In a surge of hope and anxiety, he moved along the glass-fronted refrigerators. His expert eye registered pouches of blood products, vials of temperature-sensitive drugs and, as in hospitals everywhere, the food and drink of the staff. But nothing of what he needed. With each step his desperation grew – maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made, had added up to nothing more than a grand delusion. Like a fool, he had believed what he wanted to believe …
Then he looked in the last cabinet and bowed his head in a silent prayer. On a rack were eight cardboard containers holding rows of tiny glass bottles, and printed across the front of them was a complex technical description that told the Saracen they were exactly what he was looking for.
He opened the unlocked cabinet and removed six of the vials from a half-empty box. The clear fluid they held was the direct result of an experiment in a small English village two hundred years earlier, and it occurred to the Saracen, wrapping them in a cloth and putting them in his pocket, how much he and the clownfish would soon have in common. He too would be able to move through a beautiful but hostile environment totally protected from the deadly poison it contained. It can’t be overstated what it meant to him: in the desperate months during which I tried to find him, and even as my journey escalated into a horrifying race, I only ever discovered two scraps of paper that pointed to his identity. On each of them was written the word ‘clownfish’.
With the vials safely in his pocket, he turned to the drug register lying on a counter and accounted for the bottles by carefully altering several entries going back three years to make sure nobody ever found out that any of them were missing. He put the register back, headed to the corridor, closed the door and, thanks to his plastic gloves, left the clinic with no forensic trace of ever having entered it. He ran past the aquarium and into the long, silent corridors which led to the front doors.
He estimated that in two more minutes he would be home free. There was only one problem – the prisoner in the SUV was about to beat him across the line.
Chapter Twenty
SNAP! THE ELECTRICAL tape binding Tlass’s chest broke as his teeth ripped through the final strand. Bleeding from a fractured incisor but barely noticing, he tore his arms loose of the remnants of the tape and sat upright.
With blood returning into his hands, making him gasp with pain, he threw himself forward and started to free his legs and ankles – falling back every time he lost his balance, pitching himself forward to continue, already imagining his hands on the steering wheel pressing the phone button, followed by the sound of his boys hitting their siren and minutes later screeching into the parking lot.
It wasn’t salvation he was starting to taste on his lips. It was revenge. He ripped his first leg free and used his booted foot to smash and kick the last of the tape away. Groping in his perpetual darkness, he scrambled to his knees. He was free.
Two hundred yards distant, the glass doors of the institute slid open and the Saracen, having retrieved the plastic containers with the eyes, sprinted out of the building and on to the path leading to the parking lot. In twenty seconds he would be in the Cadillac. With its engine running, he would throw it into gear and be heading out of the parking lot by the time the institute’s electronic locks and computers had resealed the building.
Already he could see the alien glow of the sodium lights ahead. He swerved left across garden beds and saved himself a few seconds, bursting on to the asphalt and seeing the black SUV dead in front of him. The vehicle was rocking on its suspension. Somebody inside was moving …
Tlass – a man possessed – was scrambling fast over the flattened seats towards the steering wheel, making the suspension shudder. He crashed into the back of the driver’s seat with his shoulder, recovered and somehow tumbled between the front seats. He put one hand out to break his fall and, by good fortune, grabbed the wheel.
The Saracen dropped the plastic containers holding the eyes and pounded towards the vehicle. He had no idea what Tlass was trying to do – hit the accelerator and crash the car, smash the gear stick and disable it, lock him out – but he figured all the danger came from the driver’s seat.
In those few frantic paces, he made a decision on which both his and Tlass’s lives would turn. More importantly, it would determine the fate of his entire plan. A better man – a man with a wife and children and dreams for them, no matter how modest, a man who had seen less of killing and more of love, a decent man in other words – would have wasted time by opening the door. But the Saracen did exactly what I or any other real killer would have done – he decided to punch his fist straight at the tinted glass of the driver’s window.
