Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) (3 page)

Karp laughed. “If I don’t know that I’m doing it, how can I help it?”

T
HE LARGE GRAY RAT CREPT ALONG IN THE DARK, ITS NOSE
twitching and whiskers spread like an antenna, alert for signs of danger. It padded around a puddle that oozed from the wall of a long since abandoned subway tunnel—sealed off from the main system decades earlier and forgotten—and stopped.

Cautiously, it approached a man sitting on the ground with his back against a wall. The rat was hungry and hoping to steal in for a bite, if the opportunity presented itself. The man did not move, even when the rat scampered across his outstretched legs in an exploratory dash. It circled back and hesitated, listening to the man’s shallow breathing, sniffing suspiciously. Then it sprang forward, leaping onto the man’s chest and sinking its long yellow incisors into his cheek, ripping off a piece of flesh.

The man woke at the sharp pain, and feeling the weight of the nearly two-pound rodent clinging to his chest, he screamed and shook his head violently. He tried to reach for his attacker but his hands were manacled and chained above his head. All he could do was screech and twist violently.

Surprised by the reaction, the rat jumped back and prepared to flee. However, it quickly realized that it was in no danger from the man. It hissed and was preparing to leap at him again when it was
blinded by a sudden bright light. Confused, the rat froze in place and never saw the stick that broke its neck and crushed its skull.

“Oooh, lookie here, Jeremy, a fat Gotham City rabbit for the pot tonight,” a short, dark shadow standing behind the flashlight beam chortled, holding the dead animal up by its tail in the light for his companion to see.

“Right on, Paulito. Nothin’ like a bit of fresh meat,” his tall, skinny companion agreed, turning his own flashlight onto his friend, a dwarf with a bulbous nose and thick, stumpy arms and legs.

“I ’spose that’s what our dinner was thinking when he jumped on our friend Amir, here,” the dwarf said, laughing.

The two men turned their flashlights onto the prisoner, noting the small trickle of blood running down his cheek. The man turned his head from the painful stab of the lights and flinched as the dwarf moved toward him. But the little man brought a large set of keys from a pants pocket and used one to open the lock that bound the chains.

“Come on, asshole, Father David wants to talk,” the dwarf growled, grabbing the man by his elbow.

Amir al-Sistani groaned as he was helped to his feet. He then stood docilely as the two men fastened a rope around his neck and, giving it a light tug, led him into the darkness.

After his capture in an underground tunnel as he left the New York Stock Exchange building, believing that his plot to destroy the American economy was well under way, al-Sistani thought of little other than how to escape these wretches and their insane leader, David Grale. He dreamed of making his way back to the world of sunlight. Back to where he was known to his devoted followers as “the Sheik,” and had hundreds of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts to buy every luxury, even as he plotted a radical Islamic takeover of the world with himself as the leader, the caliph.

On the fourth day of his captivity, he’d even managed to break free from his guards, Jeremy and Paulito, as they were escorting him to Grale for another interrogation. He’d fled blindly down a
tunnel in the pitch black with no idea if he was running toward sunlight or deeper into the bowels of the city above.

Stopping at one point to catch his breath, he heard his captors laughing back in the direction he’d come from and calling for him to return.
“Better come back before the others find you…or then you’ll be sorry.”

However, he’d splashed on for a few more feet through foul-smelling water, recoiling as his hand reached for a wall to steady himself and came away dripping with slime. Forcing himself to move forward, he finally had to stop at what appeared to be an intersection of two tunnels. He was trying to decide which way to go when he heard strange voices screeching and gibbering from the tunnel on the left; they sounded some distance away, but close enough to send shivers down his spine. Realizing then the futility of his efforts, and frightened of these “others,” he stopped and waited for Jeremy and Paulito to catch him and bring him back to Grale.

“Well, I hope you have that out of your system,”
Grale had said with a chuckle, glancing at his grinning followers.
“It can be quite dangerous to wander alone in my kingdom. You might lose your way and starve to death in some dark pit—or perhaps meet one of the former ‘pet’ alligators you may have heard have made their home here…and that’s no urban myth, I can assure you.”
He laughed with his men, but his face had then turned grim as he added,
“Or you might meet others who live here—not like my fine friends, but
shayteen,
to use the Muslim expression, demons who look like men. And let me warn you, they would not be too squeamish to see what a well-fed terrorist tastes like.”

