"I am being eaten alive, Vasily," mutters Louis. "In which rubbish tip did you find these rags?" He shifts his weight to scratch and momentarily takes his eyes off the entrance they are watching.
Vasily does not move his gaze, and so sees their target leave the building surreptitiously and without the usual bodyguards. Right on time. He nudges his friend.
"I bought them in a market. Near the Sabra Camp. Let’s move."
They stagger to their feet, limbs stiff from waiting. Louis scratches the back of his neck.
"Thinking about it will only make it worse, Louis."
Louis gives his reply in so low a voice, Vasily cannot distinguish the words, but he can feel their meaning.
"You need too many luxuries," he replies. "It makes minor hardship difficult."
"The absence of itching is not what I would call a luxury," says Louis. He lifts his chin toward the target. "He is checking his back."
He pushes Vasily into an alley. The two shed their outer layers, stow them in a holdall, and step out onto the street in different colored clothing. Vasily stoops to pick up a pebble and puts it in his shoe. He proceeds with a limp. Louis picks up an empty can from the gutter and tosses it down the next alley they cross. Misha is somewhere among the rubbish, but they cannot see him.
The target turns right. Louis turns left at the crossroad, then takes a position on the other side of the street. Misha catches up to Vasily, who has lost the pebble and with it, the limp. They turn behind the target, who checks the street and appears to see nothing amiss.
"I hesitate to involve the woman," says Misha, "but I see no other way. His bodyguards are with him at other times. If there is a gun battle, the target could be hit and we lose the fee."
Vasily nods. "Louis is an expert with women. But why not just pass the target in the street? See, the man brushes against people as he walks to the woman’s flat. Louis could easily be one of them. He is deft with a needle."
He is not sure why Misha does not answer. Probably considering all the ways such a simple plan can fail.
"Then what would we do?" Misha asks finally. "Call an ambulance? Carry him down the road ourselves? And after that, how to bring him across the border?"
Misha is thinking out loud. Vasily knows better than to interrupt, and so waits quietly as they watch the target enter the woman’s apartment building. Louis is already inside.
"The clients gave us false documents to help us get him across," says Vasily.
"That is the riskiest way. Checkpoint guards will see immediately that he has been drugged. I wish they wanted him dead."
"Louis likes the extra fee."
"We have not done a live extraction before. Louis should remember before he says yes to such commissions that if we fail, all fees will stop."
Misha becomes pensive as they find their backpacks in a narrow space between two buildings. They take turns watching while the other discards another layer, revealing a white shirt underneath. They are both sweating as they add ties and light sport coats from their bags. Louis joins them, also looking like a businessman. They follow their quarry to his headquarters, then continue to their hotel a few meters down the street.
"This is truly delicious," says Louis. He breaks a bread roll from the basket on top of the room service trolley and scoops up the last of the gravy on his plate. "Let me see. I taste cumin, certainly cinnamon. Is that cardamom?" He closes his eyes as he chews.
Misha has ordered the same meal. "No, it is nutmeg."
Vasily mechanically chews a bite of plain boiled lamb.
"How can you be so indifferent to fine things, Vasily?" demands Louis. "You miss all the beauty that makes life worth living. Your food is so plain, you don’t even use salt. I have never seen you admire a luxury, let alone buy one."
As he swallows, Vasily puts down his knife and fork. "You suffer more when we are captured, because you indulge too much when we are not."
"But you cannot say that a vase of flowers in your room at home makes you suffer more in prison. The housekeeper told me you refused to have it."
"If I get used to it, it will. You always complain in lock-up.”
"Because I like to complain! Complaining reminds me that I still live. You don’t complain only because it requires talking."
Misha places his napkin beside his plate and leans back in his chair.
"Why have you hired watchers tonight, Vasily? Not to give us the luxury of dinner together, I think. Are they trustworthy?"
"I trust them, and the target never moves at night."
Vasily studies the faces of his friends. This request will be difficult. He will be required to explain. How can he explain what he does not understand himself? He settles on four words and pushes them past his throat into the air, never to be called back.
"I have a request."
Louis and Misha wait.
Now he must use six words.
"I have something to show you."
An hour later, they stand before the empty loom in a barn outside the city. They feel exposed and nervous in the brightly lit space, Vasily knows, but he could not explain the thing as they drove. He has decided to let the thing explain itself.
They stare down at a magnificent carpet stretching to the far wall.
"How large is it?" asks Misha.
"Three meters by twelve," says the proud proprietor of the shop.
Louis looks sharply at Vasily. "Those are the dimensions of the corridor outside our rooms."