With his arm cocked, he had a moment of panic: what if the glass was armoured? It would have been, too, had Tlass still been in the secret police, but the Cadillac – big and flashy – was his private vehicle. Anyway, the Saracen had no time to reconsider …
Tlass had already hauled himself into the driver’s seat, found the phone button and pressed it. The system was beeping fast as it dialled the number. Help was a few digits away. Three, two …
A white Toyota Land Cruiser – siren blaring, red-and-blue lights flashing behind its radiator grille, no cars on the holiday eve to impede its progress – barrelled down a freeway skirting the edge of the old oasis, heading straight for the institute. Inside, Tlass’s two buzz-cut sons scanned the road ahead for fire trucks, ambulances, a broken guard rail or any other sign of a wreck.
The phone on the Toyota’s dashboard rang and the brothers looked instantly at the caller ID on the screen. It was their father at last!
The Saracen’s fist appeared in a shower of glass, taking Tlass across the bridge of the nose. It was a wild punch, the sort any Afghan muj would have been proud of – smashing the man’s septum, spraying blood, sending him half sprawling into the passenger seat, drowning him in pain.
The taller of Tlass’s boys, riding shotgun in the Toyota, pulled the phone out of its cradle and spoke one urgent word: ‘Dad!’ There was no response.
His father was crumpled in a whimpering, blinded mess across the centre console of his SUV. But he was still conscious: he could hear his son calling to him with escalating urgency. Like a deathbed convert, all Tlass had to do was find the strength to say the few words which would bring salvation. In this case: ‘Office. Parking lot.’
Confused – with no idea how the phone could be working without a handset – the Saracen heard an unknown voice yelling for his father and saw Tlass rise on to his shoulder, his mouth starting to move to reply. For the second time in as many moments, the Saracen made an inspired decision – he ignored Tlass and his own confusion, reached out, turned the ignition key in the lock and yanked it out, switching off the engine, killing the electrical system and disconnecting the phone.
Tlass, unable to see what was happening, tried to beat back the pain flooding out from his splintered nose. All he knew was that he had not had a chance to say the words which would save him, and he started to haul himself up.
In the speeding Toyota the two men heard the connection fail, and the taller one immediately redialled their father’s car. They still had no idea where he might be, so his brother continued to charge towards the institute.
Tlass was up on one elbow when he heard the passenger door of the SUV being thrown open. He felt the Saracen’s powerful hands grab him by the lapels and haul him across the console into a sitting position in the passenger seat. He tried to resist, but it was to no effect.
The Saracen extended the passenger seatbelt and kept looping it tight around the prisoner’s bloodied neck and arms, holding the exhausted man upright in the seat, binding him tight. He snapped the buckle of the seatbelt home, checked that Tlass was completely immobilized and scrambled out of the vehicle. He ran across the parking lot, scooped up the plastic containers with the eyes and sprinted back to the vehicle.
As soon as he turned the engine on the phone began ringing again. The Saracen would hav
e liked to switch it off but, knowing nothing about the system, decided not to touch it. He backed the SUV out hard and made sure the wheels crushed the glass from the broken window. He would have preferred to pick it up, leaving no evidence at all, but he wasn’t willing to spend the time. First, the disembodied voice and now the drumbeat of the phone told him the hounds were loose and, while he had no idea how close they were, the delay in searching the building and his shredded nerves were screaming that he needed to change his plan fast.
He swung the wheel and hit the gas, fishtailing out on to the access road. Instead of joining the freeway and heading towards a longterm parking lot at the airport, where he had intended to execute Tlass and abandon the car among thousands of others, he decided to trigger the fall-back plan and ditch the vehicle as fast as possible.
It was for that reason, and that reason alone, that everything went to hell for the rest of us. He kept going around the access road and sped out the back of the complex. Tlass’s sons, pistols in their laps, came off the freeway and through the front entrance and missed seeing the black Cadillac by no more than ten seconds.
