Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Mia unclipped her seat belt and tugged at the door latch desperately. The door wouldn’t open, its frame bent from the collision. “It’s stuck,” she shouted back as she pushed, putting her weight into it. “It won’t open!”

“Get it open now or we’re dead,” Corben yelled as he fired out his window again, peppering the street around them with bullets, buying them a few more seconds. “Ramez, get out of the car, away from the street,” he ordered. He edged upwards for a peek over the headrest of his seat, towards the back of the car, and saw the tips of Ramez’s fingers poking up from the back, shivering nervously. “Ramez,” he shouted again, but the assistant professor didn’t answer him, instead muttering something angrily in Arabic that Corben couldn’t make out.

Mia slammed her shoulder into the door and it groaned open a couple of inches. She kicked and pushed at it until it was wide enough for them to climb out. “Okay,” she screamed.

Corben herded her out frantically, yelling, “Get out and stay low,” as he fired a few more rounds before crawling across the seat behind her, head down, and slithering out of the car headfirst onto the sidewalk. “Ramez,” he shouted as he pounded on the back door. He craned his head up to look into the car, but had to duck down, cursing, as a volley of bullets crunched into the other side of the car and splattered against the wall behind him.

He heard the leader of the killers shout something out in Arabic—“We need him alive, don’t kill the professor”—and a second later Ramez screamed back in Arabic, “I’m coming out, don’t shoot!”

Corben yelled, “No!” as he heard the opposite passenger door creak open. He spun to Mia, ordered her, “Stay down,” clenched the gun in both fists, and took in a deep breath before springing upwards, finger on the trigger, only to find Ramez, his hands raised, stumbling away from the Cherokee, towards two of the killers who had now emerged from their cover. The sight down the nozzle of Corben’s handgun found one of them and he loosed a couple of rounds. The man snapped backwards and yelped in pain as his shoulder erupted in a red puff of blood. Corben swung across to fire at the other man but hesitated for a split second as Ramez was in his line of fire, and before he could find the shot, the pockmarked leader of the hit team swung out from his cover and fired back. Corben ducked down as the rounds hammered their way into the car’s bent panels like rivets while others sizzled past, skimming the stranded SUV’s roof and biting into the wall beyond.

Mia and Corben huddled against the Cherokee and crouched low, with their backs against the car, Corben scanning left and right, mind racing frantically, Mia watching him with her heart in her throat.

He heard some more hurried orders in Arabic—“Finish them off, hurry, we have to move”—and tensed up as he peeked over the doorsill and glimpsed two of the killers converging on the Cherokee, one from either side, while Ramez was being shoved into the big sedan by the leader. Corben took in a big gulp of air, raised a cautioning finger at Mia, and waited a split second, listening carefully to the rushing, approaching footsteps before rolling to his side, towards the back of the beached SUV, and, staying low, raising his gun to fire from under the vehicle at the feet of one of the killers who was now less than ten feet away. He steadied his grip and ripped out three quick shots and saw bursts of blood erupt from the man’s ankles before he toppled over, screaming in agony.

The move took the other killer by surprise. He freaked out, unleashing a ferocious barrage of bullets at the SUV, cursing maniacally at the top of his voice as the rounds tore through the metal and the seats and exploded any remaining windows, before the gang’s leader ordered him back to the car with a fierce yell. The crazed shooter kept cursing out loud and firing as he retreated to the sedan.

Corben felt his jaw muscles tighten as he waited for him to turn and climb in, figuring that would give him the opening to take him out. Sure enough, the wild firing stopped a couple of seconds later. Corben visualized him getting into the car, and just when he imagined the man would be most vulnerable, half into the car, he darted out from behind the SUV and fired, only the car’s door was already swinging shut, and more worrying, the man whose ankles he’d obliterated was turning to face him and raising his submachine gun at him. Corben quickly dropped to one side and fired off four rounds into the writhing man’s chest and skull before watching the Merc tearing down the street until it disappeared from view around a corner.

Corben got up, the staccato beating of his heart pounding deafeningly in his ears. He stepped out into the street and checked the downed killer. There was little doubt that the man was dead. He looked around him, taking in the otherworldly, deathly silence after the ear-shattering chaos of only seconds ago, and called out to Mia, “You okay?”

Mia emerged from behind the SUV, covered in dust and with deadened eyes, but otherwise intact. “Yeah,” she said, nodding as she came around the battered car and joined him.

The whole experience had been mind-blowingly brief and intense, and she felt shell-shocked and yet, oddly, desensitized. The crash, the bullets — she felt strangely dissociated from it, as if it had happened to someone else. It was all such a blur, a confusing, manic storm, one that she’d somehow survived.

She saw the dead killer lying in the middle of the road and wanted to turn away, but couldn’t, not immediately. Something made her get closer to it. She took a long, cold look at his body — one of his feet had been sheared right off at the ankle, a bloody mess splattered on the asphalt around it — and at his hard, lifeless face, before glancing up at Corben.

He looked at her, as if trying to suss out how she was feeling. Somehow, she didn’t feel devastated. She didn’t feel scared, she didn’t feel like crying. She felt different.

She felt angry.

And right there and then, standing in the middle of that dusty road, with blood pooling under the dead killer and steam pouring out of the SUV’s engine and stunned civilians emerging from every corner and converging on them in shocked silence, what she wanted most in the world was to make sure the bastards that did this, the bastards who had kidnapped her mother and killed those soldiers and had now also taken away Ramez, the pathological psychopaths who destroyed lives and rode roughshod over this city as if it were their little fiefdom, meting out pain and suffering with galling indifference, were stopped with — to use an expression for whose meaning she now had a whole new appreciation — extreme prejudice.

Corben had just finished checking the dead killer’s body for anything that would lead back to the hakeem, or for a cell phone — neither of which he found — when the Fuhud detectives barreled in.

With them there to arrange for carting off the dead body and the wrecked Cherokee, he was good to go. He didn’t want to hang around there any longer than he had to, and he didn’t have to. Filling in the detectives was a courtesy, to keep them sweet, but the clock was ticking. Farouk would be calling Ramez in less than four hours’ time, and with Ramez in the hands of the enemy, Corben had to move fast.

He recovered his briefcase, and not holding out much hope, he checked the back of the Cherokee for Ramez’s phone in case it had fallen out of his pocket in the chaos. It wasn’t there. He dropped to one knee and swept his eye under the car too, but there was no sign of it there either. He made sure the weapons cache in the trunk was solidly locked, and after giving the two detectives a clipped briefing of what had happened and telling them to clear the area as quickly as possible and not to release anything to the press just yet, he turned down their offer of a ride and, instead, hailed a passing taxi to take him and Mia up to the embassy in Awkar.