Sherman bowed his head. “I know. Right now, I’m just grateful that my wife and son are alive and safe. It . . . it means a lot.”
Tobin put his hand on Sherman’s shoulder. “I’m glad, too. Listen, I figure you have a heaping plateful right now and it’s gotta be overwhelming—and this is a total jump to another topic—but would you like me to pray with you?”
Sherman glanced up, surprised and . . . touched. “I’m not religious, man.”
Tobin smiled. “Neither am I. I am, however, a believer in Jesus. He’d like you to know who he is, that he loves you, and that he’s willing to help. So. Want me to pray?”
“Yeah. I think I would. Thank you.”
Chapter 18
LAYNIE WAS READY ON that fourth morning when Bula appeared. She’d worked hard to rebuild the strength and muscle tone she’d lost. She wasn’t fully recovered by any means, but she could walk under her own steam now.
More importantly, she was “prayed up,” as prepared inside as she could be for whatever the day held.
Bula unlocked her cell an hour after breakfast and walked her to the common room again, to the improvised bathhouse behind the curtain. The old woman had run another bath. “Alyona” and “Not Alyona,” eyes down, waited nearby. This time, Bula stationed two guards outside the curtain, neither of whom were Doku.
Laynie kept her expression studiously blank. Sayed has ordered that I appear before him appropriately “clean,” yet he is snared by his own blindness. He fails to see the irony of insisting that I be clean while his own lusts rise as a stench before the throne of God in heaven.
Bula handed her into the old woman’s care and left. Laynie removed her veil. She offered the old woman a small smile and a soft greeting.
“As-Salamu Alaykum.”
The old woman’s mouth dropped open—and Laynie saw that she did not have many teeth left. Laynie turned to “Alyona” and “Not Alyona” and nodded. “Thank you,” she murmured, first in Arabic, then in Russian.
Laynie didn’t wait for the women to respond. She was not attempting to garner a reply but to earn the minimum measure of goodwill, perhaps even build simple relationships—if she were around that long. She disrobed and tested the water. It was quite warm, but not excessively so. She stepped into the tub on her right foot and eased her left one in to see how it fared. The wound stung briefly, then adapted to the water. Laynie slid down into the water, grateful again for the soothing relief on her sore muscles and tender spots.
This time, when the women came at her with soap and washcloths, Laynie shook her head. She gestured for them to give one to her. The old woman shrugged and handed over her cloth.
Laynie bathed herself, washed her own hair, and—reluctantly—left the tub, then toweled herself off. “Alyona” and “Not Alyona” held up extra towels. When Laynie nodded, they worked the water out of her wet hair.
Then the old woman patted a stack of clean clothes on the bench. Laynie sat and started to dress herself. Slowly.
She sighed. The heat took more out of me than I thought.
The old woman must have motioned to “Alyona” and “Not Alyona,” because they began to help her.
“Thank you,” Laynie whispered again.
Laynie thought “Not Alyona” smiled beneath her veil. The movement flashed across the visible part of her face like the sweep of a bird’s wing. There and gone.
The old woman waved them into the common area where the two girls dried her hair, brushing it to a shimmering sheen.
Bula returned, and the three women hastened to finish whatever preparations they’d been ordered to make. “Alyona” fetched the folded veils from the bench, but Bula gestured her away and motioned Laynie to him, her head uncovered.
Laynie summoned all her strength and rose from the chair. With her chin held high, her eyes straight ahead, she walked to Bula.
Lord, if I’m going to die today, let me die as a daughter of the King of Kings—full of your grace and righteousness.
TWO GUARDS SNAPPED to attention and one held the curtain aside for Bula, who pulled Laynie into Sayed’s salon after him. Some memory of the room must have remained with her from her first encounter with Sayed, because she recognized the air of formal opulence of the room, if not the actual surroundings.
