“Foreign investment has been quite hard to come by,” another of the locals ventured. “But we are not the sort to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“I’m not a gift horse,” McKibbin shot back.
In the antechamber, the smaller of the American’s bodyguards stepped closer to the room. Now he could see as well as hear.
Few observers, in any case, would have had any trouble discerning the various power inequities within. The American was plainly one of those intermediaries who made a living by contravening international law on behalf of parties who had to operate in secrecy. He represented foreign capital to a group of local businessmen whose need for such funding was far greater than any scruples they could afford about its provenance.
“Mr. Yorum,” McKibbin said briskly, turning to a man who had not yet spoken, “you’re a banker, are you not? What would you say are my best opportunities here?”
“I think you will find everyone here to be an eager partner,” replied a man whose squat face and tiny nostrils suggested the countenance of a frog.
“I hope you will consider Mansur Enterprises favorably,” one of the men interjected. “We’ve had a very robust return on capital.” He paused, mistaking the disapproving looks around him for skepticism. “Truly. Our books have been carefully audited.”
McKibbin turned a chilly gaze to the man of Mansur Enterprises. “Audited? The parties I represent prefer a less formal system of bookkeeping.” Floating up from outside was the sound of squealing tires. Few paid it any mind.
The other man flushed. “But of course. We are, at the same time, quite versatile, I assure you.”
Nobody uttered the phrase “money laundering” nobody had to. There was no need to spell out the purpose of the meeting. Foreign dealers with unaccountable reserves of cash sought businesses in poorly regulated markets like Lebanon to serve as fronts, as entities through which illicit cash could be sluiced, emerging as legitimate business earnings. Most would be returned to the silent partners; some could be retained. Both greed and apprehension were palpable in the room.
“I do wonder whether I’m wasting my time here,” McKibbin went on in a bored tone. “We’re talking about an arrangement that depends on trust. And there can be no trust without candor.”
The banker ventured an amphibious half-smile, blinking slowly.
The fraught silence was broken by the sound of a group of men rushing up the wide terrazzo stairs: late arrivals to a meeting elsewhere? Or—something else?
The harsh, concussive noise of automatic gunfire stilled idle speculation. At first, it sounded like a burst of firecrackers, but the burst went on too long, and was too fast, for that. There were shrieks—men forcing air through constricted throats, emitting a keening chorus of terror. And then the terror spilled into the meeting room, like a rampaging fury. Men clad in keffiyehs charged in, aiming their Kalashnikovs at the Lebanese businessmen.
Within moments, the room had turned into a tableau of carnage. It looked as if a disgruntled painter had splashed a can of crimson paint against the stuccoed walls; men sprawled everywhere like red-drenched mannequins.
The meeting was over.
Rome
Todd Belknap raced to the study door and, clipboard in hand, made his way down the long hallway. He would have to brazen it out. His planned means of escape—descending to the inner courtyard and exiting through a delivery chute—was no longer possible: It would require time he could no longer afford. He had no choice but to take a more direct route.
When he reached the end of the hallway, he paused; at the landing below, he could see a pair of sentries making their rounds. Flattening himself in the crook of an open guest-room door, he waited several minutes for the guards to move on. Fading footsteps, the jingle of keys on a chain, the closing of a door: the ebbing sounds of movement in retreat.
Now he stepped lightly down the stairs and, casting his mind back to the blueprints he had studied, he opened a narrow door just to the right of the landing. It would take him to a back staircase that would avoid the main floor of the villa and lessen the risk of exposure. Even as he stepped through the threshold, though, he could sense that something was not right. A small twinge of anxiety arrived before he was conscious of the explanation for it: raised voices and the sound of rubber soles slapping against hard flooring. Men running, not walking. The disruption of routine. Meaning: Khalil Ansari’s death had been discovered. Meaning: Security at the compound was now at high alert.
Meaning: Belknap’s chances of survival were dwindling with every minute he remained inside.
