by Mark Greaney
“Who . . . who are you?”
“Well, I’ll tell you who I’m not. I’m not the lifeline you were hoping for.”
The prisoner’s eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t understand. I demand to speak to my embassy.”
“Afraid that won’t be possible. The locals here don’t have the best consular system around, I can tell you that. And, unfortunately, there is no Finnish consulate outstation here in Saydnaya Prison.” Drexler chuckled at his joke and looked at the guards, but they did not speak English, so the humor was lost on them.
The prisoner just cocked his head, regarding Drexler as if he were mad.
“The problem is,” the Swiss man continued, “that you have something that I desperately need.”
“What do I have? I had a backpack with me in my hotel room. Check it out. You can have anything. Cameras, computer . . . money. Anything you—”
“What I really need, actually, is your identity. I must make my way into Europe, and that is a problem. You see . . . I was a very bad boy once.” He held up a hand and corrected his last statement. “More than once, to be perfectly frank, so the Europeans don’t like me. In fact, they are hunting me down. I had a little plastic surgery on my face two years ago, so it is difficult for their cameras and computers to recognize me. But to get into Europe . . . it is more difficult. With your identity, however, I can travel freely.”
The Finn nodded slowly, thinking he understood. “I get it. You need my passport.” He was conspiratorial now. “It’s true. You and I look similar. We’re about the same size, same age. You can use it. Just let me go.”
Drexler nodded along with the Finn for a moment, they both smiled, and then Drexler continued smiling, but his up-and-down head bob suddenly turned into a left-and-right shake of the head.
Still smiling, still happy as he could be, Drexler said, “But you don’t get it, man. You don’t understand.”
Veeti Takala stopped smiling. “Don’t understand what?”
“A passport alone won’t work.”
“What do you want, then?”
“It’s not what I want, friend; it’s what I need. I need . . .” Drexler reached inside his jacket, drew his FN pistol from his shoulder holster, and flipped off the safety. “I need your fingerprints, and there’s just no pleasant way to take them from you while you’re alive, so I’ll do you the kind gesture of making this easy for you.”
The Finn’s face went white, and his eyes locked on the gun.
Sebastian Drexler leveled the gun at the man’s heart. “I don’t know if you are curious, but I’ve been told by the doctors that the moment this gun goes bang, I will have fewer than thirty-six hours to get into Europe before the prints begin to decay.”
The Finn started to hyperventilate. Through it, though, he was able to croak out, “Sir . . . I beg of you—”
“Don’t beg. I am you now, and you are me, and I would never lower myself to begging.” Drexler took a step back and fired one round into the man’s chest.
The blast in the small room was earsplitting. The 5.7-millimeter projectile tore through the Finn’s heart at a range of less than three meters. The guards standing next to the prisoner held him by the shoulders as he crumpled forward, then pushed him back up against the wall as Drexler himself helped to unhook Takala’s wrists from his shackles. Drexler then stepped to the side, two male medical attendants wheeled a gurney straight into the room, and together with the others they laid the prisoner down. The victim was on his back and being rolled out of the holding room before his eyes flitted and rolled up and the last breath escaped his lungs. As they pushed him up the hallway towards the operating room, Drexler shouted out in Arabic, “The clock is ticking! Watch the hands! Take care of the fingers! Those are mine now.”
Drexler could not watch the procedure on the body; he had to get himself prepped, so while the surgeon and his team worked in the operating room, Drexler undressed and took a quick shower. After this, he entered another operating room, sat on a chair waiting for him there, and reached his hands over a table covered with blue surgical draping. Nurses positioned his arms so his hands faced up, and leather bindings were wrapped around his wrists so he could not move them.
Some time later Dr. Qureshi entered the room, carrying stacks of interlocking metal pans. Everything was arrayed on tray tables near Drexler, and while he watched the clock, Qureshi and his team went to work.
