The Sanctuary

by Raymond Khoury

  What was left of the diplomatic mission squatted in the nearby British embassy—a seven-story apartment building that was bizarrely veiled by a massive, tentlike antirocket net from top to bottom—for a few tense months before relocating to two villas in Awkar, in the lush, forested hills just north of the city. The area was under Christian control, but it didn’t prove to be any safer. Another car bomb ripped through that compound the following year, killing eleven. The State Department threw in the towel and closed its mission down for a couple of years, but with fighting finally subsiding in the early 1990s, the staff returned to Awkar while awaiting the construction of a new, highly fortified compound east of the city, close to the Ministry of Defense, a project that had yet to materialize.

  Corben had driven straight to Awkar after leaving Mia at his apartment.

  He checked in briefly with his colleagues on the second floor of the consular annex. The CIA station chief, Len Hayflick, and the four other agents in the Beirut team had their offices there. They had their hands full. Beyond the ongoing assignments, such as tracking down Imad Mughniyah, the man thought to be behind the truck bomb that blew up the marines’ compound in 1983 and killed 241 servicemen, and monitoring burgeoning militant groups such as Fatah al-Islam, Lebanon was “in play” again. An undeclared, dirty war was in full swing. It was the bread and butter of the agency, but while there were big opportunities, there were even bigger risks. Still, the Bishop kidnapping needed to be handled with urgency, and Corben had quickly maneuvered to snag the assignment once Baumhoff had shown him the Polaroids.

  Corben spent the afternoon in his office working his phone and his databases. There was nothing new on the kidnapping. No calls had come in, no one had claimed responsibility, no ransom demands had been made. Not that it surprised him, but he still half-expected some fringe group to claim it for their own and try to use it for some kind of leverage. The United States wielded a big stick in the region, but it could also bestow great favors if merited or, in this case, coerced. No such favor was requested.

  A follow-up call to a Fuhud officer he’d conferred with briefly after leaving Mia in her hotel room informed him that the dead man from the apartment didn’t have any identifying papers or tags on him. They would be running a close-up of his face in the next day’s papers, but Corben didn’t think anyone was going to be claiming him anytime soon. He made a couple of other calls to contacts of his in the Lebanese intelligence services and sounded them out without giving too much away about his involvement beyond looking for a kidnapped American national. Nothing new had come up, no fingers pointed one way or another. He made sure they would contact him if anything broke.

  He recovered Evelyn’s cell phone from Baumhoff and scrolled through to its received-calls log, but the last caller wasn’t ID’d, confirming what Baumhoff had told him. No one had called it since. He accessed the dialed-calls log. She’d called a bunch of local numbers over the last few days, but the most recent call was the one that immediately piqued his interest. A U.S. number. Rhode Island, according to the area code.

  He remembered the business card that had been sitting on her open organizer on her desk and pulled it out. The number matched. It belonged to someone called Tom Webster, at the Haldane Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. Corben made a quick calculation of the time difference and realized it was still early on the East Coast. It was unlikely anyone would be there at this hour. He opened a browser window on his computer and got onto the institute’s Web site. It informed him that it was a privately funded research center devoted to the study and promotion of the archaeology and art of the ancient Mediterranean, Egypt, and Western Asia, affiliated with Brown University. There was no sign of anyone by the name of Webster in its listings. He jotted down “Tom Webster,” “Haldane, Brown U,” and “privately funded” in his notebook and made a mental note to call it later.

  He walked the phone over to the communications office and handed it to the chief geek there, technical operations officer Jake Olshansky, asking him to work his magic and see if he could trace the shy caller who had called Evelyn’s phone. He also requested a log of incoming and outgoing calls going back two weeks and asked the young techie to see if he could also pull up similar logs for Evelyn’s home landline, assuming she had one. He picked up Mia’s phone from Baumhoff and had a quick look through it, but nothing on it jumped at him. He asked Olshansky to run a quick log off its SIM card and made a mental note to pick it up on his way out to bring back to her. He also gave him Evelyn’s laptop—his own attempt to boot it up had been thwarted by password-protected access, but he knew Olshansky would find a way in without too much trouble.

  Back in his office, he turned his attention to Evelyn’s personal organizer again. It was overflowing with cards and notes, an active, busy life’s cache of information. His first trawl through it didn’t kick up anything useful. The calendar entries of the last week, and of the last two days in particular, didn’t appear to mention anything about the man from her past that Evelyn had come across. He put the organizer aside, saving it for later. He knew he’d need more time to go through it in detail.

  The profiles he pulled up for Evelyn and Mia didn’t kick up any surprises—not that there was much there. Nothing about either of them hinted at anything other than two women who lived quiet lives and never strayed on the wrong side of the law, not even for an unpaid parking ticket. He found some fairly vocal comments Evelyn had made during the struggle over the downtown area between the developers and the conservationists, but it wasn’t overly confrontational and he quickly dismissed its relevance.

