ARAB (29 page)

That he might be monitoring her calls brought a tremor to her knees she prayed he didn’t notice. But apparently he did.

Watching her, pleased with himself, he said, “We know the royal family hates you. They think you’re responsible for corrupting the prince whom you represent. The Americans are looking for you. Eventually they’ll find you and fly you to America where you’ll face charges of treason.”

She paused for a long moment, head down, then walked back to her chair, lowered herself into it, pressing her legs so tight against the front rail, her calves bulged. “And now, believing that nonsense, you are holding me for ransom. I’ve been kidnapped, is that it?”

“Not at all,” as though frowning at an absurdity. “I can protect you. I can send you anywhere you want to go. The Americans don’t know you’re here. Otherwise they’d have arrested you. Right now, under my protection, you’re safe.”

She despised this lying animal but he was right: she couldn’t stay in this hotel. She couldn’t escape on her own. Where would she go?

With a slight tremble in her voice, she said, “Okay. I’ll try to help you. But you’ll have to show me good faith. You’ll have to get me somewhere the police can’t find me.”

So long as he believes I’ll be here until this evening, I’m safe. But then what? I’d be an idiot to leave here with him.

She watched him walk to the door.

“Be ready tonight,” he said. “Have only what you can put into a small handbag. You’ll have to leave everything else here. Make sure you leave nothing that’ll identify you, especially papers that call you Mrs. Nelson. Bring toilet articles that might contain your DNA, like lip rouge and a hairbrush. We’ll leave together as though only for the evening. Wear your best dress.”

“DNA…? What’s he talking about?” A shudder ran through her.

*

When the door was closed behind him, she waited in the chair and pushed negative thoughts from her mind, her lips contracted firmly against her teeth. She gave a great sigh and strode to the bedroom and unzipped the canvas bag that contained her personal items. For several long seconds she gazed at the jar of sodium pentobarbital Nelson had given her. Was it enough? Would it kill her? She stared at it as at the muzzle of a gun, heart pounding.

She didn’t want to die.

She hid the bottle under a package of tissues and closed the bag. She removed a small card from a side pocket and carried the card to the bedside desk. She punched numbers into the telephone. She heard two rings, then a voice saying,

“The Embassy of the United States of America. How may I help you?”

I’ve done nothing illegal, she told herself. I work for a man who donates to charities. They can’t make a case against me. They have no evidence.

*

Around seven-thirty that same evening Captain Huzayfi stood before his bathroom mirror admiring the necktie his wife had selected for him—conservative blue with golden threads weaved through it, exactly the tone he wanted—caution with a dash of gold.

“Please hurry,” his wife said from the top of the stairs. “I hate walking in late.”

She was picking lint off his sleeve on the sidewalk waiting for the cab when the Captain’s cellphone buzzed.

“I don’t believe it,” his wife said, gritting her teeth.

Out of habit the captain stepped away from her to take the call.

“My apologies, sir—”

“Never mind that. What is it?”

“I have the taxi driver.”

“Where are you?”

“On Shari Aysha at-Taymuriyya.”

“Then take him into the station there. Don’t tell him why, and don’t let anyone else talk to him.” He glanced at his wife who was watching. “Change that,” he said. “Are your lights flashing?”

“Yes.”

“Is he a flight risk?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then hold him there. Don’t question him. I’ll be right over.”

His wife didn’t scream, didn’t lash out at him. She contented herself with giving him a punishing look of disappointment.

“It’s all right,” he told her. “It’s not far out of our way. It’ll take me only a minute.”

He patted her knee when they were in the cab. She pushed his hand away.

*

The driver who had spirited Helene Bryce away from the airport, a thin man with slanted eyes and a beard, was standing with the uniformed policeman outside the police car no more than a hundred yards from the Garden City station.

“I believe your name is Ali,” the captain said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Thought I recognized you. Good work, Ali.” The captain turned to the cab driver. “You’re not under arrest and you won’t be if you answer my questions. You know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes. He told me,” pointing at Ali. “I was only doing what a man hired me to do. I didn’t know him. He found me at the cab stand….”