The surgical team began with the pinky finger on Drexler’s left hand. They applied a caustic solvent on the fingertip to roughen it up, and the patient grunted with pain, but he urged the surgeon to continue. A silicone gum was spread in a thin sheet on the skin to protect it, and then Qureshi took a soggy wet piece of live natural sponge out of a dish of salt water with a pair of forceps. This the surgeon cut to the size of Drexler’s fingertip, taking his time to make a precise little oval.
Some high-end fingerprint readers have a feature designed to ensure that the prints are not silicone imprints or harvested from cadavers by using software to compare the spatial moisture pattern of a finger’s pores to detect natural secretions. But Drexler knew a spoof for this. The small organic sponge, saturated with salt water and a little glycerin and placed carefully under the cadaver print, kept the dead skin moist longer, and it allowed just enough dampness to register on the surface.
Once the sponge was glued in place with a latex adhesive that bonded with the skin, the surgeon lowered surgical eye loupes over his eyes to magnify Drexler’s fingers. He very carefully reached a set of straight-blade forceps into a dish marked “L-Hand, 5” in Arabic to indicate the pinky finger, and he retrieved Veeti Takala’s pink flesh.
Drexler was surprised how thick the dead skin was; he had pictured something translucent, like an onion peel, but the surgeon held up a dense and opaque chunk of human tissue.
Drexler asked, “How are you going to make that look natural on my finger?”
The surgeon did not look up from his magnifier. “The cement I will use on the sides will be tinted to your skin tone.” He shrugged a little, though he kept working. “A close examination of your hand will reveal that these fingerprints are not your own, but it will still be difficult to detect.”
“The Mukhabarat will hold you personally accountable if I fail, Doctor. If that was not clear before, let me stress it now.”
Looking through his magnifying loupes, the surgeon put cement on the sides of the dead flesh, very carefully, as if he were painting a tiny figurine. As he did this he said, “I am the best vascular surgeon in Damascus. I am not, however, a cosmetic surgeon. You have my full capabilities at your disposal, and you will not leave here until I am certain I cannot provide you with better results. If that is not good enough, then I suppose we will both suffer. Brow wipe!”
Drexler cocked his head at the exclamation, but understood when a nurse stepped in and blotted the surgeon’s forehead.
Qureshi continued. “In the meantime, sir. I must ask you to stop talking. You will have your job to do wherever it is you need these new fingerprints to take you. But for now, allow me to do my job. It would be a pity if your threats caused me to perspire all over my masterpiece.”
Drexler wondered if Qureshi knew he could have him thrown into a cell here at Saydnaya for his attitude even if he did a perfect job on his hands.
But he let the surgeon slide, for now.
Qureshi placed Takala’s fingertip over Drexler’s finger and pressed it into place. He added more cement around the sides, tinted it with a paintbrush and a natural coloring, and placed a piece of plastic over the finger. Then his assisting surgeon used padded tissue forceps to hold the fingertip in place while Qureshi went on to the pinky finger on the right hand.
Back and forth they went on like this, left hand to right and then back to left, one finger at a time. It was a slow and meticulous process, and the surgeon weathered the periodic admonition
s of his patient throughout. Drexler kept an eye on the clock across the room and watched it tick away, and he took out his frustrations on Dr. Qureshi, but the surgeon remained steadfast, and he got the job done.
Just after the two-hour point the white-haired Syrian gently clamped the padded forceps onto the last finger, the thumb on the right hand. He looked up at his patient. “I am aware you understand the protocol, but I will remind you. You will need to keep these moist. A lotion will travel in your Dopp kit; it is marked as a store brand, but in actuality it is made for use in cadaver labs in Europe and America to keep necrotic tissue fresh. Use it every two hours.
“Even so . . . the flesh will begin to deteriorate in thirty-six hours, and the sponge secretions will have dried out by then, as well.”
* * *
• • •
Sebastian Drexler wore oversized gloves to protect his fingers as he walked out to the waiting helicopter, already spooling up on the launch pad behind the Red Building. His three intelligence officer escorts climbed into the Mi-8 with him, and within seconds they had lifted off towards the airport in Damascus.
