The Sanctuary

Chapter 37

Corben hurried up the stairs to the third floor, headed for the communications office. It was past nine thirty, and Farouk’s call was due in a under three hours’ time.

He’d already called Olshansky from the car and told him to start working on the tap.

The briefing hadn’t gone too badly. They were letting him get on with things, which was all he needed right now. Kirkwood had sat back and hadn’t asked any obtrusive questions.

He found Olshansky in his batcave, sitting in front of an array of three flat-screens. Muffled sounds and the occasional garbled voice were coming from the computer’s speakers. The middle screen had a number of open windows. One of them was a rolling graphic display of a waveform plotting the noise. Under it was what looked like an on-screen synthesizer, which Olshansky was manipulating using the keyboard.

“How are we doing?” Corben asked.

Olshansky didn’t look up, his eyes riveted to the screens. “I’ve managed to download the rover into his phone, but so far, I think it’s still stashed in someone’s pocket. It’s just garbled mumbo jumbo.”

Olshansky’s predecessor had hacked into the computers of Lebanon’s two cell-phone service providers without too much difficulty. Having a few of its employees on the payroll probably helped. Corben was hoping to use that access to listen in on what was going on within the pickup range of the microphone on Ramez’s cell phone, using a “roving bug,” a remotely activated wiretap. The technology was alarmingly simple.

Most cell-phone users didn’t realize that their phones weren’t necessarily fully powered down, even if they were switched off. You just needed to set the alarm on your phone for a time when it’s switched off and watch it light up to see that. The FBI, working with the NSA, had devised a surveillance technique — though it denied any existence of it — that allowed it to remotely download eavesdropping software onto most cell phones. This software would then enable the phone’s mike to be switched on and off on its own, anytime, remotely and surreptitiously, effectively turning the phone into a bug, whether the phone was powered up or not. They didn’t even need to have physical access to the phone to set it up. It was a clever evolution of an old and simple technique that was pioneered by the KGB, which involved upping the voltage on a landline just enough to activate the phone’s mike even when it was on the hook.

Corben listened to the noise coming from Ramez’s phone. It sounded like fabric rubbing against the phone’s mike, as if the phone was in someone’s pocket. In the background, some distant voices were barely audible.

“Can’t you boost the voices?”

“I tried. The distortion’s across the range. I can’t isolate them.” He shrugged at Corben. “This is as good as it gets right now.”

Ramez couldn’t stop shivering. His chafed wrists pulsed against the plastic straps, the constant movement generating an irritating, burning sensation. At least, that’s what he imagined was happening. He couldn’t see out of the burlap sack covering his head.

They’d shoved it on seconds after stuffing him into their car, then — not that he’d resisted — they’d sadistically thrown in a couple of heavy punches to his face for good measure before pushing him down to the footwells of the backseat and pressing down on him with their shoes to keep him there.

The ride hadn’t taken that long, and although being in that car — with his head covered in that stinking sack, the occasional stomp to the ribs, and the muffled sounds of the city wafting by — was horrific enough, he would have preferred it to drag on if it meant delaying his current situation.

They’d dragged him out of the car, into an echoey building and down some stairs, then thrown him into the chair and strapped him in. The maniac with the concrete knuckles couldn’t resist landing another blow, which was all the more terrifying as, like those before it, it came unannounced, exploding onto his face through the stifling darkness of the sack.

He could hear occasional movement, footsteps around him, and there were voices a bit farther off, men’s voices. The accent was unquestionably Syrian, which didn’t bode well — not that anything else did. His mouth quivered as he tasted the sweat that trickled down his bruised face and mixed with the blood from his cut lip. The sack, which reeked of what smelled like an ungodly combination of rotten fruit and engine grease, wasn’t entirely opaque. A few tiny pinpricks of light found their way in, not enough to see anything, just taunting him with a hint of the outside world without allowing him any advance warning of the occasional incoming blow that his captors seemed to enjoy randomly inflicting upon him.

His body went rigid as he heard footsteps coming right up to him. He could feel someone’s presence, inches away, studying him. The silent shadow blocked out any light from outside, making Ramez’s world even darker.

The man didn’t say anything for a few maddening seconds. Ramez shut his eyes and tensed up, expecting another blow. The shivering wouldn’t be cowed. Instead, it increased, and with it the burning in his wrists.

But the blow didn’t come.

Instead, the man finally spoke.

