Sam sat on the floor and faced the front door with a gun in one hand, a burner phone in the other, and a pair of kitchen knives tucked into her socks for good measure. She surveyed the flat: one room, rugs on the floor, no furniture, a wooden divider that provided the illusion of privacy around a filthy toilet, a small hotplate in the corner plugged into the wall. The whole apartment offered little more than shelter from the elements. It was a stark contrast to El Anwar’s opulent penthouse just one floor above.
She wasn’t sure how much time she had before the flat’s occupant came back, or how much time she would need. El Anwar would certainly sound the alarm. The responding goon squad, flavor to be determined, would undoubtedly post someone at each of the building’s exits, at the elevator on the first floor, and probably across the street as well.
After a while, boredom would set in. Shortly after that, the team would lose patience and send people to search the building. Sam settled in to wait it out. It would be much easier to escape El Anwar’s building in the middle of the night, and she needed time to figure out where to go next.
Darkness fell. Hallway noises came and went. Harsh male voices spoke in Arabic, which reminded Sam once again how much every conversation in that language sounded like an argument.
The search party was as undisciplined as Sam had anticipated. They hadn’t bothered to corral the building super to let them into the apartments, and they didn’t even bother to knock on doors, asking residents for information about her whereabouts. The apartment’s occupant hadn’t yet returned, which was a small bit of good fortune that Sam was grateful for.
Her burner finally vibrated with a text from Dan: “Tripoli–Izmir–Madrid–Cagliari.”
The first two locations Sam understood. Natan El Anwar’s message, earmarked for easy eavesdropping by the word “jackrabbit,” left Tripoli and traveled through Izmir. Mehmet Kocaoglu had probably forwarded the message from Turkey, though Sam couldn’t be sure.
“But Madrid? And where the hell is Cagliari?” she texted. She would have preferred a phone conversation, but she couldn’t risk speaking aloud.
“Sardinia,” Dan replied.
“Which is where, exactly?”
“West of Italy, south of Corsica.”
“An island?”
“No, a very large ocean vessel.”
“Smartass. Did we expect this? Who’s in Cagliari?”
Dan didn’t know.
Sardinia had popped up in their earlier Doberman network analysis but the location appeared with very low frequency, which was why Sam had paid it little attention. But El Anwar’s message—the Jackrabbit red herring she’d fed him, which was eminently traceable now that they’d compromised Kocaoglu’s computer network—had stopped in Sardinia. That suddenly made the island much more significant.
Sam recalled a few casual conversations she’d had with Brock about Sardinia. The island offered little aside from coastline and wilderness, Brock had said. He’d spent some time during his F-16 days at Decimomannu, a sleepy WWII-era air base still in service and used primarily for exercises aimed at knocking the rust from Europe’s aging fighter force. Sardinia was about as far from mainstream Europe as you could get without falling into the Med. Cagliari was the island’s largest city, fading and falling into disrepair, but good for local wine by the gallon and some surprisingly good food.
If Cagliari housed no one more important than a bit player in the Doberman group, Sam would have expected the Jackrabbit message to be subsequently sent on to other, more important nodes in the network. But it hadn’t. The message had stopped in Sardinia, which suggested that Sardinia was a node of some significance.
She couldn’t be sure, of course. Maybe the Doberman agent in Cagliari was just taking a siesta and would see to his clandestine communications duties later in the evening. Maybe if she waited a few more hours, the message would be forwarded to some other location. But Sam didn’t think so. Sardinia sounded like a perfect place for an international assassin to hang his hat between jobs. And placing herself in her adversaries’ shoes, Sam could easily see why they’d require a killer’s services. Her men had killed Ezzat. She had ferreted out El Anwar and harassed him. She had become a squeaky wheel. They’d likely be more than happy to grease her.
Sam awoke from a fitful slumber. It took her a moment to regain her bearings. She was holed up in an impoverished flat one floor beneath El Anwar’s penthouse estate, awaiting a reasonable opportunity to escape without being nabbed by the muscle squad that El Anwar had undoubtedly called in to find her.
