It wasn’t hard to pick out the players, and Sam tucked in beside them like a remora next to an oblivious shark. With Dan’s long-distance help, she read their emails, listened in on their phone calls, and quickly worked her way toward what she was after: a friendly Libyan with knowledge of Natan El Anwar’s whereabouts. If their analysis was correct, Natan El Anwar was slated to replace the late Tariq Ezzat in the Doberman group’s hierarchy.
Tariq Ezzat. The name conjured instant bile even before the images flashed before Sam’s eyes of the vile man’s last act on Earth, firing the shot that ripped a gaping hole in a young girl’s tender body as her mother helplessly watched.
As Sam watched, too, also helpless, but ultimately responsible. Those two words—the words that had changed everything—had come from her mouth: Take him.
Sam shook her head, tried to clear the persistent nightmare from her mind, turned her eyes back to the café across the street. Her mark was inside.
She watched, tried to remain present and focused, but her mind kept returning to her predicament. The CIA seemed to have taken an interest in her. Avery Martinson, former CIA goon and all-around terrible person, had rattled her cage in Izmir shortly after her meeting with Mehmet Kocaoglu. She had listened in on CIA man Jim Price’s phone conversation with an unknown party, a call that seemed to center on Sam and ended with chilling instructions to “stop her.” A surveillance team had picked up her tail shortly thereafter, and it had taken a bit of effort to lose them.
Sam was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t the CIA who had planted the bug in her coat pocket, and who might also have committed the terrifying home intrusion that had rocketed her into this frenzied search for answers.
But why? What was the Agency’s interest? Why did they care? She had been taken completely out of the hunt immediately after Sarah Beth McCulley’s death, days before the intrusion at her home. She was facing the specter of a very public administrative inquiry into the Ezzat incident. Why would anyone have bothered putting her under surveillance?
Martinson’s clumsy attempt to scare her away from Kocaoglu—at least, she assumed Martinson’s warning was about Kocaoglu, a member of the Doberman group, but she wasn’t completely sure—seemed like an obvious clue, and it seemed to go together with Jim Price’s instructions to “stop her.” Those seemed like two perfect reasons to continue her Doberman investigation.
Her former investigation, she corrected herself. She was officially off the Doberman case and was not currently an active Homeland agent. Worse, she was officially under indictment by the United States Attorney for negligent homicide, which to her seemed positively draconian considering the facts. Perhaps she had indeed made a mistake—a terrible, tragic one, no question—but to be charged with a crime? Manslaughter, no less? It seemed outrageous, a miscarriage of justice, well beyond the pale. It seemed so . . . wrong.
How could it all have possibly come to this? She had no answers. But she hoped to squeeze a clue or two from Natan El Anwar.
Motion drew her eye and Sam focused on the young woman leaving the café across the street. The woman had just concluded a brief meeting with a man wearing traditional Muslim garb, but who, to Sam’s eye, was obviously American. There was something in the way he carried himself. Sam’s assessment was undoubtedly also biased by her knowledge that the man was American. Josh Garrett, Assistant to the Director of Advanced Concepts, Exel Oil. Advanced Concepts? Really?
Sam rose from her seat on the park bench, followed the woman at a distance, bided her time. Then, when the moment seemed not quite right but at least not entirely wrong, Sam closed the distance between them. “Fatima,” she called.
The woman didn’t stop. She walked faster. It was what you did in Libya. If they were calling your name, you had already lost, and no amount of conversation was going to change it. You were better off trying to find a way to escape.
“Fatima,” Sam repeated. “I’m a friend of Mr. Garrett’s.”
Fatima walked faster, large hips working harder under the coverall she wore. The woman tucked the scarf more tightly around her face.
Sam sped up, closed the distance, and tucked in beside the frightened woman. “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I’m a friend. I’m not here to do you any harm.”
“You’re already doing harm,” Fatima said between clenched teeth. Her English was nearly perfect.
“Is there someplace we can talk?”
“You’re placing me in danger.”