“Ah, Bula. Good. I am anxious to see her,” Sayed called from the U-shaped seating area. Although the couches and cushions were of the same style, Sayed’s seat was noticeably larger. Larger and more . . .
Regal, Laynie thought as Bula led her forward. Elegant and regal. Sayed’s ego requires a throne to signify his importance.
Bula pulled on her arm and led her to a low table in the center of the seating area. He pushed her down onto her knees, Sayed directly across from her. Laynie didn’t sit back on her feet. She kept herself erect on her knees. Tall.
Amused, Sayed smiled. He ran his eyes over her. “Yes, you are much improved today. And your hair—it is as beautiful as I was told. Not a single color but a kaleidoscope of many. It reminds me of wheat fields near harvest. A rippling of white and gold and every shade in between. I look forward to running my fingers through it.”
He wants to talk first. He hopes to interrogate me, but what is he after?
In addition, Laynie wondered why Sayed spoke English to her. It was not a language known by many of his soldiers, including Bula. Maybe he felt that a conversation in English with her would give him a modicum of privacy.
More likely he wants to impress me, Laynie thought. The illustrious AGFA general—a great tactician and cultured, intellectual leader—a Renaissance Man. Instead, it put her in mind of Petroff. Laynie nodded to herself. A powerful man with an inflated sense of self and a fragile ego.
When Laynie failed to respond to Sayed’s compliments one way or another, he snapped his fingers. A servant who had been waiting off to the side of the room unfolded an intricately embroidered cloth and spread it across the table. The cloth was so beautiful that Laynie reached out and stroked one perfectly smooth blossom and a fringed tassel attached to the cloth’s corner.
Sayed’s man placed a small plate of dates and figs in the center of the table. Laynie’s stomach lurched. She was so hungry that she tasted stomach acid at the back of her throat.
The servant then brought a tea service to the table and poured two glasses of steaming tea. He carefully stirred sugar into one glass that he set before Laynie. The other he placed before Sayed.
While he worked, Laynie’s eyes were busy, but not noticeably. They roamed across the servant and took in minor but important details—such as the way his teeth pulled nervously on his bottom lip as he spooned sugar into her glass for her and how he avoided looking at her. She slid her gaze to Sayed, captured a picture of him, and waited to dissect it until her eyes had returned to the steaming glass in front of her.
Sayed gestured to Laynie. “Please. Partake of my hospitality.”
Laynie had cataloged the microexpressions on the servant’s face, had watched the flicker around Sayed’s eyes. She left the glass sitting where the servant had placed it on the table.
Sayed picked up his own glass and blew across its steaming surface. “Surely you would not deny yourself a bit of refreshment?”
“No, thank you.”
Sayed’s smile dropped. “You refuse my hospitality? Your behavior borders on offensive.”
“So does ordering your servant to drug me. Do you deny it?”
Sayed flushed, then mastered himself. He spread his hands in a placating manner. “Perhaps I simply wished to have a productive conversation with you. I have questions you would answer with more candor were you . . . relaxed.”
And I think that although you enjoy taking a woman against her will, getting off on her screams and protests, you prefer to blunt her strength while you rape her.
“Ask away,” Laynie said. “I promise to be candid.”
He snorted. “Tell me, then, why you were in Tbilisi.”
It was Laynie’s turn t
o smile. “It is a beautiful city with much to see. I particularly enjoyed visiting the cathedral.”
“And the market?”
“A unique and pleasurable experience.”
“You entered a car with two men as you left the market. Who were they?”
A fractured memory flickered behind her eyes. I left the Tbilisi bazaar with two men? Oh, yes. I remember now. Rode in a car with them and a driver. Two men in the front. One in the rear with me.
“Everyday tour guides. Did you kill them?”
A truck careening off course—going to hit us!
Sayed shrugged. “People die in war.”
Horrible pain—my ankle. The coppery smell of blood mixed with that of spilled gasoline. Someone prying open the car door and pulling me out . . .
Then nothing.
