Amid the Shadows (11 page)

Behind them, the
screaming got even louder with people pushing through
any
possible exit,
even the open wall of glass.
 
Behind the
car, Smith’s movements were fluid and fast.
 
He shot two of the three before any of them got a single shot off.
 
The third opened fire forcing Smith to duck
down.
 
In a panic, the man unloaded his
entire magazine, with most of the bullets missing completely and shattering
another set of windows at the far end of the room.
 
Smith waited for him to run out of bullets
and then dropped him with a single shot.

He scanned the
restaurant and then looked outside.
 
Satisfied, he swiftly stepped over the debris between himself and the
girls.
 
He looked down at Sarah and then
to Christine.
 
“We need to leave, get in
the car.”

Christine was shaking,
looking as though she might be in shock.
 
Slowly she blinked and looked up at Smith.
 
“Why…what…” she shook her head and grabbed
Sarah’s hand again.
 
“What in the hell is
this?” she cried.
 
“Who are they…who are
you
?”

“Glen Smith,” he
answered calmly.
 
“I was the one standing
outside your front door.”

“What…happened?” She
looked around the dining room.
 
Several
innocent people were lying motionless on the floor.
 
“Why are they doing this?”
 
She looked back toward the front, and her
eyes fell on Liz’s body.
 
“My god!
 
They killed Liz!”
 
Her eyes began to well up.
 
“Why?
 
Tell me why!”

Smith watched her and
holstered his gun beneath his jacket.
 
“I’m sorry, this is not the time for questions.
 
We need to leave.”

In stunned silence,
Christine did a full scan of the restaurant and thought she could hear the
faint sound of sirens in the distance.
 

Smith heard them too,
glancing in the direction from which they were coming and then back to
Christine.
 
He looked at Sarah again,
then took a few steps over some twisted bench seats and opened the passenger’s
door.
 
“Getting arrested by the police
will not help.
 
It will make things far
worse.”
 
The sirens grew louder over the
sobbing of people outside.

Christine turned to
Sarah and whispered, “Is he
red
?”
 

Sarah shook her head
no.

What was she
supposed to do?
 
Christine
thought.
 
No one in the police department
had been able to protect them.
 
They
still didn’t have any answers.
 
And Smith
was the only one offering protection now.
 
It had to be protection, didn’t it?
 
If he wanted to kill them, he would have already.

The sirens were getting
closer.

“Okay,” Christine said
meekly.
 
She rose slowly and pulled Sarah
with her to the car.
 
She scanned the
inside, both front and back, and pushed the seat forward, letting Sarah into
the back.
 
“Put your seat belt on,” she
said with a trembling voice.

Christine watched Smith
circle back around to the other side of the car and slide in.
 
He closed his door and looked at her.
 
With reluctance, she closed the passenger
door and continued to watch him.

Smith quickly started
the car and dropped it into reverse, then drove backward until he could turn
around.
 
He turned off his headlights and
headed east on the main street, away from the approaching lights and sirens.

“Are either of you
hurt?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.
 
They both shook their heads.
 
“Good.”
 
He continued to drive,
watching the rearview mirror.
 
After
several minutes of silence, Smith turned to Christine.
 
“Can you drive?” he asked.

“Yes,” was all that
came out.

“Can you drive
now
?”
Smith asked again.
 
“Are you hurt, are
you tired?”

“No.”
 
Christine frowned.
 
“Why?”

Smith leaned forward
and looked carefully out the window for a place to pull over.
   
“Because I’m about to lose consciousness.”

“What?”

Smith pulled into a
dark parking lot behind a convenience store.
 
He put the car in park and turned off the engine, then reached down
gently and pulled open his blue jacket.
 
The left side of his torso was covered in blood.

Christine’s eyes
widened.
 
“Oh my god!”

Smith grimaced slightly
when he pulled his shirt up; some of the blood was already dried.
 
The bullet had gone straight through.
 
He blinked twice and turned to her.
 
“Listen carefully.
 
I don’t have much time.”
 
He pulled his jacket off and reached across
Christine, opening the glove compartment.
 
He pulled out a roll of duct tape from the inside.

“What’s that for?” she
asked, watching him rip off a large piece.

“It’s for repairing
ventilation ducts,” he answered dryly.

She frowned
sarcastically.
 
“I know that.
 
I mean what-” she stopped when he stuck the
tape to the steering wheel and then pulled his shirt off and ripped it
lengthwise.
 
He folded one half of the
shirt a few times and pressed it against the wound while securing it with the
tape.
 
He ripped off more tape from the
roll and did the same to the wound on his back.

When he was done, Smith
turned and looked at Sarah who stared nervously back at him from the rear
seat.
 
He turned back to Christine.
 
“Where is your phone?”

“It’s right here.”
 
She looked in her purse and pulled it
out.
 
“Why?”

“Turn off your cellular
signal,” Smith said.
 
His breathing was
beginning to sound labored.
 
“They can
find you that way.
 
Do you know how to
turn it off?”

“Yes.”
 
Christine nodded and fumbled with her phone,
finally turning off the signal.

“Just…use the
GPS.”
 
Smith said.
 
He reached back into the glove compartment in
front of Christine and pulled out a piece of paper and pencil.
 
He wrote something on it and handed the paper
to her.
 
“Use your phone’s navigation to
get to this place…as quickly as you can.”

Christine took the
paper apprehensively and looked at it.
 
On it was scribbled a set of numbers.
 
