A white American woman with red hair and tattered, blood-soaked clothing wasn’t exactly an inconspicuous sight in Tripoli, and it could no longer be accurately said that Sam was even in Tripoli. Outskirts would be generous. She was basically in the desert, well west of the Gargaresh District and Natan El Anwar’s flat, where the Libyan police had arrested her hours before. She had no idea what kind of justice the three police officers had in mind as they drove her to the boonies, but she imagined it wouldn’t have been terribly just.
Her flight from the scene of the road ambush, which she had somehow miraculously escaped with only the tiniest of injuries, had taken her even further away from civilization. There was plenty of physical evidence at the scene of the assault to indicate someone had escaped the bloody police cruiser, and it would take a seven-year-old approximately seven seconds to figure out that the survivor had dashed off into the wilderness, away from the road. Sam knew she was on borrowed time. Someone would be looking for her.
She took inventory. Short list. The Libyan police had confiscated everything in her possession, save for a wad of cash stashed in her bra, and she had only the stolen police sidearm she’d taken from the scene of the assault.
She thought of the data she’d downloaded from Natan El Anwar’s cell phone. She hadn’t had time to find the data drive after the assault on the police cruiser, and she wouldn’t be able to set Dan loose on the spoils. She shook her head and cursed.
Sam kept the afternoon sun on her right as she trudged through the desert, taking her south, further away from the coast and from the bloodbath she’d just survived. She was thirsty, bloody, sore, and several notches beyond fatigued, all of which meant that she wasn’t going to be able to walk very far or very fast, which motivated her to decide on a rather extreme course of action.
She came upon a two-lane hardtop road. She stood on the shoulder of the eastbound lane. Seconds turned into minutes. No cars appeared. Sam began to fight despair. The most important ingredient in any survival situation was a positive attitude and Sam felt hers flagging. She couldn’t muster the energy for an internal pep talk. Her thoughts kept returning to the infernal playground in that infernal metropolis, and the look of pain and hatred on Frank McCulley’s face after his daughter’s funeral. Perhaps suffering an ignominious death in a North African backwater would be a fitting end. Karma. All even.
Tire noise brought her back to the present. Soft at first, like a whispering wind, then louder. Engine noise joined the mix, and before long she saw the unmistakable gleam of sunlight bouncing off a windshield.
She stepped out into the road, placed her feet shoulder-width apart, and leveled the dead Libyan cop’s pistol at the car. The odds of doing serious damage by shooting at a moving car with a handgun were slim, and the odds of injuring the driver were even worse. But the car’s driver was evidently not statistically savvy. He jammed on the brakes, squealed the tires, and came to a jerky halt twenty feet in front of Sam.
The driver’s hands disappeared below the wheel, fidgeting for something. Sam fired a warning shot. The driver’s hands shot back into view. Sam trained her weapon on him, advanced toward the car, and motioned for him to get out.
The door opened. “As salam alaykum,” Sam said: Peace be upon you. She gestured with the gun for him to exit the car, which he did slowly and with pained reluctance. He wore a set of white man-jammies and an old tweed sport coat, the kind with patches on the elbows. He eyed her blood-soaked clothes, but kept his mouth shut.
Sam stuffed a handful of cash in his coat pocket. “Shukraan,” she said: Thank you.
Then she took his car.
Getting cleaned up, finding a set of unstained clothes, and laying hands on a burner phone required a series of crimes: trespassing, breaking and entering, and petty theft, though Sam wasn’t sure what the locals would call it, and she had no idea what the long-dead prophet might have had to say about it. She just knew that getting caught would be a bad idea. She took great care to remain unnoticed as she broke into an empty home, cleaned herself up, bandaged the worst of her scrapes, and found a change of clothes. The fit wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly passable.
She ditched the stolen car as soon as possible. Its interior was covered in the dead police officer’s blood mixed with a little of her own. She contemplated liberating a bicycle to replace the car but recalled some recent story involving several women arrested in Iran and Saudi Arabia for riding bicycles. The wind had evidently caused their personal tents to conform to the outlines of their bodies in an unchaste manner. Was Libya as fanatically Muslim as those other two locales? Sam wasn’t sure, but erring on the side of caution seemed prudent. She concluded that grand theft auto, or whatever its Libyan incarnation might have been called, probably entailed less risk than bicycle riding, so she stole another car. This one came with a pay-as-you-go telephone resting in the center console. Sam was grateful for the stroke of luck.