Grale lived with dozens of his followers in a surprisingly large cavern about the size of a university gymnasium. Within the cave’s confines and some other nearby tunnels and openings, the inhabitants had created small “apartments” carved into the walls or, like Grale’s, built from pieces of wood, bricks, and cinder blocks they’d gathered from the world above.

Scavenging seemed to be the inhabitants’ main occupation as they came and went like ants foraging for the winter—leaving with nothing but the ragged clothes they wore but always returning with
some useful item, whether it was a piece of food or of corrugated tin. al-Sistani had been surprised that these homeless beggars had electricity to dimly light and heat—via glowing space heaters—their filthy hole in the ground. Then it dawned on him that they must be tapping into the energy source for the subway trains that could be heard rumbling beyond the walls surrounding the underground encampment.

Grale had pointed to Jeremy and Paulito.
“These good men I’ve asked to watch over you are, in fact, your protectors as much as they are your guards. The others generally avoid the parts of my kingdom we patrol. But you never know when hunger will drive them to take chances, and with winter approaching they will be even more ravenous than usual.”
al-Sistani realized then that he’d been allowed to escape as a lesson.

Al-Sistani originally believed that Grale had to be some agent of the Great Satan in Washington, D.C., part of a secret U.S. antiterrorism agency that was holding him incommunicado to keep him out of the American court system, where he would have been afforded a lawyer and rights. When he learned that wasn’t the case, he’d offered Grale millions of dollars in gold for his freedom. But the lunatic just sneered at his offer.
“What use will I have for gold in the Kingdom of God?”

Only then did he realize that Grale was simply insane. A religious zealot who saw himself as a modern-day Crusader, battling the forces of evil—in his case, Islam—as he waited with his followers, who addressed him as “Father,” for the Apocalypse. So he’d pretended to be persuaded by Grale’s counterarguments. He claimed to have seen the error of his ways and wanted to convert to Grale’s version of Christianity—a sort of mystic Catholicism built around the concept that Armageddon was fast approaching.

He felt no shame or sin in pretending to convert to Christianity. According to the imams in the radical madrasah of Saudi Arabia, strict fundamentalist schools, the Muslim concept of
al-Taqiyya
allowed believers to lie and deceive if it was for the good of Islam and the conquest of the non-Muslim world. In fact, the imams insisted that Allah blessed such deceptions.

But Grale, whose glittering, intense eyes seemed to see into
his mind, merely laughed.
“I find your ‘conversion’ insincere and, therefore, as a servant of Christ, I reject it as false,”
he’d said, smirking.
“Consider yourself a condemned man for crimes—committed and intended—against humanity. Your life is forfeit, but should you wish to prolong it, you will tell me everything you know about the plans of your evil brethren.”

At first, al-Sistani had refused to divulge anything. He’d expected to be tortured—as that’s what he would have done—but was surprised that Grale did not physically abuse him. However, the rats and the wet darkness—and the gibbering voices that sometimes seemed too close as he sat chained against a wall—eventually proved too much. He decided that Allah wanted him to stay alive with his mind intact. And that meant feeding Grale tidbits of information.

Of course, he’d betrayed organizations and other terrorists with whom he had the least connection. The names and addresses of certain rogue members of the Irish Republican Army. Plans for suicide bombings in Muslim countries that he considered inconsequential to his grander plans to establish a Muslim caliphate.

He’d been prepared to go on with further betrayals, but after the first hour, Grale’s eyes had clouded over and he’d gripped his head with both hands and moaned.
“Get him out of here,”
he’d screamed, waving a hand at al-Sistani.

As he was hustled out of the cavern, al-Sistani wondered if he might outlast his captor. He’d seen Grale coughing up blood—
probably tubercular,
he thought—and the man had so little flesh between his skin and bones that he looked almost skeletal.

