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 have 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 Fü hrer’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.