“I wasn’t aware that the Republic of Georgia was at war.”
Sayed sipped at his glass. “Universally, the followers of the Prophet are always engaged in a holy struggle.”
Laynie fiddled with the tassel hanging from one corner of the ornate tablecloth. “Your struggle cannot be very holy if it requires you to murder innocent people. Of course, religious fanatics often excuse their own evil acts as obedience to their god.”
Sayed’s lips thinned. He switched directions. “You are American, are you not? It explains why you are so outspoken.”
“My passport says I’m American—and you have my passport, do you not? It was in my bag when the truck you hired rammed us.”
Ignoring her question, Sayed murmured, “And yet Bula tells me you speak Russian like a Russian native. A Muscovite. How curious.”
“Yes, I’m fluent in Russian. However, I’m most comfortable in English.”
“You mean American English.”
“If you say so.”
Sayed leaned toward her. “I have visited America. I love many things about your country. Its wide-open spaces, its cars, and its entertainments. A country’s entertainments can reveal a lot about a culture . . . particularly its indulgences. Its weaknesses.”
He’s bragging now. Showing me how worldly he is. Trying to elevate himself in my eyes.
“America is only truly great when its people are faithful to the God of the Bible, when they repent of their sins and return to him—of their own free will, not at the prodding of a sword.”
Again Sayed ignored her. Laynie figured he had an agenda, a script he wanted to follow that would take him to his real questions.
He sat back. “As for American books, I have many favorites. For example, I have enjoyed all of Tom Clancy’s novels. Debt of Honor and Executive Orders are my favorites. I found them pleasantly prophetic—particularly the plane in Debt of Honor that flew into the US Capitol building, killing the president, most of Congress, and all the justices of the Supreme Court.”
His servant presented him with a box of cigarettes. Sayed took a moment to light one and draw on it, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs. “They are presently filming the movie version of Clancy’s Sum of All Fears. I’ve heard it won’t be released until this coming May, but I arranged to receive a copy of the script. It was positively inspirational.”
“I’m not much of a moviegoer,” Laynie murmured. “I prefer not to immerse myself in fantasy.”
She was exaggerating, but it allowed her to administer a dig that would not go unnoticed.
“Touché, but you miss my point,” he answered. The smoke curled from his mouth.
“I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.”
“The enlightenment comes not from me but from one of the movie’s characters, a German named Dressler—a visionary. The script quotes him as saying, ‘Let no man call us crazy. They called Hitler crazy. But Hitler was not crazy. He was stupid.’”
Laynie’s attention sharpened. “Hitler could very well have been both crazy and stupid—he did lose because he elected to fight a war on two fronts.”
“Perhaps. But I have not yet reached the meat of the quotation, the essence that our movement has ingested and made our own. Here it is. ‘You don’t try to fight Russia and America. You get Russia and America to fight each other . . . and destroy each other.’ If such a feat were successful, it would leave the world open to so many possibilities, would it not?”
Laynie shrugged and tipped her chin toward her chest—to hide the shock that Sayed would surely have seen written in her expression.
That is exactly what Rusty suggested! Lord God, his theory was spot on.
She played back his passionate “what if” in her mind.
“I keep hearing your voice in my head, Bella, asking for AGFA’s real objective—and what got me was that it has to be something so significant that it requires pitting the US and Russia against each other. And then I thought, what if that objective means they want more than another cold war between the two nations. What if they want to start a real conflict, a shooting war? A conflict that would remove these two ‘superpowers’ from the picture?
“And I asked myself, ‘What objective could warrant taking such a risk? What goal would inspire AGFA to attack the West like al-Qaeda did?’ Certainly not mere Chechen independence. So, I told myself, ‘Think globally, Rusty!’
“What if these radical Chechens are more closely aligned with al-Qaeda and like-minded Islamists than we thought? What if they are part of a global strategy to raise up a Salafi–Wahhabi caliphate?”
