The Sanctuary

by Raymond Khoury

  “This is classified,” he informed her with a raised finger before pausing to take a breath, seemingly still debating whether he was making a mistake in sharing this with her.

  He turned the screen to face her. It showed a photograph of what looked like a wall inside a narrow, cell-like room. Something circular, the size of an open umbrella judging by the scale of the light fixture overhead, was scratched into the wall. Mia recognized it instantly.

  “I was stationed in Iraq in the first years of the war,” he explained. “One of our units got some intel about a doctor who was close to Saddam, but by the time they raided his compound, he was gone.”

  A barrage of questions rose within Mia, but Corben wasn’t through.

  “What they did find in his compound was pretty horrific. There was a huge lab in its basement. State-of-the-art operating chamber, the works. He was running experiments there, experiments that…” His voice drifted off for a moment as he chose his words, and a fleeting look of pain crossed his face, a pain Mia could hear in his voice. “He was experimenting on humans. Young and old. Male, female. Kids…”

  Mia felt her blood chill as horror and concern for her mother consumed her in equal measure.

  “There were holding cells in the compound, but everyone in them had been executed shortly before they were raided. We also found dozens of bodies buried in a field not far from the house,” he went on, “dumped in mass graves, naked. Many of them had been operated on. Some were missing body parts. There were stashes of organs, gallons of blood, stored in fridges. Some of their wounds, where he’d cut them open, weren’t sutured. He didn’t bothering closing them up once he’d taken out what interested him. There were other…more disturbing discoveries in the lab that I’ll spare you. He just used them like guinea pigs and tossed out what he didn’t need. It seems Saddam supplied him with them, along with everything else he needed.” Corben paused, as if to purge the images from his mind and collect himself. “This”—he pointed at the image of the Ouroboros on the laptop’s screen—“was carved into the wall of one of the holding cells.”

  Mia felt a sudden wetness on her mouth and realized she’d unconsciously caught her lower lip with her teeth and bitten into it hard enough to draw blood. She released her bite and dabbed her lip with her finger, then rubbed the droplet away. “What kind of experiments was he running?”

  “We’re not sure. But given Saddam’s interest in finding efficient ways to commit mass murder…”

  Mia’s eyes rocketed wide. “You think he was working on a biological weapon?”

  Corben shrugged. “The secrecy surrounding his work, the dead bodies, Saddam’s championing him…put it this way. I don’t think he was looking for a cure for cancer.”

  Mia stared at the shot of the cell again. “But why the carving on the wall?”

  “We don’t know. We managed to track down some people in Baghdad who came across him. I spoke to a dealer in antiquities, as well as a guy who used to be a curator at the National Museum. It seems this man, the hakeem as they called him, was fascinated by Iraqi history, turn of the millennium specifically. They said he knew a lot about it and had traveled extensively in the region. Once they felt comfortable opening up a bit more, they separately told me he’d asked them to look for any local references to the Ouroboros in ancient books and manuscripts.”

  “Which, presumably, they did.”

  “You bet,” Corben confirmed, “but they didn’t find anything. So he asked them to look some more, and to widen the search, even outside Iraq’s borders. And to keep looking. Which they did. They said he was completely obsessed with it, and they were both terrified of him.”

  “And they found nothing?”

  Corben shook his head.

  “And now he wants this book…” Mia connected the dots in her mind. “So this…this doctor. He’s still out there.”

  He nodded.

  A devastating sense of dread choked Mia’s heart. “And you think he has my mom?” The words almost dried in her throat as she uttered them, willing the answer to be negative.

  Corben’s somber look told her it wasn’t, but she knew that already. “His trail went cold north of Tikrit a few weeks after the discovery of the lab, and we haven’t had any leads since. Given that Evelyn had a connection to the Ouroboros through the chamber she found, and given the ruthlessness of whoever seems to be after the relics,” he said gravely, “I think it’s more than likely that either he’s got her or she’s being held by someone who’s linked to him in some way.”

