The Sanctuary (37 page)
Authors: Raymond Khoury
Two targets were now in Corben’s crosshairs. One would inevitably contact him: The hakeem would assume Corben had Farouk—and the book—and would want to trade. The other would be making his way to a quiet rendezvous somewhere in eastern
Turkey
. Corben needed to be there for it, but he had to find a way to do it on his own terms and without involving his colleagues at the embassy. At this point, apart from the mystery buyer and Abu Barzan himself, no one else knew about the imminent transaction. He wanted to keep it that way for now, at least until he could set up his trip to
Turkey
on his own terms. He needed to choose his words carefully if he was going to pull it off without attracting undue attention.
Either way, the endgame was near.
KIRKWOOD
STUDIED Corben’s face as he listened to the agent’s briefing with deepening unease.
Things hadn’t gone according to plan. Admittedly, Corben had been winging it. There were never any guarantees that they’d be able to intercept the call to Ramez, much less actually beat the kidnappers to Farouk. Corben had done remarkably well to get hold of the Iraqi before them, and he’d almost pulled it off, if it hadn’t been for an unlucky round that had found its way into Farouk’s side.
He scanned the other faces around the room. The ambassador and Hayflick, the station chief, were also listening intently as Corben presented his thought process with impressive clarity.
“So what are we left with?” the ambassador asked. “Do we know where he stashed the pieces Bishop’s kidnappers are after?”
Corben shook his head. “I didn’t have time to get that from him. He was in shock, just rambling incoherently in Arabic before his body gave up on him.”
The ambassador nodded glumly.
Kirkwood
kept his eyes locked on Corben. He wondered if Corben also knew that there was no stash to be found. The call from Abu Barzan had raised some troubling questions in
Kirkwood
’s mind, and since Farouk hadn’t been grabbed by the kidnappers, the other bidder wasn’t one of them. Which meant it was someone else. And the timing was too coincidental to discount the possibility that the other bidder was linked to Corben, if it wasn’t actually him.
Which threw up some disturbing realizations.
One was that Corben was, quite possibly, well aware of the forthcoming Turkish transaction. The other was that, given the ulterior agenda he seemed to be pursuing, getting Evelyn back safely might not exactly be a priority for him.
“You think the kidnappers will get in touch?”
Kirkwood
probed.
“They’ve got to,” Corben speculated. “Right now, they think we’ve got Farouk, which means they’ve got to assume we also have his stash. And that’s what they’re after. I’ve got to think they’ll make contact and offer to trade Evelyn for it. At least, I’m hoping they do. Right now, it’s looking like our only chance of getting her back.”
A sobering silence descended on the room.
Not good enough,
Kirkwood
thought. He wasn’t comfortable
with the wait-and-pray strategy, nor
with the potential danger of a bluff trade if they did call. He needed to instigate things. “We need to send them a signal,” he suggested.
“A message.
Let them know we’re ready to trade.” He turned to the ambassador. “Maybe you could make a statement to the press. Something along the lines of ‘We’re waiting for word from the kidnappers so that we can work things out and give them what they need to bring this matter to a mutually beneficial conclusion.’
That kind of thing.”
The ambassador’s expression clouded. “You know our policy on negotiating with terrorists openly. You want me to go on TV and invite them to make a trade?”
“They’re not terrorists,”
Kirkwood
reminded him. “They’re antiquity smugglers.”
“Come on, Bill. It’s a nuance no one’s going to pick up on. For most people who’ll be watching, they’re one and the same.”
Kirkwood
frowned with frustration. “What about the Bishop girl?
A daughter making an emotional plea for the return of her mother.”
“I don’t see a problem with that,” the ambassador conceded. “Okay. I’ll set something up. But it’s going to be tricky to pull off a bluff like that, given that we don’t have the pieces.”
“If we get that call and they want to trade, we’ll get her back, regardless,” Hayflick assured him. “We can set it up so it’s to our advantage.”
Kirkwood
turned to Corben. He thought he spotted a hint of discomfort in his hardened expression, but the agent’s face wasn’t giving much away. He just acknowledged
Kirkwood
’s suggestion with a small, thoughtful nod.
At the back of
Kirkwood
’s mind, something else was vying for attention. More and more, he was feeling it would be inevitable. He and his partners were all in agreement on this.
