The Sanctuary (36 page)

He handed the phone to Farouk as he heard Abu Barzan pick up on the first ring.

Farouk listened for a moment before turning to Corben, his face contorted with pain and dismay.

“His buyer’s offered six hundred.”

Corben expected as much.

He knew it would be pointless to counterbid. The relics weren’t worth anywhere near as much, which meant the buyer was definitely after the same thing he was and was probably prepared to pay what it took to get them. Still, he thought of bidding up. Whether he’d ever have to come up with the cash was a different matter. But before he could even answer, he noticed that Farouk still seemed to be listening intently to Abu Barzan.

The expression on the Iraqi’s face darkened even more. “He’s saying there’s no need for you to offer more money,” Farouk relayed, his breathing labored. “He’s saying his client’s known he was getting the pieces all along, which means that if anyone’s killing people for them, it’s obviously not his buyer. And he’s more than happy with the price. He thanks us for
ramping
the price up, but the deal’s done.”

Corben frowned. It was slipping away. He needed an advantage, and the only card he could play was weak, one that could work as much as it could backfire, depending on Abu Barzan’s politics, which he had no time to assess, and his propensity to be intimidated.

He decided to give it a shot. “Does he speak English?”

Farouk nodded.

“Give me the phone.”

Farouk mumbled a brief introduction, convinced Abu Barzan to stay on the line,
then
handed the phone to Corben. It was sticky with blood.

“I can’t outbid your client,” Corben told him, “but I’d like you to reconsider my offer.”

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Abu Barzan chortled. “I know my buyer’s real, I know I’ll have my money tomorrow, and I’ll go back to
Mosul
a very rich man, but I don’t know anything about you. Besides, you have an expression in
America
, no?
Something about money talking and bullshit walking?”

“I just need you to think about a few things,” Corben told him calmly. “It’s not all about cash. I work for the
U.S.
government, and I can think of worse things than having us owe you a big favor. The way things are shaping up in
Iraq
, we’re not gonna be out of there for a while. And you might find that having a friend in the system could come in handy one of these days, you know what I’m saying?”

Abu Barzan went silent for a beat. When he came back, the relaxed mocking in his tone was gone, replaced by an icy disdain. “You think telling me you work for the American government is going to make want to help you? You think you can do things for me in
Iraq
?”

The politics were clear. “Better to have us owe you than be pissed off at you, that’s for sure,” Corben countered flatly, knowing that wasn’t going to work either.

“Now you’re threatening me?” Abu Barzan spat back, following it with a torrent of inspired abuse. He was on his second “Fuck you” when Corben hung up.

Farouk was staring at him with round, baffled eyes. “What did he say?”

Corben shook his head slightly. “He’s not interested.”

Farouk sighed heavily. “Then you have nothing to trade for
Sitt
Evelyn.”

Which was true.
But he knew who had the book. And he now had his phone number.

Abu Barzan had told Farouk that he was on his way to deliver the goods, and he’d added that he’d have his money “tomorrow evening.” That gave Corben a little over twenty-four hours to track him down. If Abu Barzan was traveling and needed to stay in contact with his buyer, he wouldn’t probably have time, nor would he risk, changing phones. Corben felt reasonably confident that Olshansky would nail down his position.

Thinking about it now, Corben realized things hadn’t gone too badly. Sure, the discovery that another buyer was out there did complicate things. On the other hand, it also drew out someone Corben was just as interested in finding, someone who’d been hiding in the shadows successfully long before Corben had even gotten wind of anything. And that, in itself, was a welcome development.

Which left Farouk.

Sitting there, wheezing and groaning and bleeding all over Corben’s borrowed embassy car.

Corben knew wounds like this. He knew that on TV, people who got shot were always told they were lucky it was “just” a flesh wound and would be bouncing around a few days later with nothing more to show for it than a big white bandage. The reality was very different. Most shots needed hospitalization and IVs. Infections set in easily and were commonplace. And a wound such as Farouk’s would require, at best, a month of serious hospitalization. It was also highly likely he’d feel its effect, in some way, for the rest of his life.

And that was a problem.

As he had told Farouk, a hospital wouldn’t be safe, not from the hakeem, given his contacts in the Lebanese police force. Besides, the last thing he wanted was for the hakeem to know Farouk had been shot. And even if the hakeem didn’t grab Farouk outright, he’d find out what Corben now knew, and any leverage Corben had over the hakeem would be lost.

The Fuhud detectives would get involved.
The head of station.
The press too, probably.
Every move, every choice Corben made, or wanted to make, would be
poured
over with a microscope. The ambassador and the Lebanese government would also get sucked in. If they found out about Abu Barzan’s pieces and managed to get hold of them, they might set up an exchange with the hakeem and trade them for Evelyn. The hakeem would have what he was after, he’d recede into the shadows, and Corben would be left with nothing but frustration and tons of paperwork. And if the hakeem couldn’t get to Farouk, or if no exchange went through, he’d also disappear.

That ruled out the hospital.

He couldn’t keep Farouk at the embassy either. They didn’t have the medical facilities there. It would be bad enough if Farouk died while in hospital, but if he died while he was at the embassy…The ambassador was a principled, honorable guy who wouldn’t keep Farouk’s presence a secret, not from the State Department, nor from the local authorities. Farouk’s death on
U.S.
soil would create a shitstorm that would ruin everything.

He wouldn’t get what he was after.

Thinking it through dispassionately,
he
couldn’t see that Farouk was of any further value to him. The man had only gotten drawn into this accidentally, and now that Corben knew what Farouk knew about Abu Barzan, the Iraqi had become obsolete.

More than obsolete.

He was a liability.

Whichever way he turned, all Corben saw coming out of bringing him in was questions, obstacles, complications, and grief.

