The Sanctuary

Chapter 60

Corben watched as Omar, gun drawn, surveyed the front living room before yanking him in like a dog on a leash and rushing through the house with him.

He spotted the wounded shooter by the doorway and crossed over to him in a few quick strides. He was slunk down, huddled against the wall, and looked as if he wasn’t doing too well. The body of the second shooter to go in lay by his feet. Omar took cover beside the open door and yelled down the hallway, asking for updates. A voice yelled back that someone called Rudwaan was dead — one of the two shooters Omar had dispatched to the back of the house, either the third member of his hit team or one of the drivers who’d met them — but that the other hired gun had been killed and that the American and the girl had gone upstairs.

Omar glared angrily, then dragged Corben out by his neck and slipped deeper into the house. They met up with the surviving shooter who’d come in through the back. The body of Kirkwood’s other hired gun was all bent up at the foot of the stairs, messy with blood.

Omar looked up, thought for a nanosecond, and turned to Corben. He brought his handgun up and shoved its nozzle under Corben’s chin. His eyes burned into him, the fury seething out of every pockmark in his scarred face.

Corben didn’t flinch. He either died here, now, or he’d have a chance.

The hakeem’s man barked to his man to stay with Corben and watch him, then rushed up the stairs after Kirkwood and Mia.

Kirkwood and Mia moved around the roof in a daze, trying to divine some kind of escape, flicking anxious glances from the low parapet surrounding them to the trapdoor and back.

They’d gone all the way around the edge of the house and were back where they started.

The shooters would soon be there.

They had to do something.

Kirkwood headed for the side with the narrowest gap separating it from the next house and called out for Mia to follow him. They reached it and stood by its edge. It was a six-foot gap to the next flat roof, that of the bazaar, which was long and had many protrusions they could use for cover.

But it was a six-foot leap over a three-story chasm that led down to the narrow cobbled passage below.

“Can you jump it?” he asked Mia, his voice frantic, his eyes darting back at the trapdoor, expecting it to fling open any second.

“Are you nuts?” she shot back.

“You can do it,” he insisted.

“I’m not jumping this.”

Loud thrashes against the trapdoor rattled them.

Kirkwood’s eyes lasered into Mia’s. “You can do this,” he yelled fiercely. “You have to do it.”

Another jarring burst against the trapdoor. It creaked open, its hinges juddering. It wouldn’t last much longer.

Mia looked at the bazaar’s roof, then back at Kirkwood.

“Jump over, and I’ll throw you the book. Don’t wait for me. Just go. Make your way to one of our embassies, insist on speaking with an ambassador, only with an ambassador, do you understand?”

She seemed to be looking into him, her mind swamped by a flurry of questions and emotions.

The trapdoor thudded again.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Who are you? Why should I trust you?”

The questions were like spears through his heart. He felt a wild grief and a raging fury take possession of him at the same time. “Because I was with your mother in that chamber in Al-Hillah,” he told her.

A look of utter mystification washed over her face.

“Because I’m pretty sure I’m your father,” he added desperately, feeling as if his soul had been sucked out of his body there and then.

Another loud thump and this time, the trapdoor gave.

Kirkwood and Mia both turned in tandem as the pockmarked killer burst out of the opening and clambered onto the roof.

“Go now!” Kirkwood ordered her.

Mia looked down to the dark passage below, raised her glance to the man who had just told her he was her father, and nodded. She was too numb to speak, her mind submerged under a deluge of questions. She simply took a few steps back, charged forward, and flung herself into the air.

The ordeal lasted less than a breath as her legs flailed in the air in big, rotating sweeps before she tumbled heavily onto the roof of the bazaar, rolling on its dust-swept surface. She righted herself and sprang back to her feet, her teeth rattling and her head spinning from the harsh landing, and rushed back to the parapet.

Kirkwood stood there, his face breaking into a radiant smile of relief as he saw her straighten up unscathed.

A shadow was rushing up behind him. The same pockmarked man she’d seen in Beirut each time the madness started. He had a gun in his hand.

“Behind you,” she shouted.

Kirkwood glanced back, turned to her, dropped his eyes and slid one last glance at the book he gripped in his hands, and in one fluid motion, he flung it to her.

It twirled in the air, spinning around itself, a priceless ancient Frisbee, before landing in her arms just as the killer reached the parapet. She saw him raise his handgun at her, she saw death about to reach out from its nozzle and rip the life right out of her, only the man she knew as Bill Kirkwood lunged at him from the side and tackled him, pushing his arm away and sending the bullet careening into dead air.

“Run,” Kirkwood yelled as he struggled against the armed killer.

And despite every yearning, every emotion, and every instinct gluing her feet to the ground, she did.

In the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, Corben watched the nervous shooter guarding him as they both listened to the repeated blows echoing down from above. It sounded as if Mia and Kirkwood had locked themselves into a room. Omar would break through soon, of that Corben had no doubt.

It would soon be over. If he was going to try something, he had to do it now.

Only one man watching him.

A nervous wreck, at that.

Time to party.

Kirkwood’s dead gunslinger was blocking the stairs. Further down the hall, one of Omar’s dead shooters was sprawled on the ground. Something of interest was lying by his arm.

Corben’s eyes snared his guard’s nervous look, then glanced sideways, down at the body of Omar’s man, and turned to his guard in mock surprise.

“The book. It’s there, look.” Corben pointed down at the bloodied floor. And he took a step towards the dead shooter, keeping an eye on his guard, testing his reaction.

The shooter yelled at him, warning Corben off, but Corben stared him down and kept moving, his voice even louder. “It’s the book, asshole, you understand? Al kitab.”

And he took another step, raising his cuffed hands in a gesture of helplessness, then pointed downward. “Al kitab,” he repeated. “It’s what your mu’allim wants, numb nuts.”

The shooter kept shouting and raised his gun, his eyes darting nervously up the stairs after Omar, unsure what to do. Corben was committed now, he was in a zone and wasn’t going to back out. He kept reaching down, yelling, “The book, okay? Al kitab, you understand?” And with that, positioning his back to the gunman, his fingers grabbed the fallen man’s silenced gun and he spun to face the wide-eyed Arab and pulled the trigger, hoping to a God he didn’t believe in that its magazine wasn’t empty and undergoing a small conversion in matters of faith as several rounds drilled into the man’s chest and punched him backwards before dropping him to the floor in a bloody mess.

On the roof, Omar shoved Kirkwood off him with a vicious head butt and pushed himself to his feet. He held him at bay with his handgun as he scanned the roof of the adjacent bazaar.

There was no trace of Mia or of the book.

He grabbed Kirkwood by the neck and pulled him to his feet. He took one last look across the roof, then gave up and yelled at Kirkwood to move. He pushed him through the trapdoor and herded him down the stairs, prodding him in the back with his handgun.

He was livid.

He’d lost the book, when it was right there, within reach. But he had what the hakeem wanted even more: the buyer. Unscathed. Ready for questioning. But it wasn’t a success, not by any means. Apart from the book, he’d lost several men.

He had to get out of there fast. The Turkish police would, no doubt, be rushing over, alerted by the gunfire.

He followed Kirkwood down and saw Corben’s back as they reached the bottom of the stairs. He barked out angrily to the man he’d left guarding the American.

Corben turned to face him slowly, unthreateningly, his expression a blank sheet.

And in the darkness of that dusty hallway, Omar didn’t see the gun in Corben’s hand, not even when it spat a 9mm round that spun out of its nozzle and cleaved a path straight through his forehead.