Do your best to get Evelyn out without exposing the project. But if you have to, then use the book.
Not having seen the book yet, he wasn’t sure that giving it up would expose anything, but it could jeopardize their work and put a legacy that was hundreds of years in the making at risk.
It wasn’t a decision he had to make just yet. It was irrelevant as long as the kidnappers hadn’t made contact.
He felt a silent vibration in his pocket and fished out his phone. He glanced at the caller ID. It was his main contact at the UN. “I’m sorry, I have to take this,” he apologized to the others as he got out of his seat and stepped away from the table.
The blunt voice on the other end went straight to the point.
“That thing you asked me about,” his contact at the UN said.
“This hakeem.
I think I’ve got something for you.”
THE CONTRITE WORDS coming out of Omar’s mouth inflamed the hakeem.
“He got away,
mu’allimna
. The American has him.”
The hakeem seethed with disbelief. How could Omar have failed him—again? The man had all the necessary advantages. He had the resources, the contacts, the firepower, and still he failed.
Omar rattled off his explanation and his excuses, but the hakeem silenced him with a ferocious rebuke. He didn’t need to hear the details. He only cared about results. And he needed people who could provide him the ones he wanted. When this was over, he’d have to see about having Omar replaced. They’d need to get him someone more reliable.
More capable.
Someone who would get the job done.
He allowed his breathing to settle and focused on his next move. He knew he still held a trump card. They’d give him what he was after in exchange for the woman, he didn’t doubt that. But the trade would carry risk, and given Omar’s track record of late, pulling it off without leaving a trail was by no means assured. The hakeem was loath to take unnecessary risks, but Omar’s ineptitude had made a big one unavoidable. Hostage exchanges were never foolproof, not for either party.
Something else was coursing through his veins, something far more poisonous than the looming threat of the exchange: The American had humiliated his men yet again, which meant he’d humiliated him. It was a personal affront, a grave insult, one that the hakeem found intolerable and unforgivable. The transgression had to be punished. Order needed to be restored.
“Call your contacts. Do it now. I want to know everything there is to know about this American,” he rasped.
“Everything.”
C
ocooned inside her hotel room, Mia watched herself on TV with subdued detachment. She stared through the screen as her own face loomed bizarrely back at her, reciting the carefully worded plea that Corben had given her before handing her over to the embassy’s press attaché. The image on the screen wasn’t registering. It felt like an alternate reality, a surreal parallel universe that she was watching through a tear in some
Matrix
-like continuum, except that it wasn’t. It was real.
Starkly, unquestionably real.
With a heavy heart, she’d called her aunt’s house back in Nahant just before the news conference. Her aunt had picked up, her sunny voice indicating that she hadn’t yet read anything about the kidnapping. Mia built up some courage with a brief exchange of banter, then, with great care, she told her aunt what had happened. It was a hard conversation to have, but her aunt was a strong woman who, though hugely concerned, took it stoically. Mia alerted her to the press conference while assuring her that every effort was being expended to find Evelyn and get her back safely, adding that, yes, she would be careful too. She’d hung up, feeling a constricting ache in her chest.
She turned the volume down and brooded over Corben’s grim update. With Farouk dead and his stash missing, there was nothing to trade for Evelyn.
Which was really bad news.
She’d thought about going back to Evelyn’s apartment, looking through her stuff, seeing if she could find another book, something with the tail-eater symbol on it that they could use, something to entice the kidnappers into a barter, but Corben had shot that idea down pretty quickly. He’d been there, done that. He’d found nothing in her apartment that they could substitute for the book.
Besides, it was all moot right now. The bastards hadn’t made contact.
She silently hoped—prayed—they would. They had to. What was the point of taking her, if it wasn’t to trade her for something?
The news moved on to some other uplifting event. She clicked the TV off and looked around the room. She hated the utter loneliness of it and thought back to the previous night, to being at Corben’s apartment. Even though she barely knew him, his presence was comforting. She realized she’d been through more with him, in the brief hours she’d known him, than she had with most men she’d dated. She wondered whether to call him, to see if there was anything new, but she buried the thought, certain that it would be a bad idea.
She glanced at her bed and knew that sleep, if it was to come, needed to be coerced, bribed,
enticed
.
