“Firas? How is our guest?”
The young man did stir now, but he just moved his arm a little on the table, and in so doing, he knocked a wineglass onto the floor, shattering it. Rima was surprised by this, but doubly so when she saw a second glass, half filled with red wine, on the table.
She raced the rest of the way across the small room, and now she saw the two empty bottles on the floor.
“Firas!” she shouted, and her nephew sat up, ramrod straight, but he was disoriented, confused.
Clearly, he was drunk.
Now she moved to the door to the guest quarters, put her hand on the latch, and tested it.
To her dismay, the door opened, and to her horror, the room was empty. She ran through the narrow room to the bathroom; the door was open and it was unoccupied.
Now she ran back into the wine cellar, over to the storeroom adjacent to Medina’s quarters. She threw this door open, hoping against hope she’d see the model in here, but instead she just saw racks of cleaning solvents, mops, furniture polish, and other housekeeping supplies.
“Firas!” she shouted again. “Where did she go?”
Back in the wine cellar, Firas was standing now on wobbly legs, but he wasn’t responsive to his aunt’s question.
Rima didn’t have her phone on her, nor did she have a radio. It occurred to her that she wouldn’t know the code to use Firas’s iPhone, and this was something they should have organized before an emergency. She ran over to her nephew, opened up his jacket, and checked to see if his gun was still there.
To her relief Bianca had not disarmed him. Rima yanked the weapon from his pants, spun away, and raced up the wooden steps as fast as she could. She didn’t know if the gun had a safety on it, though it hardly mattered because she wasn’t going to shoot Bianca. It was a tool for bluffing, but she knew it would only work for that if she found her prisoner.
* * *
? ? ?
Bianca Medina opened the door from the hearth room that led out to the stone patio at the back of the home. Beyond the manicured lawn, a forest of hard woods looked dark and foreboding now as dusk set in, but she knew she had a much better chance of disappearing out there in the dark, so she fought against her fear and steeled herself to make a run for it.
She had grown more and more worried with each passing hour that Ahmed would simply kill Jamal back in Damascus, even if the American did his best to get there before he could do it. Bianca had spent the last three days thinking of nothing but her son, his predicament, and her utter inability to do anything to help him. She was his mother, and she found it unacceptable to just sit there in a tiny room off a wine cellar thousands of miles away from where her baby was in mortal danger.
So she’d decided to act with the tools available to her. Beauty, charm, intelligence, and a mother’s ceaseless tenacity to protect her child.
And one more thing . . . the ability to drink most men under the table, assisted by the fact she’d been drinking wine heavily since her midteens.
She’d knocked on the door to ask Firas for a glass of wine from the cellar, and within ten minutes of him obliging her, they were drinking Bordeaux together. She’d asked him about his life and his family, and she’d learned that he was the nephew of Rima and Tarek, and he’d lost two cousins in the war: the Halabys’ adult children.
They talked for an hour and drank two bottles of wine. Every now and then Firas would receive a text from upstairs checking on him, and he’d confirm all was well, but Bianca worried the entire time someone would come downstairs to relieve him, in which case she’d have to start all over with another guard, another life story, and more red wine.
But soon enough, the young schoolteacher’s eyes went fuzzy and he put his head down on the table, and even though he wasn’t unconscious, he was disoriented enough to where Bianca just told him she was going to the bathroom in her little cell, but instead she stepped around a rack of brut champagnes. When she felt sure his attention was not on the situation around him but instead on trying not to puke, she darted up the stairs.
She’d made it through the kitchen and the hearth room, and now it was time to flee the house entirely. She felt that if she could get to a road she could find a ride, and if she could find a ride she could get a phone. Her plan was to contact Jamal’s au pair, Yasmin, and have her get a message to Ahmed that she had been kidnapped by Syrian expat insurgents, and this would ensure the safety of Jamal.
She stood up now, took a deep breath, and started to run.
“Take one more step and I’ll shoot one of those long legs of yours!”
The sound of Rima Halaby’s voice behind her, more stern now than Bianca had ever heard it, stopped her in her tracks. She raised her hands but did not turn back around at first.
Bianca said, “Madame, I am begging you. Please just let me go. It’s the only chance for my son.”
“The only chance for your son is the American who promised to put his life on the line for him, so the least you could do is fulfill your end of the deal and stay here.”
Bianca turned around and lowered her hands.
“You and I are different, Doctor.”
“This is true.”
“I mean that you are able to trust men. I am not so trusting.”
“I don’t trust all men. But that man, I believed that he believed he could do it, and that was enough for me.”
“But you have no idea what it’s like down there in Damascus now. There is no way he’ll survive, and by failing, he will reveal to Ahmed that I told you about Jamal.”
“Believe, daughter. Allah sent him to help us.”
“If that American is an angel, Rima, then he is an angel of death.”
Rima’s face hardened. “Perhaps that’s just what my country needs right now.” She looked at Bianca. “A man is risking his life for your child. He owes you nothing, your child nothing, me nothing. But he’s doing it. Believe in him. And believe me, daughter, if you try to run away again, I will kill you with my own two hands.”
* * *
? ? ?
Rima led Bianca through the hearth room on their way back down to the cellar stairs off the kitchen. The gun was low in her hand; she didn’t need it, but it was there in case Bianca decided again to run.
As the women entered the kitchen, they passed by Vincent Voland and Boyer, the leader of the new team of security men. Rima gave a slight embarrassed nod, Bianca just looked to the floor, and soon they both disappeared down the stairs.
Boyer shook his head and turned to Voland. “Vincent, if you are having trouble keeping the prisoner in, you might find it doubly so keeping a motivated enemy out.”
“Well then, I’m glad I hired you all. Whatever just happened, we will be certain it doesn’t happen again. You just worry about the threats from outside, and we’ll get things straightened out on the inside.”
Boyer said, “Put your people around the house, in the windows. My team and I will split. Two of us at the front, two of us in back. We’ll cover ninety degrees per man during the evenings.” Boyer pulled the cocking handle back on the MP5 submachine gun hanging from a sling over his shoulder. “We’ll be ready if they come, mon amie.”
CHAPTER 33