You really can’t control who you fall in love with, Ali thought.
He hurried out of the church to find her.
CHAPTER 36
Elise realized that she’d misjudged Darby’s concerns from the beginning. She thought he’d be worried that she might expose him as Christendom’s man in BP to win her freedom, and that his primary agenda would be to confirm that she hadn’t sold him out during questioning. But he told her that he wasn’t worried about her discretion. The cops weren’t going to subject her to the type of brutality needed to extract her contact’s name, he said, not when the world was desperately trying to sustain some measure of harmony.
Now she understood. It really was all about the proof of God. He’d never called it such. He’d only referred to it as “the treasure.” But she suspected he knew exactly what it was Christendom had sent her to purchase. Darby didn’t strike Elise as one of the blindly allegiant. He behaved more like an informed fanatic.
And she’d had more than enough of him this evening.
“For the umpteenth time,” Elise said. “When I left his house the night before, the man in the wheelchair’s head was still attached to his body. His housekeeper escorted me in and out. The next day when I showed up, the door was ajar but no one answered. I went inside and found his head detached from his body. And I found three decapitated ceramic cats. Then the cops came flying out of the walls. They were everywhere. They were waiting for me.”
“And did you examine the insides of these ceramic cats?”
“They were eye-level on a table. They were hollow inside. There was enough space to store a computer chip or a rolled up piece of paper. But there was nothing inside any of them.”
Darby opened his black leather bag. “So you say.”
“Yes, so I say. And let me ask you something, Doctor Darby. If I’d acquired the treasure, how could I still have it if the cops arrested me and strip-searched me?”
Darby considered the question as he unzipped the bag. “That thought occurred to me, which is why if you do have the treasure, you had to have acquired it last night, the first time you went to his apartment.”
“And how exactly did I do that? Bribe the man in the wheelchair with a bunch of diamonds I bought with my meager life savings? Because I didn’t get the diamonds until today.”
Darby shrugged. “You have an answer for every question, which is to be expected. You’re a spy. There’s only one remaining course of action for a situation like this.” He peered into his bag.
The room had become insufferably hot. Elise waited for Darby to pull out a weapon. His dentist’s drill would work just fine, she thought, especially in the absence of Novocain.
Instead, he pulled out a bottle of wine.
“Best way to transport a haram libation,” Darby said, grinning. “No one wants to see the inside of a dentist’s office, or his black bag.” He pulled out a corkscrew. “Sorry about the Spanish inquisition. Procedure, you know? Obviously I believe you. From the moment I met you I could see you were obsessed with the extraction of that girl, not money. Now let’s have some of this claret.”
Elise followed him into the kitchen where the two guards sat reading papers at the table. He’d given up his absurd accusation so quickly that she had difficulty accepting his sincerity. But Darby certainly was sounding and behaving as though he believed her.
He pulled out two glasses and uncorked the wine.
“Speaking of extraction, what did happen to the girl?” he said.
“No show,” Elise said.
“And the cop? Why was he there?”
Elise told him about the dhimmi murder at Matthias, Ali’s investigation, and how Valerie might have helped him with his investigation.
“The girl they found at the church altar,” Darby said. “I heard about that. But the Eurabian police … they don’t really care about a dead dhimmi girl, do they? Is this fellow really investigating, or just going through the motions?”
“Given he took me from jail to the statue on his own, I think you can answer that for yourself.”
Darby looked at Elise and struck a reflective pose. “Yes, he does seem motivated, doesn’t he? I wonder why …”
The question hung in the air as he turned to his men and told them to gather the others and go home. Darby thanked them and told them he wouldn’t need them anymore this evening. The men rose and left.
Meanwhile, Elise stood in the kitchen trying to make certain she wasn’t imagining what she’d just heard. It wasn’t the dismissal of the four men that were supposed to drive her back to Budapest that had caught her attention. It was the manner in which Darby had delivered the message.