As they flew high over the green landscape, Drexler had one of the Mukhabarat men place a call to a phone number he gave him from memory. A headset was placed on Drexler’s head, and he waited to hear a woman’s voice answer on the other line.
“Yes?” It was Shakira Azzam.
“It’s me. I’m leaving now. I’ll be on the ground there late this evening.” The U.S. and Europeans had massive amounts of electronic intelligence assets pointed at Syria, and even though it was difficult to grab a satellite call, Drexler knew he needed to stay vague when speaking on an open line.
Shakira Azzam replied, “And my husband knows you are going?”
“Yes. He asked me personally to go and attend to the issue.”
“Well . . . he and I both want you to have a successful journey, but he and I are after a different outcome.”
“You can rely on me.”
“I want updates.” A pause. “And I look forward to your safe return. If something should delay you, I will reach out to my own contacts abroad to try to find you . . . in case you need some help.”
Drexler knew this was a not-so-veiled threat against him trying to run from Syria.
“I will be home within days, my darling.”
“And we will celebrate.” Shakira hung up the phone, and Drexler nodded to one of the officers in the back of the Mi-8, who then removed the headset.
The Swiss intelligence agent looked out the window now as the hills below gave way to the northern suburbs of Damascus, anxious but supremely confident about the mission ahead of him.
CHAPTER 27
Court Gentry sat in the back of a twenty-five-year-old Saab 340 turboprop, his mind full of worry about the mission ahead of him.
He was winging it, he knew, and until he got on the ground and took in the lay of the land, he would have no way of planning his next move.
The vibration of the landing gear lowering into place below his feet brought him back into awareness of his surroundings. He looked out the window over his right shoulder; all he could see from this vantage point was the endless green sea. The aircraft seemed like it couldn’t have been more than a thousand feet in the air, but just then the plane entered a hard bank to the north, tipping Court forward in his side-facing seat, and when it leveled off he looked out the window again and saw whitewashed buildings on the coastline, then terraced olive fields on a hillside.
It looked utterly peaceful, but he knew that the area around Latakia was anything but. It was in the hands of the Syrian regime and its proxies, but insurgent attacks were not uncommon.
Here in the cabin with him were a dozen other men. He hadn’t spoken to any of them, nor they to him, but he took them all for security contractors of some sort. A couple were Hispanic-looking, a couple more had to have been Japanese, one was black, and the rest were fit-looking bearded white guys. Just like Court himself.
They all sat in silence, their packs in their laps or by their sides.
Over the airfield Court had a moment of deep unease about his decision to come to Syria. Latakia’s only airport, Martyr Abdul al-Azzam, had been divided into two separate entities with two separate names. The Russians had erected Hmeymim air base virtually on top of the commercial airport, and they effectively ran the vast majority of the place now, so much so that even before he touched down he could see evidence of their presence everywhere. The first three aircraft Court saw upon landing all bore Russian military markings. A pair of Su-27 fighters and a massive Ilyushin Il-76 cargo jet were all taxiing to the parallel runway, and a long row of new and massive bombproof hangars to the east showed him that the Russians were dug in and planning on staying awhile.
Court had read that this was Russia’s only fixed air base outside its borders anywhere on Earth, which told him something about their commitment to maintaining influence over Syria. A Russian admiral had bragged that Hmeymim was its newest “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Med, a boast Court understood better now as he looked around at the incredible amount of military aviation hardware on display.
As his plane touched down and raced along the runway, it shot past a couple of Syrian Arab Air Force MiG-25 Foxbats, then a Russian Mi-8 helicopter, a pair of Russian MiG-29s, and more Russian and Syrian cargo and transport aircraft.
The Saab turboprop taxied to the only nonmilitary apron on the entire airfield and parked next to an Iranian commercial Airbus A320, and here Court followed the other passengers and a member of the flight crew to the exit.
