by Mark Greaney
Court said, “Look me over like a mule, but you aren’t getting blood or DNA.”
“God no. Of course not. I understand you are a different case, a damned celebrity, and you will be treated as such.” He raised his eyebrows as a new thought came to him. “I’d like to exploit this, financially. Tell the Syrians you are special, require special rates.”
“No,” Court said with authority. “I don’t want to stick out. Especially not down there.”
Klossner waved a hand through the air. “The Gray Man. I get it. Forget I mentioned it. The guy I’m bumping to send you down. He’s Canadian. You’ll take his documents, assume his identity.” Klossner shrugged again. “It’s a fake name, anyway. All my guys use pseudonyms on their ops. Safer for everybody. I’ll have my people come here tonight and get your picture to match it to the docs. I’ll get more papers for my Canadian contractor and send him to Caracas.” Klossner shrugged. “He was a coward anyway, didn’t want to go to Syria.”
“Works for me.”
Klossner reached out and shook Court’s hand. “The motherfucking Gray Man,” he said, still marveling over the fact that the legend was here in his presence.
* * *
• • •
Court lay folded in a small closet in a guest room of Klossner’s penthouse apartment, the door cracked and his pistol by his side. He’d unmade the bed, then turned on the light in the bathroom and closed the door. If anyone came into his room tonight they’d think they’d caught him up and taking a piss, and this would buy him some time to mount a counterattack.
He stared at the dark ceiling, thinking about the operation to come. He’d have to be in a car on the way to the airport in less than four hours, but for right now his nerves kept him awake.
So far, everything was proceeding according to plan. He’d known for a long time that Lars Klossner was running mercs into Syria, and making a small fortune doing it. He’d also been reasonably sure Lars wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to send him down if given the chance to do so. Court had hoped he’d be on his way in two or three days but was astonished to find out he’d be getting on a plane within eight hours. It didn’t give him much time to study maps, but the quick infiltration into Syria was one of the first good things that had happened for the chances of little Jamal Medina in the past three days, so he told himself he should just try to relax and go with the flow, up until the moment when he had to break his cover legend and make a run for the kid.
Court wondered about the job ahead. Not the kidnapping of the child; instead he speculated about what he might have to do as a contracted member of a Syrian regime militia.
He hadn’t known Klossner was working with the Desert Hawks Brigade, and this sucked, because he knew all about them and what they were doing in Syria.
At the darkest portion of the war for Azzam, he signed a decree that allowed businessmen to raise their own militias to defend their capital assets. This action, in one fell swoop, turned the smugglers, con men, and kleptocrats of the nation into warlords.
The Desert Hawks Brigade became one of the most successful and violent pro-regime armies in the conflict. Independent of the Syrian military chain of command, they helped the regime by fighting its enemies, but they were also able to spend their time stealing and smuggling, assassinating their rivals in the underworld.
Working for the Hawks in Syria was a little like working for both the Nazis and the mafia at the same time.
The Desert Hawks Brigade was infamous. They regularly tortured and killed men, women, and children, and now Court would be shoulder to shoulder with these monsters. Suiting up for the Desert Hawks meant Court would probably be asked to do some horrible things, but if he wanted to maintain his cover, he’d have to comply.
And there was another downside to using this means to get into Syria. As soon as he broke away from the Desert Hawks and went for the baby, Court knew the affable but imposing German sleeping nearby in the master bedroom would probably become a sworn enemy. But that was a problem for another day. Pissing off the president of a company that rented out mercenaries to train and kill for third-world death squads didn’t seem like a great idea, but Court figured getting into Syria on his own, with a good cover legend about what he was doing there, was worth the risk.
This was going to be a tricky operation, to say the least, and the fact that he did not know how much time he had before Ahmed Azzam decided to remove the compromise of his child and simply move him or kill him only made Court’s operation to come more unsure.
He closed his eyes and willed himself to catch a couple of hours’ rest, because he knew one thing—right here, right now, lying in a closet in Munich, there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about what would happen tomorrow in Syria.
CHAPTER 25
Jamal Medina began to cry.
The house had been quiet since the four-month-old baby finally went to sleep two hours earlier, but Jamal was letting all within earshot know that it was time for a late-night feeding.
The au pair had been dozing on a mat near the crib—the baby had the more luxurious arrangement—but she sat up quickly and checked the clock. It was eleven fifteen p.m., a little earlier than usual for Jamal to want to eat again, but the only thing the au pair found consistent with the baby was inconsistency, so she was not surprised in the least.
Yasmin was the only person in the home allowed to handle the baby, but she was not the only person in the home. She was surrounded by five security men: all Alawis, and all members of a specially vetted Ba’ath Party unit, chosen for their skill and their support for the Azzam regime.