He hadn’t spoken in his usual broken Arabic and poor accent. Darby had delivered his order in a fluent and mellifluous manner. She wondered why he’d hid his fluency from her and all his employees. No answer occurred to her immediately, and the question left her unsettled for reasons she couldn’t explain.
“The wine would have been wasted on them,” he said, “and a man hates to be rude to his staff. Sending them home was the best compromise. More for us, yes?”
He aligned the screw over the cork, gripped the bottle with the vise ring attached to the device, and tried to lift the lever which would force the screw through the cork. But he winced before he could complete the process, dropped the corkscrew on the counter and massaged his wrist vigorously.
“My wrist,” he said. “Repetitive motion injury. The perils of dentistry.”
Elise glanced at his hand. Then she remembered something Ali had told her earlier tonight. A horrific thought occurred to her and a sense of impending doom seized her.
Outside, a pair of cars started. Headlights shone through the window, and Darby’s men drove away.
Elise tried to speak but choked on her first few words. She so dreaded what she might discover that she had to swallow and start her sentence again.
“I don’t remember you speaking Arabic so beautifully at your offices,” she said.
“It pays to remain inscrutable, in life and in business. Better all the locals—employees and patients alike—underestimate me, don’t you think?”
“Makes sense,” Elise said. “Where did you learn it?”
“In Maharashtra, on the road between Mumbai and Agra. I was stationed there as a technical consultant for the Kingdom of Hindu in my prior incarnation. Rugged territory, but oh the curry.”
“Mmm,” Elise said, but her mind was not on food but rather Ali’s description of the killer, which he’d shared on the way to the hookah bar.
She’d never measured Darby before but now observed that he was of average height and build. He spoke perfect Arabic, something was wrong with his wrist, and he loved curry. It was impossible, Elise thought. Based on the devotion to Western ideals and Christianity he’d conveyed in his philosophical musings, Darby was among the least likely men she’d ever suspect of being a killer of dhimmi girls.
And yet, much to her shock, he was the killer. She certain of this, not only for the reasons that had just occurred to her but because an insufferable tension had spread through the room. With this realization, Alice’s fight or flight instincts kicked-in, and she understood that her own life was in imminent danger.
“I wish you hadn’t mentioned curry,” she said, drifting around the perimeter of the kitchen to give herself a better chance of getting to the door before he could stop her. “I didn’t have dinner and now you’ve made my mouth water.”
Elise fired a glance at the exit. When she looked back at Darby, she realized she’d been unlucky. He’d lifted his eyes from one of the glasses mid-pour and caught her plotting her route of escape. That’s all it took for a man so experienced in detecting human emotion—one look.
Darby finished pouring two glasses in silence while Elise’s heart pounded in her ears. Then he brought them over and handed her one.
“Cheers,” he said, and raised his glass for her to clink it.
Elise answered in
kind and obliged. She watched her hand, praying that she’d be able to keep it steady. When she managed to do so, she savored a small measure of victory. But her satisfaction was short lived.
Darby studied her with a wry smile. “You think I’m a monster, don’t you?”
The ruse was over, Elise thought. He knew she knew he was the killer.
“What?” she said, doing her best acting job. “No. Why would you say such a thing?”
“Oh, come now. We both know what we’re talking about here. Let’s not waste time pretending otherwise.”
He was going to kill her any minute, Elise thought. He couldn’t trust her no matter how much she tried to convince him otherwise. He had to eliminate her out of self-preservation. It was the smart move.
Elise scrambled to come up with a plan. She wasn’t trained in self-defense. It was rule number one where Christendom’s spycraft was concerned. Self-defense skills compromised a spy’s commitment to her cover. It also reduced the odds of a spy’s survival behind enemy lines, because the moment the spy fought or ran she was confirming the enemy’s suspicions and she was dead. A spy who didn’t fight or try to escape, but rather maintained her cover always had a greater chance of surviving than the one who did. This had been the philosophy of the former Soviet Union’s notorious secret police, the KGB. Christendom’s spymasters had borrowed from the best. Given her current circumstances, however, Elise wished her employer had borrowed from someone else.