Her perceived nonchalance seemed to anger Sayed. “You do not seem concerned for your precious America, Miss Garineau.”
In control of herself again, she glanced up, eyes innocent. “Sorry. Did I miss something?”
She knew it would anger him, push him harder than she’d already pushed him, but she did it anyway. The slap, when he lunged across the table and delivered it, stole her breath away. Made her nose and eyes run.
Sayed was out of patience. “You are an American operative named Anabelle Garineau—which is not your real name. You lead a team, a task force, whose mission is to thwart the plans of All Glorious for Allah.”
“If you say so.”
Sayed studied her. “What about your task force?”
“What about it?”
“I would very much like to know more about it—for example where your little troupe is hiding.”
Laynie smiled to herself. Interesting—and revealing, Sayed. I thought the Ukrainian mob wanted our location because they were trying to track down Jaz. Why would you want to know our location unless . . . unless you are working with them?
She answered Sayed, “We gave the mob the slip when we up and left Germantown all together.”
Sayed’s lips thinned. “Mob? What mob?”
He wasn’t as smooth as he thought he was.
“The Ukrainians. Your partners in America, I surmise.”
“Nonsense. I wish you to tell me where your task force is.”
“I wished for a pony once. Never got one.”
Sayed ignored her flippant response. “Tell me, what has your task force uncovered? What do the Americans know of our upcoming attacks?”
“We have no knowledge of upcoming attacks.”
True. The task force had no operational knowledge of the attacks, only Cossack’s word that they were imminent. Cossack. She hoped he had found another route to securely pass the attack details to Wolfe.
“You are lying, and I know you are lying.”
“Am I lying? Now, how would you know that? Is it because your operatives have wormed their way inside our ranks?”
Sayed did not rise to the bait. “You may have played at being a secret agent for many years. You may have even taken pride in your work, but it all ends now. This day I will chain you to my bed. I will take your body and use it to satisfy my desires. Again and again and again. You will remain chained to my bed until I have broken your spirit.”
An irrational picture popped into Laynie’s mind. Princess Leia chained to a slimy, slobbery Jabba the Hutt—and Leia strangling him with the very chain he used to
keep her tied to him.
Sayed laughed to himself. “I will use you as I wish, and you will beg me to stop, but I will not until I have properly humbled you. Then and only then will I give you to my men to use as often as they like, and—”
“You cannot humble me, Sayed.”
A look of puzzlement strobed over his face. Before he could exert his own better judgment, he asked, “How do you mean, Miss Garineau? You are not in control here.”
“No, but my God is. You should know that I am a woman of the Book—a follower of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Son of God, God himself born in human likeness to become the Savior of the world. I have submitted my life to Jesus and have already humbled myself under his mighty hand.”
Sayed barked an incredulous laugh. “And will your precious Jesus save you from me?”
“He already has. Jesus gave me everything I need to live as a woman of God, both in this life and the next. He said, I give you eternal life, and you shall never perish. So you see, Sayed, nothing you can do to me matters.”
Sayed first gaped, then he raged. “Isa is but a third-rate prophet who failed the purposes of Allah by dying an ignoble, barbaric death! He is nothing, and he cannot protect you. Only Allah is God—”
“Allah is not my god, nor is he the god of the Bible. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the Eternal One, the Ancient of Days, the maker of heaven and earth—and Jesus is his only begotten Son, the Son who is both fully God and fully man. As Muslims are fond of saying, Allah has no son—therefore, Allah is not the god of the Bible.
“Jesus also said, My Father, who has given you to me, is greater than all, and no one can snatch you out of my Father’s hand. Jesus is greater than Allah and ‘no one’ includes you.”
“You speak blasphemies!”
“Says every false leader who hides behind phony piety while violating the chastity of virtuous women and little girls—in order to satisfy their own sinful lusts while puffing up their sinful egos.”
Laynie Portland, Spy Resurrected Page 21