Yasmin Samara was a twenty-four-year-old Sunni Syrian and the granddaughter of the former speaker of the Syrian People’s Council, a Ba’ath Party official who served both Ahmed al-Azzam and his father before him. She had worked as an au pair in France for three years, then returned home to take a job as the nanny of a wealthy expatriate woman who lived in Mezzeh.
It wasn’t until she was brought in to meet a very pregnant Bianca and garnered her approval that she was told the father of the baby she would be looking out for was the president of the nation. Bianca stressed that she could not mention this to a soul, but it wasn’t until Ahmed Azzam himself dropped in on his new child that she understood the full scope of the danger she was in. Azzam was kind to her, but when he left, he left one of his security officers behind a moment to remind her to keep her silence, and that any failure to do so would be a criminal act.
Yasmin was the right girl for the job because she was an excellent nanny, and she hadn’t breathed a word to anyone, not even her family.
Bianca had been due back earlier in the day, but Yasmin had not heard any news from her. She wondered if the beautiful Spanish model had found some excuse to stay in Europe a little longer, but she doubted this, because Bianca had confided in her that Ahmed Azzam barely let her go in the first place, and sticking around overseas was a surefire way to make him angry.
Yasmin was deathly afraid of Ahmed Azzam, although he’d been in her life for all of her life. Bianca, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be afraid at all. The married man was obviously in love with his Spaniard; Bianca would tell Yasmin stories about his awkward romantic acts that made the young au pair blush.
As she carried Jamal into the kitchen tonight for yet another feeding, she rubbed the dark hair on the top of his head and sang him a little song with a tired voice. At the bottom of the stairs she saw lights appear in the circular driveway out front. Yasmin felt sure it would be Bianca, finally home from her trip, and she was glad she’d bathed Jamal just before bedtime.
As Yasmin stood in the living room a security man climbed off the sofa, slipped his suit coat back on to cover the pistol in a shoulder holster, and looked out the window in the entryway.
But only for a second. Then, with wide eyes, he spun around and looked at Yasmin.
“It’s him!�
��
“Him” could only mean one thing. The president of Syria was making an unannounced visit to the home where his mistress and his son lived.
Now Yasmin was doubly glad she’d bathed the boy.
* * *
• • •
Ahmed Azzam looked positively drained when he marched through the door behind the four bodyguards.
He stepped past the security men already working here in the house and up to Yasmin. He didn’t look at his son at all as he stared her down. “Have you heard from her?”
Yasmin shook her head. “La, sayidi.” No, sir.
“She said nothing to you about her trip?”
Yasmin did not meet her employer’s gaze. She only stared at the floor. “She said she was nervous.”
“Nervous?”
“About being back on the runway. It had been so long. She was worried about her looks after the baby. Getting back in shape . . . things like that.”
“Had she been acting strangely before she left? Any calls to the home from people you did not recognize?”
Yasmin’s huge wide eyes darted up to Azzam, then back down to the floor. What is going on? “La, sayidi.” No, sir.
“She is missing,” Azzam said. “I do not know when she will return. While she is away I will place more security here around you. You are not to leave the house. You are not to talk on the phone.”
“Nem, sayidi.” Yes, sir.
He put his hand on his boy’s head, stroked it for a moment, and again Yasmin stole a look at her employer. An expression of frustration, anger, and . . . was it fear?
Ahmed looked away from his son and back to Yasmin. “If she contacts you in any way, I will know it.”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
Azzam reached out and put his hand on the side of Yasmin’s face. “Your grandfather was a great man, daughter. He was a friend to my family for a long time. I miss him every day.”
She started to thank him, but her voice caught in her throat as his hand lowered from her face, traced down the side of her neck, over her shoulder, down again, and then onto her chest. He stopped there, opened her robe a little, and slid a cold hand inside and around one of her breasts.
She worried he could feel her heartbeat; worried that her high heart rate from her near panicked state would anger him or make him think she was lying.
Yasmin said, “The Samara family has always been honored to serve the Azzam family.”
Azzam looked at her a moment more, then drew his hand away, like a snake slipping back into the tall grass. He turned away without another word.
Yasmin watched him step over to the head of the guard force of the house. “How many men do you have here?”
“Five, sir. Around the clock.”
“Make it ten. And find a way to double the security throughout the neighborhood.”
“Of course, Mr. President. Is there any specific threat I should know about, sir?”
Azzam turned for the door. “Yes. Me, if you fail to protect my child.”
* * *
• • •
As Ahmed al-Azzam climbed back into his SUV, he thought again of just ordering Yasmin and Jamal shot and disposed of. He had great plans for the boy, true, but if his son was exposed, if Bianca talked and compromised the child, then the plans for his son’s future as the male heir would become null and void.
But he did not give the order for his men to kill the two. He told himself he’d give Sebastian Drexler time to get to France, to find his lover, and to determine what the hell had happened. If she could prove that she had nothing to do with her disappearance and that she had been careful about what she had said to those who took her, then his plan for the future—new wife, new son, new heir, new relationship with Russia and Iran, and new strength at home with the total conquest of his domestic enemies—would remain intact.
