Primary Target

by Jack Mars

  After the injection, he would simply leave the building through the nearest emergency exit, not twenty meters past her. Her friends would see him, yes, they would. But they were all drunk, and his work would be done before they could move.

  Later, they would describe him to the police. Only by then, he would no longer appear as they described them.

  Ah. Here was Rita. He was moving close to her now. People were milling around very nearby. That was fine.

  Rita would never speak to anyone about her friendship with Elizabeth Barrett.

  She would never speak to anyone about her friend Ahmet and how they met.

  She would never speak to anyone about how Ahmet and she dreamed up a plan to help Elizabeth Barrett escape from her confinement.

  She would never speak to anyone… again.

  He looked at the syringe in his hand. He had it right out in the open. Such was the environment in discos that a man could stand in a crowd, brandishing a poison injection, and testing the plunger just a bit.

  Rita and her shapely, beautiful neck were just in front of him now. She was all neck to him, like a goose, or even a swan. A vein pulsed there.

  He reached for her.

  BANG!

  Suddenly, to his left, the emergency door burst open. Large men surged in. The police! They pushed people to the ground, screaming and cursing. More and more of them came—five, ten, fifteen. A few had their nightsticks out, wielding them but not hitting anyone.

  Across the club, another group stormed in through the front entrance.

  Rita turned to see the commotion. Amazing! They were looking for her! Three policemen climbed over the barrier and into the VIP area.

  Rita had moved away from the railing. The police were shouting at her.

  The man dropped his syringe to the floor.

  Mission aborted.

  He kicked it under a table.

  Suddenly the police were on him, surging past him, shoving him to the wall and out of their way.

  The music stopped. The lights came on.

  The man allowed himself to be pushed and shoved along, his hands in the air to show they were empty. He was one of many, a face in the crowd, someone who was simply here for a night of good times, no threat to anyone.

  * * *

  She did not know where she was.

  For a long time, Elizabeth drifted in darkness, but then her thoughts started climbing up and out of the abyss.

  They were confused thoughts, a mad jumble of images and ideas, and sensations and disembodied voices, all superimposed on each other. She recovered slowly. She felt how her lungs were filling with air, and then she began to do it consciously and with pleasure. She was breathing!

  More clearly now she heard the car engine, and mingled with that, the sound of unfamiliar voices. Several men were speaking in a language she did not understand. She tried to open her eyes. Her eyelids seemed glued firmly shut. They were so heavy it was almost unnatural to lift them.

  In the first moments, her vision was out of focus. It was like a photograph taken at night, through a rainy, foggy window. Everything was smeared and hazy and very dark. But with each successive moment of consciousness, her wounded brain began to put all the puzzle pieces together. Soon enough, the picture became clearer—resolving itself, slowly and inexorably, into something she did not want to see.

  She found herself in a car full of strangers, driving through the night.

  Inky darkness flew along outside her window, shadowy landscapes that were formless and empty. The car moved too quickly over rutted and pitted roads, shuddering and banging the entire time. She could make out nothing about where she was. The car seemed to be passing through an unpopulated countryside—there were no lights out there at all. She was in the back seat of the car. The full horror of it began to sink in.

  What happened?

  Where are they taking me?

  Who are these men?

  As if on cue, that question was answered. Ahmet was in the front passenger seat. He turned and looked back at her. He stared at her for a moment, as if she were some kind of insect, or an animal about to be dissected.

  Her whole body had gone numb. Now she noticed her tongue. It felt thick in her mouth. She made a sound, like a shout, but also like the horrible groaning of an animal.

  The men ignored her. They talked incessantly, excitedly, almost in a panic. Their language seemed like the language of a lost jungle tribe.

  A sudden attack of fear surged within her.

  I can’t do this! I do not want to go anywhere with these people!

  She wanted to go home. She wanted to go back! Her heart beat at a furious pace, and the blood pounded inside her temples. She pictured her mother and father—the terror they would feel. How stupid she had been!

  Someone said something she did not understand. Maybe they were speaking in Turkish, since Ahmet was a Turk.

  Is he really a Turk?

  She realized she knew nothing about him, only what Rita had told her. He could be anyone from anywhere. Terror suddenly took hold of her.

  He could be anyone.

  She wanted to run away so badly, to run away and forget all of this. She wanted out.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  Nobody seemed to pay attention.

  What if they don’t speak English?

  But it couldn’t be. She knew for sure that Ahmet spoke English.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” she said again.

  The man behind the wheel said something in the foreign language. Ahmet pulled a bottle from his leather jacket. It was filled with a dark liquid. Ahmet stretched out his arm to give Elizabeth the bottle.

  “Drink this.”

  His eyes sparkled at her. He looked like a demon.

  She shook her head. “No. I won’t.”

  The big man who was sitting quietly to her right all this time suddenly turned toward her, and with only his left hand, he pressed her entire body against the seat. The man held down her body with his terrible strength, and at the same time, he opened her mouth with his other hand, compressing her cheeks together, his fingers painfully pushing into her skin.

