Red Wolves

by Adam Hamdy

  ‘Don’t!’ Pearce yelled.

  Kamal shouted something, but it was lost beneath the crack of a gunshot. The black pistol spat again and a second bullet hit Karim in the back. He toppled into the dirt and his mother started screaming.

  ‘He was trying to escape,’ Yousef said, turning to Pearce and the others as they raced towards him. ‘I think he had another bomb.’

  Pearce was furious at the unnecessary loss of life and the grief it would inflict on Karim’s family. He was enraged by the fact Yousef thought him too stupid to see through the ruse. Most of all, Pearce was angry at himself for having brought this murderer here. But they hadn’t been able to leave Yousef at the prison for fear he would have called the authorities.

  Yousef’s eyes widened in fear as Pearce sprinted up to him and grabbed his lapels. Brigitte ran on, heading for Karim, as Pearce snatched Yousef’s pistol.

  ‘You killed that man for nothing!’ Pearce yelled.

  Chapter 20

  Salah followed Brigitte, and Kamal stopped by Karim’s mother, who’d collapsed against her home. Her daughter and grandchildren clustered around her, weeping, as Kamal phoned for an ambulance. Recovering from their shock, the crowd, mostly made up of young men, started muttering angrily and began to close menacingly. Life was hard enough for these impoverished people without wealthy outsiders coming here to murder them. Pearce had known Middle Eastern crowds to inflict rough and instant justice and he sensed the mood turning all around them.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Yousef asked. ‘I had to shoot him. I aimed to injure him. I did not want to kill the man.’ His voice was high and uneven, the tone of liars throughout the ages. ‘Let me go.’

  Pearce ignored him and pushed him up the slope towards the large mausoleum. Brigitte was crouched beside Karim and looked up as they neared.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said.

  Pearce gripped Yousef tighter and forced him on.

  ‘Hey! Let me go!’

  Pearce replied with a hard smack. ‘You’ll talk when I tell you to.’

  Yousef whimpered and his eyes welled with tears.

  ‘We don’t have long,’ Brigitte said, glancing round nervously as she fell in beside Pearce.

  The crowd was gathering a sense of purpose and had started following them up the gentle incline. Salah said a quick prayer over Karim’s body and hurried towards the tomb.

  Pearce kicked open the rusty gate that stood across a narrow corridor which ran through the middle of the squat building. He dragged a protesting Yousef along the passageway and down a run of stone steps.

  ‘Stop!’ Yousef pleaded. ‘Please. I didn’t mean to kill him.’

  The tomb was dark and the warm air ripe with the smell of decay. Pearce pushed Yousef roughly, bouncing him from one coarse stone wall to the other. There was another corridor at the bottom of the steps, and two crumbling wooden doors stood opposite each other. Pearce forced Yousef through the one on the right.

  ‘No!’ the deputy governor shouted. ‘You can’t do this.’ He tried to force his way out, but Pearce clocked him with the pistol and he fell back, moaning.

  Brigitte followed them in, but when Pearce saw Salah in the doorway, he blocked the captain’s path.

  ‘I want him to suffer,’ Salah said as he tried to push past.

  ‘It’s better if you don’t see this,’ Pearce replied. ‘Stop anyone coming in. They want his blood.’

  Yousef whined, and Salah looked at the pathetic man who was hunched over, sobbing as he cradled his head.

  ‘Give him something from me,’ Salah said before heading out of the shadows towards the sunlight at the top of the steps.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Yousef whimpered. ‘You’re FBI. You have rules.’

  Pearce stalked up to the man, who shuffled back towards the wall of shelves that held the shrouded corpses of the family who owned this crypt. Judging by the size of the bodies, this was the chamber for men, and the one across the corridor would have been for women.

  ‘We don’t have any rules.’

  Pearce punctuated his statement by driving the pistol into Yousef’s clavicle, breaking the bone. Yousef’s shrill scream echoed around the crypt, and he collapsed, clawing at his shoulder and crying freely.

  ‘You didn’t want us coming here,’ Pearce said. ‘You knew there was a risk Karim would tell us the truth. You recruited him. You hired him to smuggle the canister into the prison, didn’t you?’ He crouched and forced Yousef to look at him. ‘Didn’t you?’ he yelled.