Which didn’t really leave him much choice.

He turned to Farouk. The wounded Iraqi looked like a mauled animal, curled up and drenched in blood. His face glistened with sweat and looked even more ashen in the pale, diffused light of the forest. His whole body was shivering, and his trembling hands, caked thick with blood, still pressed down meekly on his wound. He was staring at Corben with scared, half-dead eyes that were barely managing to stay open.

He opened his cracked, dry mouth to say something, but Corben calmly gestured to him to stay quiet. He leaned over to him and said, “I’m sorry.”

Farouk looked at him with faint puzzlement.

Corben’s arms lashed out towards him. One hand went behind his head, holding it in place. The other slammed onto Farouk’s face, squeezing tightly, clamping his mouth and nose shut.

Farouk’s eyes rocketed wide and his arms flailed upward, but there was no strength left in them. Corben swung an arm down and darted a punch right next to Farouk’s wound, causing him to exhale in a muffled howl of pain as he bent forward. Corben shoved him right back against the seat and kept the lock on his breathing. Farouk started coughing and wheezing with a heavy, gurgling sound, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets as he stared at Corben in primal horror. Corben increased his vise grip on him, feeling the Iraqi’s strength drain, feeling the last wisps of life abandon his battered body until the futile resistance stopped altogether.

T
hrough the window of her room in the press office, Mia noticed the Pathfinder driving past the annex, headed for the rear of the compound. The driver’s-side window was down, allowing her to spot Corben as he guided the SUV into a parking slot in a covered bay that was kept away from the main building as an additional safety precaution against booby-trapped cars.

She sprang to her feet and looked out, her pulse racing as she concentrated her gaze on the car. The angle hadn’t allowed her to see anyone in the passenger seat. Interminable seconds crawled by before Corben finally appeared from behind the bay’s bunkerlike shelter.

Mia’s heart sank. He was alone.

Even worse, he was covered in what could only be blood. And as if that weren’t enough, the grim scowl that darkened his face said it all.

Mia felt her knees buckle. She slid back into her chair, feeling a great tearing deep inside her.

No Farouk.

No way of getting the book.

Nothing to trade for her mom.

CORBEN SHUT HIS EYES and let the torrent of hot water flush the weariness out of his aching body. The embassy’s gym was a windowless, isolated haven tucked deep into the basement of the annex, and right now, its shower cubicle afforded Corben a momentary respite from the blood and the grime of what had become his most intense day since being posted to this unsettled city.

He’d thought carefully about what he would tell his bosses—the station chief and the ambassador—before calling in and giving them a heads-up while driving back to the embassy. Farouk had been shot.
Mortally.
He’d died before he could get him to a hospital. And at that point, there was only one option open to him: He needed to make sure the kidnappers didn’t find out Farouk had been killed. If they did, they might assume that the relics’ location was lost with him, and if so, there’d be nothing to trade for Evelyn.

He couldn’t bring his body to the embassy, which was technically
U.S.
soil. He couldn’t hand him over to the cops either. Given how pervasively they seemed to be penetrated, the kidnappers would find out Farouk was dead long before his corpse went cold. He had to make him disappear.
For a while, anyway.
To buy
himself
some time to come up with another way to get Evelyn out.

So he’d driven deep into the pine forests east of the city and dumped his body there, off a small trail that was hardly used. No one had been around. If and when the body was eventually discovered, Corben and the embassy had total deniability. Yes, Corben had driven off with him, but the man had been wounded in the shoot-out and had bolted out of the car when it got stuck in traffic and run off. An entirely plausible theory would be that the men who were after him, and who had killed the assistant professor, had caught up with him. By then, the whole affair would probably be done and dusted, and no one would be too concerned with the fate of an illegal alien, let alone one from
Iraq
.

Corben didn’t really have a choice. It was a tough decision he had to make, there and then. It was either that or
jeopardize
the whole endeavor. Which he wasn’t about to do. The brass ring he was reaching for was far too momentous for that.

He shook his misgivings away, and his thoughts soon migrated to something more productive. Olshansky had gotten a preliminary hit on Abu Barzan’s cell phone. It wasn’t in northern
Iraq
, as assumed. The phone signal was roaming somewhere in eastern
Turkey
, close to the Syrian border. Olshansky would need a bit of time to get a tighter lock on it. He’d told Corben that he was confident he’d be able to track down the man for him, but that working backwards to trace whomever he’d been in touch with would be harder, adding some technobabble about incompatible network systems that Corben tuned out.

The location didn’t surprise Corben. A foreign buyer wouldn’t risk venturing into
Iraq
to take delivery of the pieces, and
Mosul
—where Abu Barzan was coming from—wasn’t far from the Turkish border. Corben knew the area reasonably well. It was predominantly Kurd, on either side of the border, as was
Mosul
. He guessed the buyer would have arranged for the transaction to take place in Batman, Mardin, or
Diyarbakir
. All three had airports that were serviced by regional flights and private charters, and all were within a few hours’ drive from the Turkish/Iraqi border.

It was an exchange Corben didn’t want to miss.

Farouk’s revelation of a buyer paying over the odds for Abu Barzan’s little trove threw all of Corben’s plans into question. Up until that point, the hakeem had been Corben’s main target, the only man on his radar whom he knew to be chasing the dream with ruthless abandon. This mystery buyer was now at least as interesting to Corben as the hakeem. Somehow, he’d managed to hear about the book’s availability before the hakeem. He’d trumped him into securing it. Hell, he could well know more about it and its significance than the hakeem. The question was, was what he knew enough to make the hakeem irrelevant to Corben’s plans, or was his work incomplete? Did he have the treatment figured out already, or would he need the hakeem’s extreme resources and facilities to turn the dream into a reality?