Or was it too late already? As he raced down a flight of stairs, he heard a buzzing sound, and the swinging grate at the bottom of the landing clanged shut electronically. Someone had activated a high-security state for all points of egress and ingress, overriding the ordinary fire-safety presets. Was he trapped on this flight of stairs? Belknap raced back up and tried the lever knob to the floor above. The door opened and he pushed through it.
Straight into an ambush.
He felt an iron grip around his left upper arm, a gun pressed painfully against his spine. A heat-and-movement sensor must have revealed his position. He whipped his head around and his eyes met the granite stare of the man gripping his arm. It was another, unseen guard, then, who had the gun to Belknap’s back. It was the less challenging position, and therefore occupied by someone who was surely junior to the man to his side.
Belknap took another look at him. Swarthy, black-haired, clean-shaven, he was in his early forties, at a stage of life where the seasoning of experience conferred an advantage that was not yet offset by any loss of physical vigor. A young man with muscles but limited experience could be overcome, as could the superannuated veteran. But everything about the way this man moved told Belknap that he knew precisely what he was doing. His face betrayed neither overconfidence nor fear. Such an opponent was formidable indeed: steel that had been hardened by duress but not yet fatigued.
The man was powerfully built, yet moved with agility. He had a face of planes and angles, a nose with a thickened bridge that had obviously been broken in his youth, and a heavy brow that jutted out slightly over reptilian eyes—those of a predator examining his fallen prey.
“Hey, listen, I don’t know what’s going on,” Belknap began, trying to sound like a bewildered factotum. “I’m just one of the site architects. I’m checking on our contractors. That’s my job, okay? Look, just call the office, get this thing straightened out.”
The man who had shoved a gun in his back now walked alongside him to his right: mid-twenties, lithe, brown hair cut en brosse, sunken cheeks. He exchanged glances with the senior guard. Neither dignified Belknap’s chatter with a response.
“Maybe you don’t speak English,” Belknap said. “I guess that’s the problem. Dovrei parlare in italiano…”
“Your problem isn’t that I don’t understand,” said the senior guard in lightly accented English, tightening his iron grip. “Your problem is that I do understand.”
His captor was a Tunisian, Belknap guessed from his accent. “But then—”
“You wish to speak? Excellent. I wish to listen. But not here.” The guard stopped walking for a moment, jerking his captive to an abrupt stop. “In our lovely stanza per gli interrogatori. The interview chamber. In the basement. We go there now.”
Belknap’s blood ran cold. He knew all about the room in question—had studied it on the blueprints, had researched its construction and equipment even before he had confirmed that Ansari was the villa’s true owner. It was, in plain English, a torture chamber, and of truly cutting-edge design. “Totalmente insonorizzato,” the architectural specifications had stipulated: completely soundproof. The soundproofing materials had, in fact, been special-ordered from a company in the Netherlands. Acoustic isolation was achieved by density and disconnection: The chamber was floated and lined with a dense polymer made of sand and PVC; sturdy rubber seals lined the door frame. A man could scream at the top of his lun
gs and be entirely inaudible to someone standing outside, just a few feet away. The elaborate soundproofing guaranteed that.
The equipment contained in the basement chamber would guarantee the screams.
Evildoers always sought to sequester the sight and sound of their deeds; Belknap had known this since East Berlin, a couple of decades earlier. Among connoisseurs of cruelty, privacy was the invariable watchword; it sheltered barbarism in the very midst of society. Belknap knew something else, as well. If he were taken to the stanza per gli interrogatori it was all over. All over for the operation; all over for him. There was no possible escape from it. Any form of resistance, no matter how hazardous, would be preferable to allowing himself to be taken there. Belknap had only one advantage: the fact that he knew this, and that the others did not know he knew this. To be more desperate than your captors realized—a slender reed. But Belknap would work with what he had.
He allowed a dull look of gratitude to settle on his face. “Good,” he said. “Fine. I understand this is a high-sec facility. Do what you need to do. I’m happy to talk, wherever you like. But—Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Call me Yusef,” the senior guard said. There was something implacable even in the pleasantry.
