Red Right Hand

36.

CAMERON CAME TO in a dingy room no more than four feet across. A bare lightbulb was screwed into the fixture above her. The floor on which she sat sloped toward a drain at its center. The wall they’d left her propped against was water-stained and smelled of cleaning products. A utility sink jutted from the wall.

A janitor’s closet, she realized.

Apart from Cameron, it was empty. No mops, no tools, no cleaning products-nothing she could use as a weapon. Not that she was in any shape to fight. Her head pounded. Her limbs ached. Her thoughts were slippery, and she had difficulty holding on to them.

She rattled the door. Locked. She banged on it awhile and shouted herself hoarse, but no one came.

An hour or so later, the door opened. The hallway’s fluorescent light was an assault. A wild-eyed man in filthy clothes and cowboy boots stood just outside, conferring with the head of hospital security. The latter’s nose was packed with cotton, and when he looked at her, his features warped with rage.

“She’s all yours, Mr. Yancey-but be warned, she’s scrappier than she looks. “

They yanked her to her feet and zip-tied her hands behind her back. Then Yancey dragged her out a service entrance, identifying himself as law enforcement to everyone they passed so they’d ignore her cries for help.

As they crossed the lot to Yancey’s rental car, the fog enveloped them. Cameron managed to writhe free of his grasp when he took a hand off her to open the back door, but Yancey grabbed her by the collar and punched her in the face. His ring split her cheek open like an overripe tomato. She crumpled, dazed, to the concrete. He kicked her until she blacked out, and possibly a while longer.

When she came to, she was lying across the backseat with what seemed to be a pair of dress socks in her mouth, her feet now zip-tied too. Her arms burned from lack of blood flow. Her ribs ached with every breath. Her face was so swollen that she could barely open her left eye, and it was sticky from drying blood.

The cabin of the rented Cadillac was thick with cigarette smoke. Pavement clattered by beneath. Yancey was on the phone.

“…about fucking time we caught a break. Hold position until I arrive-I want to be there when you go in.” A pause. “No, I’ll call the boss myself and let him know.”

They jounced over a set of train tracks and Cameron was momentarily airborne. Her cheek slammed into the armrest on her way down. The pain was excruciating. Her eyes watered. Her vision went spotty. She cried out involuntarily, but it was stifled by the gag in her mouth.

Sometime later-five minutes? an hour?-the Caddy rocked to a halt. Yancey put a hand on the passenger-seat headrest, turned around, and favored her with a manic smile. His cheeks were flushed. His eyes were wide. “Sit tight, darlin’. Daddy’s got some work to do. But don’t you worry, he’ll be back soon enough. And then you and me are gonna make your buddy pay.”

He engaged the backseat child locks and climbed out of the car.

As soon as she was reasonably sure he was out of sight, Cameron began to move.

“What’s the sitrep?” Yancey asked, out of breath from having trotted across the parking lot. He’d left his rental car around the corner of a nearby building because he couldn’t risk the girl making noise and compromising the mission-or seeing something that she shouldn’t.

“Heat signatures indicate two people inside,” the man who’d called him-Osborne-said, “which is consistent with our intel.”

“Armed?”

“Hard to say. It looks to me like they’re asleep. Near as we can tell, they have no idea we’re here.”

The imam, it turned out, had been telling the truth; he’d had nothing to do with the bombing or the men who perpetrated it. But then, Yancey’d already known that, just as he’d known the men in question did, in fact, attend that mosque while they were in town. Eventually, though, with enough cajoling, that imam coughed up a list of names-almost literally, in fact, along with a pint or so of malt liquor and the contents of his stomach-of congregants who might be sympathetic to those espousing extremist views. Bellum dispatched a team to each, and they repeated the process. Eventually, one interview bore fruit. Yielded an address. The man who gave it to them had-along with his family-been taken into Bellum custody until Yancey’s people could determine whether his information was legitimate.

The address was of a shuttered body shop in South San Francisco. Bellum’s source said it was where the remaining members of the True Islamic Caliphate were hiding out and planning their next attack.

It’s no wonder the business didn’t last, Yancey thought now-the place sat in a desolate stretch of self-storage facilities, warehouses, and old factories, train tracks slicing up the parcels of land at odd angles.

That was good.

It meant fewer witnesses.

“Are your men in position?” Yancey asked.

“Yes, sir. We’ve got teams stationed at all three entrances, and snipers on the adjacent roofs. All we’re waiting on is your go-ahead.”

“You’ve got it,” Yancey replied.

Osborne gave the order. His men breached all three entrances at once. For a moment all was chaos. Shouting. Screaming. Frenzied action. Yancey hung back and braced for gunfire-but there wasn’t any. It was over in seconds, the men inside subdued without a shot.

“Clear?” Yancey called from just outside the door.

“Clear!”