The flat’s occupants hadn’t returned, a continued stroke of good fortune. She’d been asleep for just under an hour, and during that time the building’s sounds had quieted as evening turned to night. She heard an occasional bark from a small dog several floors down and heard the creak and groan of under-insulated plumbing contracting in the cool evening air. But there were no human sounds to speak of. It was as good a time as any, she figured.
She rose, stretched, twisted her torso, and did several squats to get her heart rate up and shake the remaining cobwebs from her mind. Then she pulled a knife from her sock, hoping to solve any potential conflict without the noise of a gunshot, and made her way through the Spartan flat that had been her hideout for the past few hours. She listened for a moment at the hallway door then opened it slowly.
She walked silently through the hall to the stairwell door, listened again, and peered through the rectangular window cut into the door near the jamb. Seeing no one, she pushed gently on the release bar. It moved an inch or two, then stopped. Sam applied more force.
Clack. The retreating latch’s loud report echoed in the hallway and stairwell. Sam cursed silently and moved through the door as quickly and quietly as possible.
She paused against the far wall, slowing her breathing, listening for signs that anyone had heard the noise. After a long moment, during which she was pursued only by figments of her imagination, she descended the stairway, knife clutched in her hand.
As she made her way down the stairway floor by floor, the smells became stronger and more pungent, a slightly sickening mixture of rancid cooking oil, burnt meat of indistinguishable provenance, and piss. The smells combined with a painfully empty stomach to produce an altogether disagreeable effect. She needed fresh air.
As floor after floor passed uneventfully, Sam’s tired mind turned from tactical matters to strategic. There had been no further updates from Dan regarding the Jackrabbit message she’d injected into the Doberman group’s communications network. The message’s terminus remained in Cagliari, reinforcing her decision to travel to Sardinia as quickly as possible. She couldn’t figure out how to apply any leverage to the CIA for information about their unexplained interest in her or about their relationship to the Doberman group, so pursuing the Doberman people seemed her best option.
The group communicated in code, so she and Dan had uncertain knowledge of what their messages contained. They knew only that the recent missives included the code word “jackrabbit.” But Sam felt reasonably certain they were talking about her. She’d inserted herself into the middle of their business and had announced herself as a significant threat to their operations.
In a way, that was good news. It made their next move somewhat predictable. The cleaner in Sardinia would undoubtedly travel to Libya to hunt her down, but she intended to be long gone by the time he arrived, and she intended to take full advantage of his absence in Sardinia to extract as much intelligence as possible about the Doberman organization. After all, in the digital age, an email address led almost without fail to a physical address. It required only a little bit of effort.
Sam rounded the corner between the fourth and third floors and stopped dead in her tracks. A giant of a man paced in the stairwell. His back was turned to her. His shoulders were rolled forward and his elbows flared out from his sides, his joints evidently surrounded by too much muscle to attain a normal posture.
Sam tightened her grip on the knife. She took a small, quiet step backward, aiming to retreat up the stairs and regroup, but that wasn’t in the cards. Her left foot made the tiniest of scuffs against the uneven concrete floor and the giant whirled to face her.
His voice came in a low rumble of rapid-fire Arabic. Sam caught the gist: “Who the hell are you, and what the hell are you”—a woman—“doing walking around unescorted after dark?”
She intended to tell him that she was going to visit a sister’s apartment, but she couldn’t remember the Arabic words for “sister” or “apartment.”
The man reached into a pocket and pulled out a phone. The jig was up.
She lunged, leapt, and carried her rear foot forward in a vicious roundhouse kick toward the large man’s jaw. His arm flew upward in defense. Her foot smashed against his forearm, which felt stone solid. She’d put just about every ounce of her strength into the kick, but the man didn’t seem to budge.
She sensed motion at the edge of her peripheral vision and instinctively dropped to her knees. A fist the size of a cooking pan sailed inches from her head. If the punch had connected, it would have broken her in half. There really was no way to win this fight fairly, she surmised.
