Ice Cold Kill (14 page)

Asher winced. “Hannah, yes. But not all of our plans are sanctioned by God.”

Ten

The Middle East
Almost Twenty-four Years Ago

The girl didn’t know where she was.

She knew that the place was big. It smelled like boiled cabbage, which partially hid fetid human smells she didn’t recognize. The walls had been white once, a long time ago. The children were frightened. The grown-ups were more frightened.

The sound of jet engines made everyone wince. Bombs landed in the neighborhood at all hours. Someone swept the floors, almost daily, but the shelling outside just resettled the dust. The shelling had gone on a long time, the girl thought. But then again, she was about six. And a long time is a relative term.

She knew she was
about six
because she heard the staff say so.

Each child had an olive-colored canvas cot and a pillow with no pillowcase. There were blankets, but not enough, and every night the older, stronger children took what blankets they wanted.

There were two meals per day and both meals included bread, or oatmeal, or koshary, a combination of lentils, pasta, chickpeas, and a tomato sauce. The food was terrible but would get them through to the next meal.

Every third or fourth day, a Swellat Bedouin from Lebanon would come to the big building with the children. He wore a slick Western suit and a shiny black shirt open to the middle of his chest, and shiny shoes. He wore a ring on his little finger and his hair was long and greased back. He would speak to the administrator, and between them they would pick out one or two of the girls, one or two of the boys. The Swellat would hand the administrator an envelope, then the selected children would leave with him.

After one such visit, the girl climbed onto a radiator, raised up on her toes, and peered out through the iron bars over the window to watch. The chosen children climbed into an aged Volvo with the slick-haired man with the pinky ring.

A few days would pass. And the man would return.

One day, the man saw the girl sitting on her cot. Her legs dangled, her sneakers grimy and dull.

He pointed to her.

The administrator beckoned her over.

The girl climbed down off her cot and walked over. She wore a baby blue smock. She had had a matching barrette but an older girl had taken it the first night.

The man picked two more children. All three were ushered out. The girl and the others climbed into the back of the Volvo. It smelled of sweat and something animalish and mean that the girl remembered and associated with soldiers. And pain.

It was the last time she would ever see the big building with the once-white walls.

It was cold in the car. Very cold. And the wall was cement. Only it wasn’t a wall. It was a floor.

She lay not in a car but on the floor. Under a bed. Under a—

*   *   *

Daria Gibron’s eyes snapped open.

The cement floor under the cot was ice cold. It was the cold that woke her. Then the pain. Her head was a burlap bag of barbed wire.

She lay under a simple bed frame with a simple mattress, in a bare, cinder block room with harsh phosphorescent lights. Daria lay in a tight fetal position, her body a parenthesis of terror. Again.

The nightmares had been her constant companion for as far back as she could remember. Daria thought they might have had the decency to give her the night off. No such luck.

She peered out. The ceiling, the color of bad mayonnaise, was fifteen feet high. She groaned, slowly rolling over. She sat up and hugged her knees, her bum and the balls of her bare feet on the poured cement floor. She wore her matching black panties and camisole.

She looked around. The room was a perfect cement square. The floor, stained with years of accrued residue, sloped slightly downward at the center to a rusty iron drain. There were two identical doors, both the kind that hang off heavy iron castors and roll open sideways. She checked the upper corners of the room for cameras but saw none. It was maybe fifty degrees in the room.

She climbed up onto the bed, off the frigid floor. She remembered New York. The CIA. The trap. The Syrian, Belhadj.

The room felt old. The smell of the air was slightly off, but she wasn’t sure why.

She set her feet back down on the cement floor and stood, wobbly. She braced herself by gripping the bed until the nausea passed. Her head swam. She wasn’t dead. And so far she hadn’t thrown up.

She stumbled over to the door to her right, gripped the vertical iron handle with both hands and hauled on it. It was locked.

She limped to the other door, the floor painfully cold under her feet. She pulled it open. Beyond she found a cheaply hacked-together shower over a simple floor drain, a sink, a lidless toilet, and an aged mirror showing more silver than reflection. A coarse towel lay on the floor, neatly folded, with a single bar of soap.