He dropped his cigarette. Ground it out beneath his boot. Picked up the butt and slipped it into his pocket before he entered.

Two Arab men were hog-tied on their stomachs in the middle of the floor, their backs arched, ankles in the air. Gags stretched across their mouths. Both were young, skinny, and hollow-eyed. One was quiet, still. The other sobbed. Surrounded by armed men in riot gear, they looked more frightened than frightening. That was always the way, Yancey thought. In the end, every monster he’d ever met was just a man, full of hopes and fears and weaknesses of mind and flesh. But that didn’t mean they weren’t also monsters.

Flashlights swept across the darkened space as Yancey’s men searched the building. It smelled of sweat and motor oil. Three sleeping bags lay beside the bound men, two open and mussed, one rolled neatly, its nylon straps clipped and yanked so tight that its ends flared out. A camp stove and a couple pots sat nearby. Empty cans were scattered all around-SpaghettiOs, fruit cocktail, Coca-Cola. Funny to think of terrorists eating like four-year-olds. Yancey wondered if any of the food qualified as halal. Maybe their God didn’t care. Maybe bombing the bridge earned them their virgins no matter what they ate.

“Sir!” one of the men called. Who, Yancey didn’t know. Bellum’s matte-black ballistic masks rendered them indistinguishable from one another.

“What is it, son?”

“Come look at this.”

The man panned his flashlight across a digital camcorder on a tripod and the filthy sheet that it was pointed at, which hung from the wall, a makeshift backdrop. Beside the sheet was a workbench. Yancey wandered over and inspected it. On it were two combat knives. Three handguns. A Kalashnikov. A MAC-10. Assorted maps, blueprints, and bomb schematics. A cling-wrapped brick of plastic explosive the dusky orange of Wisconsin cheddar. And two partially assembled suicide vests festooned with braids of multicolored wire and studded with ball bearings.

Yancey poked at the vests. Examined the schematics in detail. Hefted the MAC-10, testing its weight. He ejected the magazine, peeked inside, and reinserted it with a click. Then he trotted over to where the terrorists lay and crouched beside them so he could see their faces.

“Evenin’, gentlemen,” he said. “Long time, no see.”

One of the men stared at Yancey, hatred glimmering in his eyes. The other’s eyes were shut tight. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

“Jesus, Waheeb. I never pegged you for being such a whiny little bitch. You should take a lesson from al-Nasr here and man up. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Al-Nasr attempted to reply, but the gag prevented it. Yancey watched him with amusement for a moment, and then removed it.

“Do not speak to Waheeb this way,” he said, his English heavily accented. “He is ten times the man you will ever be.”

“If you say so,” Yancey said. “Since you two are still alive, I’m guessing Bakr must’ve been the one piloting the boat. Does that mean he drew the short straw or the long? I can never tell if you people are serious about dying for your God or if you’re all just beating your chests and secretly hoping one of your buddies will volunteer.”

“Bakr was a hero,” al-Nasr said. “He died with honor. We should all be so fortunate.”

“You think? Because I think he was a fucking coward who killed a bunch of innocent people for no reason. A worthless piece of human trash too dumb to realize he’d been misled for his whole miserable life. I bet he died with shit-stained trousers.”

“I would not expect you to understand his sacrifice.”

“Let me tell you what I understand. I understand that Bellum brought you here to train you to better fight Assad, and in return you promised us intel and freedom to operate within your territory. I understand you disappeared from the safe house we set up for you right around the time a massive cache of Semtex went missing from our training facility. I understand a member of the local mosque we recommended told you that this place was vacant and suggested you could hole up here without attracting attention. What I don’t understand is why you decided to dick us over or where you got the boat and bomb schematics, because they sure as shit didn’t come from us.”

“Suffice to say, we have some very generous friends.”

“And here I thought we were your friends-but apparently you’d rather bite the hand that feeds you than free your homeland from oppression.”

“You think we owe you loyalty?” Al-Nasr’s face showed disdain. “We owe you nothing. Allah will reward us for what we’ve done.”

“Yeah? Be sure to say hello to Him for me.” Yancey raised the MAC-10 and loosed a flurry of bullets into al-Nasr and Waheeb. He didn’t ease off the trigger until the gun clicked empty and the two men were scarcely more than meat and gristle.

Bellum men came running but lowered their weapons when they realized there was no threat. Yancey’s ears rang. The room stank of voided bowels and spent ammo.

Osborne, red-faced with fury, grabbed Yancey by the lapels. He had three inches and forty pounds of muscle on Yancey, easy. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.

Yancey dropped the MAC-10 and placed his hand on the wooden grip of his revolver. “Get your goddamn hands off me. Our orders were clear.”

“But if we’d had the chance to question these assholes, we might’ve discovered who helped them carry out the attack!”