  Brigitte smacked the back of Yousef’s head. ‘Talk to him!’

  ‘Please,’ Yousef cried.

  ‘Who hired you?’ Pearce asked.

  ‘I don’t know his name,’ Yousef sobbed. ‘I think he was Czech or Polish. Maybe Russian. I don’t know. He came to my house a few weeks ago. He offered me a hundred thousand dollars. I didn’t know. He said if I didn’t help, he would tell the governor about the bad things I was doing in the prison. Tell him about the drugs. I swear I didn’t know what they would do.’

  ‘Who was he? What did he look like?’ Pearce drove the muzzle of the pistol into Yousef’s collarbone and the man screamed.

  ‘Please!’ he said when Pearce removed the gun. ‘I don’t know. He wore a mask. He had a beard. A long one. He was as tall as her,’ he indicated Brigitte. ‘I don’t know anything else.’

  Pearce heard raised voices cascade along the corridor. Then Salah spoke rapidly in Arabic, telling people to stay back. There was the sound of a commotion. They didn’t have long. ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘The prisoner, the one we knew as Ibrahim Mahmood, the man who was broken out – when he’d first come to prison, he spoke of working at a big port in America,’ Yousef said. ‘I think he said Seattle. Please. That’s all I know.’

  Pearce looked at Brigitte, who nodded. The angry cries coming from outside were growing louder and more hostile, and calls for justice bounced around the tomb.

  ‘Help me,’ Yousef pleaded, his face a dirty mess of blood, tears, dust and snot. ‘Don’t let them in.’ He understood the severity of his situation.

  Pearce stared at him coldly. ‘You’re on your own.’

  Yousef cried out as Brigitte and Pearce left the crypt. His pained lament filled their ears as they hurried into the sunlight. They found Salah at the top of the steps, struggling to hold back the growing crowd. A young man in shorts and T-shirt was out cold in the nearby dirt.

  ‘He wouldn’t listen,’ Salah explained.

  ‘We’re finished here,’ Brigitte responded.

  Salah nodded and turned to the crowd. ‘Imshi,’ he said, clearing a path that kept the gathered souls at a safe distance. The last thing they needed was to run the risk of infection and lose fourteen days in isolation.

  As the angry crowd surged forward, Salah yelled commands to ensure people kept their distance, and he, Brigitte and Pearce walked away from the sounds of violence that soon sprang from within the dark crypt.

  Chapter 21

  People were the problem. The massive volume of freight moving through America’s eighth largest seaport posed few serious issues. The freight management systems were fully automated, and while there might be the occasional illegal shipment or a consignment that needed to be quarantined, there was a process to deal with everything to do with the millions of tons of goods that flowed through the port. Apart from exceptions that needed human intervention, the majority of incoming shipments were identified and unloaded automatically, and the cargo either stored or forwarded. The huge container storage area was also automated and if a shipment was to continue its onward journey by road, the truck driver would simply present the container ID number and it would be automatically loaded onto his vehicle by the vast crane and container management system.

  It was this automation that was so prized by Deni and his associates. By virtue of his position as shift supervisor, Ziad had access to the systems management room and could move a container out of the bonded customs zone, o
r, thanks to a kernel of code Deni had paid a hacker to develop, make a shipment disappear entirely. Deni used this power to enrich himself, shipping contraband from ports in Asia, making Seattle Port a Pacific gateway for a range of regional organized crime groups who paid the Chechen tribute.

  But it had been almost a week since their meeting in the bookstore and Deni hadn’t made contact. Ziad wondered whether he was no longer needed to run product through the port because one or more of his colleagues were now working for the Chechen. He couldn’t ask, and he knew better than to arouse Deni’s suspicions by suggesting he was ready to run shipments. He simply had to wait. And while he waited, he thought about Essi and wondered whether she’d been in on her father’s plan to get rid of him. He turned the question in his mind as he dealt with the mundane challenges of his job. Ben Samuels had to leave early to pick up his kid from school. Julio had booked a vacation that wasn’t showing on his schedule. Kenny and Luke got into a fistfight and had to be suspended. And then there were Richie Cutter’s friends, who were back from compassionate leave and mourning the man’s passing. Ziad was still troubled by Cutter’s death and the bodies he had chalked up during the escape from Al Aqarab. He tried to tell himself that thousands of people died every day and that at least the people he’d killed had lost their lives for a purpose. Besides, Richie Cutter and the prisoners were not good men.

