That it never occurred to them that they would now be leading someone straight to another terrorist was an indication of both their amateur status and their state of mind. Neither man would have considered himself to be in a panicked state: that is the nature and the power of panic.
Things had begun to go terribly wrong with the captive Emma on November 11th, in Hamza’s flat. They had only been trying to sever the ties with the seedy place. To do that, Emma would have to be transported away from the flat. It had been as simple as that. All quite reasonable, if one assumed Emma’s cooperation in the move. That had been a mistake. Regardless of their liberal application of duct tape, she not only fought, she had effectively disabled Hamza during the battle with a strong, two-footed kick to the groin. Anton, who had wrapped his arms around her head to avoid being butted, found himself alone in the struggle with her. Although they’d had duct tape around her wrists and ankles, binding them securely, she had been able to whip her head and feet around, nearly squirming free of their grip, and the resulting kicks had finally scored a direct hit on Hamza, who had gone down hard, taking the struggling girl with him, and hitting the back of his head on the wooden floor. Although he hadn’t lost consciousness, he had unsteadily left the room, and Anton had heard him retching moments later.
Now alone with Emma, Anton continued to try to subdue her. The duct tape over her mouth, which at least muted her yells and screams, also effectively restricted her from breathing through her mouth. Anton felt that she had tired sooner because of that, and was grateful.
When Hamza went down, Anton had become furious at their captive. In his efforts to subdue her without assistance, he resorted to slamming her head against the wall, the bedpost, and the small nightstand. In so doing he not only succeeded in stunning her, he broke her nose, causing it to bleed. Paying little attention to her condition, Anton had merely grabbed her by her waist, and slung her onto the bed. He had then turned his attention to Hamza. While he was occupied with assisting his retching partner to the toilet, Emma Schiller had aspirated blood, swallowed blood, choked, vomited, and subsequently suffocated.
Anton discovered her condition when he re-entered the room some ten minutes after leaving her.
He shook her shoulder. “Wake up, whore.”
There was no response. Worse yet, the woman’s head lolled about as he shook her, and her fingernails were turning blue. Anton felt as if he, too, had been kicked in the groin.
“Wake up . . .” he said, as he tore the duct tape from her mouth. A trickle of blood mixed with vomit drained out, between her bluish lips. He checked for a carotid pulse, as he looked at her wide open eyes. The pupils were, as the doctors would have said, fixed and dilated. There was no doubt in his mind. She was dead.
He’d been trained in CPR, and it occurred to him that she might be saved even yet. He looked again at the contents of her mouth, and decided he could more easily deal with her death.
His mind was racing. Dimly, he realized three things. First, Emma was dead, or as good as. Secondly, he had been the sole cause of her death. And last, it was a week too soon according to their instructions. Instructions from people who he was convinced had the will and the capability to kill him for his mistake.
He found himself back in the loo, staring down at Hamza on the floor by the toilet, his mind moving so fast that he was hardly aware of having walked there. “Bugger,” said Anton.
Hamza, in considerable pain, looked up, and said nothing.
“Best get up,” said Anton. “The bitch’s dead.”
“What?” came painfully and incredulously from Hamza.
“You did her, mate,” said Anton. “She’s bloody well deceased.”
Hamza’s features contorted, not with pain, but with fear. “No . . . I didn’t. . .”
“Well, she’s dead,” said Anton, feeling his composure beginning to return. “I know I didn’t kill her. She must’ve hit her head when the two of you took the tumble.”
“No,” said Hamza, horrified. “I didn’t . . . I couldn’t. . .” His head was still foggy with pain, now jolted by fear, and he was struggling to remember if he’d even hit her above the midsection. He only remembered hanging on to her by her waist, then her legs, and then the blinding pain when she’d twisted away and he’d been kicked, and both of them had hit the floor.
“Well, I couldn’t hit her in the fuckin’ head, now could I? I was holding onto it with both hands.” Anton’s thoughts were beginning to coalesce, as Hamza’s confusion deepened. “Well, I know I couldn’t have done it, I never struck her . . . you must have.”
Hamza struggled to his feet. Nausea swept over him, but he refused to retch again. The pain was too great. “No,” he managed to get out, as he hobbled into the bedroom. “No, I think . . . no. . .” He looked at Emma. There was no doubt in his mind that she was, indeed, dead. She seemed somehow deflated, an object more than a person. How could he have killed her? Confronted with the fact of her death, and what was to him the obvious fact that Anton had, truly, been holding her by her head, he was left with it being his own action. He didn’t remember doing anything like striking her head, but the pain had been so intense, he couldn’t remember anything immediately after she’d kicked him.
“I didn’t . . . I don’t remember. I didn’t hit her in the head. You let go, for her to hit the floor. What are we going to do?” he said, as much to himself as to Anton.
Anton now took complete charge of their joint thinking. “I bloody well let go, I didn’t want her to get my stones as well. But you took her right down. Don’t try to blame me, mate.”
“I didn’t mean to . . . imply that.” He stared down at the dead body of Emma Schiller. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, weakly. “Marwan . . . Allah have mercy. She’s dead.”