  Mia felt the air vacate her lungs. Her mom’s situation seemed horrible enough when she thought they were just—just—dealing with a gang of smugglers. This…this was too horrific to imagine.

  She stared out into nothingness, her mind short-circuited by Corben’s grim revelation. The room seemed to darken around her, and everything in it shifted slightly out of focus. She sensed Corben picking up his phone and heard dialing tones at the periphery of her consciousness, followed by the same unanswered ringing tone as before and his phone snapping shut. It took a moment for her to emerge from her daze and register that he must have been trying Ramez’s number again.

  A question drifted out of the fog. She turned to Corben. “Given all the fuss about WMDs and what you know about this man, I’d have thought you’d have a massive team of people on the case, working it with you. Surely, getting him is a huge priority, isn’t it?”

  “It was,” Corben said glumly. “It’s not anymore. We cried wolf about WMDs once too often, and the word itself has become poison. We deserve as much, I guess, but no one wants to hear about them anymore, and if anything, the priority’s to disengage from Iraq, not commit more resources.”

  “But he’s a monster,” Mia protested, clambering angrily to her feet.

  “You think he’s the only one running around out there?” he countered with calm frustration. “There are plenty of other mass murderers out there, from Rwanda, Serbia, you name it—they’re living quietly in leafy suburbs of London or Brussels under assumed names, no one’s bothering them. The only people after them are investigative reporters. That’s it. They’re the new Simon Wiesenthals, and there aren’t that many of them, just a handful who care enough to devote their time and risk their lives tracking these butchers down. They’re the only ones making a difference. Once in a while, they’ll out one of them in a story that might get a few columns not too far from the front page, and some prosecutor will maybe pay attention and look into it if it creates enough of a stink, but generally, these guys get away.”

  Which was true. Saddam and his decapitated brother-in-law were rare exceptions. The norm was that deposed dictators were often able to enjoy exile in blissful, unrepentant comfort while their underlings, the thugs who had overseen or actually participated in the killings, vanished into lives of placid anonymity.

  “There isn’t a concerted, official effort to bring any of these people in,” Corben added. “Life moves on. Politicians step down, others take their place, and the crimes of the not-so-distant past are quickly forgotten. No one in the State Department wants to hear about this right now. The Iraqis themselves aren’t in a position to go after him, they’ve got bigger problems to deal with. And I can’t exactly see the Lebanese government getting involved given the mess their country’s in.”

  Mia couldn’t believe it. “You’re working on this alone?”

  “Pretty much. I can draw on the same Agency resources if and when I need them, but until I have a definite, and I mean definite, lock on this guy, I can’t call in the troops.”

  Mia stared at him, stupefied. The news was getting bleaker by the minute, and the images he’d seeded in her mind refused to fade. “He experimented on kids?”

  Corben nodded.

  A realization thudded heavily into the pit of her stomach. “We have to get her back. But we also have to stop him, don’t we?” She felt tears welling up, but she bit them back.

  His eyes were on her, and something warmer fl
ickered in them. He nodded thoughtfully, taking in her words. “Yes.”

  “We need to find Farouk. If we can get to him before that”—she paused, unsure about how to refer to the hakeem, then chose—“monster does, and if he has this book, then maybe we can trade it for Mom.”

  Corben’s expression brightened. “That’s what I’m hoping.”

  He picked up his phone and hit the redial button.

  Chapter 30

  R amez stared worriedly at his phone as it vibrated with a low buzz that sent it skittering sideways across the coffee table in brief, tortuous spurts.

  With each grating buzz, the phone’s LED screen lit up, casting a temporary, ghostly blue-green glow across the darkened living room of his small apartment. His eyes blinked to attention each time, transfixed by the bright display. The words PRIVATE CALLER—shorthand for a withheld number—stared alarmingly back, taunting him, before the display flicked back to blackness. His body went rigid every time the phone sprang to life, as if the device were hardwired straight into his skull.