  What about the guards? he thought every so often.

  They were bad too.

  All of them?

  He never answered the question because it was a trick designed to make him think he wasn’t a good man. He was good. He was just doing what was necessary.

  Elroy Lang and the silent Thai, Awut, seemed pleased by what he’d done. They lurked around the house on Kenyon Street. Some evenings the two men would vanish for a few hours, but for the most part they lingered like patient reptiles, watching TV, waiting for news from Ziad. Elroy had praised Ziad for the way he’d eliminated Cutter and every now and then he talked of the satisfaction of vengeance. According to Elroy, humans are born with an inbuilt sense of right and wrong, which is why revenge and delivery of just retribution were some of the most satisfying outcomes a person could ever achieve. Ziad knew the man was bolstering his resolve, but it wasn’t necessary. Despite his misgivings about the people he’d killed, Ziad just had to picture Deni Salamov’s smiling face, and imagine Essi’s treachery, and an unquenchable fury would rise. They would suffer for what they had done.

  Ziad had just shut down his computer when Harry Martin appeared at the door.

  ‘How’s it feel to be back?’ Harry asked, gesturing at Ziad’s small office.

  ‘Good,’ Ziad replied, getting to his feet. ‘After what I’ve been through, this is heaven.’

  ‘A few of us are going for beers,’ Harry remarked. ‘You thirsty?’

  ‘I can’t.’ Ziad pictured himself having to make awkward smalltalk with friends of the man he’d murdered. ‘I’ll take a rain check,’ he added enthusiastically.

  They left the port authority building and talked about Elite Voyager, a huge ship that was due in from China the following week. They reached Ziad’s Buick first, and Harry eyed the old junker with a broad smile.

  ‘Jeez, Zee,’ he said. ‘Is this your bid for a raise?’

  ‘I’m trading up soon,’ Ziad replied. ‘It’s just while I get back on my feet.’

  Harry’s smile disappeared and he nodded sombrely. ‘Sorry, that was insensitive.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Have a good one,’ the director of operations said, and carried on walking through the large lot.

  Ziad started the old Buick and left the sprawling port complex. Instead of taking the I-5 south towards South Park, he headed north and within forty minutes he was driving up the hill to Essi’s Point Edwards condo. It was a pilgrimage he’d made every day since their encounter outside the restaurant, a ritual that brought him some comfort. He liked being in her life, even if it was only by virtue of sitting outside her building for twenty minutes a day. Hate was as powerfully seductive as love, and he experienced warming anger every time he caught sight of her. She brought him back to life.

  But today was different. When he drove up the hill and rounded the bend just before her building, he caught sight of Essi standing on the sidewalk right where he usually parked. She was wearing dark skinny jeans and the black floral sheer top he’d always liked. She’d pulled her hair into a ponytail, and when she heard the rattling engine and saw the rusty Buick approach, she folded her arms and gave him a cold hard look of disappointment. He thought about driving on, but that would have been churlish, so he pulled over.

  ‘I told you I didn’t want to see you, Zee,’ Essi said. She walked round the car and surprised him by opening the passenger door and sliding in beside him. ‘We’re done. You’ve got to stop coming round here. It’s freaking me out.’

  Ziad tried to control his rising anger. He recalled all the times she’d been happy to see his BMW turn into her condo complex. All the times she’d emerged from her apartment full of smiles. All she had to do was say the word and they could go back to those days. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t.

  ‘I’ve moved on,’ Essi said. ‘But my father hasn’t. He wants to see you.’

  Chapter 22

  The drive south was awkward. Ziad burned with the shame of rejection. Somewhere deep down he still harboured the hope Essi would come to her senses. But if she did, what would that mean for his quest for vengeance? Could he forgive her?

  You’re being ridiculous, his inner voice told him. She’s a stranger to you now. Look at her, she is sickened by you. Her skin is crawling just being near you.

