Samira studied his face, wishing she could carve it with her knife. He didn’t look like the Andrew Kane she’d first met, not anymore. Even she had to admit that the work of Dr. Buchwald, a plastic surgeon, was amazing. Gone was the formerly, rather effete-looking blond with the pale blue eyes. He’d been replaced by a more rugged-looking man with a cleft in his rounder chin, wider cheeks and fuller lips, as well as larger, crooked nose—presumably from some old injury. The hair was now chestnut; the eyes no longer blue but brown, thanks to contact lens. He even had a thin white scar beneath his right eye, evidence of a traffic accident that never happened…at least not to Andrew Kane.
Still, she knew that the real Andrew Kane had never been what she’d seen on the outside. In her mind, the real Kane merely wore the physical characteristics of a man as a disguise or cloak. He reminded her of childhood stories her parents had told her from Arabian folklore and the Quran regarding the jinn.
Allah created man from sounding clay like the clay of pottery, her father would begin, gathering his children around on cold winter nights in Palestine. And the jinn He created from a smokeless flame of fire.
The jinn were spirits—sometimes formless, sometimes inhabiting the bodies of men and animals—and there were different sorts. Some were essentially harmless, even helpful. But others were evil and dedicated to tormenting humans—deceiving and guiding them away from the true path.
The worst are called shayateen, her father had whispered, looking around and over his shoulder as though leery of eavesdroppers in the shadows. His children followed his gaze, half-expecting to see some furtive movement in the dark corners or a shadow pass across a doorway. They serve Iblis, the Evil One, and the strongest among them are called afreet.
Of course back then, in better times, such bedtime tales would end with her father jumping up with a shout to startle his boys and girl, who would shriek, then laugh and never seemed to grow tired of the game. The memory stirred a rare longing in Azzam, who blinked back the tears. She wondered if her father knew that the jinn were real and inhabited men like Andrew Kane. “Audhu billah,” she muttered.
“What was that, my darling?” Kane asked. “Did you say ‘I seek refuge in Allah’? Isn’t that something you superstitious desert folk say to ward off evil?”
“It is just a saying,” Azzam replied. “Like ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes.”
“Hmmm…could have sworn it was a little stronger than that,” Kane said, and then chuckled. “But I am doing rather well with my language lessons, don’t you think? Good thing, as it looks like I may have to spend some time in your part of the world after we’ve accomplished our task in New York.”
“Yes, you are learning quickly,” Azzam replied. And yes, she thought, it will be difficult for anyone to recognize this Andrew Kane. The scars from the surgery were mostly healed and one had to look close to see them. Even his body had changed. Although reasonably fit in the manner of a wealthy New York lawyer who visited the gym a few days a week to work out and talk business when she first met him, ever since his escape, he’d trained religiously until there was tight definition to his muscles and more speed and coordination in his movement.
The training included working out almost daily in martial arts with Samira, who was teaching him the Filipino knife-fighting techniques of Kali. Kane had proved an apt student there, too. The cold and efficient nature of using a knife as a weapon suited his personality. He was now sparring with her nearly at full speed. She always won the encounters easily if she concentrated and went all out, but he was progressing rapidly and was growing more difficult to beat if she wasn’t on her game.
The practice session ended when several large Arab men entered the room, half-dragging, half-pushing a blindfolded prisoner. Behind them, smiling uneasily, walked Dr. Buchwald and Bandar Al-Aziz bin Saud, the minor Saudi prince whose home they were using as a base of operations while Kane healed from his surgeries and set his plan in motion.
“Ah, Agent Vic Hodges of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” Kane said to the blindfolded man.
“What the hell is going on here?” Hodges replied angrily. “And what do you mean ‘Agent.’ I ain’t no goddamn federal agent. I’m just a redneck nigger hater trying to make a buck and screw the U.S. government at the same time. Now, are we going to talk guns and money or play this little game?”
