Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

He opened his cracked, dry mouth to say something, but Corben calmly gestured to him to stay quiet. He leaned over to him and said, “I’m sorry.”

Farouk looked at him with faint puzzlement.

Corben’s arms lashed out towards him. One hand went behind his head, holding it in place. The other slammed onto Farouk’s face, squeezing tightly, clamping his mouth and nose shut.

Farouk’s eyes rocketed wide and his arms flailed upward, but there was no strength left in them. Corben swung an arm down and darted a punch right next to Farouk’s wound, causing him to exhale in a muffled howl of pain as he bent forward. Corben shoved him right back against the seat and kept the lock on his breathing. Farouk started coughing and wheezing with a heavy, gurgling sound, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets as he stared at Corben in primal horror. Corben increased his vise grip on him, feeling the Iraqi’s strength drain, feeling the last wisps of life abandon his battered body until the futile resistance stopped altogether.

Through the window of her room in the press office, Mia noticed the Pathfinder driving past the annex, headed for the rear of the compound. The driver’s-side window was down, allowing her to spot Corben as he guided the SUV into a parking slot in a covered bay that was kept away from the main building as an additional safety precaution against booby-trapped cars.

She sprang to her feet and looked out, her pulse racing as she concentrated her gaze on the car. The angle hadn’t allowed her to see anyone in the passenger seat. Interminable seconds crawled by before Corben finally appeared from behind the bay’s bunkerlike shelter.

Mia’s heart sank. He was alone.

Even worse, he was covered in what could only be blood. And as if that weren’t enough, the grim scowl that darkened his face said it all.

Mia felt her knees buckle. She slid back into her chair, feeling a great tearing deep inside her.

No Farouk.

No way of getting the book.

Nothing to trade for her mom.

Corben shut his eyes and let the torrent of hot water flush the weariness out of his aching body. The embassy’s gym was a windowless, isolated haven tucked deep into the basement of the annex, and right now, its shower cubicle afforded Corben a momentary respite from the blood and the grime of what had become his most intense day since being posted to this unsettled city.

He’d thought carefully about what he would tell his bosses — the station chief and the ambassador — before calling in and giving them a heads-up while driving back to the embassy. Farouk had been shot. Mortally. He’d died before he could get him to a hospital. And at that point, there was only one option open to him: He needed to make sure the kidnappers didn’t find out Farouk had been killed. If they did, they might assume that the relics’ location was lost with him, and if so, there’d be nothing to trade for Evelyn.

He couldn’t bring his body to the embassy, which was technically U.S. soil. He couldn’t hand him over to the cops either. Given how pervasively they seemed to be penetrated, the kidnappers would find out Farouk was dead long before his corpse went cold. He had to make him disappear. For a while, anyway. To buy himself some time to come up with another way to get Evelyn out.

So he’d driven deep into the pine forests east of the city and dumped his body there, off a small trail that was hardly used. No one had been around. If and when the body was eventually discovered, Corben and the embassy had total deniability. Yes, Corben had driven off with him, but the man had been wounded in the shoot-out and had bolted out of the car when it got stuck in traffic and run off. An entirely plausible theory would be that the men who were after him, and who had killed the assistant professor, had caught up with him. By then, the whole affair would probably be done and dusted, and no one would be too concerned with the fate of an illegal alien, let alone one from Iraq.

Corben didn’t really have a choice. It was a tough decision he had to make, there and then. It was either that or jeopardize the whole endeavor. Which he wasn’t about to do. The brass ring he was reaching for was far too momentous for that.

He shook his misgivings away, and his thoughts soon migrated to something more productive. Olshansky had gotten a preliminary hit on Abu Barzan’s cell phone. It wasn’t in northern Iraq, as assumed. The phone signal was roaming somewhere in eastern Turkey, close to the Syrian border. Olshansky would need a bit of time to get a tighter lock on it. He’d told Corben that he was confident he’d be able to track down the man for him, but that working backwards to trace whomever he’d been in touch with would be harder, adding some technobabble about incompatible network systems that Corben tuned out.

The location didn’t surprise Corben. A foreign buyer wouldn’t risk venturing into Iraq to take delivery of the pieces, and Mosul — where Abu Barzan was coming from — wasn’t far from the Turkish border. Corben knew the area reasonably well. It was predominantly Kurd, on either side of the border, as was Mosul. He guessed the buyer would have arranged for the transaction to take place in Batman, Mardin, or Diyarbakir. All three had airports that were serviced by regional flights and private charters, and all were within a few hours’ drive from the Turkish/Iraqi border.

It was an exchange Corben didn’t want to miss.

Farouk’s revelation of a buyer paying over the odds for Abu Barzan’s little trove threw all of Corben’s plans into question. Up until that point, the hakeem had been Corben’s main target, the only man on his radar whom he knew to be chasing the dream with ruthless abandon. This mystery buyer was now at least as interesting to Corben as the hakeem. Somehow, he’d managed to hear about the book’s availability before the hakeem. He’d trumped him into securing it. Hell, he could well know more about it and its significance than the hakeem. The question was, was what he knew enough to make the hakeem irrelevant to Corben’s plans, or was his work incomplete? Did he have the treatment figured out already, or would he need the hakeem’s extreme resources and facilities to turn the dream into a reality?

Two targets were now in Corben’s crosshairs. One would inevitably contact him: The hakeem would assume Corben had Farouk — and the book — and would want to trade. The other would be making his way to a quiet rendezvous somewhere in eastern Turkey. Corben needed to be there for it, but he had to find a way to do it on his own terms and without involving his colleagues at the embassy. At this point, apart from the mystery buyer and Abu Barzan himself, no one else knew about the imminent transaction. He wanted to keep it that way for now, at least until he could set up his trip to Turkey on his own terms. He needed to choose his words carefully if he was going to pull it off without attracting undue attention.

Either way, the endgame was near.

Kirkwood studied Corben’s face as he listened to the agent’s briefing with deepening unease.

Things hadn’t gone according to plan. Admittedly, Corben had been winging it. There were never any guarantees that they’d be able to intercept the call to Ramez, much less actually beat the kidnappers to Farouk. Corben had done remarkably well to get hold of the Iraqi before them, and he’d almost pulled it off, if it hadn’t been for an unlucky round that had found its way into Farouk’s side.

He scanned the other faces around the room. The ambassador and Hayflick, the station chief, were also listening intently as Corben presented his thought process with impressive clarity.