After the interrupted session, a week had passed with no more contact with Grale. He’d asked Paulito why, but the dwarf just shrugged. “He’s in one of his moods. Believe me, you don’t want to talk to him when he’s like this. Not unless you want to feel his knife. When he’s like this, he hunts the others above and below the streets, including some of them you told him about.”

Imagining the gaunt, spectral figure rising from the shadows, his knife raised, al-Sistani had shuddered.
Better them than me, however.

Many days had passed since that conversation, or at least what he
believed were many days—in the darkness it was impossible to tell exactly how long. Then the rat had attacked him and Jeremy and Paulito appeared to bring him back to Grale.

As they entered the cavern, the people there stopped what they were doing to watch him walk past. Many were disfigured and cripples; they were missing teeth and sometimes arms or legs. Quite a number were obviously mad as they muttered to themselves, twitched, hopped about, and looked at him with confused, frightened, or angry eyes. Their unwashed bodies and foul breath made him nauseous.

Most of them appeared to be men, though some were so disgustingly buried beneath stained rags and dirty faces it was impossible to determine their sex. However, there were some women, and even children and teenagers. In his eyes, they were a loathsome, scabrous people—the end product of decadent Western civilization and proof that all it needed was a push into oblivion from true believers such as himself.

He thought of them as human garbage, unwanted even by their fellow Americans. But they seemed to see themselves as a community of equals; their pathetic shows of affection for one another, and the way those who appeared more or less mentally and physically competent took care of those who weren’t, disgusted him.

Grale’s hovel was at a far end of the cavern in a cave dug into the wall at the back of some sort of raised cement platform that al-Sistani guessed had once been part of the subway system. Usually, the madman sat on the platform in front of his shack in an ancient, overstuffed leather chair, watching over his flock. He dressed in a cowled monk’s robe that shadowed his gaunt face so that the hollows beneath his dark and feverish eyes were accented against the nearly luminescent quality of his skin.

As they approached, he saw that the madman held a chain leash attached to a leather collar that was fastened around the neck of a naked and prostrate man.

Grale yanked on the leash, forcing the prisoner to raise his filthy head. Shocked, al-Sistani found himself looking at Azahari Mujahid,
sometimes called Tatay, a
mujahedid
holy warrior. He was from the Philippines and was noted for his spectacular bombings of infidel targets throughout his home country and Indonesia. He’d been brought to New York to assist with al-Sistani’s plan to destroy the American economy.

So that’s at least part of why my brilliant plan failed,
al-Sistani thought. Somehow Tatay had been discovered and captured before he could complete his mission with Nadya Malovo.
Is there nothing this bloodthirsty maniac doesn’t have his hand in?

“I see you recognize my dog,” Grale snarled. “But no, I would not treat a dog so. However, a mass murderer of innocent men, women, and children? A demon who shows no mercy to those who had never harmed him? Yes and yes again, a thousand times yes. So now he pays a penance on earth before he goes to meet his maker and then into the everlasting torment. But only after I have wrung everything he knows from him. We are near that point, aren’t we, dog?”

Tatay looked from Grale to al-Sistani, and then the mujahedeen, bomb-maker extraordinaire, slayer of infidels, threw back his head and started to howl.

Grale laughed, a harsh sound with no joy in it, and yanked on the chain to stop him. Then he leaned forward and fixed al-Sistani, his eyes burning with some mad internal fire. “My dog, here, tells me that there was another plan—something that would be set into motion should your plan fail. Tell me about it.”

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” al-Sistani mumbled.

“Well, then one of you is lying!” Grale bellowed as he jumped up from his chair, lifting Tatay to his knees. With his free hand he pulled his wicked curved knife from the folds of his robe and before anyone could react, he drew the blade across the terrorist’s throat.

Hot blood had spurted from the platform and struck the horrified al-Sistani in the face and chest. He opened his mouth to scream but nothing came out except a high-pitched whistling.

Grale let go of the leash and Tatay’s body fell back to the ground where it twitched as the man bled out. “You’d do well to remember Proverbs 12:22, ‘Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.’ I will
give you one more chance to tell me the truth. Tell me what you know of this plan or join my dog in hell!”