“That’s not my intention,” Sam said.
Something like a laugh escaped from beneath Fatima’s scarf. “Are you all the same?”
This isn’t going well, Sam thought. But she was dead in the water without a bit of information, so she took a chance. She held the photo of Natan El Anwar for Fatima to see. “I need to find this man,” Sam said. “You used to work for him.”
Fatima stopped and turned to face Sam. Only her eyes were visible, but Fatima’s eyes communicated plenty.
“He is not someone a woman seeks,” Fatima said.
“Not a nice guy?”
“More animal than man.”
“Drugs? Guns?”
Fatima nodded. “But mostly girls.”
“All the more reason I need to find him,” Sam said.
Fatima turned, continued on her way, but spoke as she did so. “If I help you, you must never approach me again.”
“Scout’s honor.”
Fatima kept walking. “Club Paradise,” she finally said. “Usually after ten.”
A grimace crossed Sam’s face. A strip club? Really? Was this some kind of trap? “Thank you,” she said. “But isn’t that a strange place for a Muslim man to spend his time, especially now?” Meaning, in the post-Gaddafi food-fight between militias jockeying for prominence, each trying to out-Islam the next.
“Libyan society is not nearly as monolithic as it is portrayed,” Fatima said.
“Just the same,” Sam said. “It sounds like a dangerous place to spend time.”
“If only it were,” Fatima said. “And maybe it is, for some. But not for Natan El Anwar.”
“He has friends there?”
“He is the owner. This makes him powerful. He knows all of the pious men who pay for . . . time with his girls.”
Sam nodded. It was a valuable bit of information, and it would change how she approached El Anwar. She expressed her thanks to Fatima and offered recompense for the woman’s time and trouble, but was rebuffed with a dismissive wave. “Please go, and leave me alone,” Fatima said.
* * *
There wasn’t a good way to go about it, really. If Sam went inside, she’d be spotted instantly as an impostor, so she waited and watched, lying low in the backseat of a rented sedan parked in the employee lot behind Club Paradise. She was beneath a blanket, little more than her eyes protruding, and had an unimpeded view of the rear entrance.
The horizon turned crimson, then dark. A bare bulb winked on above the club’s service entrance. Covered women with bowed heads walked in but didn’t leave. Their shifts would undoubtedly last until the small hours of the morning. Sam wondered how the women reconciled their employment with the rest of their lives. Tenuous, she concluded. And, as Fatima had hinted, more than a little dangerous, which was probably insight into the degree of economic desperation that had settled upon Libya, yet another squalid, corrupt kleptocracy perched atop billions of barrels of oil.
It was close to midnight when Natan El Anwar arrived. He parked a gleaming black Mercedes a few feet from the door, planted a snakeskin boot in the dust, stood to his full but unimpressive height, re-slicked his already-slicked hair, thrust his clean-shaven chin forward, and swaggered through the door.
Sam was predisposed from Fatima’s description to dislike El Anwar, but she thought she’d probably want to kick the cocky little man’s ass even without prior knowledge of his résumé. He gave off the prick vibe. It stirred her deep-seated desire to deliver comeuppance with extreme prejudice, which she had c
ome to regard as equal parts virtue and vice. She would have to work extra hard to stay cautious and strategic, she reminded herself. She was not on friendly turf.
She looked at El Anwar’s car. Spotless. The Mercedes hood ornament stood erect and intact. The aftermarket rims had only a thin coating of dust on them. The windows were tinted and very clean. It was perhaps the only clean car Sam had seen since her arrival. Every other vehicle on Tripoli’s roads was tired, dust-caked, poorly maintained. Natan El Anwar didn’t care about blending in, and he wasn’t worried about parading around in a gleaming beacon of prosperity in a city full of the desperately poor. That meant, as Fatima had suggested, that he had all the protection he needed, and then some.
At some point, working women stopped arriving to begin their shifts and the employee lot grew quiet. Sam’s eyes grew heavy, her body warm and cozy beneath the blanket. Her thoughts liquefied and she drifted off to sleep.