  Ahmet stretched back from the front seat, held the bottle above her head, and poured the alcohol into her mouth—it burned like wildfire.

  The flaming liquid fell onto her tongue and flowed down her throat. The nasty liquid warmed her from the inside. A surge of heat suddenly enveloped her like a cozy blanket.

  The voices faded and started drifting somewhere far away. She felt much better. Strange waves of sensation were already carrying her into the darkness.

  Again.

  * * *

  They were alien to her—men with blurred faces, framed by dark hair and beards. She did not understand what they were saying, and she did not care—she was beyond caring. She felt herself floating in the air like a balloon—so light and indifferent.

  She could no longer think, or feel. She did not belong to herself. Her life was to be decided by strange and scary people. She could not resist anything. She could not say anything. She could not speak at all.

  One of the blurry faces spoke to her in English. His voice seemed to echo from far away. “We’re going to be in the open for a moment,” he said. “Don’t cry out or say a word. No one will help you.”

  Was she hallucinating? The men all seemed to have the same facial features. They were just blank faces, washed out, pixelated, devoid of any specific characteristics, as if they did not have faces at all. The dark framing of their hair and their thick beards made their heads seem disproportionately large. They were men with gigantic heads, and faces that all looked identical.

  She was out of the car now.

  Suddenly, the darkness enveloped her again. But this new darkness was different. It was not the kind of darkness into which you fall instantly, and disappear into a deep abyss, and which doesn’t give you a chance to get scared for even a split second. It was not the same kind of darkness
that she had already experienced.

  This time it was a darkness where you realize that the worst is just moments or even seconds away. It was the kind of darkness the condemned man experiences when he is brought to the scaffold to be executed.

  They had covered her head with a black hood.

  One of the men carried her. She felt herself become like some boneless deep sea creature, a jellyfish, but a jellyfish made of bread dough, malleable and light. Her breathing slowed down, her heart was barely beating, her muscles became limp and formless, and her body was slung over someone’s shoulder like a bag of rice.

  She knew it was the beginning of the end. Soon she would be killed. There would be no explanation of anything—just darkness, confusion, and then death.

  She saw her father again, looking for her, very scared.

  Her father…

  The President of the United States.

  She would tell them. It was all a mistake. They had taken the daughter of the President. They were going to be in big trouble.

  Of course, they knew that already. That was the whole point of this. The weight of knowledge landed on her with a nearly audible thud. This wasn’t a mistake. It was a kidnapping, and had been planned long before.

  Rita. Rita had done this to her.

  Where was she now? Was she in on it?

  It was cold out, and she felt them crossing a gap, an empty space, a threshold of some kind. Then she was sprawled on a padded seat, and her face was uncovered.

  They were moving once again. She looked out and saw that they were on a boat, the boat racing, bounding, no lights on, across vast and open water.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  May 8

  3:15 a.m. Arabian Standard Time (2:15 a.m. Central European Summer Time; 8:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, May 7)

  Al-Fallujah

  45 miles west of Baghdad

  Iraq

  The street where they met was wrecked.

  The Americans had taken the city in brutal house-to-house fighting six months before. All this time later, nothing had been rebuilt. Buildings were mere rubble, or were pockmarked with bullet holes. Scrap metal littered the streets and alleyways. Fresh water was brought in on trucks. The sewage system was destroyed. Half the city still had no electricity.

  The locals called it punishment. The Americans called it justice.

  The man called himself Abu the Martyr. He was forty-three years old and long ago had started turning gray. His beard was shot through with gray and white. His vision, once so acute, was beginning to fail. When reading the Holy Quran in the evenings, he was forced to hold it as far from his face as his arms would allow. Soon, someone would have to hold it up for him from across the room.

  He had been trying to martyr himself for more than twenty years. He was willing, but Allah had chosen not to take him.

  “His will, not mine, be done,” the Martyr whispered.

  He quietly smoked a cigarette and stood in the doorway of an abandoned building. The front façade of the building was intact. The rear of the building was open air and a pile of shattered bricks. A missile or rocket had hit this place, a very typical residential building in what had once been a poor, crowded, but very typical residential neighborhood.

  Up the street, a car appeared, its headlights off. It rolled slowly through the ripped up asphalt that littered the road. It descended into a shallow missile crater, then came up the other side.

  Now the Martyr could see it more clearly. An old black armored Mercedes, windows smoked, metal rutted and pitted and banged in from use in a war zone. The man was here, just as he announced he would be. How he managed to cross back and forth through the American military checkpoints was a mystery, the answer known only to him.

  How he managed to openly cross territory held by Sunni militias was not a mystery—the man was an untouchable.

  The car pulled up to the doorway. The window powered down.