“Worried are you? Well, me, too, but I’ll stick by you. There are ways around that. We just have to show a fresh dead body on that date. But one that we killed then, right?”
Hamza stared at him, uncomprehending.
“We claim we killed her a few days from now . . . get it? We wait . . . then do her after the 21st, as far as anyone knows. We can control that. We can fucking well shoot her a few hours before that Mr. Kazan comes to make sure we did it.”
“But, but she’s dead. She’s dead now. . . .”
“Well, bloody hell, let’s just freeze her. Get her out a day or so before he comes, let her thaw, then just bloody well execute her, man, and she’ll look fresh from the market.”
Hamza just stared at him.
“And it gives us time, mate. Thinking time is what we need right now, agreed?”
Hamza nodded his head. That much he could agree with wholeheartedly. “But . . . but won’t they be able to tell?”
“What do you think Kazan is going to do? Whip out a bloody knife and perform a sodding autopsy on the slag?”
“Uh. . . . No, I . . . no. Not if we do it right, and we just tell him what she did . . . because they were late. Not our fault. . . .” His mind was beginning to shut itself away from reality. “We must freeze her.”
“It’s brilliant, ain’t it? Just put her on hold, so to speak.”
“Wait . . .” said Hamza. “No, it won’t work. It won’t because Marwan will be coming back for her before then. He has a plan. To save her . . .” he said, and he started to cry.
Anton slammed him in the shoulder. “No bloody crying! Marwan said we move her today, right?”
Hamza nodded.
“So, we bloody well move her. He isn’t going to contact us for a few days. We get her somewhere else, and we say we were unable to contact him and tell where she was. It’s his bloody fault then. Marwan can piss off, far as I’m concerned. He’s no bloody threat at all. It’s that Mr. Kazan we got to impress, he’s the one that’ll kill us if things go wrong. Do you see?”
Hamza nodded. He did. Clearly.
“Be happy,” said Anton. “All we got to do is give her a ride now. The hard part’s done, for sure.”
>
“What?”
“Well, look on the bright side, will you? At least we don’t have to kill her, now do we?”
The only freezer available was the small top loading one in the kitchen. They tried to think of a way to get her out of the flat, to a place with a larger freezer, but there was no way they were about to carry her out the door in a recognizable fashion.
“We can’t muck about here,” said Anton. “If we wait, shell stiffen up, and we’d have to wait days until she gets loose again.” He picked the little freezer up, inverted it, and dumped the contents on the floor. “Here we go . . .”
It had been a tight fit. They’d had to remove her clothing, because it tended to bind, and kept her from folding enough to get her in. After trying head first and feet first, they found that, by stuffing her in buttocks first, folding her arms tightly across her chest, and then pressing her knees to her chest as well, and by pushing on her feet . . .
“There,” said Anton, when they had her shoved in as far as they could. “She fits.”
About five inches of feet and the very top of her head protruded above the top opening lid.
“That’s not good enough,” said Hamza. “Look . . . she sticks out.”
“Close the lid. We take turns sitting on it until she gets frozen. Then it’ll stay in place as long as we want. It’ll work.”
And so it did. They traded off sitting on the lid about every half hour. During one of his turns, Anton began discussing her body.
“Her tits were smaller than I’d like. How about you?”
“Do not say that! We must respect her. She is dead.”
“You killed her,” said Anton. “You respect her. But she’s just an American whore. Be truthful. Didn’t you think they were too small?”
Hamza held his hands over his ears. “Stop saying that. Don’t say that. Don’t talk about her that way.”
Anton grinned. “Didn’t color her hair, though, did she?”
Hamza started toward the door.
“Don’t run off and leave me here to hatch this bloody egg,” said Anton. “She’s yours, all yours. Don’t forget that!”
Hamza turned slowly, defeated. “I assume all responsibility. But I owe her a debt, and she must not be mocked. I took her life . . . I must protect her honor.”
Anton looked incredulous. “Honor? American women have no honor.”
“Do this for me.”
Anton thought for a moment. He was now certain that he’d convinced Hamza that he was the killer. Excellent, he thought. He had every intention of telling Mr. Kazan that Hamza had, indeed, killed the hostage. If Hamza believed that himself, ever so much better for Anton. Satisfied, he said, “Yes. I will. For you. I am sorry.”
That had been the end of the first half of the disaster. The second half occurred the next evening, November 12th, when Emma was pretty solidly frozen, and they could take her out of the flat in the small freezer.
Both young men had decided that it would be extremely uncomfortable for them if Marwan, or worse, Mr. Kazan, paid them an unexpected visit and found out what had happened. Hamza had the bright idea that they could drive somewhere remote, find an accommodation, and rent a room until the 21st.
“As long as it has electricity, we can keep her there.”
“What about whoever cleans the room,” asked Anton.
“You can refuse that sort of thing. We can’t stay here.”
“Too true. Right, then, but we can’t take her on your motor bike. We need a car.”
“My mother has one,” said Hamza. “Down in Portsmouth. I could go down and get it.”
“I ain’t staying here with this bitch-sickle,” said Anton. “Not and have you forget to return.”
