Any Minute Now (26 page)

El-Habib's mouth formed a shocked
O
. As he tried to double over, Charlie grabbed him by the armpits, kept him more or less erect as his body spasmed in agony.

“What's going on here?” Whitman said, striding in.

“I tried to stop her,
compadre
,” Flix said. “She's a loose cannon. Don't say I didn't warn you.”

Whitman handed the sat phone back. “Charlie, what's going on?”

“The Chinese are going on,” she said. Her face was so close to el-Habib's she could smell the stink of fear and pain coming out of his mouth. “You're in bed with the Chinese. Isn't that right, fucker?”

El-Habib stared at her, shaking.

“
Compadre
, how long are you going to let her—”

He broke off at the sight of Whitman's raised hand. “Seiran,” he said softly, almost gently, “I'd like to intervene, really I would. But this woman is a force of nature. Once she starts down a path even God can't stop her, so I'm going to take a step back and give you two the space she needs.”

“
Dios mío
, Whit, she's out of control.”

Whitman whipped around. “Shut the fuck up, Flix. Go back to what you do best, monitoring comms. Make sure no one's trying to reach the compound. And take it outside, will you?”

Shooting a dagger of a look Charlie's way, Flix made his exit, muttering a string of filthy Spanish imprecations. For her part, Charlie had reached down and grabbed el-Habib's balls, squeezing hard. Tears flew out of his eyes and a dribble of saliva appeared at one corner of his mouth. He said something unintelligible.

Whitman stepped forward. “I can't hear you, Seiran.”

“Make … make her stop.”

Charlie bared her teeth. “Only you can do that, fucker.”

“H-how?” he said through teeth clenched in pain.

“Tell me about the Chinese.”

“I … I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I saw the tin, fucker. The tea tin. That didn't come from Mecca or Kabul or Islamabad. It came from Beijing, courtesy of your friends there.”

“
Khara
,” el-Habib said. “
Khara
,
merde
, shit.”

She turned to Whit. “You wondered why the NSA first targeted this prick? Now you know. He's in bed with the Chinese.”

“Doing what?” Whitman inserted his face next to Charlie's. “What are you doing with the Chinese, Seiran?”

“I-I'll tell you, but get her to let go of my private parts.”

Whitman shook his head. “No can do. Her interrogation, her rules.”

For a long moment, el-Habib's eyes beseeched Whitman's. Then, finding no solace there, he closed his eyes.

“Please,” he whispered, to Charlie, Whitman, or Allah.

“I'll let go when you're done,” Charlie said. “Not a moment before.”

The Saudi nodded. “I'm a kind of middleman.”

Charlie tightened her grip. “Either you're a middleman, fucker, or you aren't.”

More tears leaked out of el-Habib's eyes, squeezed shut against the grinding agony. “Okay, okay, I am a middleman.”

“Between who and who?”

“You know.”

“I want to hear you say it, fucker.”

His teeth ground together. “The Chinese and the Americans.”

Charlie gave Whit a meaningful glance, then she said, “The American government.”

“No. A private group.” Then he let out a scream as she increased the pressure on him.

“Liar. You were guarded by members of the U.S. military.”

His eyes flew open. The capillaries in the whites were bloodshot. “I'm telling you the truth, I swear.”

“Evidence says otherwise.”

“I can't help that. The person who comes every six months—”

“He brings you new girls because you get bored with the old ones.”

His eyes opened wide. “Who told you that?” he whispered.

“Alice.”

“She's a born liar.” He looked around. “Where is she, anyway?”

“In the kitchen, fast asleep.” Charlie's hand pulled him back to her vector. “A man with milky blue eyes will be here in three days,” she said. “Is that a lie, too?”

El-Habib quailed beneath her withering gaze. “N … no. He … he'll be here.”

“With a new pair of girls.”

When the Saudi did not respond, Charlie said, “Answer me or it won't matter how many girls he brings.”

“Please. Have mercy. Yes, he'll be bringing the girls.”