Ten seconds – nothing really – but it was enough. It meant, not for the first time, that the lives of countless people would turn on a tiny event. If only the bomb hadn’t been placed under an oak table in the Führer’s conference room. If only the Tsar of Russia hadn’t executed Lenin’s brother. If only – but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention, and that fate favours the bad as often as the good.
The men in the Toyota arrived those few seconds too late and didn’t see their father’s car, which meant they didn’t give chase, they didn’t capture the Saracen and nobody ever discovered that six small glass vials were missing.
Chapter Twenty-one
EVEN BEFORE THE sons had finished searching the cluster of parking lots, the Saracen had found the road he wanted. He turned on to it, switched off the Cadillac’s headlights and was swallowed up by the long, pot-holed blacktop.
On one side was a municipal dump, and the Saracen made sure that he travelled slowly enough not to raise the flocks of seagulls that attended it or scare the wild dogs constantly roaming its perimeter. On the other side was a wasteland of scrub, its only landmarks the hulks of abandoned vehicles and a canal overgrown with reeds and full of fetid water.
The Saracen slowed at a chain-link fence, nosed the Cadillac through a gate hanging on its hinges and pulled to a stop in a deserted cul-de-sac which serviced what some optimistic realtor had once called an industrial estate. Fronting the road was a shamble of buildings forming an auto-repair yard which was probably a chop-shop, a low-slung warehouse selling reconditioned washing machines and five converted garages used to package lamb delicacies. With food, sometimes it’s better not to know.
Thanks to the pain, the seatbelt around his neck that was as tight as any garrotte, the fever and a galloping infection from the unsterilized scalpel, Tlass had plunged into a twisted and psychedelic unconsciousness. The Saracen opened the door, untied the belt and pulled him out into the rotting silence. The warm air Tlass dragged into his lungs allowed a splinter of reality to enter his fevered world and he managed to hold himself upright, tottering.
‘You do good work with the garrotte – one professional to another,’ he said through his damaged larynx. With which he collapsed to the broken asphalt and started whispering in weird fragments about God and the heavenly light show.
The Saracen knew where it came from: like people who have had arms amputated and can still feel their fingers, a person who had lost the use of their eyes often saw displays of spectacular lights. The Saracen left Tlass to his private aurora borealis, gathered the things he needed from the back of the SUV then dragged the prisoner by his collar to a garbage skip full of refuse from the meat works.
He saw that, among the reeds and stunted bushes, primeval shapes were moving – little more than pools of greater darkness – and he knew the wild dogs were coming. The meat works was a favourite feeding ground among the stronger ones, and now they could smell sweat and blood they knew that an animal, a large animal, was in trouble.
The Saracen propped Tlass up in the garbage skip. He took the dead eyes out of the icy containers, jammed them back in their sockets and deftly wound a piece of ragged fabric around the man’s head. It looked like a dirty blindfold, but it’s real function was to hold the eyes tight in place.
As Tlass felt a sudden coldness on his fiery flesh, the kaleidoscope of lights faded and, in his madness, he thought they were ministering to his wounds. Sure he had wanted to kill them, but now, like most people subjected to torture, he felt an outpouring of gratitude for even the smallest kindness. ‘Thank you for the bandage,’ he whispered.
At the thought of the crisp, white dressing his spirits rose and he turned his attention to the suffocating stench of blood, vomit and defecation. He knew from his experience in the secret police exactly where he was – he had been dragged back down into the cells. Pretty soon somebody would come, strip off his clothes and hose him down. The jailers never touched the shit-covered clients themselves, so it would be a pair of female prisoners.
Usually the guards made the women do it naked and, when they were close enough, Tlass had to remember to try to get a feel – the guards always laughed at that. He heard a sharp click of metal. It made him pause; the sound was familiar, like a … like …? Then it came to him through his fever and he laughed – it was just like a pistol being cocked. That was ridiculous – nobody was ever shot in the cells, it was far too messy. And why treat his wounds if they were going to execute him? No, it had to be something else.