She stood before the mirror. Being doped and left on a cot with a head full of styling gel made her look like the Bride of Frankenstein. Perfect. Captured by a Syrian spy, called a “horse” by the Central Intelligence Fucking Agency, and a legendarily bad hair day to boot. Simply perfect.

*   *   *

She showered. The hot water helped raise her body temperature and the headache evaporated. She slid back into her panties and camisole. The panties consisted of a few square centimeters of black lace and silk. They had been prohibitively expensive, made for her bespoke by a designer in Rio de Janeiro. She sort of wished she’d chosen something a tad less racy.

She padded back out past the bed to the second door, which now was cracked open. Peering through the door, she discovered she was in a warehouse, wide and vast, with sparrows darting through the rafters and chirping for freedom. She noted a garage-style exit door bolted with a padlock the size of a small ham. The iron-grated windows were grimy and ten feet off the rough cement floor. Crates were stacked fourteen feet high. The furniture consisted of one long, chipped Formica table and a few folding chairs.

Khalid Belhadj sat in one of the chairs, an empty holster under his left arm, the Springfield .45 auto resting near his hand. He ate from a greasy takeout box of panfried noodles, using a cheap plastic fork. A file folder lay open before him. It was the CIA Operation Pegasus file.

“Sit, please,” he said in English.

The Syrian had set up a sturdy metal chair, away from the folding table where he ate. Handcuffs dangled from the slatted back of the chair. Daria sat—the chair was freezing!—and noticed that the chair legs had been bolted to the cement floor.

Her eyes on Belhadj, she fixed her wrists in the cuffs, behind her back.

Belhadj shoveled the food into his mouth in the manner of soldiers throughout the world: eat when you get a chance to eat.

The food smelled wonderful.

After a minute, he used an unbleached, brown paper napkin to dab his lips then stood, leaving the noodles but picking up the Springfield. He circled wide around her, approached her chair from the rear and checked Daria’s cuffs. Satisfied, he returned to the folding table, set down the handgun and picked up the takeout box. He turned a page in the CIA file. He had hardly glanced at her.

Daria chose to go with Arabic. “I’m surprised you recognize me. I’ve been out of the game a while. And we’ve never met, the two of us.”

Belhadj kept his eyes on his food.

“What time is it?”

“Almost noon. Friday.” He switched to Arabic. He ate voraciously but his left hand never strayed far from the handgun.

Friday?
“I’ve been out two days?”

He didn’t reply. Daria stuck out her lower lip and blew damp hair off her forehead. “You could have killed me.”

Belhadj devoured the noodles, studied the files.

“Why take me? Why keep me alive?”

“According to the Americans, we are partners in crime. Yes?”

She snorted. “Pegasus.”

“A noble beast. A mythical, winged horse.”

“I suppose the hippos in tutus from
Fantasia
had already been taken.”

The Syrian frowned, getting neither the reference nor her pique. He set down his plastic fork and reached down to retrieve a black messenger bag from behind his chair. “I need your help.”

“You should feel free to go fuck yourself.”

Belhadj nodded, as if agreeing. He opened the flap of the waterproof bag and withdrew a folder. From that, he withdrew a photo, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. He held it up, facing her.

She leaned forward, squinting at the photo. Her dark eyes grew wide. They rose from the photo to the sullen face of Belhadj.

“You lie.”

The Syrian nodded. “No. Asher Sahar. Former Mossad agent. Convicted in a star chamber of high crimes. Locked away in a secret prison we weren’t supposed to know about, but of course we do. And the man who shot you.”

He propped up the photo against the greasy bag from the takeout food. Daria studied the photo. It showed Sahar from the waist up, wearing an olive tunic with epaulettes and many pockets. Under the military jacket he wore a wilted white shirt and a cardigan. His hair was both thinner and shorter than Daria remembered and he wore a short beard and mustache. His small, round glasses made him look academic.

“That’s not possible.”