When no plan came to her, Elise decided her optimal strategy was to stall.
“Why did you kill those girls?” she said.
Darby raised his eyebrows and sighed as though she’d asked an important or complicated question—she couldn’t tell which. But when he took a sip of wine, scrunched his forehead in deep concentration and began speaking, Elise exhaled. She suspected she’d just bought some time. Based on her experiences in his dental chair, Darby loved to hear his own voice as much as the Cardinals.
“The Muslim fascination with blondes goes back to Byzantine days,” Darby said, “to the eighth century. It was the last vestige of the Roman Empire, in the city now known as Istanbul, which was the front line against the Islamic assault. Muslims gushed over the Byzantine woman’s blond hair, blue and green eyes, and their figures. The Byzantine maiden was the most coveted slave from Muslim conquest.
“Fast forward more than a thousand years and nothing changed. When European countries opened their borders to immigration and decided to become multi-cultural, the countries formerly known as Sweden and Denmark became the rape capitals of the world. Eighty percent of those rapes were committed by Muslim men. Scandinavian women started dying their hair to cut the odds they’d be attacked by a stranger. This was long before Eurabia became reality.”
“You can’t blame an entire religion for what some men did,” Elise said, “unless you have the evidence to back it up. Statistically, those men probably amount to an asterisk. That’s racist and bigoted.”
“There’s nothing vague about what went on there or in England. Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby, Oxford, Bristol, Telford, Banbury, Keighley, Halifax … and those are just the towns we know about where someone came forward. Where witnesses weren’t intimidated. Muslim men trafficking in under-aged English girls—in their case, hair color be damned as long as they’re not Muslim. Thousands of girls abused and barely a headline around the globe. And the media and the politicians unwilling to make an issue of it for decades. For decades, man. Since when is an enlightened man afraid to ask questions, no matter how politically incorrect they may seem?”
“Was the West that enlightened after World War II?” Elise said, “when it carved up Arabia randomly and put its puppets in charge of the countries? It ended up creating a world of slums. Take away their opportunity, and some men lose their way.”
“Yes,” Darby said, “but they always have their religion, don’t they? And therein lies the problem. Their religion is governed by a literal interpretation of eighth century ideals. There’s been no enlightenment. They say God created the laws of Islam. Well, God created reason, too, didn’t he?”
Elise pressed the point as his devil’s advocate, to buy time and extend her life expectancy.
“Were the Crusades in the name of Jesus—the so-called Prince of Peace - reasonable?” she said. “Was the Inquisition reasonable? The rack and the head crusher?”
“Obviously not,” Darby said. “But the Crusades were almost a century ago. Again, I ask—where is the reformation of Islam? And for that matter, where the hell are all the moderate Muslims? You know, all those decades of jihadism before Europe became Eurabia, and I never saw a moderate Muslim community protest against the so-called extremists. Well, the time for protests has long passed. I’m interested only in action.”
“What kind of action?”
“The definitive kind. Did you know they keep a list at the top slave training schools called Girls of Yellow? I posed as a broker for wealthy individuals looking to acquire a slave—forged some references, even had an asset act as a legitimate one—and got some of those lists in several cities. They came complete with pictures of the girls and thorough personality evaluations. Can you imagine something so vile?”
“I’m confused. If someone’s looking to acquire a slave, wouldn’t they want to see the candidate’s picture?”
“My dear, the Girls of Yellow isn’t a list of slave prospects.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s a list of matrimonial candidates.”
Elise shuddered.
“A Muslim man is allowed to have four wives and he’s allowed to marry his slave. There’s nothing some wealthy and powerful men want more than to have a girl of yellow among them.”
Perhaps this explained why Valerie was so scared, Elise thought. All the girls probably knew there was such a list.
