Doha 12

by Lance Charnes

  “Don’t you dare.” She slipped her phone into her purse. “Jake, little girls are tougher than you think. I know, I was one once.”

  “Maybe it’s you kibbutznik girls who’re so tough. You know, rifle practice when you’re five, all that.”

  “I didn’t touch a rifle until I was eight, but that’s not the point. Maybe Eve sees how sad you are. Maybe if you show her it’s possible to be sad and strong at the same time, she’ll think it’s safe to open up.” Her fingertips brushed his sleeve. “Just a thought, from a former little girl.”

  This, he hadn’t expected. He thought some genuine concern edged into her eyes, which had finally changed from softwood to brown cashmere, matching her hair. “Thanks.”

  A male face from a classical painting, halfway down the train car: soft, almost feminine features, a long straight nose, searching eyes. I’ve seen him before, Jake thought, but couldn’t quite decide where. Then a wild, random notion smacked into him. “Miriam, you get the web on your phone?” She nodded. “Bring up the INTERPOL site, okay?”

  She frowned, but unearthed her phone again, fiddled with the screen for a few seconds, then said, “Okay. What do you need?”

  “The Doha pictures.” She poked at the screen some more, then turned the phone so he could see. He moved in close enough to smell her shampoo (nice, more feminine than he’d expected), scanned the tiny pictures, then pressed one in the third row. A passport photo filled the screen. It was the man on the train. What the…? “Look toward the center of the car,” he whispered. “By the right-hand door. The guy in the green jacket with short dark-blond hair. See him?” She nodded, then glanced at the photo. He heard the sharp breath. “Same guy?”

  “Yes.” She turned to face him, their noses less than six inches apart. “Does that mean…”

  He plucked the phone from her hand, found another picture, held it up for Miriam. “This gal stopped me on my way to work last week to ask directions. Real friendly, said she was from Greece, on vacation.” A glum Elena from Athens stared back at them, blond in the photo but otherwise unchanged. He knew he’d seen her someplace before. He scrolled down to the text block. Alias Schaffer, alias Miriam. “She was you in Doha. It’s gotta be Mossad.”

  Miriam felt a flutter in her chest. Mossad, here? Following them? Why? Was that even possible? Of course it was possible; they could go anywhere. What did they want?

  “If they’re here on the train,” Miriam whispered, her voice straining its leashes, “is Hezbollah here too?”

  Sohrab turned away instantly, but he knew it was too late. She’d seen him. The woman from the car park, the one who’d shot at him. Police? FBI? How had she found them?

  How many others were on this train? At the station?

  His heart threw itself against his ribs; all the hair on his body tingled with the adrenaline storm. Police. Armed. They know we’re here. He smiled to himself. That just makes it better.

  He edged back against Gabir. “Tell Ziyad,” he whispered. “Surround them, get in close, fire at zero range. Use their bodies to muffle the shots. Then split up and meet at the woman’s office building.” Gabir nodded. “By the doors. There’s a woman wearing a tan coat and a white cap. She’s police, she was at the action yesterday. Keep the crowd between us and her.”

  “We could just kill her,” Gabir mumbled.

  “David, Sasha? They’re here.”

  David’s voice came back into Kelila’s ear instantly. “Hezbollah?”

  “Yes, three of them.” Kelila gave them a quick description. She wished she knew the station’s layout; she never liked walking into a situation blind. “Form a triangle around the covers, wait for the hostiles to come to us. Take them out quietly.” And don’t get caught.

  They both watched for anyone they recognized from yesterday’s attack, but couldn’t see anything beyond their car. Jake’s mainspring wound so tight he was sure it would snap. Miriam’s eyes turned back into rock and her lips vanished under pressure.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Miriam murmured. “I’ll be okay once I get a taxi.”

  “Bullshit. You’re stuck with me. We’re going straight to the cops.”

  “What are they going to do?” She leaned in closer. “That didn’t work very well last night, did it? The police have to believe me before they’ll protect me. These people will wait until we come out, or they’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “So you’re going to work? Really?”

  Miriam crossed her arms hard, frowned. “What else can I do, hide? Where? If they’re on this train, they know where I live. What do you want from me, Jake? What should I do?”

