The Sanctuary

Chapter 15

An acrid, bitter smell speared Evelyn back to consciousness.

She jolted upright, shaking its sting away. Her eyes shot open, only to be assaulted by the fierce neon lighting in the room. It seemed to be coming at her from all sides, as if she were sitting in a white box. She squeezed her eyes back shut.

Slowly, hints of awareness broke through her daze. For one thing, she wasn’t stuffed in the car’s trunk anymore. She was sitting on a hard, metal-framed chair. She tried to shift her position and felt a burning pain from her wrists and ankles. She tried to move them, but couldn’t. She realized she was cuffed into place.

She sensed movement around her, and warily she opened her eyes. Inches from her face, a blurry hand was pulling away. Its fingers held something, a small cylinder of some kind. As she regained her focus, she realized it was a capsule. She thought it must be the smelling salts. She caught a final whiff of it as she followed the hand up. A man was standing there, facing her.

The first thing Evelyn noticed were his eyes. They were an unusual blue, and utterly devoid of any emotion. The word arctic came to mind. They were fixed on her, scanning her with detached curiosity, alert to every twitch in her body.

They never blinked.

She guessed that the man was in his fifties. He had a handsome, distinguished face. His features — the brow, the cheekbones, the chin and nose — were prominent, aquiline, and yet, finely sculpted. His skin was slightly tanned to a rich, golden hue. He sported a full head of undulating, salt-and-pepper hair, which he wore suavely gelled back, and he was tall, easily over six feet. What stood out mostly in her mind, though, was how slim he was. Not in a bulimic, waiflike manner. Just skinny, which his height only accentuated. He clearly looked after himself well and had his appetite on a tight leash and didn’t seem any weaker for it. His posture exuded confidence and influence, and his cold eyes presaged a steely, uncompromising disposition, which she found unsettling.

For some reason, her instincts were telling her he wasn’t Arab. Which was confirmed by his accent, when he finally decided to speak up. Not to her. To someone she hadn’t noticed, behind her.

“Give her some water,” he ordered calmly, in an Arabic that was definitely not indigenous but that, oddly, had an Iraqi tinge to it.

Another man appeared beside her and brought a bottle of cold mineral water up to her mouth. His features were dark and brooding, his eyes dead, like those of the men who’d grabbed her in Beirut. Her captor seemed to have a veritable private goon squad at his disposal. She stored the thought as she gratefully took in a few gulps, before this dark man pulled back and disappeared from view again like a ghost.

The man facing her moved to a low cabinet that ran along the wall and pulled open a drawer. She couldn’t see what he was doing, but she heard what sounded like a plastic packet being ripped open. With rising trepidation, she cast her eyes around the room. It was windowless and painted a harsh, acrylic white, all around. The shiny, white drawer cabinet ran the full length of the wall. The room seemed impeccably kept and meticulously efficient — harshly efficient, Evelyn suddenly thought. A reflection, she realized, of its master.

Several other worrying thoughts abseiled into her mind.

First and foremost was that she wasn’t blindfolded. Her kidnappers in Beirut — well, that was self-evident. They weren’t about to waltz through the crowded downtown arcades in balaclavas. But here…This was different. And this was no hired henchman. This man was clearly in charge. And that he didn’t mind showing her his face did not bode well at all.

Next was his attire. He was wearing a sports shirt and khaki chinos,under a dark blue blazer. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the white doctor’s coat he wore over them. In the white room. With the long white unit of drawers and cabinets. And with, she now noticed as she glanced up, the kind of stark lighting you normally find in an operating room.

Evelyn swallowed hard.

She didn’t dare look behind her, to the rest of the room, but her mind filled in the surgical equipment that she imagined was lurking behind her back.

“Why did he come to see you?” the man asked with his back turned. His English had a European accent. If she’d had to guess, she would have said Italian, or possibly Greek. But she had more pressing concerns at the moment.

Her instinct was to ask him who the hell he was and why he’d had a bunch of murderous thugs pluck her off the streets, haul her into the back of a car, and bring her here, but she reined in her indignation. Her mind raced back, processing the events that had led to her being here. She knew it had to do with Farouk, with his murdered friend. With the pieces from Iraq. And, if she remembered correctly, quite possibly with the Ouroboros. Which meant that the man in the lab coat probably knew exactly what he was after. And pissing him off would therefore be the wrong move right now.

“Why am I here?”

He turned to face her. In his hand was a syringe and a rubber strap. He nodded to the man behind her, who pulled over a chair and a small table for him and set them facing Evelyn. The man in the lab coat sat down and calmly placed the needle and the strap on the table. He turned to her and, casually, reached out and clamped his hand around her jaw. His grip tightened harshly, painfully, around Evelyn’s face, but he didn’t flinch and his voice didn’t waver. “If we’re going to get along,” he told her, “we need to establish some ground rules. Rule number one is never to answer a question with another question. Understood?”

He kept his eyes locked on her until she nodded. He released his grip, a faint smile breaking across his thin lips.

“So,” he went on, “and I would very much prefer not to have to repeat myself again — why, exactly, did he come to find you?”

Evelyn felt her skin crawl as she watched him reach over and roll up her sleeve. She could smell a subtle, musky aftershave on him. Annoyingly, it wasn’t half-bad.

“I’m assuming you’re talking about Farouk,” she replied, saying it in a way so as not to make it sound like a question.

A smile flitted across the man’s lips. For such a handsome face, it was disconcertingly threatening. “I’ll allow you that one.” He tucked her sleeve into place. “And, yes, I am talking about Farouk.”

She studied him, unsure about where to begin. “He needed money. He was trying to sell some pieces from Iraq. Mesopotamian artifacts.” She paused, hesitating, then ventured, “Am I also allowed to ask questions?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Let’s see how we get along first,” he told her, his eyes fixed on her while he tapped two fingers on her forearm and beckoned a vein to reveal itself.