“Sure, unless the Feds caught wind of the fact that we had suspects in custody and took them from us before they cracked. What do you think would happen if the world found out that Bellum brought these fucking towelheads into the country under false pretenses and gave them access to explosives? I’m guessing that scenario ends in prison sentences, and I’m not eager to play bitch for the same lowlifes I spent twenty years putting away.”

“When we brought them here, we had no way of knowing that they planned to double-cross us.”

“Listen to yourself. Do you really think that matters? The longer these two remained breathing, the greater the chance that Bellum’s role in the attack, however inadvertent, would be exposed. If you’d just put them down when you came in, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“My men and I aren’t trained to shoot people who don’t pose a threat.”

“Well, then, I guess you should be thanking me for saving you the trouble.”

“You think I ought to thank you? I-”

Yancey held up a finger to silence him. His phone was humming in his pocket. He took it out and answered it. “Hello, Mr. Wentworth. Yes, it’s done. Thank you, sir, but our tac team deserves most of the credit-they did good work.” He covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said to Osborne, “Anything you’d like to add, or are we good?”

Osborne fumed but said nothing.

Yancey terminated the call. Then he knelt, fished a handkerchief from his pocket, and used it to wipe his prints off the MAC-10.

“Comb this place from top to bottom,” he said. “Take the Semtex and anything else that could lead back to Bellum. Then send teams through the surrounding buildings to look for witnesses and cameras.”

“That could take all night.”

“Then it takes all night. We’re on the one-yard line, son. Let’s not fumble now because we forgot to dot our i’s or cross our t’s.”

“Yes, sir,” Osborne replied through gritted teeth.

“Good man.” Yancey clapped him on the shoulder condescendingly and headed for door, lighting a fresh cigarette as he stepped once more into the fog.

Cameron sat in the rancid muck that had leaked out of a rusty dumpster and tried to use the hole’s jagged edge to saw through her zip-tie handcuffs. She couldn’t see what she was doing because her hands were behind her back, but her wrists burned with every downstroke, and blood dripped freely from her fingers.

I’ll be pissed if I survive this only to die of tetanus, she thought.

Earlier, as soon as Yancey’s footfalls had been swallowed by the fog and Cameron knew she was alone in the backseat of the Caddy, she had curled into a fetal position and tried to bring her hands around front by sliding them past her butt and pulling her legs through. But she was bound too tightly, the V made by her arms too narrow.

The exertion winded her. Yancey had stuffed a pair of balled-up dress socks in her mouth, and she could barely breathe through her nose because it was crusted with dried blood. If I want to get out of here, she thought, I’m going to have to get rid of these goddamn socks.

She’d opened her jaw as far as she could and pushed at the socks with her tongue. It seemed to take forever, but eventually, she succeeded in getting them out. She licked her lips and spat lint onto the backseat.

Yancey had engaged the rear child locks. With her hands and feet bound, she had no hope of climbing into the front seat and unlocking the door. That left one option…and it was going to be noisy.

Cameron scooted into position. Drew her knees up to her chest. Kicked the Caddy’s back right window as hard as she could.

The car shook. Her legs ached. But the window didn’t break.

She tried again. Still nothing.

Automatic gunfire echoed through the night. Cameron shuddered with terror and willed herself not to cry. Then she doubled her efforts.

On the seventh kick, the window shattered. She threw herself out of the aperture and landed face-first on the pavement, her hands useless behind her. For a moment, agony blotted out the world. It took every ounce of will she possessed not to scream.

With some assistance from the car, she’d managed to stand. She tried to hop away but soon toppled and was forced to inch along on her stomach. The fog enveloped her. Eventually, she wriggled around a corner, out of sight of anyone near the car.

She’d found herself in an alley between buildings. It was shrouded in long shadows, its only illumination the distant streetlights through the fog. Her first thought when she’d crawled behind the dumpster was to hide, but then she saw the hole and thought the edge might be sharp enough to sever her bonds.

Now, Cameron wondered about the gunfire. Hoped that Yancey had been killed. But she kept sawing because, deep down, she knew he hadn’t.

She heard sounds coming from around the corner, a muffled curse and a fist pounding the Caddy’s roof in frustration, and she realized he’d returned. She froze and tried to breathe as quietly as she could.

Seconds passed that way, or maybe hours, or maybe years. Then she caught a whiff of cigarette smoke, and a voice nearby said: “There you are, you little bitch. Didn’t I tell you that I’d be right back?”

Cameron cowered. Tried to kick him with her bound feet as he approached. He slapped them aside, hoisted her up by her hair, and punched her twice in the gut.

The air whooshed out of her like a bellows. She doubled over in agony. Yancey used her momentum to throw her over his shoulder. Then he carried her back to the car.

As he stuffed her in the trunk, she begged, “Please don’t kill me.”

“Don’t worry, kid. I’m not gonna kill you-not until you help me get Segreti back, that is.”