“We’ll get all of that later.” He asked Ali, “You’ve seen his credentials? You have it all…?”

“Yes, sir.”

Turning back to the driver, he said. “Where did you drop her off?”

“The Meridien Hotel on Rawdah.”

“Was she with anyone?”

“No. She had a large bag and a smaller one.”

“All right. Don’t leave the city. You’re not in any trouble, but we’ll want you for questioning.”

He told Ali to let the man go.

As he drove across town, he phoned Nick and told him where he might find Helene Bryce. “Whether she’s there, I don’t know. But it’s where the cab driver dropped her off.”

*

At the “black site” Yousef listened with disbelief as the woman told him what had happened. He dismissed her but could not expunge the message she had given him. Their prisoner had tried to escape, she had said, and the man named Hafiz had Tasered him. Never in her experience had using a stun gun killed anyone. It had become a standard method of persuasion, she explained, obviously nervous, fearing his wrath, he supposed.

And within his stern exterior, he was bristling with fear and indignation.

The air in this ancient room smelled of crumbling cement walls and centuries of dying insects and breeding mice.

The moment he saw the body, lying supine on the floor with the shirt torn open to the waist, he knew the woman had been lying. Clearly visible, even beneath the chest hair, were six puncture wounds. A seventh and eighth wound were on the belly.

“He tried to escape. I had no choice,” Hafiz said, pimples on his face seeming to glow with surging blood, his eyes fearful.

“You’re lying!” Yousef yelled, back-handing the man’s face, knocking him against the wall. “I said hold him, not kill him!”

“You said ‘soften….’”

“That’s a lie!” Yousef yelled, including Hafiz’s partner in the sweep of his glance.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean….”

“Get him out of here. Take him out the back way, bury him in the desert, and speak to no one of this.”

Upstairs he told the woman to say, if anyone inquired, that Habib Rahal had been released, unharmed. “You have no idea where he went. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No one must ever know what happened here,” Yousef said to the man at the door who looked as though he had no idea what Yousef was talking about.

Yousef climbed behind the wheel of his limo and reached into the glove compartment for a sedative, praying it would ease the headache.

How will I explain this to Aziz?

*

Later that evening, on the terrace high up in the residence hotel overlooking the Nile, Captain Huzayfi watched the several men clustered near the French doors, most of them in dress whites, each holding a wine glass, all of them laughing at jokes they had heard a thousand times. He wondered how many were as bored as he was, whether, like him, they came to these events only because it was expected of them.

Just as his wife tugged at his sleeve to draw his attention to something across the room, he received another call. She made a face as he used himself and wandered to an empty corner.

“You’re sure?” he said.

“I worked with him, Captain. I couldn’t be mistaken.”

“How did it happen?”

“It looks like the trunk lid sprang open when the car struck the tree. They think he was already dead, maybe a heart attack. They weren’t sure. It’s like these two guys were transporting him to the desert.”

“And you’re absolutely sure it’s Habib Rahal?”

“Like I said, I worked with him. You may remember I almost became his partner. I couldn’t mistake him for someone else … the missing eye….”

With a saddened heart, he tried to make another call to Nick. No one answered. He decided against leaving a message. Wouldn’t be wise to create evidence that he was providing information to the American CIA.

Chapter Twenty-three

Anwar Bindari—burdened by fear of his uncle, who had threatened to eliminate his job at the airport—cautioned Boutros, the man on the passenger seat, to stay in the car. He didn’t want a second man standing outside Aleyya’s doorway. If she gave him trouble, he’d deal with it alone.

A woman on the steps smoking a cigarette watched him come down the alley, watched him step around a sleeping dog, watched him scrape something off his foot on a raised stone. He brushed past her into the darkened building and mounted creaking wooden stairs, avoiding the rail he knew was polished by a century of germ-laden hands, the air in this old building thick with feculent odors.

Upstairs he stood under a ceiling bulb, staring at a lighted crack in the door panel. He knocked.

“It’s open!” A woman’s voice.

He turned the knob, opened the door onto a woman striding toward him, dark hair dangling on the shoulder straps of a blue dress, barefoot, better-looking than most, taller than average, in her thirties.