“But, Yusef, you’re making a mistake. You got no beef with me.” He slackened his body slightly, rounding his shoulders, subtly making himself physically less intimidating. They did not believe his protestations, of course. His awareness of that fact was all he needed to keep from them.
Opportunity came when they decided to save time by frog-marching him down the main staircase—a grand, curving structure of travertine adorned with a Persian runner—instead of the concrete rear stairs. When he saw a glimpse of the streetlights through the frosted window bays to either side of the massive front door, he made a quick, silent decision. One step, a second step, a third step—he jerked his arm from the guard’s grip in a feeble gesture of wounded dignity, and the guard did not bother to respond. It was the hopeless fluttering of a caged bird.
He turned to face the guards, as if trying to make conversation again, seemingly careless of his footing. The runner was well cushioned with an underlay that snaked along the treads and risers; that would be helpful. A fourth step, fifth step, sixth step: Belknap stumbled, as convincingly as he could, pretending he had missed his footing. Now he pitched forward, gently, falling on his slack left shoulder, while secretly breaking his fall with his right hand. “Shit!” Belknap yelped, feigning dismay as he rolled down another couple of steps.
“Vigilanza fuori!” the seasoned guard, the man who called himself Yusef, muttered to his partner. The guards would have only seconds to decide how to respond: A captive had value—the value of the information he could provide. Killing him at an inopportune moment could, in the fullness of time, lead to recriminations. Yet a nonlethal shot had to be aimed with great care, all the more so when the target was in motion.
And Belknap was in motion, righting himself from a sprawl and now springing off a step as if it were a starting block, bounding down the rest of the staircase, his ankles like tightly coiled springs, and then surging toward the Palladian-style door. Yet the door itself was not his target; it, too, would have been magneto-locked shut.
Abruptly, Belknap veered off to one side of it—to a two-foot-wide ornamental segment of leaded glass, an echoing, though narrower, Palladian shape. The city of Rome forbade any visible change to the villa’s facade, and that included the ornamental panel. The blueprints ultimately called for it to be replaced with an identical-looking panel that would be rendered of a bulletproof and unbreakable methacrylate resin, but it would be months before the replica, which required the collaboration of artisans and engineers, would be ready. Now he threw his body at the panel, leading with his hips and averting his face to avoid laceration and—
It gave way, noisily popping out of its frame and shattering upon the stone outside. Elementary physics: The energy of motion was proportional to mass times the square of velocity.
Belknap righted himself swiftly and took off down the stone path in front of the villa. Yet his pursuers were merely seconds behind him. He heard their footfalls—and then their gunfire. He darted erratically, trying to make himself a difficult target, as muzzle flashes punctuated the darkness outside like starbursts. Belknap could hear bullets ricochet off the statuary that decorated the villa’s front grounds. Even as he tried to dodge the handgun fire that was aimed at him, he prayed that no unaimed ricochet found him. Gulping for breath, too frenzied to inventory his injuries, he veered to his left, sprinting to the brick wall that marked the end of the property, and vaulted over it. Razor-edged concertina wire slashed and sliced at his clothing, and he left half his shirt on its barbs. As he dived through the gardens of neighboring consulates and small museums on the via Angelo Masina, he knew that his left ankle would soon start sending shooting pains, that muscles and joints would eventually protest their abuse. For the moment, though, adrenaline had taken his body’s pain circuitry offline. He was grateful for that. And grateful for something else, too.
He was alive.
Beirut
The conference room was rank with the foulness of perforated bodies betraying their contents: the old-penny stench of blood, mingled with odors alimentary and fecal. It was the fetor of the slaughterhouse, an olfactory assault. Stuccoed walls, pampered skin, costly fabrics: All were drenched in a syrup of exsanguination.
