“Don’t beg. I am you now, and you are me, and I would never lower myself to begging.” Drexler took a step back and fired one round into the man’s chest.
The blast in the small room was earsplitting. The 5.7-millimeter projectile tore through the Finn’s heart at a range of less than three meters. The guards standing next to the prisoner held him by the shoulders as he crumpled forward, then pushed him back up against the wall as Drexler himself helped to unhook Takala’s wrists from his shackles. Drexler then stepped to the side, two male medical attendants wheeled a gurney straight into the room, and together with the others they laid the prisoner down. The victim was on his back and being rolled out of the holding room before his eyes flitted and rolled up and the last breath escaped his lungs. As they pushed him up the hallway towards the operating room, Drexler shouted out in Arabic, “The clock is ticking! Watch the hands! Take care of the fingers! Those are mine now.”
Drexler could not watch the procedure on the body; he had to get himself prepped, so while the surgeon and his team worked in the operating room, Drexler undressed and took a quick shower. After this, he entered another operating room, sat on a chair waiting for him there, and reached his hands over a table covered with blue surgical draping. Nurses positioned his arms so his hands faced up, and leather bindings were wrapped around his wrists so he could not move them.
Some time later Dr. Qureshi entered the room, carrying stacks of interlocking metal pans. Everything was arrayed on tray tables near Drexler, and while he watched the clock, Qureshi and his team went to work.
The surgical team began with the pinky finger on Drexler’s left hand. They applied a caustic solvent on the fingertip to roughen it up, and the patient grunted with pain, but he urged the surgeon to continue. A silicone gum was spread in a thin sheet on the skin to protect it, and then Qureshi took a soggy wet piece of live natural sponge out of a dish of salt water with a pair of forceps. This the surgeon cut to the size of Drexler’s fingertip, taking his time to make a precise little oval.
Some high-end fingerprint readers have a feature designed to ensure that the prints are not silicone imprints or harvested from cadavers by using software to compare the spatial moisture pattern of a finger’s pores to detect natural secretions. But Drexler knew a spoof for this. The small organic sponge, saturated with salt water and a little glycerin and placed carefully under the cadaver print, kept the dead skin moist longer, and it allowed just enough dampness to register on the surface.
Once the sponge was glued in place with a latex adhesive that bonded with the skin, the surgeon lowered surgical eye loupes over his eyes to magnify Drexler’s fingers. He very carefully reached a set of straight-blade forceps into a dish marked “L-Hand, 5” in Arabic to indicate the pinky finger, and he retrieved Veeti Takala’s pink flesh.
Drexler was surprised how thick the dead skin was; he had pictured something translucent, like an onion peel, but the surgeon held up a dense and opaque chunk of human tissue.
Drexler asked, “How are you going to make that look natural on my finger?”
The surgeon did not look up from his magnifier. “The cement I will use on the sides will be tinted to your skin tone.” He shrugged a little, though he kept working. “A close examination of your hand will reveal that these fingerprints are not your own, but it will still be difficult to detect.”
“The Mukhabarat will hold you personally accountable if I fail, Doctor. If that was not clear before, let me stress it now.”
Looking through his magnifying loupes, the surgeon put cement on the sides of the dead flesh, very carefully, as if he were painting a tiny figurine. As he did this he said, “I am the best vascular surgeon in Damascus. I am not, however, a cosmetic surgeon. You have my full capabilities at your disposal, and you will not leave here until I am certain I cannot provide you with better results. If that is not good enough, then I suppose we will both suffer. Brow wipe!”
Drexler cocked his head at the exclamation, but understood when a nurse stepped in and blotted the surgeon’s forehead.
Qureshi continued. “In the meantime, sir. I must ask you to stop talking. You will have your job to do wherever it is you need these new fingerprints to take you. But for now, allow me to do my job. It would be a pity if your threats caused me to perspire all over my masterpiece.”
Drexler wondered if Qureshi knew he could have him thrown into a cell here at Saydnaya for his attitude even if he did a perfect job on his hands.
But he let the surgeon slide, for now.
Qureshi placed Takala’s fingertip over Drexler’s finger and pressed it into place. He added more cement around the sides, tinted it with a paintbrush and a natural coloring, and placed a piece of plastic over the finger. Then his assisting surgeon used padded tissue forceps to hold the fingertip in place while Qureshi went on to the pinky finger on the right hand.
Back and forth they went on like this, left hand to right and then back to left, one finger at a time. It was a slow and meticulous process, and the surgeon weathered the periodic admonitions of his patient throughout. Drexler kept an eye on the clock across the room and watched it tick away, and he took out his frustrations on Dr. Qureshi, but the surgeon remained steadfast, and he got the job done.
Just after the two-hour point the white-haired Syrian gently clamped the padded forceps onto the last finger, the thumb on the right hand. He looked up at his patient. “I am aware you understand the protocol, but I will remind you. You will need to keep these moist. A lotion will travel in your Dopp kit; it is marked as a store brand, but in actuality it is made for use in cadaver labs in Europe and America to keep necrotic tissue fresh. Use it every two hours.
“Even so . . . the flesh will begin to deteriorate in thirty-six hours, and the sponge secretions will have dried out by then, as well.”
* * *
? ? ?
Sebastian Drexler wore oversized gloves to protect his fingers as he walked out to the waiting helicopter, already spooling up on the launch pad behind the Red Building. His three intelligence officer escorts climbed into the Mi-8 with him, and within seconds they had lifted off towards the airport in Damascus.
As they flew high over the green landscape, Drexler had one of the Mukhabarat men place a call to a phone number he gave him from memory. A headset was placed on Drexler’s head, and he waited to hear a woman’s voice answer on the other line.
“Yes?” It was Shakira Azzam.
“It’s me. I’m leaving now. I’ll be on the ground there late this evening.” The U.S. and Europeans had massive amounts of electronic intelligence assets pointed at Syria, and even though it was difficult to grab a satellite call, Drexler knew he needed to stay vague when speaking on an open line.
Shakira Azzam replied, “And my husband knows you are going?”
“Yes. He asked me personally to go and attend to the issue.”
“Well . . . he and I both want you to have a successful journey, but he and I are after a different outcome.”
“You can rely on me.”
“I want updates.” A pause. “And I look forward to your safe return. If something should delay you, I will reach out to my own contacts abroad to try to find you . . . in case you need some help.”
Drexler knew this was a not-so-veiled threat against him trying to run from Syria.
“I will be home within days, my darling.”
“And we will celebrate.” Shakira hung up the phone, and Drexler nodded to one of the officers in the back of the Mi-8, who then removed the headset.
The Swiss intelligence agent looked out the window now as the hills below gave way to the northern suburbs of Damascus, anxious but supremely confident about the mission ahead of him.
CHAPTER 27
Court Gentry sat in the back of a twenty-five-year-old Saab 340 turboprop, his mind full of worry about the mission ahead of him.
He was winging it, he knew, and until he got on the ground and took in the lay of the land, he would have no way of planning his next move.
The vibration of the landing gear lowering into place below his feet brought him back into awareness of his surroundings. He looked out the window over his right shoulder; all he could see from this vantage point was the endless green sea. The aircraft seemed like it couldn’t have been more than a thousand feet in the air, but just then the plane entered a hard bank to the north, tipping Court forward in his side-facing seat, and when it leveled off he looked out the window again and saw whitewashed buildings on the coastline, then terraced olive fields on a hillside.