Chapter Eighteen

ALL ACROSS THE institute’s deserted parking lot, sodium street lights hissed to life. Tlass couldn’t see their yellow glow, he would never see anything again, but he heard them and his heart soared: the arrival of night meant the clock was running out for the filthy Palestinian.

A monstrous red pain had been spearing deeper into his forehead, and he could still feel blood weeping from his eye sockets, but the sedative was wearing off and although the pain increased exponentially so did Tlass’s energy.

He was a strong man, a fit man, but what was that worth if the spirit was broken? The thing which was parachuting him down, the secret knowledge sustaining him, was the fact that he had already been running late when he left the building. Now night had come, he knew the alarm would be raised in earnest.

His wife and four adult children, waiting impatiently at his eldest daughter’s house for a poolside gathering, would have already tried phoning all the numbers they could think of. One of his two barrel-chested sons – both making a name for themselves in their father’s old outfit – would even have slipped inside and made a call to their father’s mistress, ready to berate her for keeping him from his family obligations.

Unable to locate him and with darkness falling, the two boys, he was certain, were getting into one of their cars to trace his route, worried he had been involved in a wreck. As members of the secret police, both of them were always armed, and now all Tlass had to do was stay alive and help them find him as fast as possible. Despite his injuries, despite the pain and nausea, he knew how to do it.

Working his face from side to side, loosening the bands of electrical tape binding his head, he gradually ripped his hair, flesh and beard free of it. It was an agonizing task but if he could get his head loose he could use his teeth to rip at the tape around his chest and liberate his arms.

Earlier, he had felt the fanatic pull the cellphone from his pocket and then seen him grab the car handset out of its cradle. Moments later he had heard both phones being smashed to pieces on the asphalt. But the idiot had left the engine running in case he needed a fast exit and, knowing nothing about luxury cars, didn’t realize it meant the hands-free phone system was working. If Tlass could get his arms loose and lunge forward to the driver’s seat he didn’t need his eyes to find the button on the steering wheel which activated the car phone. And he certainly didn’t need the handset.

The last call he’d made had been to his eldest son’s cellphone that morning, and hitting the steering wheel button would redial it automatically. All Tlass had to do was speak loud enough for the microphone above his head to pick it up. ‘Office. Car park, ’ he whispered, practising.

His son would recognize his voice, and Allah help the Palestinian when the two boys arrived. The woman’s cries for mercy just before he first entered her – and then her pleas for a quick death many hours later – would sound like soft poetry compared with the song his sons and their colleagues would make the fucker sing. He was still repeating the two words – louder, stronger – when he finally tore his head and chin free of the tape. He gasped with the pain and would have cried for real if he’d had any tear ducts left.

He sat for a moment to recover from the agony, and anybody cupping their hands against the glass and looking through the Cadillac’s smoked windows at that moment would have seen a man with empty eye sockets, clumps of hair missing from his head and strips of flesh ripped from his face.

Had they continued to watch, they would have seen him lean forward to tear at the tape around his chest with his teeth and – given his wild determination – they would have said it would be only a matter of minutes before he was free.