“I . . . I said nothing. Not a word. Why . . . ? Is something wrong?”
Azzam did not know if something was wrong. He couldn’t detect a lie over a satellite phone. No . . . he needed to see his lover face-to-face to find out if she had told the terrorists about the existence of her son and where she lived.
“Nothing is wrong. Everything is just right, now that you have been rescued.”
“Good,” she said. “When I get off the phone with you, I will call Yasmin.”
Ahmed’s narrow expression of mistrust returned. He said, “I have ordered Yasmin and Jamal moved, for their safety, and there is no phone where they are. You will see them as soon as you return.”
“I . . . Yes, all right.”
“Come home to me. We have much to discuss.”
“Yes, love. Inshallah.”
Ahmed hung up the phone and adopted an impassive expression for the benefit of the men across the corridor. But in truth his body steamed with rage. His child had been taken from his city, and it would be days before he knew if his mistress was involved in the crime.
But for now he had to hurry to the airport. His flight north to Homs to appear at an Iranian base would be tomorrow, and then, the next morning, he would go to Palmyra to a Russian facility on the edge of the desert.
He didn’t want to go to these places. His son, the heir to his reign here in Syria, was missing, and even though he had thousands of police and internal intelligence officers looking for him, while this was going on it was hard for Ahmed to focus on other matters.
And doubly so because of Bianca. When she came home he was going to have her visited by his best intelligence interrogators under the guise of asking about her captors. But the real objective of his people would be to find out if she had any culpability, either in her disappearance or in Jamal’s disappearance. His people had been extracting the truth from terrorists, rebels, dissidents, turncoats, and political rivals for a long time. They would find the truth from beautiful Bianca, and if the truth was what he feared, he would have her tortured and then executed for her disloyalty.
As he walked back to his office, he decided he might even take part in the torture himself.
* * *
? ? ?
Bianca Medina did her best to keep from crying. She handed the satellite phone back to Malik, who stood there with Drexler and the French police officer, who clearly did not understand a word of Arabic.
After sleeping through the morning, Bianca had asked to call Yasmin, but Malik reminded her that the president himself was waiting to hear from her. She did her best to sound innocent, to reveal nothing about the Halabys, the American killer, the French spy. But she did not think Ahmed believed her.
She did not believe him for a moment that Yasmin and Jamal had been moved to somewhere secure. No . . . the American had taken them, and that was why Ahmed was suspicious of her. Ahmed had determined the truth: that she had told her captors everything.
If she returned to Syria, she would be killed; this she knew without a shadow of a doubt. But she saw no opportunity to get away from the men who held her now.
She did not believe she would ever see her son again, and she did not believe she was safe in Europe, or safe at home.
She returned to her cot amid the hanging bed sheets, and she sat down, and there she could hold it no longer.
She started to cry.
* * *
? ? ?
Malik and Drexler watched the woman cry alone for a moment, and then they turned away and stepped into an office in the warehouse building to talk. Drexler knew all about the kidnapping of Bianca’s son, from Shakira, but Malik knew nothing about the child, even of his existence. All he knew were his orders—to get Drexler and Bianca back to Syria—and he knew that this plan had hit a stumbling block.
Drexler said, “You told me we’d go to the airport at noon. It’s five till.”
Malik said, “I had one of my men go to Toussus-le-Noble. He says French military troops have arrived and are searching it top to bottom. They are setting up tents off the tarmac, preparing for a longer stay. We won’t be flying out of there.”
Drexler rubbed his face in frustration.
Malik said, “You shouldn’t have left Voland alive. This is his doing.”
Drexler shook his head. “No, it’s not. I wanted a peaceful resolution so we could exfiltrate France quietly. Voland did his best to give that to us. But the massacre and the fire that could be seen from a jumbo jet . . . that is what brought the authorities out en masse.”
Malik turned away. “I have my men acquiring some vans. We will drive east. Not to Serbia; I don’t feel confident in the private flight to Russia any longer.”
“Why not?”
Malik shrugged. “Again, you left Voland alive. I think he will be involved in the search for us. He could have distributed photos of Bianca everywhere, even to a small airport in Serbia.”
“So . . . where are we going?”
“We will go to Athens, and then—”
“Athens, Greece? That’s a twenty-four-hour drive!” Drexler shouted.
Malik kept his voice calm. “We will drive for twenty-four hours. When we arrive in Athens, we will wait for a ship to pick us up. You, Bianca, and I will travel to the Syrian coast.”
“What is this ship?”
“It’s been used in smuggling operations for years, but right now it is off the coast of Lebanon. A dozen of my Mukhabarat colleagues working in Beirut will board today, and it will make the two-day crossing to Athens, where it will meet us.”
Drexler thought this over. He wasn’t getting on board that ship, obviously, but he saw how this change of plans might work to his advantage.
“When do we go?” Drexler asked.
“We will leave here within the hour.” Malik looked over at Sauvage, sitting and smoking at the front loading dock of the warehouse. “What about the cop?”
“He will come with us, he might be useful,” Drexler said. “I’ll see that he earns all the money that I have promised him, even if he never lives to see a cent of it.”
CHAPTER 59
At the refinery in central Syria, Van Wyk finally announced the “all clear” to his KWA mercenaries, after twenty minutes searching the control building. In all that time, the two KWA teams found a grand total of three armed enemy: the one Van Wyk sighted in the first room, and a sniper-spotter team on the roof that was killed by the men from the other BMP.
While this was going on, there had been a lot of shooting taking place all over the refinery as an entire company of Desert Hawks Brigade militia, some two hundred men, took outbuildings, pumping stations, storage facilities, and other structures, but Court couldn’t tell much from the cadence of fire. It could have been that the Desert Hawks were involved in multiple skirmishes with the enemy in different parts of the massive property, or it could have been that they were simply executing civilians they found hiding in the ruins.
As soon as the control building was clear, the battalion command of the Desert Hawks Brigade began pulling up in trucks, armored personnel carriers, and other vehicles. As the building had been used as an HQ by the Syrian Arab Army when they owned the refinery, there was already space for them to move their equipment into. Three large command center rooms on the second floor were used to bring in communications equipment, maps, headquarters staff, and senior officers, while a platoon of security was positioned on the roof and in the large building’s windows.