“Is this an address?”
 
she asked.

He took a deep breath
and shook his head.
 
“They’re GPS
coordinates.
 
Just type them into your
phone.”
 
He blinked again, longer, then
turned and focused intently on Sarah.
 
“Get to that location.
 
Your lives
depend on it.”

He managed to get the
last words out before losing consciousness and sliding with a thud against the
driver side door.

22

Zahn exited the jet and
stepped out into the arid Dubai morning air which was already approaching
ninety degrees.
 
A large delegation waited
for him at the bottom of the stairs.
 
Several photographers stood in front, while the black limousines could
be seen behind the crowd.
 
He descended
the stairs and waved with a perfect smile.
 
When he reached the black tarmac, he bowed to the Arab diplomats before
him, continuing down onto his knees and kissing the ground, symbolizing his
respect for their sovereign land.

It took over an hour
for the photographs and respectful exchanges with nearly a dozen sheikhs.
 
Zahn finally continued with his small
entourage to the limousines and climbed into the back of the middle car.
 
A few minutes later, the three cars rolled
forward, away from the crowd, circled the west end of the terminal and headed
for the large metropolitan skyline in the distance.

Dubai was originally
established in 1833 by
Sheikh
Maktoum bin Butti Al-Maktoum when he persuaded 800 members of his clan to
follow him from present day Saudi Arabia to the Dubai Creek.
 
Since then, and due to the advantage of its
strategic, geographic location, the city had grown from an important trading
hub into a major international and cosmopolitan center for the Middle East.

Zahn peered out of his tinted window at the hundreds of
skyscrapers that had come to symbolize the wealth of Dubai.
 
All funded by the United Arab Emirates’
untold billions in oil money, it was a city that was now one of the most
expensive in the world.

He looked at his watch.
 
He was ahead of schedule.
 
His
next meeting with
Mohammed bin Manal Al
Maktoum was not due to begin for another hour.
 
But it was the very last meeting that he was thinking about.

The man that sat across from
Zahn lowered his cigarette and
exhaled
the last of the cigarette smoke
.
 
Being Iranian, he was not a sheikh, but closer to an a
yatollah with one important difference:
 
Ra’ad was a warrior.
 
He had long since rejected the path of a
religious scholar and instead maintained a humble existence, fighting for his
people and more importantly for his God.

Zahn
sat two hundred miles north of Dubai and across the Strait of Hormuz in a dark
underground complex inside the Iranian border.
 
His entourage patiently waited for him in a downtown Dubai skyscraper,
maintaining the illusion that Zahn was still there, deep in discussions with
various heads of state in the Middle East, all of whom had secretly left hours
earlier.

Ra’ad
put his cigarette out in the ashtray
and looked to his men, one on his left and
one on the right.
 
Unlike most of the
“scholars”, Ra’ad’s English was perfect.
 
He took Sun Tzu’s code of
know thy enemy
very seriously.
 
“So we have come to it at last,” he said.

A
smile crept across Zahn’s lips.
 
“Finally.”

“I
will admit,” Ra’ad said with a grim smile of his own, “I did not trust
you.
 
Until the church.”

 
Zahn shrugged.
 
“Words prove nothing.”
 

Ra’ad
nodded in agreement.
 
From his demeanor,
not to mention his worn turban and clothes, no one would believe the power the
man wielded.
 
After all, most Muslims
believed his reputation to be more akin to a ghost than a man.
 
And it was a distinction that no one ever
wished to find out.

Ra’ad
studied Zahn as he always did.
 
He would
never have imagined that a westerner would come to him with this kind of a
plan, and certainly not a bureaucrat.
 
Never in his lifetime would he have thought it.
 
He put his hands together in front of his
chapped lips.
 
“You are sure he will
come?”

Zahn
smirked.
 
“Of course he will.
 
There will be no choice.”
 
He watched Ra’ad light another
cigarette.
 
“When will your men arrive?”

“Two
days,” Ra’ad replied, dropping the match into the ash tray.
 
“And then they will be yours, for whatever
you need.”

Zahn
understood Ra’ad and, more importantly, he understood his men.
 
They were not trained in silly desert camps
using wooden planks and jungle gym equipment.
 
Instead, Ra’ad’s men were converts of the deepest kind.
 
They were all trained in a special forces
group before being turned.
 
All highly
trained, thoroughly disgusted with the evil western empires of greed and sloth
and now happy to share every piece of their expert training with those willing
to take a stand.
 
More importantly, they
believed in Ra’ad, a man who rejected every form of self-indulgence, ate the
rotten rice that his men ate and drank the same dirty water.
 
He knew the history and struggle of his
people almost verbatim.
 
He knew the
difference between taking a side and taking a
stand
.
 
And Ra’ad was about to take the ultimate
stand.

Yes,
Zahn trusted Ra’ad and his men.
 
He knew
what they were capable of.
 
After all,
his man Sarat, who was sitting to his left, used to be one of Ra’ad’s best.

Zahn
smiled again at Ra’ad, who was still watching him very carefully with his dark
eyes.
 
His rough and leathery face was a
testament to what he was willing to endure for his people.
 
Zahn admired the man’s determination, his
righteousness, his faith.
 
What he had
promised Ra’ad was going to shock the world, and it was a promise he fully
intended to deliver upon.
 
Yet if Ra’ad
could see deeper into Zahn’s eyes, if he could only read his mind, he would
never have imagined what was to come after that.