Fatal Convictions (24 page)

66

Nara talked to their captors in Arabic—argued with them, as far as Alex could tell—and their captors seemed to respond with growing frustration. Through it all, Nara kept her voice measured but firm, even as the men spoke louder, their words biting and harsh.

A noise startled Alex, as if somebody had kicked over a box. He tensed, waiting for the blows to start.

“What are they saying?” he asked.

“Not now,” Nara snapped.

She engaged them again, her voice more cautious this time. But her words engendered the same angry response.

It sounded to Alex like there were three or four male voices in the room. He had a gun pointed at his head and his hands cuffed behind his back. He assumed that Nara was in the same position. For whatever reason, she didn’t seem to be backing down. She talked for a long time, uninterrupted, and this time the response seemed less angry. Like maybe they were seeing her point. She answered again, and they didn’t respond at all.

And then, just as Alex began to relax just a little, Nara shrieked. There was the sound of wrestling and a muffled groan.

The room grew quiet.

“Are you okay?” Alex asked.

A hand grabbed Alex’s hood and yanked it off. Alex blinked and looked around. A lantern in the corner of the carriage car provided dim light and cast long shadows. There were four men, each wearing a hood, the slits revealing hard eyes and eerie-looking mouths. Three of the men held AK-47s. One had the barrel of his gun within inches of Alex’s temple.

Nara was sitting across the aisle with her hands cuffed behind her back. Her captor had wrapped white cloth around her face, but there was an opening for her eyes. The man behind her had gathered the white linen in his fist behind her head and was pulling on it, tilting her head back and exposing her neck. With the other hand, he held a long knife, its blade touching the side of Nara’s neck. Her eyes were wide with terror.

“Have you ever seen a beheading?” asked the man standing in the aisle a few rows in front of Alex. He spoke English, just as Nara had predicted.

Alex shook his head.

“Unless you do as we say, you may get your chance with your pretty girlfriend.”

Alex glanced at Nara, whose dark eyes were pleading with him to do this right. He turned back to the man in the aisle. “Tell your buddy to take the knife away from her neck,” Alex said.

The man clenched his teeth and shook his head, his eyes narrowing. He held his index finger and thumb an inch apart. He mumbled something that made Nara close her eyes and tense; then the man behind her sliced the blade ever so slightly into Nara’s neck, creating a small sliver of blood.

“Do not think you give the orders here,” the first man said.

Alex tried not to panic. He watched the blood trickle down Nara’s neck. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice shaking.

“We have a little script for you to recite,” his captor said. “If you perform it flawlessly, you will save two lives.”

Alex looked at Nara; she gave him the slightest nod. The man pulled her head back tighter, and she winced. The blade rested against her artery.

“Okay,” Alex said quickly. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

67

They cut the plastic handcuffs from Alex’s wrists, and he rubbed the raw skin there. Nara’s eyes followed his every move. The man with the English proficiency, the tallest of his captors, handed Alex a piece of paper with a script and demanded that Alex memorize it. “We don’t have much time.”

Alex looked at the paper, angled it toward the lantern, and read it quickly. “Word for word?” he asked.

“As close as possible.”

Alex pretended to focus on the paper, mumbling to himself, secretly considering the possibilities for escape. Four captors. Two AK-47s pointed at him. One knife at Nara’s neck.

He wasn’t James Bond. There would be no escape.

After a few minutes, the tall captor reached out and grabbed the paper. “Enough. Move to the front. We start filming now.”

He pushed Alex to the front of the car, positioning him in front of a nondescript wall. One of the other captors focused a video camera on Alex. A third pulled out the battery-operated spotlight they had used earlier. He turned it on and blinded Alex.

Alex closed his eyes and tried to visualize the script. He opened his eyes, squinted at the light, and started speaking. He used a wooden monotone, making sure the words were devoid of any emotion.

“My name is Alexander Madison, and I’m the attorney for Khalid Mobassar. The date is November 16. Mr. Mobassar’s trial for conspiracy to commit murder begins in approximately three weeks.

“Later tonight, I will upload this video to the Internet and password-protect the site. If anything happens to me . . .”

Alex took a deep breath and tried to remember the next line, then shook his head and rubbed his temples. Having spent most of the few minutes they gave him for memorization trying to think of ways to escape, he drew a blank. “I don’t remember. Can I see that paper again?”