  Jake realized he had no idea. He should know, he ought to have a plan, but he was blank. “I don’t know. But I’m going to keep you alive long enough to figure it out.”

  She gave him a tight but grateful smile. “Thanks. We’ll be safe enough in a cab until we can work out a plan. We should come in on Track 1, right by the 29th Street exit. The taxis are usually on the other side, but that exit’s closed for a couple weeks.”

  “Whatever.” Maybe nobody would kill them between the stairs and the doors.

  The windows darkened when the train rumbled into Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. The car filled with people standing, putting on their coats, gathering their bags. Miriam and Jake lost sight of the Mossad man in the scrum.

  “Ready?” he whispered when the train jerked to a halt.

  She looped her purse strap over her head and one shoulder, let out some slack so the purse rested against her right hip, then slipped her hand in up to her wrist. He wondered what she had in there. More pepper spray? Hand grenades? Rocket launcher? “Ready.”

  Jake thought he should say something encouraging, even though the condor in his stomach had dived off its perch again. “I’ve got your back.”

  Miriam nodded, perhaps a little too quickly.

  The doors ground open.

  FORTY-SEVEN: Philadelphia, 6 December

  The platform filled like a river valley after a dam blowout. Jake and Miriam were swept along by dozens of people streaming through the perpetual gloom toward the stairway to the station’s main level. Jake watched behind them, but all he saw were the blank faces of legions of undead commuters. The rasp of shuffling feet filled his ears.

  The silver sign hanging from the concrete ceiling just before the stairs caught Jake’s eye. He elbowed Miriam’s arm, pointed up. She stopped and swore in Hebrew.

  “Where’s Track Nine?” he asked, afraid he already knew the answer.

  “The other end of the station, by 30th Street. The side that’s closed.”

  They took the stairs two steps at a time. Jake used his temporary height advantage to check the crowd behind them. He spied a Persian face and black leather several steps back. The young man looked straight at him. “Might be one behind us,” Jake reported.

  “Mossad or Hezbollah?”

  “Hezbollah, I think.”

  The stairway spilled them into a massive Art Deco hall of honey-colored marble the size of a football field, busy with a couple hundred commuters. A coffered ceiling hung a hundred feet overhead, while tall, narrow multi-paned windows stretched from the doorway tops to the geometric frieze. The instant they left the stairwell, Jake and Miriam broke from the pack and headed for the middle of the dove-gray, marble-tiled floor.

  Miriam pivoted to scan their surroundings. Jake edged next to her. “Got him? Bomber jacket?”

  “Yes. I’m looking for his friends.”

  All the moving bodies created too much visual clutter. Jake couldn’t see any obvious candidates. “Let’s move. If they’re here, they’ll follow us.”

  “Right.” Miriam nodded down the concourse. “That way.” She quick-stepped east. Jake traced the line of lit Christmas wreaths on the walls to the hall’s opposite end. A perfect 30-foot conical Christmas tree towered perhaps fifty yards away beyond the Amtrak information counter, lights and ornaments packed so tight hardly any greene
ry was visible. The 29th Street doors lay a very long 25 yards past that.

  “We should’ve driven,” Jake grumbled.

  Kelila surfaced just in time to see Schaffer and Eldar march down the huge hall. The Persian boy trailed them by no more than five meters. She didn’t want to spook him, so she paused at the top of the stairway to figure out the layout.

  Five facing pairs of numbered stairways lay at ten-meter intervals down the length of the concourse, odd numbers to the north, even to the south. She stood on Stairway 10. A marble half-wall flanked by massive carved wooden benches surrounded each stairwell. The 30th Street exit was at the west end to her left, the exit doors blocked by yellow “caution” tape. An Amtrak information booth topped by a black flip sign lay between Stairways 7 and 8. Two long red-and-blue banners announced “Food Court” on the south wall behind her.

  Kelila slipped in behind the Persian, buttoned her coat, pulled on her gloves. Her heart pumped with the familiar rush of imminent action. She spotted the other two hostiles flanking Schaffer and Eldar, then David and Sasha gliding along the hall’s outside edges. A blizzard of civilians blew through the little procession. Taking down the hostiles here would be like doing it on a busy city street—no chance for cover or anonymity, no good way to escape. Damn. She tapped her earpiece. “See them?”