“ ‘I’m just a redneck nigger hater,’” Kane mimicked, doing a passable imitation of his prisoner’s Deep South accent. “No, Agent Hodges, we will not be doing any business, except the business that I’m about to propose. So let’s drop the bullshit, which by the way, you are neck deep in right now.”
Kane nodded to one of the guards. “Remove the blindfold so Agent Hodges can see who he’s talking to.”
When the blindfold was pulled off, Hodges stood blinking in the sunny room as his eyes adjusted and his mind raced to find a way out of the fix he was in. His cover was that of an Aryan Nations gun dealer—that’s how he’d been introduced to Azzam, who’d been looking for a half dozen Colt M4 assault rifles and enough C4 plastic explosives to bring down a good-sized building. He didn’t like the idea of selling terrorists such a lethal arsenal, but his superior, Assistant Director Jon Ellis, had assured him that they were tracking Azzam’s every move and would know where the weapons were at all times. When they had a positive idea of what the target was going to be, they’d swoop in and catch the terrorists red-handed.
It was risky business, but then that was the nature of war. And make no mistake, there was a war going on beneath the American public’s radar that guys like him—a former agent with the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who’d volunteered for reassignment with Homeland Security after 9/11—had better win or Americans were going to have to get used to praying on their knees while facing east.
Besides, the arms deal had been the only way to get to the big prize—Andrew Kane, who was planning some major event with Islamic terrorists. The idea was for him to meet and win Kane’s trust, then, like a worm in an apple, destroy the plot from the inside out.
The meeting with Kane had finally been arranged. He’d been taken to a private airfield in Dade County, Florida, where he’d boarded a Learjet. But that’s when his predicament began. After he was seated next to Azzam, he’d suddenly been grabbed from behind, his arms pinned back, and she’d produced a hypodermic needle that she stuck in his thigh.
The next thing he knew, he was waking up with an intense headache, blindfolded with his wrists and ankles tied together, in what was a small dark room or closet. There he’d been kept for what he estimated to be several days—his only company, rough guards who entered on occasion to give him a drink of water and stuff a few handfuls of tasteless rice in his mouth.
Finally, he’d been dragged from the room, after which his soiled clothes had been cut from him, as had his bonds—though he was warned not to remove the blindfold—and allowed to shower and dress in sweat clothes. His guards had refused to answer any of his questions or talk at all except to give him curt orders in broken English.
Now, as his eyes got used to the first light since his abduction, he tried to focus on the features of the man in front of him. A confused look crossed his face. He closed his eyes and shook his head. The knockout drug must be causing hallucinations, he told himself. But when he looked again, he realized that what he had seen was real.
“What the hell,” he said as boldly as he could muster, knowing that for all intents and purposes, his life was over. “You look like me.”
“Very observant, Agent Hodges,” Kane replied. “Yes, thanks to Dr. Buchwald, the little gnomish man standing behind you, I am nearly the spitting image of you. I do have to compliment the good doctor…” he said, turning to the doctor, “…for working from nothing but photographs, you did an incredible job.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said nearly bowing in delight at the rare compliment. “I am rather—”
“Shut the fuck up, Buchwald,
” Kane said mildly. “Nobody cares what you think.”
The doctor stopped and shut his mouth while trying to manage a smile to let everyone know that he understood that everybody was just a little tense. Hodges, however, still wanted answers. “What’s this all about?”
“Tut, tut, Vic…may I call you Vic?” Kane said as he circled around his prisoner, noting the cleft in the chin, the broken nose, the thin, white scar below the brown eye. “That’s need-to-know information, and you don’t need to know. However, I do need to know some things from you—such as everything about you and your job. Your code words, how the Homeland Security operates, your contacts with the agency. That sort of thing.”
Hodges knew he was doomed, but tried to talk his way out of it anyway. “I don’t know what your bullshit is about, punk,” he bluffed. “But if you don’t let me go, my boys back in Mississippi will kick your ass.”