* * *
Trees still leafless. A cold, damp Potomac chill in the air. Familiar radio chatter in clipped tones.
The playground. The mom. The man. The gun. The girl.
The scream.
The blood.
Sam cried out. She awakened with tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. Her heart hammered. Her mind reeled. For a moment, she had forgotten where she was. Her back was stiff from lying in the car.
A glow had spread through the darkness. Dawn wasn’t far away. Shit. How long had she been asleep?
She wiped the dried spit from the corner of her mouth and cleared the cobwebs from her mind, but the rock in the pit of her stomach, the residue of an unbelievable nightmare, wouldn’t leave her. It cast its familiar pall over everything, and it brought with it the same familiar thought: I can’t do this much longer. But was there a choice?
Her eyes moved to the back door of the club. The bare bulb still shone bravely, the light bouncing off the gleaming Mercedes. Sam breathed a sigh of relief. El Anwar hadn’t left.
She looked around, keeping her head low, searching for any watchers she might have accumulated during her ill-advised slumber. She didn’t see any, but it didn’t make her feel any better. The most important goons were those you didn’t see.
The door to the club swung open. A thin, slight figure emerged, covered with a cloak and veil. The girl walked quickly through the dirt parking lot and disappeared down an adjacent alleyway.
Another followed, this one collected by a car driven by a skinny old man with a flaccid cigarette dangling from his lips. A third working girl clocked out, and then a fourth.
Then Natan El Anwar emerged, now covered by a well-tailored jacket and wearing sunglasses despite the predawn darkness. He pulled his keys from a pocket and pressed the fob. The Mercedes chirped and the parking lights flashed. El Anwar strutted forward, opened the driver’s door, and sat heavily in the seat. The engine started almost before the door shut, and El Anwar left in a hurry.
Sam crawled into the driver’s seat of her rented sedan, started the engine, checked around again for any signs of a tail, and followed El Anwar at a distance. There wasn’t much traffic in the wee hours, and she would have to give him a lot of leash to avoid giving herself away.
Too much leash. She lost him, then scrambled to find him again, then repeated the cycle half a dozen times as he sped through Tripoli’s sparsely trafficked streets. She found him again every time, sometimes through skill and experience and other times through pure happenstance.
His trip ended in the Gargaresh District. It was what passed for affluence in post-Gaddafi Libya. It featured shopping, cuisine, and the closest thing to new construction just about anywhere in Tripoli, but with the signature third-world detritus left strewn about, spilling over low walls and around facades, universally common to any neighborhood aspiring to transcend its roots.
El Anwar stopped in front of a dark gray mid-rise residential building. Sam turned down a side street a little more than a block away from El Anwar’s car, which the little prince had left parked at the curb. She drove half a block perpendicular to the main road and stopped next to an empty lot. It afforded a view of the gray mid-rise apartment building, but not its entrance.
She pulled field glasses from her bag. They didn’t offer the kind of magnification she’d have preferred, but they would have to do. She trained them on the building. Laundry hung from just about every balcony. It reminded her of institutionalized housing, like in Russia or Korea, a vibe of grinding poverty mixed with a sort of pleasant hominess. But it didn’t seem like a place El Anwar, with his gleaming Mercedes and his snakeskin boots, would spend much time. Booty call? Drug transaction? Money laundering, perhaps?
Then she panned the field glasses to the top of the building. Palm trees. A wall of glass windows, recessed from the building’s edge, reflected the dawn light. A penthouse. That seemed more El Anwar’s style. She panned back and forth across the expanse, noting again the incongruity. Money, style, unabashed hedonism, all in what was fast becoming yet another Middle Eastern theocracy.
Light reflected as a tall glass door opened, lingered ajar, and closed slowly. Two figures appeared and walked toward the edge of the roof. They stopped beneath a tall, healthy palm tree.
