A Gentleman's Game (34 page)

51

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0309:18 Local (GMT+3.00)

Thirty meters,
and Sinan could see it, looking down the short drop, at the place that had been his home.

The tents were shredded, in tatters, and in the starlight that reflected off the desert, he saw his brothers, slain as they had slept. Their blood shone black on the earth, and he heard their sobbing, their pain. He saw survivors, struggling to get their weapons, to get to their feet, to escape the tents, and he saw them twist and fall, one after the other, as if touched by the breath of the Angel of Death.

Sinan looked around, frantic, and he saw the flicker to his left, blue light suppressed, and he heard another of his brothers scream, and he dropped back, still in his crouch, bringing his rifle to his shoulder, trying to circle around behind the shooter. His heart had climbed to his throat, and he tasted a bitterness in his mouth, something acrid, and he felt his hands trembling, his whole body shaking with his rage.

He tried to move slowly, though everything inside him screamed to hurry, telling him the more he delayed, the more his brothers died.

Sinan was perhaps ten feet from the man when he stopped, rolling to his side to reload his weapon, and the man looked up, saw him, and realized what was about to happen.

The man tried to roll, slapping the fresh magazine into place, scrambling to raise the gun and fire.

“Go to hell,” Sinan said, and he pulled his trigger, held it down, watched as the muzzle-flash lit the man like a fiery strobe, watched as the man’s body rattled and shook as the Kalashnikov tore him to pieces.

52

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0309:31 Local (GMT+3.00)

Chace heard the echo
of the shots, saw the muzzle-flash light them a hundred meters away, the man with the rifle, firing and firing and firing, and it wouldn’t stop, he wouldn’t stop, and she cried out in Tom’s agony, saw his arm rise and then fall again. She brought the P90 against her hip, tearing the trigger back, all her control gone. Brass rained around her feet, spent and smoking.

The strobe went off, the man twirling away, and Chace’s eyes burned with the memory of light. She heard herself choking, jumped down the wall of the wadi, sprinting its width, her boots pounding the earth almost as hard as her heart, and when she reached the opposite side she scrabbled up it, losing the gun, not caring, pulling herself atop on her knees.

The brutality of his death forced a sob, caught in her throat. There were pieces of him missing, as if torn out by an angry, spoiled child who would rather break his possessions than share them. His eyes and mouth were open, and there was pain and fear in them, and his skin was splashed and painted in his own blood.

The emotion fractured her, stole her mind, too strong and too cruel, far beyond anything she had ever allowed herself to feel. Chace screamed without knowing she was screaming, and she put her hands to him, trying to hold Wallace one more time, trying to feel him warm and alive and hers.

Then the world exploded magnesium-flare red and white, and she came back to herself with blood in her mouth, facedown on wet earth. Disoriented and confused and still lost in the grief, she tried to push herself up. Pain ruptured in her back, sent her flat again, and somehow her mind connected that this was wrong, that she was being hurt, and she snapped her right arm back and up and surprised herself when it connected with bone. She felt another blow, this to her right shoulder, and she realized it had been meant for her head, and that she must have moved out of the way.

She pitched her legs up, to the side, twisting on the ground, and her boots connected with flesh again, not seriously, not enough to do anything but send her assailant back a few steps. She used the momentum to follow through, bringing her legs over and down again, flipping on the ground, getting her feet under her, and again she moved her head just in the nick of time, felt the brush of the Kalashnikov’s stock as it stole the watch cap from her head.

Her thought was that it had been Matteen attacking her and that she would kill him for lying, but this wasn’t Matteen, it was the other one, the one who had killed Tom. In the fraction she had to see his face, the details burned. He was young, younger than Matteen, and Caucasian, and he was swearing at her, cursing at her, spitting at her, spittle on his lips, swinging the Kalashnikov at her like a club. Blood ran from torn fabric along his left arm, and she wondered that she’d hit him only once, so poorly, and the Kalashnikov was coming at her head again.