If not . . . if he was left with any doubts at all about Bianca’s culpability in all this . . . then he would not allow his weakness to show. He would, instead, simply erase any evidence that Jamal had ever happened.
CHAPTER 26
Saydnaya Prison was lodged in the mountains twenty miles north of Damascus, near the hillside town of the same name. It was a massive walled complex with two main structures: the large, square White Building, and the even larger, tri-winged Red Building.
The prison had originally been built to process and hold a few thousand inmates, but since the war began, the population had soared. Now more than fifteen thousand prisoners were locked in cramped, foul, and cruel conditions inside, mostly in appalling cells along the echoing hallways that ran down the long wings of the Red Building. Windowless chambers originally built for solitary confinement in both the Red and White Buildings now held nine at a time, and the group cells were used to house many times that number.
Deaths from beatings, malnutrition, dehydration, and denial of medical care were common, but these were not the main causes of death here at Saydnaya. No, most people who died here were killed during the mass executions carried out in the dead of night in the basement of the White Building, where groups of twenty to fifty blindfolded men convicted in kangaroo courts were hanged by the neck simultaneously, their bodies then loaded into trucks like bags of flour to be dumped in unmarked mass graves in the nearby hills.
Killing enemies of the regime, be they combatant, protester, journalist, or others, was the regime’s only real answer to any threats to the rule of Ahmed Azzam. Tens of thousands had been hanged since the beginning of the war, mostly here at Saydnaya, and Amnesty International referred to the complex as a human slaughterhouse.
* * *
• • •
Sebastian Drexler pulled up to the lower gate of the prison at eight a.m. and shifted his white Mercedes E-Class into park at the guard shack. This wasn’t his first time at the facility, so he knew the routine. He handed his identity badge and government credentials over to the guards, received a grounds visitor’s badge, waited for a Jeep to meet him, then followed the Jeep up the hill. Together the two vehicles drove the long winding road across brown earth towards the complex. Here Drexler parked in a tree-lined lot located between the Red and White Buildings, pulled out a wheeled suitcase and a leather portfolio, climbed into the Jeep with his luggage, and rode with three intelligence officers from the Political Security Directorate into the main gate of the Red Building.
The Jeep parked by the main door and four men got out and showed their credentials through bulletproof glass, and then they were buzzed in and allowed to move freely around the main portion of the facility. On all his previous visits to the Red Building, Drexler had gone into the main entrance, then taken the hall to the right towards the interrogation section, where he would either question prisoners or meet with interrogators to pick up intelligence; today he and his chaperones made a left at visitor processing and headed towards the infirmary.
By eight thirty he and the three intelligence officers were drinking tea in a conference room, and here Drexler was introduced to a dark-bearded man in his fifties and a taller man with white hair in his sixties. They were both vascular surgeons from Tishreen Military Hospital in Damascus, and the senior of the two, Dr. Qureshi, had been brought up to Saydnaya the day before to take charge of today’s procedure.
“Is everything ready?” an anxious Drexler asked the white-haired surgeon.
Qureshi turned to the director of the prison for an answer.
The director said, “Yes. The prisoner has been held in the White Building, which is primarily for short-term housing of political prisoners. But the medical facilities here at the Red Building are superior, so we are having him brought over here to us.”
“Fine,” Drexler replied. “We must not begin the procedure until the helicopter has landed. Everything is dependent on timing. I cannot waste one moment once we start.”
“Un
derstood,” Dr. Qureshi said. “I have eight other doctors and nurses with me. They all know their roles. I was the lead surgeon on the test cases that were done last year. We will be fast, as you have requested.”
The other surgeon said, “We have trained on the process. The notes you provided us and the research you have done on the process were very helpful. But this will be my first implementation in the field. We spent yesterday afternoon practicing the operation. We are ready.”
Drexler sniffed. “I’ll hold my applause until I make it through immigration in Europe.”
The dark-haired surgeon said, “Of course, sir.”
* * *
• • •
Thirty minutes later a Soviet-era Mi-8 helicopter landed at the heliport outside the Red Building and Drexler’s luggage was loaded on board. Shortly thereafter, he was called into a windowless room just down the hall from the main operating suite of the infirmary.
Two prison guards stood against the far wall, bracketing a man in a prison uniform standing there, shackled to the wall.
Drexler looked him up and down. He was a healthy man, of average height and with very light brown hair, just a few shades darker than Drexler’s. The prisoner just stared back at him silently, unsure who this non-Arab man was or what language he spoke.
Drexler addressed him in English. “Your name is Veeti Takala. You are thirty-six years old, and you are from Finland.”
The man nodded his head vigorously. “Yes, that’s right. I am a videographer, working for ITN. I was taken from my hotel room last night. All my papers are in order.”
“I know they are, and I appreciate that.”
“I am not a spy!”