The smaller of the American’s bodyguards felt a searing pain spread across his upper chest—a bullet had hit his shoulder and possibly pierced his lung. But consciousness remained. Through slightly parted eyelids, he took in the carnage in the room, the awful swagger of the keffiyeh-clad assailants. The man who called himself Ross McKibbin alone had not been shot, and, as he stared, evidently paralyzed by horror and disbelief, the gunmen roughly slammed a mud-colored canvas hood over his head. Then they hustled the startled American away, swarming back down the stairs.
The bodyguard, gasping for breath, as his poplin jacket slowly reddened with his blood, heard the low growl of the van’s engine. Out the window he was able to catch a final glimpse of the American, his arms now bound together, roughly thrown into the back of the van—a van that now roared off into the dusty night.
The poplin-clad guard withdrew a small cellular phone from a concealed interior pocket. It was an instrument to be used only for emergencies: His controller at Consular Operations had been emphatic about it. His thick fingers slick with arterial blood, the man pressed a sequence of eleven digits.
“Harrison’s Dry Cleaning,” a bored-seeming voice prompted on the other end.
The man gulped for air, trying to fill his injured lungs before he spoke. “Pollux has been captured.”
“Come again?” the voice said. American intelligence needed him to repeat the message, perhaps for voiceprint authentication, and the asset in the poplin suit did so. There was no need to specify time and location; the phone itself contained a military-grade GPS device, providing not merely an electronic date-any-time stamp but a geolocation stamp as well, accurate to within nine feet in the horizontal plane. They knew where Pollux had been, therefore.
But where was he being taken?
Washington, D.C.
“Goddammit to hell!” the director of operations roared, his neck muscles bunching visibly.
The message had been received by a special branch of the INR, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and was relayed to the top of the operations org chart within sixty seconds. Consular Operations took pride in its organizational fluidity, a far cry from the sluggish and lumbering pace of the larger spy agencies. And the top managers at Cons Ops had made it clear that Pollux’s work was a high priority.
Standing at the threshold of the D.O.’s office, a junior operations officer—café-au-lait skin; black, wavy hair that grew tight, dense, and low—flinched as if he himself had been berated.
“Shit!” the director of op
erations shouted, slamming his desk with a fist. Then he slid back his chair and stood up. A vein in his temple pulsed. His name was Gareth Drucker, and although he was staring at the junior ops man in the doorway, he was not actually seeing him. Not yet. Finally, his eyes did focus on the swarthy young staffer. “What are the parameters here?” he asked, like an EMT verifying pulse-rate and blood-pressure stats.
“We just got the call in now.”
“‘Now’ meaning—?”
“Maybe a minute and a half ago. By a recruit of ours who’s in pretty bad shape himself. We thought you’d want to know ASAP.”
Drucker pressed an intercom button. “Get Garrison,” he ordered an unseen assistant. Drucker was a lean five foot eight, and had been likened by one colleague to a sailboat: Through slight of build, he bulged when he got the wind in him. He had the wind in him now, and he was bulging—his chest, his neck, even his eyes, which seemed to loom behind his rectangular rimless glasses. His lips were pursed, growing short and thick like a prodded earthworm.
The junior ops officer stood aside as a burly man in his sixties strode into Drucker’s office. Light from the early afternoon sun filtered through Venetian blinds, bathing the cheap government-issue furniture—a composite-topped desk, a badly veneered credenza, battered enameled-steel file cabinets, the faded velvet-covered chairs that had once been green and were still not quite any other hue. The nylon industrial carpeting, always having been the approximate color and texture of dirt, was a triumph of camouflage if not of style. A decade of foot traffic could scarcely detract from its appearance.
The burly man craned his neck around and squinted at the junior operations officer. “Gomez, right?”
“Gomes,” the junior officer corrected. “One syllable.”
“That’ll fool ’em,” the older man said heavily, as if indulging a lapse of taste. He was Will Garrison, the Beirut operation’s officer-in-charge.
The junior man’s swarthy cheeks reddened slightly. “I’ll let you two talk.”