“His name is Dante?”

“The girls know—knew—him by that name.”

“And by what name d'you know him?”

“The same.”

“And Dante works for what private group?”

Seiran el-Habib hung his head. He was done; Charlie had wrung him nearly dry. “It calls itself the Alchemists.”

*   *   *

“I want to lean on your shoulder.”

Sydny's cat's eyes watched Julie in the apartment's semi-darkness.

“On every level imaginable.”

Sydny smiled. “That's why you're here.”

“That's the new thing you're leading me toward.”

“One of the new things, but only one. Anyway, as you'll soon learn, they're all interconnected.”

Sydny's one-bedroom apartment was unnaturally large, as if she had bought two apartments and made her one-bedroom out of them. The walls and ceiling were enameled black, the high gloss giving the optical illusion that the rooms were even larger than they actually were.

The bedroom surprised Julie. Though the room was super-sized, the bed was only a double; the rest of the room was furnished in High Spartan fashion: a carved armoire, a high-backed leather chair, a dressing table and stool before a theatrical makeup mirror. Nothing else. The wood floor was bare, as were the glossy aubergine walls. And not a speck of dirt to be seen anywhere.

“Where in the world do you keep your clothes?” Julie asked.

Striding ahead of her, Sydny touched a button and part of the rear wall slid back, revealing a walk-in closet the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. Julie stepped in and a light went on: racks of clothes, racks of shoes and boots. She stood stock-still as Sydny came up behind her.

“You like?”

Julie nodded, dumbstruck.

“Let's have you try something on,” Sydny whispered in her ear. “What do you say?”

Julie's eyes closed as she felt Sydny's breath on her bare neck. “Pick an outfit for me,” she whispered in return.

“Isn't that why I'm here?” Sydny said with a laugh.

Julie turned around to face her. “Don't laugh at me.”

Sydny placed her palms against Julie's cheeks. “Poor lamb, not knowing who you are.”

Their eyes locked.

“There's nothing inside me, Sydny. Nothing at all.”

“You know that's not true.”

“No? Then where is it? I can't feel it.”

“Remember what you felt when I kissed you the other night?”

Yes
, Julie mouthed, as if she were afraid to give voice to that feeling.

“Why are you so afraid of it?”

“It's not me,” Julie said automatically.

“Kitten, do you hear yourself? You're a walking oxymoron. Everything you say, everything you want cancels itself out. And what are you left with?”

“A vacuum.”

“But nature abhors a vacuum, so we're going to fill the vacuum.”

“With what?”

Sydny took down a shimmering black bustier and tap pants set. “With everything you think is wrong.”

*   *   *

Flix, monitoring the ether in the compound's near courtyard, felt as if his brain was about to explode. There was a pulsing behind his eyes that turned brown to black, green to blue, red to gray. His breath came in hot spurts, as if being ejected from the end of a pistol. His pulse fluttered like a terrified bird, and a nerve twitched in his upper eyelid.

As he listened to a bandwidth of static, he watched a tremor start up in his hands, as if he were looking at an image on a movie screen: it was both larger than life and removed from himself. For a terrifying moment, he thought he was screening
Zero Dark Thirty
, then he pulled himself back from the brink and knew who he was and what he was supposed to be doing.

But in almost the same moment, the pain behind his eyes began again. Who was he, what had he become? It was as if someone—some
thing
—else had taken up residence in his brain and body, some malevolent force that was out to bury him, incinerate him, obliterate whatever it was that made him Felix Orteño. It had no use for Felix Orteño. He had to stop it before it finished him.

His hands went to his face, fingers curled, turning into claws. He felt his own nails digging into the flesh of his temples, and experienced a sudden flash of insight: the only way to stop it was to tear off his face.

 

25

“… person of interest who works there. Pole dancer, occasional lap dancer. She goes by the name of Sydny.”
That was Hemingway's voice. “
Real name—
” The sound of paper shuffling “—
Louise Kapok.… She's working tonight. Starts at ten, but I want you to be there earlier to get the lay of the land, as it were.”