  The man was white, with sandy-blond hair and an English accent. He was a little overweight, but not sloppy. The extra weight he carried probably came from his love affair with drink, not with food, and certainly not with sedentary behavior. He was a man frequently on the move. Rumor had it that he was a British spy. What else could he be? He had access to intelligence that no one else seemed to have.

  His blue eyes were piercing, even in the dark of night.

  The Martyr didn’t move from the doorway, not right away. Instead, he scanned up and down the street. It was always possible that the Brit had been followed. More than possible—it was probably guaranteed. The man stuck out in these parts like a green plant on the surface of the moon.

  “God is great, eh?” the Martyr said.

  Indeed, the news of the kidnapping was now circling the entire world. It was a giant blow to the Great Satan, one that would give hope to people of faith everywhere.

  “Not my god,” the man said in his cultured English accent. “And anyway, I suppose I wouldn’t celebrate too soon if I were you.”

  The Martyr nearly smiled. “No? Why not? The deed is done.”

  The Brit scanned the roadway ahead for a moment.

  “There could be a problem,” he said.

  “Oh?” the Martyr said. “What problem is that?”

  “Do you have the money?” the Brit said.

  “Of course.”

  “Then give it to me and I will describe the problem to you.”

  The Martyr leaned back into the dark shadows of the doorway. Tucked just down the hall, inside an alcove, was a leather satchel. The bag contained untraceable cash in various denominations and three different currencies—American dollars, euros, and British pounds. The money was worth roughly half a million dollars all told.

  The man was expensive, but over time he had proven to be well worth the high price. The Martyr darted across open space, carrying the bag between the doorway and the car. He didn’t enjoy being exposed on the street like this.

  “The back door is open,” the Brit said. “Put the bag on the floor.”

  The Martyr opened the back door and slid the bag onto the floor behind the driver’s side. He slammed the car door and returned to the shelter of his doorway.

  “Don’t you want to count it?”

  The Brit shook his head. “No. I trust you. How can men work together without a little bit of trust?”

  “Also, you will have me killed if the money is wrong,” the Martyr said.

  The Brit nodded. “Yes.”

  “So what’s the problem then?”

  “A small group of American operatives is on a trail that is warm, and may soon grow warmer. A Sunni tribal elder from outside Tikrit has been quite forthcoming with information, I’m afraid.”

  “The camp that was raided?”

  The Brit nodded again. “Yes.”

  “The name of the elder?”

  There was a long pause while the Brit sat quietly. He was hesitant, of course, because the brothers would show no mercy to this so-called elder. And they would seek to erase any information the elder might have shared with others, including his family and clan.

  “It is no help unless we have the name,” the Martyr said.

  “Imam Muhammad al-Barak,” the Brit said. “God have mercy on him.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Montgomery,” the Martyr said.

  The Brit looked at him, his eyes harder than ever. There was something in those eyes that gave the Martyr pause. It was a coldness, as though the Brit could kill the Martyr slowly, and without emotion. It was a coldness like the cold of deep space. Or perhaps it was just an emptiness. Perhaps it was more that something was missing than that something was there.

  But within seconds, the Martyr had recovered himself.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I know more than I seem to.”

  The Brit’s cold gaze never wavered. “There are things in this world that you’re better off not knowing. If I were you, I’d forget some of the things that you think you know. In fact, I’d start working on that
project right now.”

  The window powered up and the car slowly pulled away.

  The Martyr took a long, shaky drag on his cigarette. The Brit didn’t frighten him. No man did. He had given himself to Allah more than twenty years ago. He was trying to martyr himself, and Allah just hadn’t claimed him yet. It was good to remind himself of that from time to time.

  “Your god may have mercy on al-Barak,” he said to no one. “But we won’t.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  May 7

  10:05 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (4:05 a.m. Central European Summer Time, May 8)

  The Situation Room

  The White House, Washington, DC

  His worst nightmare had come true.

  David Barrett, President of the United States, strode the halls of the West Wing toward the elevator that would take him down to the Situation Room.

  A phalanx of people strode with him, ahead of him, behind him, all around him—aides, interns, Secret Service men, staff of various kinds. He had no idea who half these people were. Everyone was much shorter than he was—many were a head shorter or more. His Chief of Staff, Lawrence Keller, walked by his side.

  He looked down at Keller—he was a short, slim man, nearly totally bald. David knew that Lawrence was a long-distance runner. He was late-fifties, divorced, had a couple of kids. He had been around Washington forever, and was a consummate political player. He was the proverbial hot knife cutting through butter. Lawrence Keller was the only comforting fact of this entire disaster—there was someone nearby whom David Barrett could trust.

  Everyone was talking at once.

  “The Turkish prime minister sends his deepest condolences, and wants you to know that if any Turkish national was involved in this crime, the penalty will be death.”

  “French commandos are on standby—awaiting our orders. The entire country is on lockdown.”

  “House to house searches have begun in Geneva, Zurich, and Bern, as well as smaller Swiss cities and towns.”