The Fey (39 page)

The constant pressure of pretending to be
Alyssa, covering who she was, and looking over her shoulder,
slipped away in this twenty room CIA created oasis. Two days passed
into three days.

They were deliciously happy.

FFF

October 12 – 9:30 A.M.
Downtown Denver, Colorado

“
Ah shit,” Alex said as
her cell phone rang. “Do you mind?”

She and John were eating a late breakfast in
a courtyard tucked into the middle of the hotel. The waiter had
just set their meal on the table when her phone rang.

“
Go ahead,” John said
opening the Denver Post. “I have this important newspaper to keep
me company.”

Alex smiled. Surrounded by CIA operatives,
government employees, and various spies from a variety of
countries, she didn’t worry about being overheard. Plus, she was
fairly confident they were taping her calls anyway. She hoped they
enjoyed their hotel room videos. Smiling slightly, she thought,
better than porn.

“
Yes?”

“
Your friends wish to see
you now,” a voice said on the phone. “We’re waiting for you in the
front of the hotel. Tell him: ‘Sorry, I have to go.’”

Alex clicked off the phone. Standing, she
slipped on her leather jacket.

“
Sorry, I have to
go.”

Smiling, John looked up from the newspaper.
She kissed his lips then shook her head slightly.

“
You know, he always says
‘friends’.”

John’s eyes caught hers. She seemed a
million miles away. Better to just let her do her work. She’ll be
back soon, he thought.

She smiled slightly and touched his chin, “I
love you.”

He smiled in response. Without another word,
she walked out of the courtyard and through the front of the
hotel.

Raz pulled out a chair from the table.

“
Where’s Alex?” he
asked.

“
She got a call and had to
leave,” John said behind his newspaper.

“
Then she won’t mind if I
eat her… She left her coffee?”

John looked up and nodded.

“
It was quite strange,
really. She said that she had to go, then said that ‘he always says
friends.’”

Raz jumped from the table and ran through
the hotel. Alex was sitting in the back of a cab that was pulling
away from the hotel. She turned to look at him then pressed her
hand against the window of the cab. Her brown eyes were round and
hollow, as if he could see straight to her soul. He moved forward
to catch a cab but a hand held him in place.

“
Sir, we need to ask you
to return to the hotel,” the CIA doorman said. “There’s been a
confirmed major threat against this facility.”

“
But…” Raz said. He
watched the cab move into traffic.

The doorman all but pushed Raz back into the
hotel. The doors shut, then outer doors, designed to protect
against car bombs, clanged shut. Looking down at his cell phone, he
saw what he expected. ‘No Service.’ He threw the phone into the
brick wall.

In that moment, Raz understood what Alex had
told John. Furious with himself, he missed the fact that in every
call, Eleazar said the word ‘friend.’ His mind clicked through a
series of commands and sounds from the calls. Eleazar planted the
word for the moment he would use it to control her. Walking back to
the table, Raz felt his entire world crumble around him.

“
John,” Raz
said.

“
Hmm,” John said from
behind the paper.

“
Eleazar has Alex,” Raz
said.

F

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A half hour later

October 12 – 10 A.M.

North Denver, Colorado

When Alex came to herself, she was sitting
in a chair with four men standing around her. Wrapped in rope, her
hands were tied to her sides and she was tied to a chair. She
wasn’t sure what released her from the semi-trance state. She was
just here. Closing her eyes, she remembered waking up, the feel of
John’s hands across her skin, the warm burst of water from the
shower and the rich coffee at breakfast. God damn it, she left her
coffee.

Opening her eyes, she looked from face to
glowering face and smiled.

“
Hello.”

“
How dare you speak to us?
Filth!” A medium sized man stepped forward and hit her across the
face with his open hand. He began screaming Islamic slogans at her
in Arabic. His head was wrapped in a white turban and his beard was
peppered with black and white. His eyes glowed with
insanity.

“
Do I know you?” Alex
asked. Her eyes blinked at the sting of his slap. She looked at
each face. They looked familiar but she had not met them before.
“Oh right, you guys are on the Homeland terrorist list.”

“
You insolent little
bitch,” turban man said.

The man with the turban hit her across the
face with the back of his hand. He spat at her face.

Alex closed her eyes against the burst of
pain, then rubbed her bleeding lip against her shoulder. The man’s
discharge dropped from her cheek to her shoulder. Alex shifted her
shoulder and the spittle dropped to the ground.

She had no idea what they would do to her.
Eleazar was a sophisticated psychological terrorist. But these
guys? These men were thugs, sadists so damaged by their delusions
that they were willing to do anything to get what they believed
they deserved.

She knew these men and men like them. She
trained, from the time she was ten years old, for the eventuality
of meeting them in a room like this. She negotiated with them for
the release of thousands of hostages. She knew what they were
capable of. She opened her eyes to look from face to face again.
Yes, she knew them.

But they did not know her.

With a slight nod of her head, she began
singing songs in her head. She smiled slightly when the first song
that came to mind was “Somewhere over the rainbow.”

“
What can I do for you?”
she asked in Arabic.

“
You can get our
property,” a second man came forward. He spoke English with a
clipped British accent. British born Islamic extremist. He couldn’t
have been more than twenty years old. Looking into his eyes, she
saw his terror match his resolve.

“
I am not sure what
property you are referring to,” Alex said.

The Brit hit her face with his fist. Alex
saw stars as her brain smashed against the back of her skull. She
nodded her head slightly.

She heard her father’s voice echoing through
the years.

“
Stage One, is the
‘terrify you’ stage. They don’t want information. They want to set
the stage, destroy your hope, and make you more compliant to what
would come next. They’re going to beat you up, give you something
to think about, then leave you alone to think. The real torture and
raping will come much later after you’ve had time to
think.”