“Someone’s going to be calling you on your phone, in a couple of hours’ time. A man from Iraq who came to see you yesterday. True?”

Dread flooded his senses. How could they know this? I didn’t tell anyone. I only called the police.

The realization hit him like an anvil. They have contacts in the police station. Which means no one’s going to come looking for me. It was a false hope anyway. In all of the city’s grisly history, no kidnap victim had ever forcibly been rescued. They were either released or — in most cases — they weren’t.

He didn’t have any time to mull the bleak prospect as he felt the man grab his left hand and hold it firmly in place. His grip was rock solid. Ramez froze.

“I want you to tell him exactly what I tell you to say.” The man’s voice was unnervingly threatening, despite his calm tone. “I need you to convince him that everything’s okay. He needs to believe you. He needs to believe everything’s okay. If you do that for us, you can go home. We have no quarrel with you. But this is very, very important for us. I need you to understand how important it is. And to do that, I need you to know that if you don’t convince him, this—”

With a startling suddenness, the man snapped Ramez’s middle finger back, all the way back, ripping the bone off its cartilage until the finger touched the back of his hand.

Tears burst out of Ramez’s eyes as he recoiled against the straps and howled with pain, almost blacking out despite the endorphins’ hopeless rush, but the man was unmoved. He just held it there, pressed firmly backwards, and kept talking.

“—is what you can expect a lot more of before we allow you to die.”

Olshansky almost jumped out of his skin when the scream burst through the speakers of his system.

It went on for a few agonizing seconds before turning into a whimper and finally dying out. It even startled Corben, though he’d been expecting something like it. He knew what they would want from Ramez, and he knew they’d have to make sure he was scared enough to put in a convincing performance.

“Jesus Christ,” Olshansky muttered. “What the hell did they do to him?”

“You probably don’t want to know.” Corben frowned. He heaved a frustrated sigh, imagining the scene unfurling in some underground rat hole.

The scream and the whimper were now gone, replaced by the same, annoying ruffle. Olshansky rubbed his face, shaking his head. He looked clearly shaken.

Corben let him have a moment of quiet. “What about the location?” he then asked, turning to the screen to his right. It showed a map of Beirut, overlaid by the boundaries of the different cell zones covering the city.

Olshansky collected his thoughts. “They’re in this cell here,” he said, pointing at the map. Cell-phone usage in Beirut was heavy, and each cell in the crowded city only covered an area of just under one square mile. But even with the enhanced triangulation at Olshansky’s disposal, the hundred-meter diameter of the target zone was still a pretty big haystack in which to find the assistant professor.

Corben frowned. Ramez was in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah territory. A definite no-go area for a lot of Lebanese. Virtually a whole different planet for an American, especially one with the dubious job title of “economic counselor.” It was the one area where he didn’t have a local contact.

“At least we know where they’ll be coming from when the call comes in,” Corben noted. He checked his watch again. He’d need to get back to the city pretty soon. He got up to leave. “Keep me posted if you get anything clear?”

“You bet,” Olshansky confirmed without taking his eyes off the screen. “What time’s that call coming in?”

“Noon. I’ve asked Leila to come up,” Corben added, referring to one of the translators on the payroll, “for when you manage to get something clear.”

“Okay,” Olshansky said in a hollow voice.

Corben was headed for the door when Olshansky remembered something. “By the way. Your caller with the stage fright? He’s Swiss.”

Corben stopped. “What?”

Olshansky still looked haunted. “The call on Evelyn Bishop’s cell that came in without an ID that you asked me about?”

Corben had forgotten about the phone call he’d asked Olshansky to trace, the one that Baumhoff had taken on Evelyn’s phone that night, at the police station.

“It came from Geneva,” Olshansky continued.

Which surprised Corben.

“And check this out,” Olshansky added. “Whoever was calling really values his privacy. The call was routed through nine international servers, each one hiding behind a mother of a firewall.”

“But nothing that can resist your subtle ways, right?” Massaging Olshansky’s überhacker ego was never a bad idea.

“Not this baby,” Olshansky said glumly. “I managed to track it back to the Geneva server, but that’s it. This is heavy-duty code we’re talking about. I can’t get in. Which means I can’t pinpoint it any closer than that.”

“Geneva.”

“That’s it.” Olshansky shrugged.

“Well, let me know if you can narrow it down to something slightly more manageable,” Corben replied flatly. “Might be tough to put the entire city under surveillance.”

And with that, he walked out, the assistant professor’s howl still ringing in his ears.