She drove her newly pilfered ride deliberately but conservatively. The urgency of her situation clashed with the need to remain low-key and inconspicuous, especially while driving a stolen car. Libya certainly had a long tradition of being a police state, but Gaddafi’s goons did it the old-fashioned way: brother told on brother, daughters turned in their mothers. They hadn’t spent billions to put surveillance cameras on every street corner like the Western world had done—ironically, out of xenophobic fear of the backward East—so Sam felt little concern the police would be sophisticated enough to track the stolen car in real-time.
But she certainly felt a significant amount of concern. Her destination was pure insanity, but she was convinced it was the surest way to drive the situation toward a conclusion. She was going to pay another visit to her new friend, Natan El Anwar.
Along the way, she used the new cell phone to call Dan Gable. He gave her a grim update on the status of her arrest warrant and on her status as persona non-grata in the local and national media. “I’ll learn to like life as an exile,” she groused grimly.
“Just stay away from the civilized world,” Dan admonished. “It’s full of surveillance and extradition agreements.”
“Luckily, I’m nowhere near civilization,” Sam said.
She got to the reason for her call. She needed Dan to confirm a particular code word they had uncovered in the Doberman information file she had hacked from Mehmet Kocaoglu in Izmir. She thought she remembered the word, but needed to be certain.
As it turned out, she was correct. The word was “jackrabbit.” It would become the centerpiece of her plan. She thanked Dan for his help, asked him to say good things about her whenever he got the chance, accepted his well wishes, and briefed him on her plan to visit El Anwar.
“That’s among the crazier plans you’ve hatched,” Dan said.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said with a small smile. “Let’s just hope it works.”
Two minutes later, she arrived at a now-familiar site in the Gargaresh District. She bundled her stolen garb tightly around her head and face, parked the stolen car, entered the building, and rode the elevator up to the second-to-top floor. She reconnoitered the flats and noted one that appeared to be empty. She filed the apartment number away in her memory for later use. Then she composed herself and climbed the last flight of stairs up to Natan El Anwar’s penthouse.
The last time she’d been inside El Anwar’s apartment it had been in shambles, but now, as she silently picked the lock and opened the door, she saw that the mess had been cleaned. She found Natan El Anwar tidying up.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Sam said, removing the covering from her face and taking a seat on El Anwar’s opulent couch.
He was visibly surprised.
“Expecting someone else, maybe?” she asked. “Another of your Eastern harlots?”
The alarm left El Anwar’s face and was replaced by smugness. Sam took it as confirmation of her hunch: El Anwar had figured out that she wasn’t affiliated with the Doberman group. It now seemed more probable that El Anwar himself had been involved in arranging her arrest earlier in the day.
But she had something up her sleeve. “I have instructions for you,” she said with a forced confidence she didn’t entirely feel. “You are to assume your new role as Tariq Ezzat’s replacement immediately.”
El Anwar sneered. “By whose authority?”
Sam rose. “By my authority,” she said, her smile overly cordial.
“You’re exceedingly foolish to come back here,” El Anwar said, working at a tough-guy pose but not quite pulling it off.
Sam chuckled as she regarded him. He was small-time, wrapped in expensive things that helped him feel a little less inconsequential, buying the affections of women who were otherwise above his reach, dabbling in a very serious game that helped him believe a little bit more in his own substance.
“Natan,” she said, placing her hand on his shoulder and moving close to accentuate her height advantage, “you’re not the kind of man people worry about.”
His face flushed. She’d hit him close to home, she figured.
She turned her back on him and walked to the front door, her stride casual and unhurried. “One more thing,” she said, “and it must be done right away.” She turned to face him. “Are you listening?”
El Anwar didn’t respond.
“You are to initiate contact with Mercer,” Sam said, “and tell him to report to his superiors that Jackrabbit is denied.”
“What?”
“Trouble with your hearing?” Sam asked, opening the door. “Jackrabbit denied. Immediately, Natan.”
She walked out of El Anwar’s apartment, summoned the elevator, then took the stairs down one flight.
She returned to the empty apartment on the floor beneath El Anwar’s penthouse and listened at the door for signs the occupant had returned. Hearing nothing, she picked the lock and shut the door quietly behind her.