76

Scrambling to his feet, Marcus spotted a darkened alleyway.

He grabbed the tire and the carpet and dashed off the main boulevard they had been traveling down and into the shadows. A few cars whizzed by, going in the opposite direction. None of them stopped. Their drivers had probably not even seen what had happened, but even if they did, were they really likely to stop, turn around, and come find the madman who had jumped from the trunk of a moving vehicle? Only if they were cops. Or soldiers. And they were neither.

In the alleyway, Marcus found a dumpster. He tossed the tire and carpet inside but found nothing he could use. No clothing. No shoes. Not even rags to wrap his wounds. He did spot an outdoor water faucet and an old bucket. He kicked the bucket aside, turned on the nozzle, and proceeded to wash the filth off his hands. Then he began cupping water into his mouth, but this method hardly sufficed. Marcus had had nothing to eat or drink for at least the past day and a half, and he felt like he had sweat out most of the liquid in his body. So he got down on his knees, put his mouth under the spigot, and drank until he could not drink any more.

He was about to clean his wounds and do his best to remove some of the stench that had built up on him but thought better of it. Instead, he turned the water off, plunged his hands into the shallow pool of dirty water in the gutter, stirred a bit to make some mud, then slathered it all over his legs, arms, chest, and face. Infection and gangrene were distinct possibilities, he knew, but not his immediate concerns. Looking like a homeless person—a crazy person—was his new objective. The layers of filth helped, as did all the scars and bruising on his face and torso.

Mission accomplished, Marcus spotted a door across the alley. Glancing both ways and seeing no one, he moved to it and tried the knob. It was locked, but he saw another door a few yards away and tried it as well. It, too, was locked. He looked up the side of the building, hoping to see a fire escape. He did not. This wasn’t Brooklyn or the Bronx or Denver. Marcus was a long way from buildings constructed according to U.S. fire codes. Indeed, the apartments on both sides of the alley looked like they had been built back in the early 1900s. To describe them as decrepit or dilapidated was charitable. Most had been damaged, some severely, in Lebanon’s civil war back in the seventies. Others by Israel’s bombing of Beirut in the eighties. In the States, these buildings would have been condemned, torn down, and—given their proximity to the waterfront—sold to wealthy developers to create multimillion-dollar penthouses. Here, they were simply rickety, rat-infested homes for those too poor to move.

Marcus did not, therefore, see any means by which he could easily get to the top of the building. What he did see, however, six floors above street level, was a clothesline and a combination of men’s and women’s laundry hanging from it. With a new target in sight, he again tried the handle of the door in front of him. It was most definitely locked, but it was also loose. Looking around and finding the coast clear, Marcus took a step back, then rammed the door with his shoulder. The lock immediately ripped apart. Splinters of wood went flying. He had made more noise than intended. But he was in.

The hallway was dimly lit. It stank of urine and was filled with trash. Marcus moved quickly, worried less at this point about making noise than getting out of sight before someone opened their door to see what all the commotion was about. He saw no one in the stairwell, so he bounded up the steps two at a time. By the third-floor landing, he had to stop and lean against a wall, needing a moment to catch his breath. He had not realized just how little energy he had left after the events of the past thirty-six hours. But he did not dare rest for long, knowing that the moment al-Masri discovered he was missing, he and his assistant would retrace their steps and no doubt bring reinforcements.

By the time Marcus had reached the sixth floor, he was winded again. So far, he still had not spotted a soul. But he could hear televisions and radios on inside the flats. He could hear families talking and laughing behind the doors and the bark of an occasional dog. He now realized there was no way he could break into someone’s apartment. It wasn’t simply the fact that he was planning to steal some poor family’s clothing that bothered him so much, though even in his exhausted state he knew it should have. It was the fact that he was simply not prepared to do harm to someone in the safety of their own home.

Just then, a door opened somewhere on the fifth floor—the one right below him. He heard two women’s voices chatting and laughing but could not tell if they were coming up or going down. He rapidly made his way up the rest of the stairwell until he burst through a door and onto the roof. To his surprise, he found row upon row of clotheslines strung between water tanks and satellite dishes. Most were empty. Two were covered with towels, sheets, and other linens. One was just women’s undergarments. There was, however, one that drew attention. Hanging from it were several pairs of men’s blue jeans, some T-shirts, and various other articles. Leaving aside the underwear—he was desperate, all right, but not that desperate—Marcus grabbed a gray T-shirt. He started to put it on only to realize it was far too small. The jeans were too small as well, he soon discovered.

Frustrated, he carefully attached them back to the line, just as he had found them. That’s when he spotted a set of items he absolutely needed. Socks. There were several pairs hanging there. The ones he chose were black sports socks, each with a white Nike swoosh on the ankle. They were damp, but they were clean. As he put them on, Marcus felt a twinge of guilt about taking them, but he did it anyway. This wasn’t about comfort. It was about not leaving a trail of bloody footprints wherever he went. He winced, suddenly realizing he had left Colonel al-Masri and his minions more than enough visual clues to track him down. He was horrified, knowing his SERE instructor would have certainly failed him by now.

Marcus grabbed a damp towel from the line and began wiping away his footprints as best he could. Then he climbed onto a water tank, removed the top, dropped the dirty towel inside the tank, and replaced the lid. It was not enough. He knew he had left footprints all the way up the stairs. There was nothing he could do about that just now. But he had to get more serious.

And that meant he had to keep moving.