He stepped through the hatch with just a small bag holding a small amount of clothing and gear, his orders from KWA, a wallet stuffed with euros, and his forged documents for Syrian immigration; Lars Klossner had assured him the KWA men working with the Desert Hawks would provide him everything he needed and, since he’d be thoroughly searched by Syrian immigration officials on his arrival, there was no point taking anything he didn’t need that might get confiscated.
As he deplaned on the warm, sunny tarmac, a cluster of three armed Syrian officials greeted him and the others with bored nods, and together they walked up a metal stairway and into the terminal. Here, Syrian Arab Army forces stood around acting as security, wearing camouflage uniforms. Court saw that most were outfitted with AK-103 rifles, and a few carried pistols. Several armed Russian soldiers were sitting around, as well, which was an odd sight in an airport terminal, especially considering the fact that the men were armed but didn’t seem to be providing any security or other function.
As Court followed the immigration men down a long hall, he saw the flag of the regime—green, white, and black stripes with two green stars—hanging everywhere, along with photographs and paintings of Ahmed Azzam. In some the thin ruler of Syria wore business suits and smiled, and in others he wore various military uniforms and scowled, but he was always there, always looming large over the airport terminal.
Court figured he’d be seeing a lot of Ahmed’s face in the coming days.
The American posing as a Canadian was X-rayed, wanded, and frisked; his satchel of gear was perfunctorily inspected by unsmiling men who seemed more interested in their next smoke break than capturing an assassin entering their nation by private aircraft. Probably, Court surmised, since there were hundreds of private security contractors in the country, and they were constantly coming and going via this same route.
But when his Inmarsat satellite phone was pulled out of his bag and looked over, the customs inspector confiscated it.
“No phone,” the man said.
Court was next separated from the other contractors and led to a desk in the immigration office, where they took his documents, looked them over, then looked Court himself over. An official there made a call and soon a middle-aged mustachioed man in a gray suit appeared, and he took the passport and checked both it a
nd Court over even more carefully than the immigration officer had. Court took the man to be from Syria’s Mukhabarat.
The man with the mustache finally handed the passport back to the immigration officer, and he leaned over his shoulder while he checked it against a computer in front of him. As he did he addressed Court in accented English. “You are Graham Wade from Canada.”
Court nodded. “That’s right.”
“You are KWA. Contracted to Liwa Suqur al Sahara.”
“The Desert Hawks Brigade. Right again.”
The immigration officer began typing on his computer. Soon a printer behind him fired out several pages, and the official stamped them with three different embossing tools, folded them, and placed them in a plastic jacket. He stamped the passport and handed it all back to Court. The Mukhabarat man said, “You are permitted to enter the Syrian Arab Republic. You are not permitted to travel off your military base unless escorted by an officer of the Desert Hawks, the Mukhabarat, or the Ministry of the Interior. Failure to comply means you will be subject to arrest and expulsion, or arrest and a prison term.”
Court said, “No wandering around. Got it.”
“Photography, audio recordings, mapmaking, telephones for personal use, and GPS devices are prohibited.”
“Okay.” Court was allowed to pass, and when he stepped out into the arrivals hall, he saw more uniformed Russians, as well as a large group of men in business suits pulling along hand luggage. These men, Court assumed, were Iranians: either diplomats, businessmen, or a mixture of both, getting ready to leave on the Airbus he’d seen on the tarmac.
The other mercs from his flight all found their rides, and they trickled out of the terminal. Court, on the other hand, stood there in the middle of the small arrivals hall for a few minutes, and then, when he saw no one there to greet him, he walked out the front of the building and into the sunshine.
Across the parking lot he saw a beige pickup with a machine gun mounted in the back and four men standing around it. They wore Western-looking desert-print military uniforms, but they were all clearly Arab men. They didn’t look his way, so Court kept hunting for the KWA man he had been told he would meet here at the airport.