  Corben sat back and ran through the events since Mia’s drink with Evelyn the night before. He latched onto the ease and the confidence with which the goon squad was operating. Beirut had come a long way since its lawless dark ages, and a well-armed, well-trained hit team couldn’t just operate with impunity without having some kind of “official” link or sanction from one of the handful of main local militias, which meant, inevitably, a “big brother” connection to one of the government intelligence services—Lebanese or Syrian. Identifying the dead shooter could immediately point to which clan the goon squad was working for, but that didn’t seem likely. Hired guns were cheap to come by, and tracks were easily covered. Every militia, every agency, had someone on tap on the inside to make things happen or, more often, disappear.

  He needed to know where the threat was coming from. Even an accent would have gone a long way in identifying where the shooter hailed from and, possibly, lead him to his target, who he knew had hired the hit team. Sadly, the shooter’s vocal abilities had been seriously compromised by, well, death. Corben also knew these guys had already screwed up twice. A third time was unlikely. He’d have to be more than careful from here on.

  Corben reached for the file he’d taken from Evelyn’s desk and went through it. Possibly more information was tucked away on the hard drive of her laptop, but given how dated the sheets and the photographs in the file seemed, he suspected that it was where he should focus. He read Evelyn’s notes more thoroughly and examined the photographs again. From his days in Iraq, he knew that Al-Hillah was a short drive south of Baghdad.

  He imagined the underground chamber she had discovered and thought back to the lab he’d investigated.

  Both in Iraq, within a hundred miles of each other.

  Both featuring the Ouroboros.

  Coincidence sat right up there with altruistic politicians, free lunches, and a democratic Middle East in his fantasyland hall of fame.

  He went over the notes from his chat with Mia. He focused on the words Iraqi fixer, and drew a circle around them. He mulled it over, then took another look at the Polaroids from Evelyn’s handbag. An idea was coalescing in his mind, and he gave it some space. Everything seemed to fit. A man from Evelyn’s past in Iraq, this “fixer,” appears unannounced. Shortly after, she disappears. In her handbag are shots of highly prized Mesopotamian relics. He was pretty sure the fixer had come to
see her to offer her the goods, the book in particular. She had a previous connection to the snake-eater—a connection he needed to know more about. But he knew his target was still alive and well and operating with the same ruthless abandon he’d displayed in Baghdad. He knew that same ruthlessness had dispatched men to kidnap Evelyn and search her apartment.

  He was close.

  He could feel the hakeem, out there, chasing after his elusive dream. He needed to flush him out, and the obvious route involved the Iraqi fixer. Clearly, he had what the hakeem was after. He was the key to tracking down the pieces, and he was still out there, probably in hiding. The question was, how to find him? Before the hakeem did.

  The fixer had to be lured out—assuming he hadn’t skipped town already, which was a distinct possibility, given how precarious his presence here seemed to be. Corben thought about it and reached for a second look at the file he’d taken from Evelyn’s flat. Several old snapshots were in it, mementos from the dig in question, and some of them showed Evelyn standing with men who were clearly Arab workers. There was a good chance that one of them could be the missing fixer, but Corben didn’t know what he looked like.

  Mia, on the other hand, did.

  He mulled it over. He’d need to talk to her about it. He preferred not to involve her—she’d been through enough already in less than twenty-four hours—but the stakes were high, and she was already caught up in it. He just had to make sure he handled it with great care. Which wouldn’t be easy, given whom he was dealing with.

  His desk phone buzzed and interrupted the state of play unfolding in his mind. He checked the caller ID display as he reached for the handset. It was the ambassador.

  Chapter 25

  D espair settled onto Evelyn like a thick winter mist as she stared at the walls of her cell.

  Outwardly, the small room was better than what she was expecting. It wasn’t anything like the grimy, decrepit, rat-infested hellholes her recall had conjured up from the accounts she’d read of the kidnapped hostages back in the 1980s. This room felt more like something you’d find in your average Middle East hospital. Well, maybe not any hospital. More like a mental ward.

  The walls, floor, and ceiling were painted white. The bed, though narrow and bolted to the floor, had an actual mattress on it, as well as the added luxury of a pillow, sheets, and a blanket. There was also a toilet and a small sink, and both worked. The lighting was on the harsh side, courtesy of two neon ceiling fittings that buzzed annoyingly at the very edge of her hearing threshold. Two features, however, undermined any sense of relief that she could glean from the relative civility of her accommodation. The only opening to be found wasn’t on any of the walls. Instead, in was a small, mirrored observation porthole—using one-way glass and allowing her captors to look in, she guessed—in the thick, metal door to the room, a door that, she also noticed, lacked a handle. Beyond that, the room was as unsettling as any cesspit she’d read about, but in a different way. Its relative comfort alluded to an extended stay, and its clinical, cold austerity was even more subtly threatening than the cells she’d read about. A palpable malice was in these walls, and she could feel it in her pores.

