Court looked at his watch. “Okay.” And then, “You’re all I’ve got, Voland, and I don’t trust you. But I do believe that I scare the living shit out of you, so I think you’ll do your best to come through.”

“You have my personal motivation figured out. And you’re all I have down there with the ability to change the outcome of this horrible war. With you working as my man in Syria, there is some hope for that wretched place.”

Court hung up the phone. He didn’t find himself filled with the same level of optimism as Voland, and he chalked that up to the fact that Voland wasn’t relying on a man who’d double-crossed him and then turned his back on his clients.

He looked to Yasmin and switched to French. “Back in the car. We’re going back to Damascus.”

Yasmin did not hide the confusion and displeasure from her face.

“Yeah . . . tell me about it,” Court said as he pulled himself off the rubble.

CHAPTER 51

While Vincent Voland continued marching purposefully along the driveway towards the road, two full kilometers west of him a woman stumbled through a large field waist high with barley. She caught her tennis shoe on a plow track and tumbled to the ground, then struggled slowly back to her feet. She was exhausted; her hands, arms, and face were covered in cuts and bruises, and she was soaking wet, both from the rain and from the creek she’d fallen into in the woods behind her.

Bianca Medina whipped her long black hair out of her eyes with a shake of her head as she pushed on.

Thirty-five minutes earlier Rima had unlocked the door to Bianca’s room and told her that she and Tarek wanted her to run. Ahmed’s men had arrived with a man working for Shakira, Rima had explained, and while this meant they didn’t know what would happen to her if she was caught, as far as the Halabys were concerned, she needed to get out of the house and into the woods. Rima told her to hide there till either she or her husband came for her later, and to reveal herself only if she heard Rima’s or Tarek’s voice.

The Frenchman, Monsieur Voland, was no longer to be trusted, Rima had hurriedly told her without providing any explanation.

Rima remained in the wine cellar as Bianca ran with Firas up to the kitchen, and then he, too, stayed behind, holding his gun on the door to the hearth room, as Bianca raced upstairs following Rima’s instructions. She saw several FSEU guards at the top of the stairs, all checking their weapons and making a hasty blockade there from pieces of furniture, but she ran past them, heading over to a bedroom on the northern side of the house. She opened a window and climbed out, then hung down in the darkness, covered from the back by the long side of the farmhouse and partially covered to the front by the long greenhouse that blocked anyone in the drive from seeing her. She dropped down into the wet grass and entered the long, narrow greenhouse so she wouldn’t be seen by anyone at the front of the property.

On the far side of the greenhouse she stayed low, ran along the lawn there with long fast strides, then entered the woods on the northern side of the property, running as fast as her long, athletic legs would take her.

She estimated she made it three hundred meters or so, where she found a place to both hide and get out of the rain in the form of the wide trunk of a toppled oak. She sat there for ten minutes; for much of the time she listened to the pops of gunfire, and then all was still. Around the time she’d expected to hear Rima’s voice calling to her, she saw a faint glow through the trees in the distance. Minutes after that came the sirens of fire trucks and police cars.

Even before Bianca left the wine cellar she’d seen Rima pulling plastic bottles of turpentine out of the storage room. She hadn’t known what she was up to at the time, but as the roof of the farmhouse caught fire and the glow through the trees increased, casting terrifying shadows all around her, she realized what had happened.

Rima had been trying to cover Bianca’s tracks, to make it look like she’d been killed in the fire. Bianca also realized, although she did not know how she knew, that Rima and Tarek were now dead.

She waited another ten minutes, and then she decided she needed to run again. No one was coming to help her, she could feel it.

So she moved out through the dark woods, fell into the creek, and cut herself so many times she’d stopped reacting to each new individual pain. She broke out into the barley field and then saw a road in the distance, and she pushed on.

Bianca had a plan as to what she would do now. She would get to the road, find a phone, call her friends with the fashion designer that invited her to France, and they would come and pick her up. Of course she knew she would need a story for where she had been since the ISIS attack three nights earlier, but for now all she wanted to do was get away from there.

As soon as she came to the road, a car’s headlights appeared from the southwest and she waved at it frantically, standing by the side of the little road and shivering.

The white car slowed and pulled over.

Utterly exhausted, Bianca all but collapsed on the passenger-side door as she leaned into the window.

In the front passenger seat was a Caucasian man in his forties, a cigarette in his hand. After a moment he rolled down his window. In French she said, “Thank God, monsieur. Please, I need help!”

The man just gaped at her, a dumbfounded look on his face. He said nothing, made no movement, just sat there holding his cigarette and staring.

But the driver’s-side door opened, and a young dark-haired man launched out of it. He ran around to her, helped her into the backseat, and then knelt down in the open door, looking her over.

It was then she realized the man held a walkie-talkie in his hand. He brought it to his mouth, and he spoke in Arabic. “This is Number Twelve; I’m on the D91, west of the property. I have the subject! I repeat, I have the subject! She appears to be unharmed.”

Bianca blinked hard, then harder still.

Over the radio a voice in Arabic said, “What? You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir. She came running out of the field right in front of my car, Allah be praised. I’m taking her to the warehouse now.”

The man lowered the walkie-talkie and smiled at her. “Madam, I am with the Syrian embassy. We have rescued you, sister! We will get you out of here and, inshallah, back to Damascus where you will be safe from all harm. I promise I will protect you with my life.”

Bianca collapsed to her side in the backseat of the car and began sobbing uncontrollably.

* * *

? ? ?

The Syrian commando ordered Henri Sauvage to drive, and he remained in back with the woman, ready to cover her with his own body if there was any danger. The young man was almost euphoric, and Bianca, it appeared to Sauvage by looking in the rearview, seemed utterly despondent.

But Sauvage was thinking about himself, and he realized he had just helped the Syrians grab a missing Spanish national out here in the French countryside, and he, a captain in the Judicial Police, was the guy driving the getaway vehicle. He’d go to prison for life for this, which meant he’d want a bonus from Eric, for damn sure.

And he’d want to get the fuck away from France, probably for the rest of his life, as soon as this was over.

The Syrians had what they’d come for now, so he saw the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in days, and he told himself he just might survive this, after all.

CHAPTER 52

Thirty-four-year-old Dr. Shawkat Saddiqi parked his Nissan Sentra in the reserved space in front of his apartment building and turned off the engine. He sat there a moment with his eyes closed.

It was three a.m.

He’d worked a twelve-hour shift in the ER of Al-Fayhaa Hospital that had turned into a fifteen-hour shift when the nine wounded occupants of a bus bombing were brought in shortly before he was due to get off work at midnight. He’d performed surgery on three of them himself, and saved two lives.

But he wasn’t happy, he wasn’t proud of his work. No . . . now at three a.m., he was just fucking spent.

He climbed out of his vehicle and walked along the sidewalk towards the back entrance of his building. He was surprised to hear footsteps behind him at this time of the night, but not worried. This was an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Al Midan, in the center of Damascus. This part of the city had been spared much of the war, at least the physical scars of it, anyway.

The emotional scars? No one in this city was immune from those, just as almost no one in this city was blameless from responsibility for the carnage.

Saddiqi arrived at the door and reached forward with his key, but a voice behind him called out softly.

“Shawkat Saddiqi?” The doctor turned around.