Kane laughed and slapped Hodges in the back of his head. “When I told the boys in Mississippi that you were a federal agent and had been spying on them for years, they begged me to ship you back to them so that they could…let’s see how’d that moron who leads the group put it…‘skin that asshole alive and then use an acetylene torch on him.’ Sounded absolutely painful, so I’m sure you’ll be willing to help me in exchange for keeping you right here. So what about it, Agent Hodges? You going to tell me what I need to know?”
The agent hung his head. “Go fuck yourself, Kane.”
Sighing, Kane walked over to the desk and picked up a remote control for the big-screen television in the bookcase. He turned the television on and then pressed a button on the desk intercom and said, “Barak, would you please get me the satellite feed now?” He turned to Hodges and said, “I’m really sorry that it’s come to this, but since you insist on being difficult, you leave me no choice.”
The picture on the television screen was fuzzy at first, but then it cleared. Someone was videotaping a woman and a little girl walking some distance in front of the photographer at a shopping mall. Hodges gasped audibly.
“So you recognize your wife and darling daughter?” Kane giggled. The agent gave no reply so his tormentor went on. “Looks like they’re out spending some of that meager civil service pay, Agent Hodges. Girls can be such drains on the old bank account. Isn’t that right, Samira?”
Hodges glanced over at the young woman. She stared back with a look in her eyes that told him there would be no mercy shown here.
“Anyway, Vic, see that man walking about ten feet behind your lovely family? Oops, now that was poor directing, he looked right back at our cameraman,” Kane said. “I’m afraid he’s not a very nice man, and certainly not one you’d want following your wife and daughter. His name is Liam, and he used to be a Catholic priest until some spoilsport teenager reported him for raping her at a church camp. Turned out, he’d raped quite a few women and little girls, the younger the better, in the neighborhood around his parish, so I had to help him out of the mess he’d made. Now he works for me—putting his, how shall we say it, ‘passions,’ to use when I need to persuade someone like you. Oh, and I regret to inform you that he’s been getting more brutal…his last young victim didn’t survive his attentions.”
“Bastard,” said Hodges, as his mind screamed, How? How did Kane find them? Even the Aryans, who’d checked out his undercover identity, had not.
“I’ve been called worse,” Kane laughed. “But there’s no reason for this to go any further. You cooperate and that bad man doesn’t rape your daughter in front of your wife. Oh, and I’m sure we can provide a videotape of his antics for your viewing pleasure.”
Defeated, Hodges asked, “What do you want?”
“Like I said, I need to know everything you do,” Kane said. “Believe it or not, but I want to be just like Mike. And we don’t have much time so we better get busy.”
Hodges lunged for Kane but was slammed to the floor by his guards. At Kane’s command the guards picked the agent up.
Kane leaned forward until his lips were just inches from Hodges’s ear. “You are a dead man,” he said. “Your mind knows it. Accept it. However, make this easy and your ugly little wife can look forward to whatever miserly survivor’s pension your grateful but cheap government provides her and your brat. Make it tough, and you’ll still die, but not before you watch your family go through hell. So what’s it going to be?”
Hodges knew that he should refuse—that many people, not just himself and his family might die if he cooperated—but he didn’t know or love those people. “I’ll do what you ask,” he said.
“That’s wonderful.” Kane beamed. Another weakling, he thought. No wonder the West will lose this War on Terrorism. They don’t have the stomach for what it’s going to take to defeat religious fanatics like Samira, who will stop at nothing and aren’t afraid to die.
Things were going so well. In the months he spent in jail since his arrest the previous August and his escape in February, Kane had hatched a plan that was part revenge and part the beginning of his “new career,” as he’d taken to thinking about it.
The plan was brilliant and efficient because it fit both his own purposes and those of al Qaeda. Through his lawyers, he’d managed to convey the general outline of the plan to the group; Kane’s requirement was that they first had to help him escape and then allow him to accomplish his personal goals regarding Karp et al.