  Mercifully, after about eight spurts, it stopped buzzing. The room was plunged into darkness again, a bleak, lonely darkness that was occasionally interrupted by the reflections, from the headlights of passing cars in the street below, that scuttled across its mostly bare walls. It was the third time the anonymous caller had tried to reach him in the last hour, and the assistant professor wasn’t about to answer. Given that he hardly ever received such calls—withheld numbers were, oddly, a frowned-upon social faux pas in Lebanon—he knew what it had to be about. And it terrified him.

  His day had started out like any other. Out of bed at seven, a light breakfast, a shower and a shave, and a brisk, twenty-minute walk to the campus. He’d read the morning papers before leaving home, and he’d spotted the story about the woman’s kidnapping downtown, but he had no idea it was Evelyn. Not until the cops had shown up at Post Hall.

  He was their first port of call in the department, and the news had sucker punched the breath right out of him. With every word he uttered, he’d felt himself getting drawn deeper and deeper into a tar pit of trouble that he was keen to avoid, but knew he couldn’t. They were trying to find Evelyn, and he had to help. There was no way out.

  They’d asked if he knew anything about her interest in Iraqi relics, and the man who had appeared in Zabqine immediately came to mind. They’d perked up at the mention of Farouk, and he’d given them his name—his first name, as he didn’t know the man’s full name—and description. From their guarded comments, he’d gathered that his description fitted one they had of a man who’d been seen with Evelyn when she was kidnapped.

  The encounter with the detectives had already spooked him enough. Seeing Farouk emerge from behind some parked cars and approach him outside Post Hall a few hours later made him jump out of his skin. At first, he didn’t know what to make of it. Was Farouk working with the kidnappers? Was he here to grab Ramez too? The assistant professor had shrunk back defensively at his approach, but the Iraqi fixer’s supplicating and woeful manner had quickly convinced him that the man posed no threat.

  Presently, sitting there in his darkened living room, he picked through that worrying conversation, every word of it still ringing with frightening clarity. They’d found a quiet spot to talk, at the back of the building. Farouk had opened by saying he needed to tell the police what he knew about the kidnapping, to help Evelyn, but he couldn’t go to them himself. He was in the country illegally, and, given what he’d seen in the papers, the stolen relics were already a point of contention. Ramez cut in by telling him the cops had already been to see him and informed Farouk that he himself had given them his description—admittedly, in the hope of helping find Evelyn.

  The news made Farouk panic. They had his name, his description, and it looked more and more as if they were after him for smuggling relics. His eyes took on a haunting, cornered gleam as he asked Ramez to help him. He was in desperate need for money, and, yes, he was trying to sell the valuable relics—he had initially hoped that Ramez would help him in that, but that was moot. All that mattered now was survival. He filled Ramez in on what he knew, what he’d seen—the men who came after him in Iraq, the book, the drill marks on his friend Hajj Ali Salloum—and with each of his revelations, the assistant professor’s blood curdled with dread.

  Farouk asked Ramez to act as a go-between. He wanted Ramez to talk to the cops, make a deal on his behalf: He’d go in and help them as much as he could with finding Evelyn, but he didn’t want to end up in a Lebanese prison, nor did he want to be sent back to Iraq. More than that, he wanted their protection. He knew the men who kidnapped Evelyn were really after him, and he knew he wouldn’t survive for long out on his own.

  Ramez demurred, not wanting to get involved, but Farouk was desperate. He pleaded with him, asking the assistant professor to consider Evelyn’s situation, to do it for her sake. Ramez finally said he’d think about it. He gave Farouk his cell phone number and told him to call him the next day, at noon.

  Which would be noon, tomorrow.

  Not ten o’clock.

  Not tonight.