Sam let her downward momentum carry her all the way to the concrete floor. She had to roll to avoid a deadly but telegraphed kick, and she found herself positioned obliquely behind the big behemoth. There wasn’t much of the man’s critical infrastructure available to attack from that position . . . but there was enough.
It took just a single slice with the cooking blade to sever the man’s heel cord. He fell to his knees. He grunted, but other than that, there was no acknowledgement that she had just maimed him. The guy was tough as nails. She dodged another improbably large fist and parried with a slashing cut to his slab-like forearm. She felt the blade push and then rip through a sizable chunk of meat, but again the man made no sound.
“You should quit while you’re ahead,” Sam said, breathless from the exertion. She really wanted to shoot him between the eyes, but she feared the noise would bring more attention than she could possibly escape.
“Infidel harlot,” came the heavily accented reply, followed by an off-balance and ill-considered kneeling lunge toward her, hands spread as if to clasp around her neck. It wouldn’t have taken much effort for him to sever her spine, and Sam was eager to avoid giving him the opportunity.
Fortunately, the giant Libyan might have been strong and tough, but nimble he was not. Sam ducked, rolled beneath his outstretched arms, and came to rest abeam the giant’s hips. She twisted, swung her arm, and slammed the knife home into the small of his back. Warm blood flowed over her hand as she pulled the knife clear. His clock was ticking.
She rose and backed away from him, knife brandished in front of her, lungs burning, legs a little shaky. “Stop now and you can get help,” she said. “You need a doctor. Um, tabib.” Why the Arabic word for “doctor” popped into her head while “sister” and “apartment” had eluded her just moments before was a mystery. “Otherwise, you could die,” she said.
“Inshallah,” the man replied.
Sam shook her head. There was no reasoning with some people. She decided to try to make the man’s last moments meaningful by helping her eviscerate the Doberman group. “El Anwar?” she asked, studying his face. Nothing registered. “Mercer?” she tried.
Bingo. Anger flashed and the giant Libyan rolled, planted a knee and a fist on the ground, and tried to charge at her. But he was weakening and he had half the number of functioning appendages he’d started with. His effort was less than effective and Sam had plenty of time to whip up an extremely solid roundhouse kick. It landed at an angle against the bridge of the man’s nose, which gave way with a wet crunch. He fell in a heap of tangled limbs.
Sam wasted no time searching him. Cell phone, cash, no identification, a small-caliber revolver strapped to an ankle holster. Why he hadn’t used the gun, Sam would never know, but people did strange things when you surprised them, and Sam wasn’t one to look a gift horse too closely in the mouth.
She also found a set of car keys attached to a fob with a Mercedes logo. It looked stylish enough to be a late model. What kind of lowbrow knee-capper drove a new Benz around Tripoli? These guys must have picked the right cookie jar to dip their fingers in, Sam thought.
She made a much more careful exit from the building than she had managed earlier in the day. She spotted no one and made her way carefully to the parking garage. She pressed the button on the key fob, spotted the flash of parking lights several rows over, and made a stealthy approach to the goon’s car. If there was anyone else around, they did a good job of staying out of sight.
Sam searched the car for signs of tampering. It wouldn’t do to survive a fight with a giant only to be blown up starting his car. Finding nothing, she sat in the driver’s seat, used the electrical adjustment to let her feet reach the pedals, held her breath, and pushed the ignition button.
Sam sighed with relief as the engine turned over. She exited the parking garage, drove east along the Second Ring Road, turned north on Tariq Sayyidi al Misri Road, navigated around Martyr’s Square, and turned northwest onto Al Shat Road, a name that earned a mild guffaw. She drove a tad faster than the speed limit, relaxing a little bit more as each kilometer clicked away.
The aftermath of the fight and flight left her mildly sick to her stomach. She needed food and rest, but she knew those things would be hard to come by over the next few days. And despite all that she had endured already, she had a feeling that the hard part of the whole thing was still ahead of her.