A third man came forward holding a knife
with a gleaming ten-inch blade. He held the blade in front of her
eyes then pressed the razor sharp blade against her throat. In one
swift movement, he sliced into her left arm.

Alex ground her teeth together to keep from
gasping and returned her focus to her songs, now “Hello Dolly.” She
wondered idly why these old musicals always came up first.

Squeezing the muscle and sinew, he used the
knife to dig out the standard issue tracking device from her
forearm. He held the device in front of her eyes on the end of his
bloody knife. Dropping the tracking device on the floor, he crushed
the tracking device with the heel of his shoe.

“
No one will find you
now,” he said.

He ripped a filthy piece of cloth into a
long strip then wrapped the strips around her wound.

“
We want to keep you alive
for a while.”

The men laughed in unison, reminding Alex of
the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. One more to go
before the leader calls it off… for now.

“
Hello Fey,” the fourth
man came forward. “You probably remember me.”

Alex squinted her eyes thinking then nodded.
British Intelligence. Collected by mistake in a raid, he had been
tortured at Abu Graib. She and the team rescued him then helped him
return to his family. British Secret Service believed that he still
worked for them. Looking at the rubber pipe he held in his hands,
they were wrong.

Letting out a breath, Alex turned the sole
focus of her mind to “When you wish upon a star” playing in her
head, the love in her heart, and a silent message to her twin. She
felt the first blow, as the fourth man began beating her with the
rubber pipe, then felt nothing else.

Her mind slipped into dreams and
memories.

FF

“
Why Alex? Why do you have
to be a Green Beret?” John, her husband of five days,
asked.

He had just learned the origins of the scars
on her back, her wrists and ankles. He was furious. Unable to even
look at her, he stood at the hotel window staring out at Santa
Monica beach.

“
It’s who I am. I’ve
always wanted to be a Green Beret,” Alex said moving to him. She
kissed his neck and slipped her arms around his waist. “I made my
Dad pinkie swear, when I was five years old, that he would help me
become a Green Beret.”

“
Your father is behind
this? My God,” he said. He turned away from the surf to stare at
her.

“
I don’t think he had much
choice. I would have done it with or without his help. I think he
just wanted to give me the edge.”

FF

“
Pumpkin, you have to
remember that they want you to be afraid. The only way to get an
edge is to never show your fear. How will you do that?”

They were standing in the kitchen of their
Sixth Avenue Parkway home in Denver. Patrick set the dirty dinner
dishes in the dishwasher while Alex cleared the dining room table
after dinner.

“
Songs in my head,” said a
fifteen-year-old Alex. “I do that now when I’m at finishing
school.”

Patrick laughed. “I wondered how you were
getting through that. What else?”

“
Put the fear in a
box?”

“
That works. What
else?”

“
Don’t get ahead of
myself. Deal with each situation as it comes.”

“
Rest when you can,”
Patrick added. He poured dishwashing detergent into the
machine.

“
I have to believe that I
can endure everything that comes my way.”

“
And then some.” Patrick
closed and started the dishwasher. “Ice cream?”

“
Of course,” Alex
laughed.

FF

Four hours later

October 12 – 2:00 P.M.
Olde Town Arvada, Colorado

Alex awoke with the taste of ice cream in
her mouth. She was lying face down on a concrete floor. Before
moving, her mind ran down her bones to see what was broken, what
hurt, what damage was done. She felt the sharp pain of the knife
wound. Nothing seemed broken. Rolling over, she groaned in pain at
the knots, lumps and bruises which covered almost every inch of her
body. Gritting her teeth, she moved to sit up. Her hands ran down
her body. At least nothing was broken.

She felt the hair stand up on the back of
her neck. Someone was watching her. Sniffing, she couldn’t smell
anyone close. There must be a video monitoring in this room.

With a grunt, she pushed herself to standing
to check her surroundings. Three brick walls and one cement wall in
a twenty by twenty foot storage room. While three florescent bulbs
hung from the ceiling, only one bulb was lit. The light was dim in
the bare, dusty room. She could see daylight from two thin basement
vents. One door. Pressing her head against the brick, she heard
nothing. One wall at a time, she listened. She heard a mechanical
hum behind the concrete wall possibly from a heater or water
system.

Maybe the door was unlocked. Pressing on the
door, she saw that there was no inner handle only a key opening for
a deadbolt. She pressed her shoulder against the door but the wood
held. She wasn’t getting out that way anytime soon.

Someone had placed a relatively clean empty
bucket by the door and a sealed gallon of water. Clearly they
planned on leaving her here for a while. She picked up the water,
she looked around the top and edges for a puncture. What her eyes
did not see, her fingers felt. The water was drugged.

Alex turned the bucket over and stepped up
to touch the wood ceiling. Pulling on a loose plank, she peeked
into the space between the wood planking and the floor above. There
was eighteen inches of insulation before the underside of wood
flooring. No one would hear anything that happened in this room but
she would be able to hear people coming and going. Just enough
noise to make her feel completely alone yet no one would hear her
scream, call or beg. Eleazar was good.

The light shut off.

Feeling with her hands, Alex went from
hanging bulb to hanging bulb pulling on the chains. Nothing came
on. Someone set up the lights to give her hope only to snatch hope
away when she couldn’t turn the fixtures on. Yes, Eleazar was very
good.

They had taken her shoes, her handgun, her
new engagement ring, but left her fully clothed in a pair of blue
jeans, a T-shirt and a sweater. She smiled when she noticed that
they left John’s simple gold band on her right hand. The ring
wasn’t worth much to them, but to Alex the ring was a precious
connection to John. Slipping her hand under her T-shirt, she
touched the diamond in her belly button and smiled. She was glad to
have something from Raz.