‘Who’s there? Somebody there?’ he called out in what he thought was a strong but friendly tone.
The only person present – sighting down the barrel of an Afghan-era pistol he had taken out of the secret compartment in the bottom of the cool-box – heard him croak the question, the words badly slurred and barely audible, and ignored it. The Saracen was standing six feet away, just far enough, he estimated, not to be hit by bone and blood, aiming at the blindfold covering Tlass’s left eye.
Trying to hear, certain there was someone else in the cell, Tlass held himself perfectly still. The Saracen knew there would never be a better moment. Truly he was blessed. He squeezed the trigger.
Crack! Tlass felt the pain of … and then felt nothing more. A spray of bright blood, bone chips and brain exited the back of his head just as the Saracen sensed a scurry of movement behind and wheeled fast. It was the wild dogs running for cover.
The Saracen turned back, aimed and fired again, this time hitting the dead man on the right side of the blindfold, destroying – with luck – any evidence that the eyes had been surgically removed. His hope was that the investigators would think Tlass himself, having forgotten something, had returned to his office and was robbed and abducted only after he left the institute a second time. That way it wouldn’t even occur to them that anything had been stolen from inside the building.
Obviously, the less they knew the better and, to that end, he was pleased when he heard the dogs returning, loping through the darkness, anxious to eat their fill of the evidence. By then he had parked the Cadillac in the darkest corner at the back of the auto-repair yard, confident that any casual observer would think it was just another vehicle waiting to get chopped. From the back of the SUV, still wearing the plastic gloves, he removed everything that might be of any interest to the forensic experts.
Carrying the cool-box and the rest of his possessions, he set off into the wasteland. He moved quickly and kept the pistol cocked in one hand – just in case some of the dogs decided they preferred their human on the hoof.
At the municipal dump he smashed the cool-box to pieces and scattered everything else from his camp among the piles of refuse. He knew that, two hours after dawn, they would have already been retrieved by scavengers and recycled into the lawless refugee camps.
Apart from the syringe
, a cardboard ticket and some loose change, all he had left in the world was a pistol, his father’s Qur’an and the six glass vials. In his view, those tiny bottles made him the wealthiest person on earth.
Chapter Twenty-two
THE SARACEN WALKED for hours, guided only by the wan starlight. After leaving the dump, he cut across the scrub and followed the canal until he finally found a rickety wooden structure which passed as a bridge.
He crossed it and trudged for miles along the reeds before seeing what he needed: the rusting chassis of an old four-wheel drive half submerged in the rank and muddy water.
He filled the plastic containers with the syringe, Tlass’s wallet and other effects, weighed them down with pebbles and threw them into the middle of the canal.
It was with terrible regret that he raised the pistol and drew his arm back – the weapon had been with him longer than any of his other possessions except his father’s Qur’an, but it was the one thing that tied him inextricably to Tlass’s murder and he felt he had no other option. He threw the gun well and it landed in the water next to the rusting chassis. If they came down the canal, dragging a metal detector through the water, they would just think it was part of the vehicle.
Quickening his pace now, he turned towards the distant glow of lights that indicated Damascus.
Four hours later, footsore and filthy, he handed over the cardboard ticket at the luggage counter of the bus depot and retrieved his suitcase and medical bag. He undid the coded lock-strap securing the suitcase, took out a slim roll of bills, paid for the storage and gave an attendant one pound for the use of a small wash cubicle.
It was two hours until the first bus left for the Lebanese border and on from there to Beirut, and he used the time to trim his beard and to shower until his flesh was almost scrubbed raw. From out of the suitcase he put on his cheap Western suit, shirt and tie and placed two of the stolen glass vials, their identifying labels pulled off, in his medical bag, hidden in plain sight among other bottles and medicines. By the time he emerged carrying his passport and luggage, he looked exactly like what he would claim to be if anyone questioned him: a devout Lebanese doctor who, having worked in the refugee camps, was now on his way home.