. Maybe Evelyn told him something about what was going on.”

Corben processed it for a beat. “You know this guy?”

“I met him once when I went to her office, on campus.”

“Okay, good.” Corben logged the name into his notebook. He checked his watch and frowned. It was past nine. “He won’t be at the university this late.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out Evelyn’s organizer, then had another idea, picked up his phone, and hit a speed-dial key. He got up and crossed to the glass doors leading out to the balcony. Mia heard him connect with someone and ask him to check Evelyn’s cell phone for a “Ramez.” He waited a few moments, then said, “Hold on,” and crossed back to the table. He scribbled a number down in his notebook, shot a quick “Got it” to whoever it was he had called, and redialed quickly. Mia could hear it ringing, but no one seemed to be answering. Corben let it ring a few more times — cell phones in Beirut, annoyingly, hardly ever had a voice-mail service — then put the phone down with a frustrated look. “He’s not picking up,” he informed Mia.

“You don’t think he’s also been…?” She hesitated to vocalize the rest of her question, suddenly sensing she was letting her imagination loose again.

Worryingly, his look didn’t dismiss the suggestion outright. “No, I think I would have heard something. He’s probably just tired of fielding calls from people who will have heard about your mom’s kidnapping and know he works in the same department.”

She frowned with concern. “Can you get his home address?” she asked, surprising herself with her tenacity before wondering if her question had an irksome teaching-your-grandma-to-suck-eggs ring to it.

Corben didn’t seem to mind and checked his watch again. “I don’t want to flag him to the local cops, not at this hour. And there’s no reason he’d be on our database for us to have that kind of information on tap ourselves. I’ll try calling him again in a few minutes.”