Sam adjusted the focus. She saw a tall, dark-haired girl in a bikini and a short Arab-looking man with slicked-back hair. El Anwar was the obvious conclusion, though Sam couldn’t be sure. The couple clinked wineglasses in a toast, drank, and regarded the sunrise. The woman’s hand slipped around his back, their faces turned inward, and they kissed. Long and wet, from the looks of it.
Sam watched the proceedings on the balcony become affectionate, then intimate. The couple retreated into the penthouse to finish what they’d started. Certainly not a pious proceeding and one undertaken in full view of anyone who cared to look. The brashness of it struck Sam again. El Anwar really didn’t care what people thought about his lifestyle. In fact, it almost seemed like he went out of his way to rub everyone’s nose in it.
Sam’s eyes burned with exhaustion, but she knew there’d never be a better time to approach. Waiting longer just increased the odds she’d be spotted by someone associated with El Anwar.
She returned to her car, drove the short distance to the apartment building, parked in the dirt lot in back. She hurried into the building and took the elevator to the second-to-top floor. She walked up the last flight of stairs. She expected to find a security detail in front of the penthouse entrance, but there wasn’t one. It struck Sam as odd. Even powerful men took precautions, but maybe there was no need. Maybe El Anwar was connected so well that precautions were unnecessary. Or maybe he was fooling himself.
The lock on the penthouse entrance door was child’s play. Sam used a credit card to shove the bolt aside. The door opened without protest and there was no alarm.
The woman was a moaner, and her passionate cries guided Sam to the bedroom. She found El Anwar enthusiastically in flagrante. The girl had somehow attained a decidedly improbable position. Sam wondered whether her own flexibility would allow her to even attempt what she saw.
Sam cleared her throat, without effect. El Anwar’s consort had a pair of lungs on her. The girl was making quite a racket and Sam wondered idly whether the audible ecstasy was real or contrived. It certainly had a performance-like quality to it.
Sam took a seat on a large plush chair shaped like a woman’s shoe. “Good morning,” she said with a smile. She casually held a pistol in her hand.
The frolicking stopped abruptly, the girl pulled the bedcovers over herself, and El Anwar leapt to his feet, striking what might have been a tough pose were it not for his unimpressive undercarriage on full display.
Sam chuckled. “I’m impressed,” she said. “You were doing some really good work there. You might not even have to pay her.”
El Anwar cursed in Arabic.
“What you just said is inaccurate,” Sam replied, amusement on her face. “I definitely do not have sex with farm animals.” She pointed the pistol toward the
bed. “Have a seat.”
“You are making a serious mistake,” El Anwar said. It was clear he was going for menace, but he didn’t quite get there. His voice was high and a little fragile.
“You’re exactly right,” Sam said. “We might be making a serious mistake, which is why I was sent here.”
Anger turned to confusion and then to the beginnings of comprehension as El Anwar’s eyes narrowed. “Mercer,” he said.
Sam had no idea who or what Mercer was, but she certainly wasn’t going to ask. “Consider this an interview,” she said. “A last little formality before your promotion takes effect.”
El Anwar’s chest puffed and he balled his hands into fists.
“Relax. I’m not here to interfere,” she said. “I’m just here to check up on our investment.”
“Our investment?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re a Western harlot. I won’t be associated with you.”
Sam smiled. “You prefer the Eastern variety?”
El Anwar reddened, an odd reaction given the circumstances.
“You don’t take your Islam as seriously as your neighbors do, Natan,” she said. “I view that as a security risk.”
El Anwar’s chin jutted fractionally further forward. “What do you want?”
Sam examined her gun idly. “As I said, I’m checking up on our investment. You’re about to take on a very important role, and my job is to make sure you’re worthy.”
El Anwar gave her a hard stare. “Why haven’t we met before?”
Sam snorted. “You haven’t rated my attention until now.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“And you find that unusual?”
El Anwar didn’t reply.
“We take security very seriously,” Sam said. “Now let’s get to business. Who have you talked to about Ezzat?”
The Blowback Protocol: A Sam Jameson Thriller Page 10