Belhadj wiped his lips. He shrugged, eyes on his food. “He has reassembled many members of his old covert unit. Plus mercenaries. We do not know why. But then again, this is the same Asher Sahar who planned to kill a member of the Israeli Parliament and start a war. Before you intervened, that is.”

Daria sat leaning forward in the unmoving chair. The last time she had seen Asher, he had indeed attempted to kill her. The wound had been near fatal.

“How is he out of prison?”

“He didn’t dig out, if that’s what you’re asking. Someone opened the door and handed him his hat. Someone powerful. We don’t know who. As soon as we learned he was out, we had a surveillance team on him. They discovered he came to America to steal something. They also found a code name: the Viking.”

“Fredrik?”

That got his attention. “You know him?”

“Fredrik Olsson. The Viking. Specializes in transporting stolen goods overseas. The Atlantic and the Mediterranean, mostly.”

Belhadj scraped out the remains of his takeout, then threw it away with the fork and the napkin. He made eye contact with Daria for the first time. “Now. What would Asher Sahar be transporting from America?”

“How would I know? I thought the fuckwit was in prison.”

Belhadj sighed as if disappointed. “You’re alive to the degree you can help me find him and stop him. Fail to do so…?” he shrugged.

Daria leaned back and crossed her legs at the knees. The Brazilian-designed thong offered him an interesting diorama. “Then best to shoot me now. I was enjoying the company of a rather delicious first officer in El Salvador when this comic opera began. I know nothing of the CIA and Asher. Or of you.”

She sat back, half-smiling, looking calm. But her brain was working at Mach 3, processing data, trying to figure out what was so wrong with the scene. Something just felt … off. The warehouse was old—nineteenth-century old, although that wasn’t unusual for sections of New York. The crates she could see bore stenciled labels in English, French, and German. Again, not too unusual.

Still, something was amiss. It was in the walls, in the stale smells of the warehouse. Even the metal chair to which she was cuffed seemed oddly wrong (and Daria had been cuffed to chairs before; she could compare and contrast).

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she still wondered how she would get out of this jam and help Colin Bennett-Smith with his life and death problem. But, of course, Colin wasn’t anywhere near this situation. He never had been.

Once she’d played that bit out, she also remembered that the message had used the Hebrew word for
cat
,
chatoulah.
Colin Bennett-Smith might have known that old nickname. But Asher would have known it for sure. He’d been the one to give it to her.

Belhadj studied her long, lean form, leaning back, looking calm. “You’ve no idea why Sahar would stage an operation in the United States?”

“The man is capable of anything.” Daria willed herself not to shiver from the cold. She was trying to look seductive. “He’s a brilliant strategist. He’s a chess player; always sees ten moves ahead of everyone else.”

Belhadj rubbed his eyes. He didn’t look stimulated by the barely clothed woman before him. He looked fatigued. “Unlike you. I never pictured you as the chess player.”

Daria remained surprised that the Syrian had even heard of her, let alone had an opinion of her skill sets.

She shrugged as well as she could with her arms cuffed behind her back. “I never had the patience to learn chess. I never saw the point in thinking that far in advance.”

“Stealing the CIA command vehicle? That wasn’t preplanned?”

“I didn’t even know I was under surveillance until my plane landed a few hours earlier.” She didn’t tell him about the mysterious warning at JFK.
Dee Jean d’Arc
 … “It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Belhadj absently played with the Springfield, which lay on the cheap table before him. He spun it slowly, like the second hand of a clock. “You say this Viking, Olsson, specializes in overseas transportation.”

“He has access to a fleet of cargo planes and boats. If it really is Friday, I haven’t eaten in two days. I’m starving.”

“Palestinians are starving,” the Syrian replied without rancor. “You’re hungry. There’s a difference. Tell me more about this Viking.”

It was the smell of the warehouse, Daria decided. That’s what was wrong. It didn’t smell bad. It just didn’t smell right.

“He’s a middleman. His services are expensive.”

“Very?”

“Yes. But he’s paid off every field tower and harbormaster from Alexandria to Edinburgh. If you need something to cross the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, he’s worth the price.”