One of the men grumbled something in Arabic, and another turned off the spotlight. While Alex struggled to adjust to the new lighting, the English-speaking captor thrust the paper at Alex and poked the barrel of his AK-47 against Alex’s chest. “Three minutes.”

This time, Alex worked furiously to memorize his lines, glancing occasionally at Nara. At the end of a quick three minutes, his captor grabbed the paper and Alex began take two.

The spotlight came on again. Alex slipped into the same monotone. “My name is Alexander Madison, and I represent Khalid Mobassar. The date is November 16. Mr. Mobassar will be on trial for conspiracy to commit murder in approximately three weeks.

“Later tonight I will upload this video to the Internet and password-protect the site. I will give the password to one of my friends with instructions that he should circulate the video to the appropriate authorities if anything should happen to me. As long as I remain alive, the attorney-client privilege prevents me from sharing what I know. But if I die, I want people to know the truth.”

When Alex had first glanced through the script, he realized immediately what his captors were doing. If Alex or Khalid tried to blame the beheadings on Hezbollah at trial, they would kill Alex and release this video on the Internet. Everything would point to Khalid Mobassar as the man responsible for both the honor killings and Alex’s death.

“My client has confessed to me that he ordered the honor killing of Ja’dah Mahdi as well as two other Muslim women who converted to Christianity. He also ordered the deaths of the men who convinced two of these women to reject the Muslim faith. He has instructed me to defend his case by blaming other possible suspects, including those associated with Hezbollah. Mr. Mobassar’s hope is to discredit Hezbollah and its allies while ensuring his own rise to prominence as a reformer of the Islamic faith. That is the sole reason he ordered the honor killings in the first place—to bring attention to his reform proposals so that he can become the voice of Islam.”

Alex shifted his weight and stared at the back wall, past the blinding spotlight. He was almost done, and he was pretty sure he had gotten most of it right. “If you are watching this video, it means that my client considers me too high a risk to allow me to live. It is ironic that in trying to protect himself from exposure, Mr. Mobassar has sealed his fate.”

The spotlight cut off, and Alex blinked to adjust, his pupils dilating. “How did I do?”

“That will work.”

The captor standing behind Nara unwrapped the linen strips from her face and cut the plastic handcuffs from her wrists. They spoke to Nara in Arabic—harsh and angry tones—and she replied with her composure still unshaken.

“We need to leave,” she told Alex. She walked down the aisle and headed for the door. None of her captors made a move to stop her. Alex followed close behind, glancing nervously at the AK-47s pointed at him. When Nara and Alex stepped out of the train car, she grabbed his hand and started running. They stumbled through the dark, sprinting away from their captors as quickly as possible.

“Why did they let us go?” Alex asked as they darted toward the parking lot.

Nara was nearly out of breath but kept running. “I’ll explain everything later.”

They didn’t stop running until they made it to the lot. The driver of the BMW was gone. Nara looked around and grabbed Alex’s hand again. “Let’s go.” She took off running toward one of the side streets, glancing behind in the direction of the train cars.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Alex gasped.

“As far away from here as we can get.”

68

Nara and Alex eventually hailed a serviz, and Nara gave the driver instructions in Arabic. During the ride, Alex used his shirt to wipe the blood away from Nara’s neck.

They discussed their options, but Nara was dead set against reporting the incident to the authorities. The police in Beirut were not going to take on Hezbollah. Reporting the kidnapping would only make the terrorist organization more aggressive.

“More aggressive?” Alex asked. “How can they possibly get more aggressive?”

Nara made a motion with her hand for Alex to keep the volume down. She nodded toward the driver. “He picked us up in the Hezbollah district,” she whispered. “And a lot of these guys speak pretty good English.”

“Sorry.”

Nara leaned closer. “To answer your question—if Hezbollah wanted us dead, we’d be dead. They wanted to scare us, Alex. They don’t really care if Hezbollah gets blamed for these killings. But we were obviously onto something with the deposition of Walid. My guess is that they thought we were getting close to one of Hezbollah’s top leaders. This must go pretty high up the chain.”

What Nara said made sense. “Then let’s report it to the American authorities,” Alex suggested. “As soon as we get back.”

Nara looked at him like he’d lost it. “You don’t think Hezbollah can get to us in America? And what are the American authorities going to do? File a report? Call their counterparts in Lebanon? Stir things up just enough to get you and me killed?”