  “Got ‘em,” David said. “Big guy on the north side. The one on this side, his face went through a blender.” He cut toward the center.

  “No, stay out there. Take them when they go outside. It’s too crowded in here.”

  The formation pulled even with Stairways 7 and 8. The hostiles gradually drew closer to Schaffer and Eldar.

  Sasha’s voice on the radio. “Gun.”

  “Miriam? The guy from yesterday. Behind us, on our right.”

  “How close?”

  “Too close.”

  Miriam glanced to her right. The man who’d attacked her the day before stared back through bright red eyes set into livid bruises. A taped nose finished the ugly picture. A flash of light on blue steel swung out from under his coat. Behind him, the Mossad man from the train bulled through the travelers milling between two benches, something shiny in his hand.

  Someone screamed, “He’s got a gun!”

  Suddenly the hall was a wild stampede of shrieking people scattering like BBs poured from a box, luggage flying, trash cans clanging. A stocky man in a sport coat blindsided her. She hit the floor hard on her shoulder, rolled and sprawled as her purse spewed its contents.

  A shot.

  The Mossad man’s feet skittered out from under him. He fell like a toppled smokestack onto the arc of blood that spurted out his back. His head bounced off the floor.

  Oh God. Oh God. The same thing she’d always thought at the start of every firefight. Then the adrenaline hit. Everything she saw turned extra sharp. She could hear the mice in the basement.

  Jake skidded on his knees next to her. “Are you okay?”

  Another shot. Behind her, an ash-blond man rolled behind a massive dark-wood bench, took aim, tracking a target from his right to his left. More gunshots clattered off the marble. Policemen charged for cover behind a station map, shooting on the fly.

  These bastards weren’t going to kill her the way they’d killed her father and her husband. Not if she got to them first. “Help me get my stuff!”

  “Are you nuts?” Jake squawked. “Leave it!”

  Miriam flipped onto her stomach and elbow-crawled toward the puddle of her purse gear a few feet away. Jake, cursing, caught up and batted stray bits her way. She didn’t care about her makeup or aspirin or Kleenex; she wanted her wallet and phone. And her gun.

  The Arab with the broken face knelt inside Stairway 8 just a few yards away, near a fallen commuter. He and the blond man exchanged fire over her head. She grabbed her phone and stuffed it into her coat pocket. “Get my wallet!” she yelled, pointing to the black leather bundle in front of Jake. She scrabbled a few feet further, swept up her blued Walther PPK/S.

  “Miriam, what the fuck?”

  She had a shot. She could see the Arab’s hip, poking out from behind the marble railing. She stretched out flat, flipped off the safety, aimed. Her breathing churned like a dishwasher. The front sight wobbled. She fired. The Arab’s leg jerked out of sight. A hit?

  Jake swooped by and clutched her arm. “Come on! This way!”

  Kelila drew her Beretta at the first gunshot, threw herself toward the nearest benches for cover. The Persian boy was already dashing for the south wall, a pistol in his hands. She couldn’t see the big Arab or her team. She dodged from bench to bench past the screaming, sniveling, huddling bodies of commuters and tourists, trying to figure out who was shooting at whom.

  Behind the second bench she found blood smeared across the floor. At the end of it she found David, grimacing with pain and anger amid half a dozen prone, trembling civilians. Kelila squatted next to him, pulled his coat away from his chest. Blood welled through his shirt from a hole low on the left side of his rib cage. Goddamnit! Goddamnit! She grabbed a child’s abandoned blue blanket and pressed it hard against the wound. “Can you walk?”

  He mumbled “Not far” through gritted teeth.

  Shit! Nothing she could do about it. No backup, no way to get him out. She peeked over the bench’s back to catch a glimpse of Schaffer and Eldar disappearing into a side corridor past the nearby glass-faced Cosi café. The big Arab was just seconds behind. Stay with the covers, she told herself. They need help. “Sorry,” she told David, “Do what you can. I have to go.” Then she launched into a sprint, staying low, pumping hard.