She picked up her key card and her cell phone and headed for the door.
IN HIS DARKENED LIVING ROOM, Corben switched off his TV and made his way to his bedroom. It had been a ferocious day—probably his most challenging, ever. He’d been fueled through it by a torrent of adrenaline, but that well was now bone-dry. He felt the weariness of battle in every pore of his body, which was crying out for a respite. He wasn’t about to argue with that.
He climbed into bed and killed the lights. The blackout blinds blotted out the outside world, and he let his mind drift. It resisted for a while, stubbornly churning over the tasks ahead.
His thoughts settled on Evelyn Bishop’s call to Tom Webster. Corben had asked a data-mining analyst at
Langley
to feed the name into the system. There were too many hits—the name was surprisingly common. Corben had given the analyst an estimated age and some target backgrounds to narrow the field, but pinning the name to an identity, if it happened at all, would take time.
He moved on to the more pressing matter at hand. The last update from Olshansky showed the Iraqi dealer to have settled in for the night in
Diyarbakir
, a small town in southeast
Turkey
, around fifty miles from the Syrian border. Corben had thought the man would go for Mardin, which was a couple of hours closer to the Iraqi border. Both had airports, but
Diyarbakir
’s was larger, the town bigger, and visitors didn’t risk drawing as much attention. Using triangulation, Olshansky had the dealer pinned down within a radius of fifty yards, which, in a remote place such as
Diyarbakir
, was as good as it got.
Corben needed to figure out how to get there without alerting his colleagues to what he might find there. The Agency had people in the general area, but he didn’t want to delegate this. He wanted to be there himself and didn’t want Hayflick or anyone else, for that matter, to know the real reason. He thought he would use Olshansky’s phone tracking to justify the trip. Say it was someone Farouk had called from the café.
A person of interest.
Diyarbakir
was only three hundred miles away. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to fly there in a small plane. He’d need to arrange it first thing in the morning if he wanted to get there in time for when his mystery buyer showed up.
The thought of that encounter pleased him and lulled him into a desperately needed sleep.
TWO FLOORS UP from Mia’s room,
Kirkwood
glanced up from his laptop and half-watched her statement on his TV. He’d already seen it on one of the other local channels. The embassy’s press handlers had done a good job, as had Mia; her mom’s kidnappers would definitely get the message.
His attention was mired elsewhere, and his eyes dropped back to the screen of his laptop and to the baleful file that his contact inside the UN had e-mailed him. He’d read it once already, and he was about to read it again.
It was the hakeem’s file.
The file shed light on Corben, as the agent assigned to track him down. Corben himself was solid. His assignments had been bread-and-butter Agency fieldwork in the
Middle East
, nothing too vicious or too wet. It was the information relating to the hakeem that had shaken
Kirkwood
.
His contacts in
Iraq
had mentioned someone asking about the Ouroboros on a few occasions in recent years, but he was never able to find out who was behind the inquiries. People were scared to talk under Saddam.
Even more so, in this case.
He went through the dossier again, his chest constricting with revulsion. The findings in
Iraq
were beyond heinous. Autopsies that had been carried out on some of the bodies found after the raid on the hakeem’s compound confirmed, with appalling detail, what the man had been working on. There was little doubt as to what he was after.
Many of the techniques he was attempting had been tried out on lab animals, mostly mice, and had varying degrees of success in rejuvenating the animals or prolonging their lives. The thing was
,
the hakeem wasn’t using mice. He was performing the same experiments on humans.
One such experiment, famously undertaken by Italian and American neuroscientists in the early nineties, was to transplant tissue taken from the pineal glands of younger mice into older mice, and vice versa. Simply put, the older mice got younger, and the younger mice got older. The former looked healthier, were able to run around their cages and spin their wheels with startling vigor and outlived control animals of the same age; the latter’s fur lost its luster, they slowed down to a point where they could no longer perform basic tricks that they could easily manage before the transplants, and they died sooner. Autopsies on the animals also showed that some of the internal organs of the older mice that had received the transplants from the young mice displayed striking signs of rejuvenation. And given that the pineal gland is responsible for the production of the hormone melatonin, the rejuvenation was attributed to an increase in the recipients’ melatonin levels, which sparked the melatonin supplement craze.