"This gentleman has requested the size," says the proprietor, saving Vasily the trouble. "And the colors."
"When?"
Vasily must answer now. He can no longer depend on others.
"When we were here last year," he says in German. "You remember the job?"
Misha nods, but Vasily can tell he is reviewing every moment of that past commission.
"A simple commission" says Misha. "Not a complicated extraction like this one." He pauses and smiles at Vasily. "It paid for the cypher locks we had installed on the doors to the hallway."
Louis has turned over one corner of the carpet and is counting the knots.
"It is excellent workmanship, Vasily, but the colors! There should be more red."
"There is red. It is mostly red."
"If you insist that almost-brown is red."
Misha chimes in. "I would have chosen a warmer shade of cream, with more yellow in it. Also blue rather than black."
Vasily has expected this. The three of them coordinate perfectly in a firefight but can never agree even on a restaurant. He broaches the difficult subject haltingly, expressing himself badly as usual.
"It is difficult to enter this country."
Louis and Misha nod, expecting more.
"The carpet is ready now."
He hopes their leader will read his intention and translate it into words for him. After all, Misha has already connected the newly locked doors with Vasily’s only ever purchase of a luxury.
But it is Louis whose mind leaps ahead to what is needed. Switching to Arabic, Louis asks the shop keeper, "Does the price include shipping? Has it been paid?"
They have reached the essential difficulty. It is compounded by the number of voices and languages bombarding Vasily’s ears. The shop keeper has a brother-in-law, in Arabic. Louis is displeased, in French, with such a complication in the midst of a difficult but lucrative commission. Vasily nurses his automatic opposition into full-blown obstinacy.
Misha sighs as he watches Vasily set his jaw, tells him quietly in German that he will handle it and, switching back to Arabic, asks the proprietor, "Will your brother-in-law sell us the truck?"
They spend the rest of the night arguing and cleaning their semi-autos. The activity calms them. From this point to success or failure, there will be no rest. Even Louis foregoes a leftover glass of very good wine. They clean and discuss.
"Our timing must be perfect," says Louis. "It will be daylight. The street, crowded. It would be quieter in the woman’s flat."
Misha pushes a solvent-soaked patch through the barrel of his new SIG Sauer.
"Sometimes a noisy street can absorb things a quiet apartment building cannot. Especially one that requires a three-story climb."
"With a drugged body," adds Vasily. He polishes the stock of his Makarov.
"Someone is bound to see," says Louis.
"But not to understand," Misha replies.
Vasily buckles a belt holding his holster and spare magazines under a loose shirt.
"And not likely to care," he says.
"Timing must be perfect," Louis reminds them. "That rust bucket you bought had better start, Vasily."
Misha buckles his own holster-laden belt around his waist. "I checked it, Louis. The truck is sound."
Louis is back in itch-inducing rags. He twitches, glaring at Vasily’s smirk.
"Waiting will be like an eternity," he says. "Something will go wrong. I should stick him before he goes inside."
Misha rolls his eyes. "We discussed this. If he does not come to her on time, the woman will seek help. You must do it as he is leaving. It will take his bodyguards a while to realize he is late. You said yourself that she is more intelligent than all his guards combined."
"And that is why you don’t think she will cooperate," adds Vasily. "They are in love."
"I could explain to her that we will not kill him," says Louis.
He sighs as the others try not to laugh at this.
The target checks his back repeatedly as Misha swelters less and less under successive discarded layers of different colored shirts. He carries a rucksack containing two dark wigs and changes them frequently. Louis wears an eye patch and holds a cracked bowl as he sits with his back to a wall. The target drops a coin in the cup.
Misha, wearing a black wig, greets the driver of a rusted brown truck as the target steps out of the apartment building and turns down the street. The beggar’s cup sits unattended on the pavement.
The target slumps in the stream of pedestrians on the pavement, and two good samaritans catch him and lead him gently away. He is settled comfortably on a large folded carpet in the back of an old truck. One man sits with him, and as the other climbs into the cab, its driver puts it in gear.
By the time the truck reaches the outskirts of the city, the carpet has been folded gently over the target, and only one man is visible in the bed. Vasily has all the proper export documents and pays the duty in cash at the checkpoint. Everybody’s papers are in order. The border guard compliments them on their choice of carpet.
*****
"Your rug is very beautiful," says Louis as he pours more wine into Vasily’s glass, "but the corridor is too quiet. It absorbs sound. I cannot hear footsteps, like those of the servants."
"Or like interrogators?" asks Misha quietly.
Vasily nods and sips his wine.
From this day, everyone except Vasily calls the place Vasily’s Carpet.
He calls it Not Prison.