“We can’t both go. And my mother would never let you have her car,” said Hamza.
“Sod your mum, then. I’ll get us the wheels.” Anton put on his jacket, and headed for the door. “Be ready to go as soon as I get back. It won’t do to be waiting around. We’ll need to move fast.” With that, he was gone.
Hamza was beginning to appreciate the apparent loyalty of Anton, and his resourcefulness. He hated the attitude toward Emma, but there was just so much he could do about that.
What Hamza didn’t understand was that Anton felt very strongly that Marwan liked Hamza much more than he liked Anton; and that Marwan would be more likely to suspect that Anton was lying about what had happened to Emma. Anton was staying with Hamza for the sole purpose of protecting his own interests. His loyalty was to himself.
In less than an hour, Anton returned to the apartment. They struggled with carrying the freezer down a flight of steps, and then out the back entrance to the alleyway. Carefully, they set the container down on the curb, and Anton pointed to a green Honda Jazz. “Care to take her for a spin?”
“Where did you get that?!”
“Borrowed it, in a manner of speaking. Let me pop the back, and we’ll just set her in. . . .”
“You mean you stole it?”
“Nah,” said Anton, being deliberately offhanded and nonchalant about it. This ensured that Hamza was convinced it was stolen, and increased Anton’s value in Hamza’s eyes. In point of fact, he’d walked to his married sister’s flat, pounded on the door, and convinced her to let him borrow her car.
Once Emma was packed, they decided that, since Hamza had his mother in the south, they’d go northward. Just to throw off a possible search by Mr. Kazan.
“Where?” asked Hamza, who was relying more and more on Anton to make his decisions.
“The A1 gets us all the way up north, and won’t go through some of the more crowded places like the M1 does. Newcastle upon Tyne is it then? I went there once, with a friend. Fine place to get lost.”
“All right,” said Hamza. “It’s a very long way. . . .”
“Even better,” said Anton, pulling into the street. “I don’t drive much, you navigate.”
“I haven’t a map. . . .”
“Sod the map, I can get to the A1. Just keep me on track is all.”
Northward they went. All the way to Stevenage, just fifty kilometers north. Anton was hungry, Hamza would be much more comfortable with some sort of map, and they needed petrol.
Stevenage isn’t a particularly large town, but at night, it’s not too difficult to become lost. They’d been debating how long Emma would keep since she wasn’t plugged in. Hamza wanted to get something to keep moisture from leaking out, and giving them away if they were stopped. Anton thought that was foolish.
“She’s frozen solid,” he said. “Won’t thaw for hours and hours. Not to worry.”
“How long is it going to take us to get to Newcastle upon Tyne? Eight hours?” His voice was rising in pitch.
“More like six,” said Anton.
“Just pull off the road, we can do a scout. The map says that there’s a Greenway petrol station on Cutty’s Lane, just off our road . . . turn off at the next intersection. . . .”
Just to shut him up, Anton turned onto Broadhall Way.
“Now where?”
Hamza had his head buried in the map. “Left . . . to the north . . . Monkswood Way, and then keep on, and then it becomes King George’s Way, and then it’s very close, to our right. . .”
“What? This is Monkswood already. How does this turn into . . .”
“Keep on!”
“Where . . . ?”
“There, back there, on the right!”
“Bloody hell, you’ve caused me to miss the turn,” said Anton, failing to find a turn off King George’s in time, and turning onto a street called Fairlands.
“Just wait . . . that’s a drive down there . . . turn about . . . you could have, just then . . . then this one . . . pull in there and turn about.”
As they entered a park area, Hamza saw a police car on their left, pulled into a parking zone. Anton was just slowing, preparing to turn into the same place, when Hamza alerted him.
“No, no, not here! Cop car!”
&
nbsp; Anton, who had nearly slowed to a stop, accelerated, and turned to his right. It was a dead end, and re-tracing their course, they found themselves headed straight back to the police car.
“Fuck this!” said Anton, and stopped, reversed, and tried to make it into a small paved area behind them.
“Not here, he can see us here!”
Anton then started forward, they went past the police car at a legal speed, and then turned quickly to the left as they re-entered the street.
“He’s behind us. Oh, oh. Oh, no! He’s following us,” said Hamza. “Act normal!”
“We’ll dump the car,” said Anton. “You listening to me? We dump the car, and we get out and run in opposite directions, and meet up . . . over there,” he said, pointing to a mall area.
As he pointed, he swerved. Blue lights came on behind them.
“Fuck me! He’s on us. Hang on!” The car swerved abruptly onto a narrow park path, then over a bump, and back into the park lane. The police car took a more direct route, and was now closer to them than before. They could hear a siren.
“When I say run, get out!”
“We can’t leave her here. Our prints are on the freezer!”
“You can bloody well stay and wipe them, then!” yelled Anton, slamming on the brakes, and stopping the car. “Run!”
They met in the mall parking lot.
Hamza gave Anton a hug, as soon as he was sure it was him.
“Don’t! Stand back, don’t draw attention, you idiot!”
November Rain Page 16
