Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Which was true. Saddam and his decapitated brother-in-law were rare exceptions. The norm was that deposed dictators were often able to enjoy exile in blissful, unrepentant comfort while their underlings, the thugs who had overseen or actually participated in the killings, vanished into lives of placid anonymity.

“There isn’t a concerted, official effort to bring any of these people in,” Corben added. “Life moves on. Politicians step down, others take their place, and the crimes of the not-so-distant past are quickly forgotten. No one in the State Department wants to hear about this right now. The Iraqis themselves aren’t in a position to go after him, they’ve got bigger problems to deal with. And I can’t exactly see the Lebanese government getting involved given the mess their country’s in.”

Mia couldn’t believe it. “You’re working on this alone?”

“Pretty much. I can draw on the same Agency resources if and when I need them, but until I have a definite, and I mean definite, lock on this guy, I can’t call in the troops.”

Mia stared at him, stupefied. The news was getting bleaker by the minute, and the images he’d seeded in her mind refused to fade. “He experimented on kids?”

Corben nodded.

A realization thudded heavily into the pit of her stomach. “We have to get her back. But we also have to stop him, don’t we?” She felt tears welling up, but she bit them back.

His eyes were on her, and something warmer flickered in them. He nodded thoughtfully, taking in her words. “Yes.”

“We need to find Farouk. If we can get to him before that”—she paused, unsure about how to refer to the hakeem, then chose—“monster does, and if he has this book, then maybe we can trade it for Mom.”

Corben’s expression brightened. “That’s what I’m hoping.”

He picked up his phone and hit the redial button.

Ramez stared worriedly at his phone as it vibrated with a low buzz that sent it skittering sideways across the coffee table in brief, tortuous spurts.

With each grating buzz, the phone’s LED screen lit up, casting a temporary, ghostly blue-green glow across the darkened living room of his small apartment. His eyes blinked to attention each time, transfixed by the bright display. The words PRIVATE CALLER — shorthand for a withheld number — stared alarmingly back, taunting him, before the display flicked back to blackness. His body went rigid every time the phone sprang to life, as if the device were hardwired straight into his skull.

Mercifully, after about eight spurts, it stopped buzzing. The room was plunged into darkness again, a bleak, lonely darkness that was occasionally interrupted by the reflections, from the headlights of passing cars in the street below, that scuttled across its mostly bare walls. It was the third time the anonymous caller had tried to reach him in the last hour, and the assistant professor wasn’t about to answer. Given that he hardly ever received such calls — withheld numbers were, oddly, a frowned-upon social faux pas in Lebanon — he knew what it had to be about. And it terrified him.

His day had started out like any other. Out of bed at seven, a light breakfast, a shower and a shave, and a brisk, twenty-minute walk to the campus. He’d read the morning papers before leaving home, and he’d spotted the story about the woman’s kidnapping downtown, but he had no idea it was Evelyn. Not until the cops had shown up at Post Hall.

He was their first port of call in the department, and the news had sucker punched the breath right out of him. With every word he uttered, he’d felt himself getting drawn deeper and deeper into a tar pit of trouble that he was keen to avoid, but knew he couldn’t. They were trying to find Evelyn, and he had to help. There was no way out.

They’d asked if he knew anything about her interest in Iraqi relics, and the man who had appeared in Zabqine immediately came to mind. They’d perked up at the mention of Farouk, and he’d given them his name — his first name, as he didn’t know the man’s full name — and description. From their guarded comments, he’d gathered that his description fitted one they had of a man who’d been seen with Evelyn when she was kidnapped.

The encounter with the detectives had already spooked him enough. Seeing Farouk emerge from behind some parked cars and approach him outside Post Hall a few hours later made him jump out of his skin. At first, he didn’t know what to make of it. Was Farouk working with the kidnappers? Was he here to grab Ramez too? The assistant professor had shrunk back defensively at his approach, but the Iraqi fixer’s supplicating and woeful manner had quickly convinced him that the man posed no threat.

Presently, sitting there in his darkened living room, he picked through that worrying conversation, every word of it still ringing with frightening clarity. They’d found a quiet spot to talk, at the back of the building. Farouk had opened by saying he needed to tell the police what he knew about the kidnapping, to help Evelyn, but he couldn’t go to them himself. He was in the country illegally, and, given what he’d seen in the papers, the stolen relics were already a point of contention. Ramez cut in by telling him the cops had already been to see him and informed Farouk that he himself had given them his description — admittedly, in the hope of helping find Evelyn.

The news made Farouk panic. They had his name, his description, and it looked more and more as if they were after him for smuggling relics. His eyes took on a haunting, cornered gleam as he asked Ramez to help him. He was in desperate need for money, and, yes, he was trying to sell the valuable relics — he had initially hoped that Ramez would help him in that, but that was moot. All that mattered now was survival. He filled Ramez in on what he knew, what he’d seen — the men who came after him in Iraq, the book, the drill marks on his friend Hajj Ali Salloum — and with each of his revelations, the assistant professor’s blood curdled with dread.

Farouk asked Ramez to act as a go-between. He wanted Ramez to talk to the cops, make a deal on his behalf: He’d go in and help them as much as he could with finding Evelyn, but he didn’t want to end up in a Lebanese prison, nor did he want to be sent back to Iraq. More than that, he wanted their protection. He knew the men who kidnapped Evelyn were really after him, and he knew he wouldn’t survive for long out on his own.

Ramez demurred, not wanting to get involved, but Farouk was desperate. He pleaded with him, asking the assistant professor to consider Evelyn’s situation, to do it for her sake. Ramez finally said he’d think about it. He gave Farouk his cell phone number and told him to call him the next day, at noon.

Which would be noon, tomorrow.

Not ten o’clock.

Not tonight.

Ramez’s eyes were still glued to his cell phone as his weary mind tried to divine who had been calling him. If it was Farouk, he didn’t want to take the call. He still hadn’t made up his mind about whether he would help him. On the one hand, he felt he owed it to Evelyn, and, beyond that, he had to. He couldn’t exactly withhold such crucial information from the investigating cops. On the other hand, Beirut wasn’t exactly famed for its rigorous observance of legal process, and Ramez, above all else, wanted to stay alive.

If it wasn’t Farouk calling, Ramez didn’t even want to begin to think of who it could be. A wave of paranoia surged through him as he imagined men with power drills about to burst in and take him away. He shrank back into the sofa, his arms wrapped around his knees, his chest heaving, the walls of the small room closing in around him.

It was going to be a long night.