The risky escape while en route to the psychiatric hospital had become necessary when his original idea to have himself declared legally insane had been thwarted by the state’s psychiatrists. Their examination had been a loathsome experience, but he’d put up with it for his greater good.
Without admitting anything regarding the charges against him, he’d answered most of their other questions quite truthfully, including that his father had screwed his daughter, which is how baby Andrew had been conceived. His sister/mother had been sent away to give birth; after which, his father/grandfather, through bribes and “donations,” had arranged with the adoption agency run by the Archdiocese of New York to “adopt” the bastard child. Kane had learned the truth as a teenager from his sister/mother shortly before she killed herself.
A rather disconcerting event at a vulnerable age, Kane told the psychiatrists. By that he meant the circumstances of his birth; however, they thought he was talking about his mother’s suicide, until he corrected them. That didn’t really bother me all that much, he said. She was a slut. I caught her screwing the old man one day when I came home from school early, you know.
Kane left out the part about blackmailing “the old man” into blowing his brains out in the family library. Otherwise, his purpose in being honest with the state’s psychiatrists was to engender their sympathy, after which they would, of course, declare him legally insane. That would have meant a short stint at a nice psychiatric hospital where, at worst, he’d sit around with a bunch of wackos talking about their dysfunctional childhoods, playing the game, and arrange a relatively easy escape. Ship off to a country with no extradition treaty and resume his master plan.
Only it didn’t go the way he wanted. The bastards had issued their report: while he suffered from several personality disorders as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the shrinks’ bible on such things, he was legally sane. More specifically, he knew right from wrong at the time of the crimes—as demonstrated by his elaborate schemes to cover up his actions. He knew the nature of the charges against him and was capable of assisting in his defense. He was therefore deemed both legally responsible and competent to stand trial.
Someday Kane planned to have the state shrinks brutally dismembered, but for the time being they were quite a ways down on his list of people targeted for vengeance. First, Karp and his bunch.
Plan B had required that his lawyer win the motion to have him tested by a private psychiatrist at a hospital in upstate New York. Kane’s firm had once defended the doctor from a malpractice suit in which he’d been accused of s
exually molesting several of his patients. They’d won mostly by painting the women as nutcases suffering from mass delusions. The man could be counted on to say Kane was nuts. The private psychiatrist was just a last resort if something went wrong with the escape plan he worked out with Azzam.
He’d first met Azzam when she accompanied his lawyer to the Tombs, posing as a legal assistant. During subsequent visits he’d discussed the master plan—making sure she understood that it could not be done without his help—including his escape. I want what happens to the guards and any “spectators” to be as brutal as possible, he whispered to her out of the hearing of even his lawyer. I want them insane with anger—with their minds set on recapturing me and bringing us all to “justice,” they won’t be anticipating us to strike such a blow that they’ll wish they’d never heard of Andrew Kane.
Or al Qaeda, she’d reminded him.
Yes, yes, al Qaeda. He’d smiled.
Kane had been attracted to the young Palestinian woman’s cold-blooded nature. Her arrogance and disdain for him made him want to subjugate her to his sexual whims. Again through his attorney, he’d conveyed his wishes to her handlers, who’d responded by ordering her to make herself available to him when he was free. He was aware how much she despised him the first time he took her, and it had just excited him more. He also knew about her lesbian lover, Ajmaani, and had gone out of his way to demean Azzam in front of her. He’d hoped to evoke some hint of jealousy but was disappointed when the woman didn’t react.
After escaping, Kane had been quickly and quietly transported to Aspen and the home on Red Mountain of the Saudi prince, Bandar. The facial reconstruction surgery by Dr. Buchwald had been performed in the house. Meanwhile, Bandar’s family was told that the visitor was a distant relative who had a fatal, and contagious, disease and wasn’t to be disturbed or talked about with their friends in town. Bandar’s self-involved wife and children had shrugged at the information and paid little attention to the comings and goings at the guesthouse.
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