“Aleyya?”

She laughed. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’m her friend, Sakeena from upstairs.”

“Oh, I was looking….”

“It’s all right. She’s visiting her aunt in Suez with Umm Sayid.”

“Suez? You wouldn’t happen to have an address?”

Sakeena’s smile faltered. She probably realized that if he thought she might be Aleyya, he didn’t know Aleyya. “Maybe it’s not Suez. It was a long time…. I don’t know.”

He laughed. “Oh, that’s all right. I think I met her aunt, Umm Sayid’s sister, isn’t she?”

Sakeena nodded.

“She isn’t married now, is she—the aunt, I mean?”

“Divorced,” Sakeena said, puzzled.

“Well, sorry to have disturbed you.”

He left the apartment and hurried down the stairs, stopping just outside where the woman, still smoking, looked up at him, annoyed.

“Looking for Bashir Yassin,” Anwar said. “You wouldn’t happen to….”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Oh, no.”

“Well if he is, he’s with Umm Sayid. He clings to her skirts like a baby. Find her, you find him.” She dragged on her cigarette and looked away, dismissing him.

Behind the wheel of his car with Boutros, he said, “How many Sayids do you suppose live in Suez?”

“I think we’re going to find out,” Boutros said.

“Not until I’ve cleared this with Uncle Esmat. He knows people there. He’ll get an address for us. In the meantime, let’s look for some women.”

“I’m a Christian, you know,” Boutros said. “I don’t go for that.”

“Then you can watch,” Anwar said, laughing.

*

As Nick walked back to his lounge chair, he wondered why he rated a personal visit from this guy who always wanted to meet on his own turf.

“Why the limp?” Isaac said.

“Favoring the busted rib. What’s up?”

“I guess you haven’t been watching the news.”

“Rarely in the daytime, especially in this crazy place,” Nick said, cautioned by Isaac’s expression—unusually serious.

Pain jabbed Nick’s wound as he inserted his foot behind the leg of a footstool and dragged the stool in front of him, embraced it with his ankles, then raised both feet to it’s soft cushion, his rib killing him but convinced the exercise was beneficial. “So what was on the news?”

“Not good,” Isaac said. “Not good.” And he waited a moment to let that sink in. “It’s Habib, Nick.” He waited another few seconds. “I hate to tell you this, but he’s gone. They killed him.”

Nick sat bolt upright. “Habib?”

“I’m sorry, Nick. It’s been on the news. I thought you knew.”

“Habib?” the name leaping in anguish from his throat. With fists clenched, his heart on his face, he again asked, “Habib?”

“I’m sorry, Nick.”

“What happened?”

“They said he was found in the trunk of a car that went off the road near the eastern desert. Witnesses saw two men run toward what I guess is a used-car graveyard. Nothing else out there. Maybe caught by now.”

“He was already dead?”

“Apparently. Jesus, I’m sorry, Nick.”

“They’re sure it’s Habib?”

“Positive ID. One of the cops knew him.”

“Aw, shit!” Nick yelled. “This fucking war! This goddamned madness!”

“Apparently he was hit several times with a stun gun. It’s possible he had a heart attack.”

Nick was at the window, his back turned. “Tortured?”

“Apparently.”

“It’s my fault. I should’ve let him go,” and stood with head bowed, a steadying hand raised to the window frame, body gently heaving as he settled into the realization that his friend was gone. “Goddamn it, I should’ve let him go.”

“Not your fault,” Isaac said.

Nick came back to his chair. He raised his feet onto the stool, anger crowding his mind—anger at himself, at the war, at the people who killed Habib. “Why? It doesn’t make any fucking sense!”

“I know,” Isaac said, and gave that a few seconds. “Want to talk?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Nick said.

“About something else.”

“Yeah, go ahead,” impatiently.

“My office received an anonymous tip. Helene Bryce was brought to the Meridien Hotel on Rawdah.”

“You checked?”

“She’s not there now. Whether she’s gone for the evening…?” He shrugged. “I have a man there. She’s in the country illegally and she’s American. We know who brought her in. The embassy’s on it. We’ll find her.”