St. Vincent cringed at the sound of Omar Hemingway's fatuous chuckle. After his unpleasant dinner with the bigot Monroe, he had returned to the office. He'd been so preoccupied with the disappearance and probable murder of Bluto that he'd fallen behind in listening to the daily tapes of conversation in Hemingway's office.

“
Let me get this straight.
” St. Vincent identified Julie Regan's voice.
“You want me to stake out The Doll House?”

“That's right.”

He'd had Omar's office bugged for months, which was how he had found out that Hemingway had targeted Seiran el-Habib. Lucky for St. Vincent; he'd spiked that Universal Security brief and then had mustered all his political force into getting the NSA to move on to other targets.

“…
but I don't want a field man,”
Omar the Idiot was saying now.
“I want you to talk to Sydny woman to woman.”

In addition, and against any other off-the-books incursions, St. Vincent had ordered a cadre of seven soldiers to guard el-Habib. He was most concerned with Gregory Whitman, who he knew from the man's time in the Alchemists. It fact it had been St. Vincent himself who had recruited Whitman, at Preach's suggestion—though, really, when he thought about it Preach never made suggestions. St. Vincent recalled going to see Whitman. He was a profiler in the FBI's Washington field office at 601 4th Street NW. He was one of the FBI's prized possessions, having been instrumental in the capture of half a dozen serial murderers in his four years on the job.

St. Vincent recalled the intensity with which Whitman listened to his recruitment pitch, but it was the mention of Preach's name that intrigued him the most and, unless his memory was playing tricks on him, caused him to agree to join the Alchemists. And yet no one wanted him at the heart of the matter; no one wanted him to know the Alchemists' true goal of furthering their own power and wealth. Monroe was convinced that Whitman was an altruist. He did what he did for the good of the many, not of the few. And so essential secrets were withheld from him. What he told Whitman: they were fighting terrorism in ways the government could not.

For a while, St. Vincent and Whitman had been friends—close, even, principally because of their connection to Preach, though from what little St. Vincent gleaned from Whitman, their experiences with Preach were altogether different. It seemed to St. Vincent that Whitman had no fear of Preach at all, and this knowledge gradually turned envy into hate.

And then came the incident at the Well that, for the two men, changed everything.

At the Well, St. Vincent had been witness to much of Whitman's extraordinary work. Whitman possessed an extraordinary talent for extracting the deepest, most closely held secrets of their terrorist prisoners. It was as if, after he had opened them up, so to speak, they could not resist him.

The other interrogators at the Well opened the terrorists up the way people open a can of peas—cutting through layers with puncture and blade. They were rough, unrelenting, and, most times, successful, though later it was discovered that the victims had simply parroted back what their interrogators wanted to hear, rendering the cruel and bloody process useless.

Not so Whitman's subjects. He invariably got out of them the most secretive truths that were a boon to the Alchemists' plans. Possibly it was this same uncanny talent that caused Whitman to become a cause célèbre among his brethren at the FBI. And gradually it dawned on St. Vincent that there were aspects of this talent that reminded him uncomfortably of Preach.

Nevertheless, Whitman's work at the Well was so successful Monroe had no choice but to use him more and more. Then came the day when Whitman overheard St. Vincent and Monroe talking over the intel Whitman had extracted from an Iraqi member of ISIS regarding the terrorist organization's plans to take over Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine and resurrect the ancient area known as al-Sham. It was blockbuster intel that played right into the Alchemists' plans to aid the Kurds in northern Iraq. And so on that day Whitman learned how his rendition had played a key role in the Alchemists' furthering the ISIS cause for their own ends. At first, when he confronted them, he threatened to expose them, but St. Vincent rightly pointed out that exposure would only destroy Whitman's career, reputation, and, most likely, his life. Even then, Whitman remained adamant. He was outraged at what he termed “their hideous plan.” The idiot said his life was nothing compared to the death and suffering ISIS was going to unleash with the Alchemists' help.