She ducked beneath it, sprang up from her haunches, trapping the arm with her right while turning her back into him, driving her left elbow hard into his sternum. He grunted, twisting away, giving her only half the impact, and she felt the blow high on her left side, where her breast joined her ribs, and she screamed louder, yanking him forward, trying to flip him with the trapped arm.

Again, it half-worked, and the man dropped the Kalashnikov, struggling to free his arm as she brought him off the ground, twisting over her in the air, his hand dragging along her neck, pulling her hair, trying to take her down with him. Chace fell into him onto the ground, punched once at his throat, caught the mass of muscle at his shoulder instead. She felt her hair tearing as he pulled her down toward him, his mouth opening, trying to bite her face, and Chace snapped her forehead into his nose, felt the cartilage shatter and melt, and he roared and pounded at her back and side with his free hand, kicking at the earth, rolling them until she was on her back and he was pinning her with his weight.

It was impossible to breathe, agony to breathe, and Chace felt his hand hot on her throat, and something else digging into her skin above her right hip. She reached for it, found the hilt of her knife, and her vision was swimming, and he was over her, and his other hand left her hair, and the world cracked, jumped, as if badly spliced, and she felt wet heat spreading from her nose as he punched her face a second time, then brought that hand to join the first, squeezing the life out of her.

She stabbed him then, felt the blade slide over bone, then sink deep into his side, and the man howled, loud enough that she heard it through the roar of the surf crashing in her ears. Chace yanked the blade toward her, keeping it inside him, with everything she had, feeling it slide through hollow insides, and then she forced it back, in the opposite direction, turning the hilt. His grip on her faltered, and his eyes began to empty, and she turned the blade as if working the throttle of Kittering’s motorcycle, ran it down, and felt the eruption of hot blood gushing over her hand.

His grip slipped, and he pitched forward, resting atop her, and she heard his death rattle in her ear, felt it rustle through her hair.

Chace saw the stars above her blurring, felt her whole body shaking.

It hurt to breathe.

It hurt much more to be alive.

53

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0326 Local (GMT+3.00)

She was thinking
of a time when she and Wallace had broken into a liquor store because all the pubs in Bath had closed, and they were drunk and wanted something to drink. They’d driven in his Triumph out into the middle of a field and gotten pissed out of their minds, drinking toasts to the memory of Minders past, men with names like Ed Kittering and Brian Butler. They’d been sick drunk and missed work the next day, and Crocker had torn into them for being stupid and foolish, and for, worst of all, being caught on surveillance camera robbing a liquor store in Bath.

Matteen Agha was standing over her, speaking. It took her a few seconds to remember who he was, and even longer to understand what he was asking, but try as she might, she couldn’t let go of the knife. He had to pry her fingers away from the hilt before he could topple the dead man from astride her. Then he reached down and took her arms and pulled her to her feet.

“You have exfil, right?” he asked. “You have a pickup?”

Chace couldn’t understand him. She knew so many languages, and she couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“Where is the pickup?” Matteen insisted. “We need to go.”

“Parlez-vous français?”
she asked, and it was barely audible, and the pain it caused her throat was as acute as every other in her body and heart.

Matteen helped her sit, propping her against the wadi wall.

“Don’t move,” he said. “Don’t move, don’t do anything. I’ll be right back.”

“Je ne comprend pas,”
Chace croaked.

Matteen went off, back down the mouth of the wadi.

Chace sat still for most of a minute, then saw her P90 resting in the dirt. She needed two tries to get to her feet, then staggered to the weapon and nearly fell over again when she picked it up. Her fingers fumbled at the flap of her thigh pocket, and it took most of another minute to get out the remaining magazine and replace the empty in the gun.

She heard an engine start, echoing through the wadi.

She pulled herself back up the wadi wall and collapsed again, this time beside Wallace.

She heard the sound of wheels crunching earth, the slow approach of the vehicle beneath her, the headlights splashing fresh illumination. When the light hit Tom, his skin looked as pale as the surface of the moon, his eyes as cold.