The full picture, however, wasn’t as promising: Scientists who took a closer look at the results discovered that the mice that were used in the experiments had a genetic defect that actually prohibited them from producing melatonin. Attributing their improved physiology to melatonin was therefore patently absurd. But proving that melatonin wasn’t responsible for their healthier and longer lives didn’t negate that they did, in fact, look younger and live longer. Something was responsible for it. It just wasn’t the melatonin.
The autopsies indicated that some of the hakeem’s experiments were to find out if pineal-gland grafts and transplants had the same effect in humans. Running such experiments on humans wasn’t easy. The pineal gland, which is only the size of a pea in humans, is located at the core of the brain. It’s mostly active up to puberty, then gets calcified in adulthood and is thought to become obsolete.
Which means that the only pineal glands worth harvesting had to come from children or teens, and the endoscopic microsurgery to reach the glands was complex, delicate, and carried high risks for the donor.
Which wasn’t a problem if you had an endless supply of expendable kids.
The other major problem was that life-extending experiments were mostly performed on species that had short life spans, to be able to actually observe and document the changes within a reasonable time frame. Mayflies were ideal, given their one-day life spans.
Nematode worms, which live for two weeks or so, were also commonly used, as were lab mice, although their life spans of around two years made them less than ideal.
Humans needed much longer periods of observation for any significant change to be noticeable. This meant that after undergoing the hakeem’s extreme treatments, his test subjects had to remain incarcerated for months, or years, before the results of his experiments were apparent.
The autopsies showed that the hakeem wasn’t just playing with pineal glands. Other glands such as the pituitary and thymus glands were also part of his repertoire, as were testicular glands in males and ovaries in women. In some victims, he had limited his experimentation to studying the effects of various hormones and enzymes on the test subjects’ bodies. His work was remarkably advanced, encompassing both prolongevity staples such as telomerase as well as more recent fixations such as the PARP-1 protein. The equipment at his disposal was state-of-the-art, and he was clearly a skilled surgeon and molecular biologist.
Invariably, his test subjects suffered horrible deaths. Some of the men, women, and children who were wheeled into his operating chamber were farmed for whatever parts were of use to him and simply discarded. Others, the recipients, endured long periods of living with the effects of his demented procedures, and when their bodies finally gave out, he clearly had no qualms about opening them up to have a look at what went wrong before chucking their remains into mass graves.
Kirkwood
felt nauseous.
A bile
of anger burned the back of his throat. He knew of scientists who had decamped to less conscientious countries where they could carry out their grotesque experiments without worrying about activists and ethics committees. But this was different. This went far beyond anything he’d ever considered humanly possible.
This was true evil.
The most shocking part of it was that Corben, according to the file, had been tasked with finding the hakeem.
Not to take him down.
To harness his talents.
It wasn’t a first. Governments were always happy to forgive past trespasses, no matter how horrific, and dance with the devil if it meant getting their hands on innovative and valuable research. The
U.S.
government was one of the early adopters of that model. They did it with Nazi rocket scientists. They did it with Russian experts in nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare. And, it seemed, they were happy to do it with this hakeem.
Corben’s assignment was to find the hakeem and bring him into the fold. Evelyn’s kidnapping gave him a way to connect with him. But it had to mean that in their eyes, she was expendable.
A means to an end.
Nothing more.
He flashed back to Abu Barzan’s unexpected phone call.
The surprise bidder.
At the same time as Farouk had mortally been wounded.
While he’d been in Corben’s custody.
Before he’d died.
How far were they prepared to go?
He had to adjust his plans.
Kirkwood
wondered who else was in the loop. Were they all in on it?
Hayflick, the station chief—probably.
The ambassador—maybe not.
Kirkwood
hadn’t gotten that vibe from him, but then again, these people did lie for a living.
He’d need to call the others, inform them of his discoveries. He knew they’d agree. He had to short-circuit Corben’s assignment, even if it meant jeopardizing the project. Evelyn’s life depended on it, as did the lives of countless innocents who could find themselves on the monster’s operating table.
Images of the hakeem’s victims ambushed his every thought. He knew he wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon.
A FLURRY OF MUFFLED THUMPS jolted Corben awake.
He sprang up, his eyes barely registering the ghostly