Daniel Silva - The Messenger

She did, but barely. The door was just ten feet away, but to Sarah it seemed a mile at least. A few paces into her journey she stepped on the hem of the abaya and pitched forward, but once again Jean-Michel prevented her from falling. When finally she reached the door she was met by a blast of freezing air. It was snowing heavily and bitterly cold, the night made darker by the black fabric of the veil. Once again there were no customs officers or security men in evidence, only a black Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates. Its rear door hung ajar, and through the opening Sarah could see a man in a gray overcoat and fedora. Even with the drugs clouding her thoughts, she could comprehend what was happening. AAB Holdings and the Saudi consulate in Zurich had requested VIP diplomatic treatment for a passenger arriving from Saint Maarten. It was just like the departure: no customs, no security, no avenue of escape.

Jean-Michel helped her down the stairs, then across the tarmac and into the back of the waiting Mercedes. He closed the door and headed immediately back toward the jet. As the car lurched forward, Sarah looked at the man seated next to her. Her vision blurred by the veil, she saw him only in the abstract. Enormous hands. A round face. A tight mouth surrounded by a bristly goatee. Another version of bin Talal, she thought. A well-groomed gorilla.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m unimportant. I’m no one.”

“Where are we going?”

He drove his fist into her ear and told her not to speak again.

THIRTY SECONDS LATER the Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates sped past a snow-covered figure peering forlornly beneath the open hood of a stalled car. The man seemed to pay the Mercedes no heed as it swept by, though he did look up briefly as it headed up the ramp to the motorway. He forced himself to count slowly to five. Then he slammed the hood and climbed behind the wheel. When he turned the key, the engine started instantly. He slipped the car into gear and pulled onto the road.

SHE DID NOT know how long they drove-an hour, perhaps longer-but she knew the purpose of their journey. The stops, the starts, the sudden double-backs and nauseating accelerations: Eli Lavon had referred to such maneuvers as countersurveillance. Uzi Navot had called it wiping your backside.

She stared out the heavily tinted window of the car. She had spent several years in Switzerland as a young girl and knew the city reasonably well. These were not the Zurich streets she remembered of her youth. These were the gritty, dark streets of the northern districts and the Industrie-Quartier. Ugly warehouses, blackened brick factories, smoking rail yards. There were no pedestrians on the pavements and no passengers in the streetcars. It seemed she was alone in the world with only the Unimportant One for company. She asked him once more where they were going. He responded with an elbow to Sarah’s abdomen that made her cry out for her mother.

He took a long look over his shoulder, then he forced Sarah to the floor and murmured something in Arabic to the driver. She was lost now in darkness. She pushed the pain to one corner of her mind and tried to concentrate on the movement of the car. A right turn. A left. The thump-thump of rail tracks. An abrupt stop that made the tires scream. The Unimportant One pulled her back onto the seat and opened the door. When she seized hold of the armrest and refused to let go, he engaged in a brief tug of war before losing patience and giving her a knifelike blow to the kidney that sent charges of pain to every corner of her body.

She screamed in agony and released the armrest. The Unimportant One dragged her from the car and let her fall to the ground. It was cold cement. It seemed they were in a parking garage or the loading dock of a warehouse. She lay there writhing in agony, gazing up at her tormentor through the black gauze of the veil. The Saudi woman’s view of the world . A voice told her to rise. She tried but could not.

The driver got out of the car and, together with the Unimportant One, lifted her to her feet. She stood there suspended for a moment, her arms spread wide, her body draped in the abaya, and waited for another hammer blow to her abdomen. Instead she was deposited into the backseat of a second car. The man seated there was familiar to her. She had seen him first in a manor house in Surrey that did not exist, and a second time at a villa in Saint Bart’s that did. “Good evening, Sarah,” said Ahmed bin Shafiq. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

IS YOUR NAME REALLY Sarah, or should I call you something else?”

She tried to answer him but was gasping for breath.

“My-name-is- Sarah .”

“Then Sarah it will be.”

“Why-are-you-doing-this-to-me?”

“Come, come, Sarah.”

“Please-let-me- go! ”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

She was doubled forward now, with her head between her knees. He grabbed her by the neck and pulled her upright, then lifted the veil and examined the damage to her face. From his expression it was unclear whether he thought they had been too hard on her or too lenient. She gazed back at him. Leather trench coat, cashmere scarf, small round spectacles with tortoiseshell rims: the very picture of a successful Zurich moneyman. His dark eyes radiated a calculating intelligence. His expression was identical to the one he had worn the moment of their first meeting.

“Who are you working for?” he asked benevolently.

“I work”-she coughed violently-“for Zizi.”

“Breathe, Sarah. Take long slow breaths.”

“Don’t-hit-me-anymore.”

“I won’t,” he said. “But you have to tell me what I want to know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“I want to know who you’re working for.”

“I told you-I work for Zizi.”

His face betrayed mild disappointment. “Please, Sarah. Don’t make this difficult. Just answer my questions. Tell me the truth, and this entire disagreeable episode will be over.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“Unfortunately, this is true,” he said, as though agreeing with her assessment of the weather. “But if you tell us what we want to know, you’ll be spared the knife, and your death will be as painless as possible. If you persist in these lies, your last hours on earth will be a living hell.”

His cruelty is limitless, she thought. He speaks of my beheading but doesn’t have the decency to look away .

“I’m not lying,” she said.

“You’ll talk, Sarah. Everyone talks. There’s no use trying to resist. Please, don’t do this to yourself.”

“I’m not doing anything. You’re the one who’s-”

“I want to know who you’re working for, Sarah.”

“I work for Zizi.”

“I want to know who sent you.”

“Zizi came for me. He sent me jewels and flowers. He sent me airline tickets and bought me clothing.”

“I want to know the name of the man who contacted you on the beach at Saline.”

“I don’t-”

“I want to know the name of the man who spilled wine on my colleague in Saint-Jean.”

“What man?”

“I want to know the name of the girl with the limp who walked by Le Tetou during Zizi’s dinner party.”

“How would I know her name?”

“I want to know why you were watching me at my party. And why you suddenly decided to pin your hair up. And why you were wearing your hair up when you went jogging with Jean-Michel.”

She was weeping uncontrollably now. “This is madness!”

“I want to know the names of the three men who followed me on motorcycles later that day. I want to know the names of the two men who came to my villa to kill me. And the name of the man who watched my plane take off.”