  The burning pain that had seared through her veins was all gone now. She rubbed her bare arms slowly, still thrown that there was no aftereffect from the—what had he called it? She couldn’t remember. She thought back with anger at how the words couldn’t come out fast enough once she started to tell him what she knew. She felt weak, helpless, and, worst of all, humiliated. She’d faced adversity and difficult situations many times since moving to the area all those years ago, and she prided herself on her inner strength and the resolve she knew she could draw upon when needed. The last few hours had bulldozed clear through any perceptions she had of her own courage. Her captor had effortlessly reduced her to a cowering, terrified wreck, and the thought burned through her as fiercely as the demonic liquid he’d brutally injected into her.

  The worst part of it, the most frustrating and maddening part of it all, was that she didn’t even know what she was caught up in.

  The discovery of Al-Hillah had ultimately led to nothing. The trail had abruptly ended in the very chamber where it had begun, and with it had ended their affair.

  After Tom had left, after the cyclone in her mind had settled, she had chided herself for allowing herself to be swept up by him, for avoiding the signs. But then again, he had been maddeningly tough to read. Throughout their brief liaison, she had sensed a deep-seated unease, a conflict deep within him that she just knew he was struggling with. She had no doubt that he’d been keeping things from her, and her being here in this cell proved it. At the time, she’d felt—she’d hoped, anyway—that it wasn’t the kind of dreary deception one would expect: a wife somewhere, a mundane life he was briefly escaping from. This seemed to cut deeper. But when she’d dared to bring it up, he’d skirted around it and moved the conversation on with deft charm. She knew his feelings for her were genuine—he’d said so himself. Of course, she knew that men lied, but deep down, she knew she wasn’t wrong about him, and her instincts had proven more than reliable over the years. She remembered, even today, the honesty that shone through his eyes when he’d told her how he felt about her, but his ability to move on with such clinical commitment was something she’d never gotten over.

  She could still hear his parting words as if he were standing beside her now, whispering them into her ear.

  I can’t stay with you. We can’t be together.

  It’s not someone else. I wish it were that simple. But it’s not something I can talk about. Just know that if there were any way in the world that we could be together, I would do it.

  And with that, he was gone.

  Leaving her with the unenviable task of moving on with her life and forgetting about him, leaving her to deal with a separation made even more intolerable by the simple fact that it was unexplained and—in her eyes, anyway—unjustified. And leaving her to deal with raising his child, a child he knew nothing about. A child she’d lied to for years. A little girl whose father, she’d told her, had died.

  She’d lived with the lie for thirty years, and even after all this time, just thinking about it now triggered a clawing tightening in her chest. It was a hard thing to do, but she knew Mia would have gone out looking for her father if she’d thought he was out there somewhere, and Evelyn hadn’t wanted that. He’d been very clear about things. There was no need to expose Mia to a painful disappointment.

  At least, she’d managed to keep that from the hakeem. Above all else, she couldn’t let him know that Mia was Tom’s daughter. He hadn’t yet made the connection; he hadn’t asked that question. If he had, she shuddered, she probably would have told him. And that would have set him off after Mia too, which was something she couldn’t bear to imagine.

  Small victories. It was all she could cling to right now.

  Something beyond her cell door caught her attention. A noise. Harsh, labored movements, footsteps shuffling on the stone floor.

  She edged to the door and tried to peer out through the mirrored porthole, but all she saw was the harsh reflection of her own face. She plastered her ear to the door and listened intently. She heard a door being unlocked, followed by some movement and a cry that sent shivers down her spine, a young boy’s cry, a pained, pleading yell. The haunting sound was swiftly followed by an angry man’s bark, ordering him to shut up—“Khrass, wlaa”—and a sound that Evelyn was sure was a slap, quickly followed by a pained yelp from the boy’s voice, as if he’d just been hit. She could just about make out some whimpering before she heard the door slamming shut, and the lock sliding into place.

  She waited a minute or so for the man to move off, counting down the seconds, her heart in her throat, wondering if she should try to make contact with the other prisoner. Another thought occurred to her: What if others were being held here? She had no way of knowing. The man who had led her back to her cell had put a black cloth cover over her head, only
removing it once she was in. She had no idea of what lay beyond that door. And the thought, the possibility, that others were being held here scared her even more.

  She decided to risk it.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?” Her whisper echoed in the silence around her.

  There was no answer.

  She repeated it again, this time a bit louder, more desperate. Still, no one answered her.

  She thought she heard a low whimpering in the distance, but she couldn’t be sure. Her heartbeat was pulsing loudly in her ears, confusing matters.

  She waited a few more minutes and tried again, but nothing more than a deathly silence came back. Shivering, and dispirited, she sank down to the floor and cupped her face in her hands, trying to make sense of the nightmare swirling around her.

  Her mind hurtled back to the face of the man in the lab coat as he watched and listened to her story. His interest was visibly piqued when she mentioned Tom. He asked her all kinds of questions about him, wanting to know everything about the man. He was riveted and took notes, nodding ponderously as she spoke. Her instincts had been right. She should have kept Tom out of it, but, realistically, there was little she could have done to keep quiet. The flames racing through her body had seen to that.