A car door opened.

“I have to go now,” Chace said to Wallace. “I have to go.”

She raised her head and put her lips to his cheek, then pushed herself back along the ground, sliding back down to the wadi floor. She turned, saw Matteen standing beside the open driver’s door, and Chace made her way numbly around to the passenger’s side, climbed into the seat. Matteen came around and closed her door, then went back to take his place behind the wheel.

Chace fumbled out the GPS unit from her pocket, switched it on, and was amazed that it still worked.

She gave Matteen the bearing, and the car started, and she closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to look at what she was leaving behind.

54

Israel—Tel Aviv, the Hilton Tel Aviv, Room 2303
24 September 0831 Local (GMT+3.00)

The SUV had saved them,
allowed them to make the first pickup on the twenty-third, at twenty-two hundred hours. The bird had appeared out of nowhere, hugging the Jordanian terrain, set down just long enough for Chace to pull her battered and abused self into the back, Matteen following. The gunner in the back had nothing to say to them as they took off again, and when they set down at the base north of Elat, Landau was waiting.

Chace was taken to the base infirmary, where a brusque doctor gave her an efficient and not unkind examination, including eighteen stitches along her scalp, where the first rifle blow had torn away a flap of skin. He told her that she was lucky her skull hadn’t caved in, and she just looked at him, not feeling lucky about anything much at all. He gave her a shot for the pain, and she was nodding off when Landau returned with two of the heavies she recognized from the safehouse. He told them to take her back to Tel Aviv, and they brought her to another helicopter, and there was another ride, a short one, and she nodded off again while they were in the air, and a third time after they put her in the car.

She honestly had no memory of how she’d ended up in the Tel Aviv Hilton.

•

She awoke in pain, disoriented, and it took her several moments to piece together where she was and how she might have come to be there. When she got out of bed and pulled herself to the bathroom, she saw a plastic shopping bag resting on the closed toilet seat. Inside were clothes, presumably ones that would fit her.

She took a shower and didn’t much feel it, even when she made it hot, even when she made it cold.

She dried off and dressed, avoiding looking at herself in the mirror.

•

Landau and Borovsky came to see her for debriefing at nine, and she saw no reason not to tell them everything that had happened, so she did. They listened closely, their faces betraying nothing.

When she was finished, Borovsky asked how she was feeling.

“Dead,” she said.

“That will pass,” he told her, and laid a pack of Silk Cut on the desk, then excused himself and left the room, leaving Landau behind.

“Where’s Matteen?”

“Already gone,” Landau said. “CIA was waiting to scoop him up the moment we left the base.”

“So he was for real?”

“Apparently. I didn’t ask, they wouldn’t say anyway, we go on what we know at any given moment, yes?”

Chace nodded, staring out the window at the Mediterranean.

“You should be getting a call shortly,” Landau said, rising.

“All right.”

“My advice, take some time off. Take some rest.”

Chace nodded, not hearing him.

Landau sighed, put a card on the desk beside the pack of Silk Cut. “You call that number if you need anything, you understand, Miss Chace?”

“Sure.”

He hesitated, then seemed to acknowledge there was nothing he could say that she wanted to hear. He left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

For several minutes, Chace stayed in the chair, staring at the Med. Then she roused herself enough to go to the desk and get the pack of cigarettes and the ashtray. There was a book of matches in the ashtray, and she used them to light the first smoke, then used the ember of the first to light the second, and so on.

She was on her eighth when the telephone rang.

She didn’t answer it.

•

She called down to the desk and told them that she wasn’t to be disturbed.

She undressed and went back to bed.

When she awoke next, it was early evening, and the message light on the telephone was blinking orange. She took another shower, then used the room service menu to order dinner, which was a bottle of scotch and a Caesar salad.

After lighting a cigarette, she picked up the phone again and called the hotel operator, saying that she would again be accepting calls.

•

The phone rang six minutes later, and she answered it this time, saying, “Yes.”

“Tara,” Crocker said. “You can come home now.”