The Sanctuary (20 page)

“Mia Bishop,” Corben informed him. “She’s her daughter.”

T
he living room was basking in the soft glow of dusk as Mia stirred out of her slumber on Corben’s sofa. Blinking her eyes open, she was momentarily confused by the unfamiliar surroundings,
then
it all came rushing back. She sat up slowly and mopped the languor off her face with her hands. She waited for her senses to reboot, then pushed herself to her feet and padded over to the French doors and out onto the balcony.

The buildings across the street were uniformly gray and looked as tired and weary as she felt. Many of the balconies had been glassed in illegally, turning outdoor terraces into interior space, and shrapnel scars and bullet holes pockmarked virtually every façade. A forest of television aerials sprouted from the flat roofs, and telephone and electricity wires cobwebbed overhead, a constant reminder of the patched-up, makeshift feel of the place. From a strictly aesthetic point of view, this wasn’t an attractive city, not by any means. And yet, somehow, defying expectation and logic, it charmed anyone who visited it.
Including Mia.

She was drying herself off after a quick shower when she heard some noise coming from the front door. Her whole body went rigid. She listened intently, then quickly wrapped herself in a towel and crept up to the bathroom door. She inched the door slightly ajar and peered through the narrow slit. She couldn’t see the front entrance. Her mind flew into overdrive. Should she barricade herself in the bathroom?
Bad idea.
It didn’t have any windows. Should she scuttle over to one of the bedrooms, which had access to a balcony? Not hugely useful, given that the apartment was on the sixth floor of the building and that she didn’t feel like doing another high-wire act. She was running out of options when the dead bolt clicked noisily and the door juddered open. Every hair on her body went stiff for a nanosecond, before Corben’s voice rang out through the flat.

“Mia?”

She shut her eyes and breathed out in relief, chiding herself for letting her imagination run amok. “I’ll be out in a sec,” she replied, making a concerted effort to sound as unflustered as possible.

She got dressed and found Corben in the kitchen. He had brought back her cell phone. She switched it on and saw that she had a couple of messages. That Evelyn was the abducted woman in the news was starting to leak out. The first message was from the project supervisor at the foundation. The second was from Mike Boustany, the local historian who was working with her on the project and whom she’d gotten to know quite well. She needed to call them both back and let them know what had happened, but decided it would keep until the morning. She also knew more concerned friends and colleagues would be calling as the news spread, so she set her phone to a low ring, opting to screen her calls. The only call she’d take, if it came in, was from her aunt in
Boston
. She wanted to discuss things with Corben more thoroughly first. He had also picked up some food on his way back, and she felt ravenous.

They laid out the foil containers of lamb
kafta
skewers, hummus, and other mezes on the coffee table in the living room and sat cross-legged on cushions, digging into the food and sipping cold Almaza beers. Eating was, in
Beirut
as in the rest of the
Mediterranean
, an elaborate feast of delicately prepared dishes as well as a cardinal social ritual. Mia succumbed to the therapeutic charms of the food and the beer, and, for a while, the casual conversation between her and Corben—mostly about the meal—flowed easily, and she enjoyed the respite from the recent frenzied insanity and, she realized, his company, even though there was a guarded superficiality to what they talked about. She didn’t mind. Casual conversations, right now, were a welcome break, but as their plates emptied and the dusk’s golden light faded to black, so did the pretense of anything convivial about their ambrosial meal. The thousand-pound gorilla that had quietly been stalking them from the dark corners of its cage had clawed its way out and was now clamoring for attention.

She’d used the time alone to go over everything that had happened, everything she’d seen or heard. She felt she was missing a lot. “Jim,” she finally ventured, after a pregnant lull. “What is this really all about?”

She caught a small evasive skip in his eyes before they came back to meet hers. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I don’t feel I’m even close to understanding what’s really going on.”

Corben’s face clouded. “I’m not sure I know much more than you do. We’ve been kind of thrown into the deep end without warning, and so far, all we’ve been doing is reacting to events as they happen.”

“But you have an idea,” she persisted. She felt her face flush. She wasn’t used to pressing someone like that, not in such a situation, but then, she’d never been in a situation like this. Not that she imagined many people had.

“What makes you say that?”

“Come on, Jim.”

“What?” he protested, spreading his hands
questioningly.

“Well, the file, for one thing.”

“What file?”

She gave him a clearly dubious look. “The one you took from my mom’s flat. I had a look at it when I was in her kitchen.”

“And…?”

“And of all the stuff in her apartment, it’s the one thing you zeroed in on. There’s this symbol all over it, the snake that’s curled around in a circle, like it’s eating itself. The same symbol I saw on the cover of one of the books in the Polaroids they showed me at the police station, the ones that were in her handbag.” Mia paused, scrutinizing his face, gauging him. She couldn’t read anything in his reaction, or rather, in his lack of one, but then, she didn’t expect anything less from an intelligence operative. But she was on a roll and felt a nervous energy crackling through her. She pressed ahead. “Then there’s the gangland level of violence. I mean, Christ, I know smuggling museum pieces isn’t exactly a white-collar crime, and I’m no expert when it comes to the underworld or to what passes for normal on the streets of Beirut these days, but it all feels pretty hard-core to me—grabbing people off the street, killing others, shooting up apartments…” She trailed off, summoning up the courage to venture even further. “Then there’s your involvement.”

Corben’s brow furrowed.
“My involvement?”

Mia gave him a sly but nervous half-smile. “I didn’t think the CIA was really into recovering stolen loot from museums.”

“An American national’s been kidnapped,” Corben reminded her. “That’s Agency territory.” He took a final, casual sip from his bottle and put it down coolly, before his eyes settled on her again.