“The legal age for marriage in Eurabia is sixteen,” Darby said. “You think a sixteen year-old girl is mature enough to decide she’s ready for marriage? Of course it doesn’t matter—most of the time the decision’s been made for her. And that age is often a technicality. Many clerics sanction even younger brides. They have throughout the Islamic world for centuries. After all, the prophet Muhammad was fifty-three when he consummated his marriage to a nine year-old wife.”
“And your solution is what, to kill the girls?”
Darby looked aghast. “Heaven forbid. I’m not killing them. I’m liberating them. I’m accelerating their path to heaven and falling on the sword for them. I’m the one who’s going to burn in hell for all of eternity. Not them. But it’s worth it. Anything to prevent our most precious girls from being defiled by men using an ancient religion to justify their abuse.”
Elise could barely keep her voice steady enough to ask her final question. If Darby answered her as she suspected he might, she feared she would come mentally unhinged.
“And what of the girl who was supposed to meet me tonight?” she said. “What of the girl we were going to extract?”
“Oh, you mean your sister?” Darby smiled. “I couldn’t help but see the resemblance. Stunning girl. She was ranked number one on BP’s list of Girls of Yellow.”
Elise took a breath. “Did you liberate her, too?”
Darby’s eyes radiated compassion. “The sanctity of her soul … is in God’s hands.”
Elise kicked Darby in the groin.
He screamed and doubled-over.
She wanted to plunge a kitchen knife through his left eye, stuff his head into the kitchen sink disposal, or beat him to a pulp with her bare hands. But he was merely stunned, not incapacitated, and her fight or flight instincts took charge again. The next thing Elise new she was rushing to the exit and turning the handle, only to find that the front door wouldn’t open. She spun the knob the other way and yanked with all her might. Only then did she see the deadbolt securing the door to its frame.
One of the guards had locked it from the outside, she realized.
She couldn’t e
scape without a key.
He was upon her almost as soon as she heard him moving. Darby pulled her back from the door. Only when she started falling did Elise see that he’d thrust his leg out to trip her up, and as she tumbled he fell on top of her. His hands were around her throat and squeezing before she could collect herself.
She tried to roll to one side to no avail. He extended his elbows and kept his neck arched to prevent her from clawing at his eyes. Darby had much longer arms than Elise, and the highest she could reach was his own neck. She wrapped her hands around it but by then she was already fading, alarm registering in her brain that she was going to run out of air.
She squeezed his neck as hard as she could but the muscles surrounding it felt like knots. Panic gripped her. She kicked, punched, and tried to thrust her fingers in his eyes but all for naught. And then as her face began to burn, the sensation that it was going to burst from the blood becoming all too real, an eerie calm fell over her.
An image from primary school flashed before Elise. Her Spanish teacher, Miss Joba, stood in front of the class telling the story of an old man who lifted an automobile when it rolled over his torso and trapped him under one of its tires. People were capable of extraordinary feats of strength, she told the class, and the source of that strength was God.
As that lesson echoed in her ears, Elise squeezed Darby’s neck and began to pray. She prayed that God would forgive Valerie for all her sins and welcome her into heaven. She prayed that God would forgive Valerie’s mother for all her sins, too. But most of all, Elise prayed that God would give her the strength to kill Darby before he killed her.
When that final thought flitted in and out of her mind, Elise realized the absurdity of the tale her Spanish teacher had spun. Darby was twice her size and strength. She was going to die and there was nothing she or God could do about it.
Her grip slackened. Black splotches filled her vision.
And then she rose, forcing Darby up and onto his back, and tumbled atop him, their hands still wrapped around each other’s necks. Elise couldn’t understand what was happening. She hadn’t experienced any magical surge of strength, and yet she’d clearly overpowered him. Yes, she was not imagining things. She really was on top of him. He was writhing beneath her. She squeezed his neck with all her might, which didn’t feel like much—
Girls of Yellow Page 23