They were talking in hushed tones so as not to be overheard by the driver. “You got a better idea?” Alex asked.

“Let’s talk later.”

When they got to the Ramada, Nara insisted that Alex check out of the hotel and find another place. The driver had picked them up at the Ramada; their attackers knew that’s where he was staying.

“I thought they were just scaring us,” Alex said.

“Why take chances?”

After paying for the room, they snuck out the back and found an out-of-the-way place near the shore named the Regis Hotel. It was a nondescript backpackers’ dive with the room rate listed on a white board near the Formica front desk. The sign listed the cost in Lebanese pounds and American dollars. For a single room, someone had crossed through $34 and discounted the rooms to $25.

They went to the room together so they could talk over a plan.

“Nice place,” said Alex.

“Just don’t touch anything,” Nara responded.

The room felt more like a dorm than a hotel. The plaster walls were off-white with water stains in three or four spots. The carpeting was threadbare. There was a small single bed next to a window. Alex quickly closed the curtains. The bathroom had a black-and-white checked tile floor and small black tiles on the wall. A radiator sat idle in one corner. Air-conditioning was apparently not included.

Nara sat at the end of the bed, and Alex took a seat in the lone plastic chair in the room.

“What were you saying to those guys?” Alex asked.

“I told them that my friends knew exactly where we were and knew that we were meeting with Hezbollah. If they didn’t hear from me in five minutes, they were going to call the police and the U.S. embassy.”

“And they bought that?” Alex asked.

“Not really. But I came up with another story that they liked better.” Nara rolled her neck and rubbed a spot on her left shoulder.

“I told them that we would not be implicating Hezbollah at trial. I told them that you were a very good lawyer and that your first line of defense would be to attack the Patriot Act. I argued that this could be a major victory for Hezbollah and its allies.”

Alex admired Nara’s quick thinking, but he wasn’t fond of her reasoning. Would a victory by Alex really be a win for all of America’s terrorist enemies? He knew he should think only about Khalid’s innocence—but at what cost to the country? He quickly put the thoughts aside. The soul-searching could wait.

“I also told them that if the court ruled against us on the Patriot Act, I had another defense that did not involve Hezbollah. This one did involve a small lie, however. You remember the doctrine of al toqiah?”

“I remember,” Alex said.
How could I forget?

“I told them that I had convinced you I was a Christian and that my father had accepted my decision to abandon the faith. I told them that I would be the last witness called at my father’s trial and that this evidence would establish his innocence even without pointing the finger at Hezbollah.”

Nara looked sheepishly at Alex. “Sorry,” she said.

“You saved our lives,” Alex said. “No need to apologize.”

“They never really intended to kill us,” Nara said. “Think about it. They had the video and the script ready to go. They just wanted to scare us . . . and create evidence that would convict my father if they decide to kill us later.”

The logic seemed sound, but Alex was in no shape to figure things out. The adrenaline was gone. So, too, was most of the terror. In their place was a bone-weary fatigue. He rubbed his face and stretched his back.

Nara must have felt it too. She sighed and lay back on the bed, her legs dangling over the edge. She stared at the ceiling for a minute and then shut her eyes. “They’re the ones responsible for killing these women, Alex. They want to pin it on my father because he’s a reformer and they’re afraid of him—afraid of his ideas.”

Nara opened her eyes and looked at Alex. “Put me on the stand in my father’s trial,” she said. “I’ll tell the world what happened tonight. We can expose Hezbollah for who they are.”

Alex had a million reasons why that was a bad idea. The rules of evidence, for starters. But perhaps the biggest reason was Nara’s own safety. He had a duty to Khalid. But he would not sacrifice Nara to fulfill it.

He moved over and sat next to her on the bed. “Let’s talk about it later.”

Nara sat up, and Alex put his arm around her shoulder. As she leaned in, he could smell the shampoo in her hair. He pulled her closer. She wrapped her arms around his waist, burying her head on his shoulder. They sat like that for a moment, and then he felt her begin to cry.

He reached down and brushed the tears from her cheek.

“Alex,” Nara said softly, her voice so low that he could barely hear her, “I really should go now.”

“I know.”

It was hard to let her go, but he knew it was the right thing to do.

After she left, he kicked off his loafers and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Given everything he had just been through, it would be impossible to fall asleep.

It took Alex two minutes to prove himself wrong.