As inscrutable as the Sphinx,
she thought, her mind sidetracking, thinking about how maddening it would be to face him across a poker table or, worse, to live with someone as sealed in. “If you say so, but…” She shrugged and didn’t sound convinced, not that she was trying to. “Come on, Jim.” She searched his eyes for a connection, a will to open up. “She’s my mom. I know you guys have this whole ‘need to know’ thing going on, and I get that, but my mother’s life and maybe mine are in the balance here.”

She held his gaze as he clearly weighed whether to give in. She could almost hear his brain whirring, going through the worrying details of what they were involved in, and selecting what, if anything, to share and what to keep in the vault. After a brief silence, he pursed his lips and nodded almost imperceptibly, then got up and walked across the room. He brought back his briefcase and sat down again. He opened the combination lock and pulled out the file, and set it down squarely on the coffee table in front of him, resting his hands on it.

“I don’t have a full picture of what’s going on, alright? But I’ll tell you what I know.” He patted the file. “Your mom had this out on her desk, an old file which at face value doesn’t seem related to her current work. It’s on her desk the same day she meets with someone from an old dig in
Iraq
. I think he might have given her the Polaroids that were in her handbag. Maybe he came to see her about selling
them,
maybe he hoped she could hook him up with some buyers. Maybe she was interested in them herself.
Because of this.”
He opened the file and pulled out a photocopy, one of the images of the Ouroboros, and slid it over to Mia. “As you rightly noted, the excavation in the file has to do with this snake symbol, the same one that’s on the book.”

It was an old, black-and-white image of the coiled snake, taken from a centuries-old woodcut. Mia studied it more closely than she had before.The beast in the image was more than a snake. It had exaggerated scales and fangs, more akin to a dragon. Its eyes were cold and stared blankly ahead, as if the act of devouring itself were the most natural, and painless, of acts. It was a sinister image that harked back to a primal fear, a yellowed, weathered copy that reeked of malice.

She looked up at Corben. “What is it?”

“It’s called an Ouroboros. It’s very
old,
it’s been used at different times by different cultures.”

“What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t seem to have one specific meaning. I think it’s more of an archetypal, mystical symbol that meant different things to different people, depending on where it was used. I found many instances of it, from ancient Egyptian myths to Hindu legends, and later with alchemists and gnostics, and that was without spending too much time on it.”

Mia was finding it hard to draw her eyes away from the image. “The relics aren’t important. Whoever’s got her is after that book.”

“Possibly.
This might tell us more.” He tapped a finger on Evelyn’s file. “I haven’t yet had time to go through it properly. Either way, it’s not really the issue. It’s only relevant in that it’s why she was kidnapped. And right now, the best lead we have for finding her is the guy who I think brought these to her, this man from her past, the Iraqi fixer you said she mentioned. He knows more about what’s going on and about
who
else is involved in this. We don’t know anything about him, but…” Corben paused, hesitating. Mia could see that something in him didn’t want to continue, but, after a brief moment, he said, “You could well be right in that he was the same guy who was with her when she was kidnapped. And if he was, well, you saw him. You can identify him. And I’m hoping that if he’s the same guy, then maybe”—he turned the file so it was now facing her the right way—“just maybe, there’s a picture of him in here somewhere. And that would help us a lot.”

She looked at him uncertainly, feeling somewhat shortchanged by his answer, then nodded and opened up the file again. Much as she felt drawn to the materials in it—the sheets of notes, handwritten in ink with a graceful, classic penmanship that she knew well from the letters her mom had sent her when she was growing up; the photocopies of documents and pages of books, in English, Arabic, a few in French, with sentences underlined and notes scribbled in the margins; the maps of Iraq and of the broader Levant, with markings and arrows and circled notes; all of it with many, many question marks—she flicked through them after no more than a cursory glance, looking for the photographs she needed to examine.

She came across a batch of old snapshots, scattered between the pages, and studied them closely. She recognized a younger, slimmer Evelyn in some of them, decked out in khaki field pants, mesh hats, and big tortoiseshell sunglasses, and found herself imagining the exciting, unconventional life her mother must have led at the time: a single woman, a Westerner, traveling to exotic, sun-drenched locations, meeting different peoples, immersing herself in their cultures, working with them to explore the hidden treasures of their past. A driven life, to be sure, and more than likely a fulfilling one, but one that had to come at a price, which in Evelyn’s case seemed to be a wistful loneliness, a guarded solitude.

Her fingers paused at a shot of Evelyn standing alone with a man. His features were too obscured by the sunglasses, the shade of his hat, and the downward, slightly turned angle of his face. She felt a prickling at the back of her neck. She knew that shot. She’d been given a copy of it when she was seven, which she kept safely tucked into her wallet, always close. The man in the photograph was her father. Evelyn had told her it was the only picture of him she had. They’d only spent a few weeks together. It saddened Mia that she didn’t even know what he really looked like.

She stared wistfully at the photograph,
then
a troubling realization crept into her mind. Her father was there. He had been with Evelyn when she’d found the underground chambers.

And he’d died a month later.
In a car crash.

A sharp pain spiked inside her heart. For a second, it felt as if it stopped beating altogether, and she felt the blood draining from her face.

Corben seemed to spot it. “What is it?”

She handed him the picture.
“The man in the picture.”
Her words came out as if emerging from a fog. “He was my father. He was there.”

Corben studied her, waiting for more.

“He died a month later.
In a car crash.”
Her eyes were alight with questions. “What if he was killed?
Murdered.
Because of this.”

An uncertain look crossed Corben’s features. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s nothing here that indicates that Evelyn had any trouble over this before. If his death was related to all this, then she would have been under threat too. Which doesn’t seem to be the case, I mean, she lived a pretty open life.”