  Ziad burned with shame. They could never go back. She sat in the passenger seat and said nothing. Ziad responded in kind and the only noise in the car were the sounds of the city drifting through the open windows. Evening had truly set in, but it was still too warm to be sealed in a car with no air conditioning. It took a little over an hour to reach 140th Street, and when Ziad parked in the lot outside the community centre, Essi turned to him.

  ‘This is the only place I ever want to see you, Zee. I don’t want you outside my apartment, my office, or anywhere else. My father wants you. I don’t.’

  Ziad’s heart shrivelled. ‘I can’t . . .’ he began, but he choked up and had to start again. ‘How can you be so cold?’

  ‘How can I?’ she interrupted him angrily. Her eyes flashed with hostility. ‘You left me! I told you not to go. I said it would be dangerous. You left me!’ Her voice rose in pitch and started to crack. ‘You did that. All I did was pick myself up and move on.’

  There was a prolonged silence.

  ‘My father is in the coffee shop,’ she said at last. ‘Goodbye, Zee.’ She got out of the car and didn’t look back as she walked into the community centre.

  Ziad sat watching her until she was swallowed by an interior door. He was startled by someone banging on his window and turned to see Rasul, Deni’s son, grinning at him.

  ‘Come on,’ Rasul said. ‘He’s waiting.’

  ‘We need you to handle a shipment.’ Deni’s soft voice was almost lost beneath the clatter of crockery and the incessant hubbub. The cafe was packed with familiar faces, many of whom had shouted words of welcome and risen to slap Ziad on the shoulder as he’d followed Rasul to Deni’s table at the back, near the kitchen. Ziad knew the Chechen had his properties swept for surveillance devices every week, and the background noise of the place would make it impossible for anyone to listen in on them with a directional mic. The staff tested patrons for coronavirus on entry, so any strangers would be noticed immediately. Deni had survived at the top for so long by being paranoid about security and only doing business with people he trusted.

  ‘What is it?’ Ziad asked, taking a sip of his rich Turkish coffee.

  ‘Something from the old country,’ Deni replied.

  Even though none of them came from there, the old country was code for
Afghanistan, which meant they were shipping heroin.

  ‘It’s coming on the Elite,’ Deni said. ‘Rasul will give you the container number.’

  Ziad nodded at the men he hated and wondered whether they had any inkling of his true intentions. It was clear his fears had been unfounded; they still trusted him. But they shouldn’t have. He was set on making them pay the highest possible price for their betrayal.

  Awut and Elroy were eating dinner in front of the TV by the time Ziad returned to the house on Kenyon Street.

  ‘There’s food in the pot,’ Elroy said, nodding towards the dank kitchen.

  ‘They asked me to take care of a shipment,’ Ziad replied.

  Elroy shot Awut a triumphant glance. He put down his bowl of Pad Thai and switched off the TV. ‘Eat fast,’ he said. ‘There are people we need to see.’

  Chapter 23

  Pearce woke to the sound of the adhan issuing from the speakers of a nearby mosque. After the encounter in the City of the Dead the previous day, they’d returned to the apartment in Zamalek to find Leila and Wollerton already working to identify the source of a silicon chip that had been concealed in the canister used in the Al Aqarab prison break.

  Brigitte and Sharif had focused their attention on Seattle Port, hoping to get a lead on the mysterious escapee. Pearce thought Yousef had been telling the truth. He wondered what had happened to the man after they’d left. Salah had stayed with Karim’s mother to help her and the murdered guard’s family deal with the emergency services. How would he explain his role in events? Would he admit any knowledge of what had happened to the corrupt deputy governor? Pearce hoped the captain of the guard had the good sense to play ignorant.

  Kamal had driven them from the necropolis through the noisy, chaotic Cairo traffic to the lush island with its high green trees, colonial apartment blocks, and large villas. The Zamalek apartment had become a hive of intelligence analysis for everyone apart from Pearce. Leila and Wollerton were working side by side, using the laptops they’d requested from Brigitte. The Frenchwoman spent most of her time on the phone, but Pearce caught her exchanging glances with Leila, who was unequivocally hostile whenever she caught Brigitte looking at her. He shared Leila’s distrust of the Frenchwoman, but her presence had been forced upon them by Huxley Blaine Carter.