  Ramez’s eyes were still glued to his cell phone as his weary mind tried to divine who had been calling him. If it was Farouk, he didn’t want to take the call. He still hadn’t made up his mind about whether he would help him. On the one hand, he felt he owed it to Evelyn, and, beyond that, he had to. He couldn’t exactly withhold such crucial information from the investigating cops. On the other hand, Beirut wasn’t exactly famed for its rigorous observance of legal process, and Ramez, above all else, wanted to stay alive.

  If it wasn’t Farouk calling, Ramez didn’t even want to begin to think of who it could be. A wave of paranoia surged through him as he imagined men with power drills about to burst in and take him away. He shrank back into the sofa, his arms wrapped around his knees, his chest heaving, the walls of the small room closing in around him.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter 31

  M ia watched Corben click his cell phone shut. He turned to her and shook his head. He checked his watch and frowned thoughtfully.

  “I don’t like leaving this till morning,” he said, “but I don’t think we have much choice. If they’re onto him, then we’re already too late. If they’re not, then I’d rather not alert them to him at this hour. I’ll call the guys at Hobeish first thing in the morning,” he added, referring to the police station where Mia had been held, “and take it from there.”

  “We could go to the university, early,” Mia suggested, “and get to him first thing.”

  Corben did a double take. “‘We’?”

  “You don’t know what he looks like. I can point him out to you,” she protested.

  “I can just ask for him at the department.”

  “I’ve met him. He’ll feel more at ease if he sees a familiar face,” she insisted, her voice alive with nervous energy. “Besides, I don’t want to stay here alone. I’ll feel like a sitting duck.” She paused, catching her breath. “I want to help, okay?”

  Corben looked away, clearly weighing his options and seemingly not liking any. After a moment, he turned to her cheerlessly. “Okay,” he relented. “Let’s see what he has to say and take it from there.” He went to the fridge and pulled out two more beers and offered Mia a bottle.

  She took it and crossed over to the balcony. She stood there and sipped at it, staring pensively into the night. The lights from the densely packed buildings were burning brightly, crowning the city with a pale, whitish aura. She wondered where Evelyn was at that very moment and thought about Farouk and Ramez. Where had they bunkered down for the night? Beirut was a crowded city, and it knew how to keep its secrets. No one really knew what went on behind closed doors, but in this city, Mia suspected, the lurking malevolence was in a class of its own.

  “I don’t get it.” She turned to Corben. “This symbol, the coiled snake. What’s he looking for, exactly? If it’s really this book
that he’s after, why does he want it? He can’t just be some maniacal collector.”

  “Why not?”

  “He seems willing to go to some pretty extreme measures to get hold of it,” Mia noted. “It’s got to have some serious significance to him, don’t you think?”

  “He’s a bioweapons scientist. These guys are into viruses, not relics that are hundreds of years old,” Corben reminded her. “I can’t imagine its relevance to his work.”

  “Unless he’s looking for clues to some ancient plague,” she half-joked.

  Corben didn’t dismiss it out of hand. Instead, his face clouded, then the faintest of smiles flitted across his lips. “Now there’s a merry thought to sleep on.”

  She felt a ripple of concern. An outright dismissal would have been better.

  They left it at that, finished their beers, and put the food away in a leaden silence. She watched Corben as he went about the nighttime routine of spinning the dead bolt on the front door and switching off the lights. She found herself wondering about what made someone take on a life like that: solitary, dangerous, mired in secrets, trained to manipulate and predisposed to mistrust. From what she could gather, he seemed like a pragmatic, clearheaded guy who wasn’t suffering from a righteous, save-the-world delusion. She couldn’t deny that his action-adventure hero side was alluring—she hadn’t exactly met men like him in the sedate academic waters she usually navigated. But there was also something dark, unknowable, and guarded about him that, while also somewhat attractive, was also a bit scary.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  He turned, curious. “Sure.”

  She smiled, slightly uncomfortable with the moment. “Is Jim your real name? I mean, I read somewhere that you guys always seem to use Mike or Jim or Joe as cover.”

  He breathed out a small chuckle and winced. “It’s actually Humphrey, but…it doesn’t exactly go with the job profile.”