  Jake yelled, “Where’s this go?”

  “Market Street.” Miriam dodged a fallen table and the woman sheltering behind it.

  “You! Stop! Police!” An Amtrak cop popped up next to the closed Ben & Jerry’s stand at the corridor’s end. He aimed straight at Miriam. Before either of them could react, Jake heard a slam behind him. The cop collapsed into a puddle of midnight blue.

  Glancing back, Jake spotted the big dark-skinned Arab stampeding toward him like an angry buffalo. The weapon he pointed at Jake looked like a tank gun.

  Jake spied an opening and bellowed “Go right!” He clamped a struggling Miriam in his arms, hauled her off her feet, and dragged her along in his lunge to shelter.

  He landed hard on his back in a narrow hallway lined with food counters. The bright colors and neon signs seemed obscenely cheerful for a shooting gallery. Miriam, heavy on top of him, thrashed in his arms. “Let go! I’ve got a shot!”

  A flash of movement at the other end of the hall. The Persian kid, pistol in both hands.

  Jake rolled them both against the chrome cold case of Delilah’s Southern Cuisine just as the Persian shot at them. His bullet screamed off the marble floor. Miriam fired back twice, the pistol so close to Jake’s head his left ear went dead. The kid disappeared.

  The buffalo lurched into the mouth of the hall, just a few feet from Jake and Miriam. He grinned and raised his pistol.

  Kelila rounded the corner into the food court to find the big Arab next to Dunkin’ Donuts, aiming into a side passage. She charged, firing at a run. Her second shot slapped into his right shoulder as he turned to face her, knocking him back a step.

  She sidestepped and rolled for cover behind a huge, fake terra-cotta flower pot just as the big Arab let off a shot. The reverb off the marble sounded like artillery. His second round crackled through the plastic above her head. Kelila jerked upright, fired twice, the pop of her .22 almost lost in the racket. Then another weapon sounded. Heavy running feet. She peeked over the pot’s rim as the big Arab thumped past the ice cream stand.

  Kelila hesitated only a moment before she jumped into a flat run toward the corridor’s far end. She yelled into her earpiece, “Sasha! Take the covers, I’ve got a hostile!”

  “I’m going after him!” Miriam blurted, her voice too fast, her face too hard.

  “And get yourself killed?” Jake panted. �
��The only way. You’re going to die today. Is if I kill you myself. Mossad’s got him. We keep moving.”

  Jake peeked around the corner, tried to sort out who was shooting where, but the echoes of the bystanders’ screams and the high-pitched whine in his left ear didn’t help. The smell of donuts briefly overwhelmed the stink of gunpowder and fear. He grabbed Miriam’s arm and towed her across yards of frighteningly exposed floor to the substantial tile-and-wood shelter of the Saxby’s Coffee kiosk.

  Two shots behind them—one big, one small—shattering glass, a scream. Who won that one, the buffalo or Elena from Athens? Didn’t matter. Miriam breathed fast and hard next to him, her eyes and gun swiveling like a radar dish searching for a bogie. “How many rounds you got?”

  She hesitated. “Four.”

  Shit. “Stay here.”

  Sprinting the twenty feet to the fallen policeman felt like crossing Central Park naked. Jake hunkered down, noted the cop was still breathing, eased the blocky Glock 22 from the man’s hand. More gunfire screamed down the hallway behind him, but no one had shot him yet; so far, so good. Then another streak across the park. He was surprised to still be alive when he threw himself down next to Miriam. “Pretzels.”

  “What?”

  Jake led Miriam in a scramble over a pile of prone, mewling commuters—the longest five yards of his life—to the open wood-and-white cube of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels.

  The blond plainclothes cop who had dogged Sohrab all the way down the hall was out of sight now, praise Allah. Sohrab crouched at the concourse’s east end behind a black stone pedestal holding a huge sculpture of an angel carrying a dead man. From there, he could stop anyone going in or out the 29th Street doors.

  The targets were behind the stairwell by the tree. Sohrab didn’t have a good angle on them, but he could see the top of the woman’s head. He fired, sprayed chips from the top of the marble half-wall, caused them both to drop out of sight. Damn!