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After a few minutes, Marcus finally rose to his feet.

Creeping to the door to the next room, he slowly—silently—closed and locked it. Then he moved to the hallway door and locked it, too. Only then did he head to the bathroom. When he had closed and locked that door behind him, the first thing he did was rifle through the drawers of the vanity until he found a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. He ripped the package open, squeezed some toothpaste onto the end of the brush, ran it under a spritz of cold water, and proceeded to brush his teeth. It was strange just how good something so simple, so routine, felt to him at that moment.

As he spit and rinsed, he debated whether or not to take a shower. He was dying to, but would doing so spoil the illusion he was trying to create? Probably. And yet, the rest of the men, for all their myriad troubles, had obviously cleaned themselves up from the filth of the streets. They did not stink. And they were wearing the clean, if used, clothes that the church had provided them. If Marcus did not do the same by the following morning, did he risk drawing attention and generating questions he could not answer?

In any case, Marcus knew there was a far more urgent priority than a shower just then. He had to find a phone. As part of their contingency planning, he and Kailea had memorized various phone numbers that they could call in case of an emergency. The higher-ups in Washington—from DSS to Langley to the White House—were already aware that he, Kailea, and Yigal were alive because the Sheikh had used their names and aliases in his broadcast. That was good. It meant the American military and intelligence community—along with the IDF, Mossad, and Shin Bet—were already actively hunting for them. Now Marcus needed to provide them a location so they could come pick him up. Only then could they turn their attention to finding and rescuing Kailea and Yigal.

This could not wait for a shower. It certainly could not wait until tomorrow. Al-Masri and his men were already hunting for him. If they really had gone rogue, then Hezbollah was hunting for him too. He could not take the risk of waiting until morning to find and use a phone. In his world, tomorrow might never come. He needed to let Washington know where he was. Only then could he let himself enjoy a shower and maybe even a few hours of sleep.

Nevertheless, he grabbed the handle in the shower and turned the water on full blast and as hot as it could go. That might buy him some time. If someone came looking for him, hopefully they would think he was taking a shower after all. With steam filling the room, Marcus unlocked the bathroom door, moved to the door to the hallway, and listened for a full minute. He heard no one out there, though there was always the possibility the priest was standing guard. Or that the church had a closed-circuit television system to monitor any movement in the hallways. Those were risks he was going to have to take. Just in case, Marcus decided to pretend he was sleepwalking. He carefully unlocked the door, opened it, and headed into the hallway in a seemingly catatonic state. He knew it was highly unlikely there would be a phone on a floor filled with homeless men. So he drifted to the stairwell and stumbled his way up to the next floor.

At the top of the stairs, he stood in the center of a hallway for a good minute or two, staring into space, listening intently, and waiting for someone to come retrieve him and take him back to his room. No one did. Nor had he spotted any cameras, though the lights were off and the hallways were rather dark. Maybe the church couldn’t afford a CCTV system. Maybe it was broken. Maybe it was working, but they could not afford a night watchman. Then again, maybe they could, and whoever was watching the feed had fallen asleep or more likely was watching television or browsing social media.

Marcus knew he had to keep moving. He continued his trancelike progress down the hall. There were signs on each closed door. They were all in Arabic. But Marcus doubted they were Sunday school classrooms. These, somehow, seemed to him like offices. Picking one, he pretended to bump into a wall, then into the doorjamb. Then he turned the handle and stumbled inside before closing and locking the door behind him.

Marcus smiled. His instincts had not failed him. The room he had just entered was not a single priest’s office but appeared to be a bullpen of cubicles that were probably used by the church’s secretaries. The doors to adjoining rooms, one to the left and one to the right, were locked. But it did not really matter. Each of the desks around him had a phone. He picked up one and heard a dial tone.