“But what good is she to us? The mission is blown. We should kill her, she has seen our faces!”
Hasan-I-Sabbah, known among his warriors as Azrael, the angel of death, was lying on his cot, his eyes closed in perfect relaxation. When he spoke, his voice was calm and even. “It is not blown, my brother; the girl has given us an opportunity. She is our prize. She is our leverage. We are back in the game.”
Yusuf was a good second-in-command, but his nerves were fraying. He was of the younger generation of fighters of the Jihad. Hasan-I-Sabbah had given Yusuf the task of planning the ambush on the deserted roadside, had let the younger man run with the planning and choice of tactics and weapons.
He had stood back and watched the attack play out, watched as his men had been eliminated or scattered under the counter-attack of the enemy team. He did not judge his men too harshly, or indeed the young man Yusuf whom he loved as a brother; if anything, he was critical of himself more than the others. He had thought that the moment was right to entrust Yusuf with this responsibility and the honour of running the attack operation. But clearly, he had misjudged the situation and the younger man’s tactical ability.
But Hasan-I-Sabbah, Azrael, was no fool and, unbeknownst to his apprentice, had decided to have an insurance policy in place. He had personally directed two of his best men to follow the girl and her protector from the hotel and intercept them at the airport. The snatch had gone smoothly, the Spaniard had been dealt with permanently and the girl had been returned to him here for safekeeping.
Inshalla; if God wills it.
He sat up, stretched and placed a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. He was so young, the whiskers barely fully formed on his cheeks; a killer, yes, but not yet an expert in death, not yet an assassin of merit, but perhaps one day… if he survived?
“Is the girl comfortable?” he said, running a hand across his shaved head, lingering upon the scar over his eye.
Yusuf nodded, his eyes blazing with rage. “She is a whore!”
He seized the younger man’s shoulder in a vice-like grip and saw the younger man wince in pain. He shook his head. “She is our honoured guest. She will be treated with respect. Not a finger will be laid upon her. Did not the Prophet say there is no good in the one who is not hospitable? Do you understand me, my brother?”
Yusuf, eyes lowered, nodded in subservience to his mentor.
“Good, now take me to her, I wish to talk to her personally,” said Azrael, rising from his humble cot.
Their temporary base was a disused builder’s yard on the outskirts of Klosterneuburg, a small town north of Vienna. The yard consisted of a fenced and secured compound, complete with a main office building and several abandoned Portakabins and old and rusty shipping containers scattered around the grounds. The yard had been provided by their benefactor and was perfectly positioned as a covert operating base; it was secure, isolated and unobserved.
Their weapons were hidden in the roof crawlspaces of the Portakabins and the dead bodies of their comrades, their brothers, their soldiers, lay buried beneath the earth in the southernmost corner of the compound. When this operation was completed, everything would be burned to the ground and destroyed to eradicate any evidence of their existence. Their benefactor, his mentor, was rich enough not to be concerned with the triviality of a loss of assets.
The afternoon was grey and cold as they stepped out of the main office building to tramp across the mud to the furthest shipping container. Yusuf cranked open the lever to open the door and let in the light. The interior had been fitted wall-to-wall with old mattresses to muffle any sound emanating from inside. A tiny drilled hole at the far end let in some much needed fresh air, but also let in the rain, causing a puddle to form on the floor.
Sabina sat handcuffed to a heavy sofa; her clothes were muddy and stained where she had wet herself with fear during the kidnapping, her eyes were red through crying and she was exhausted with fear. Next to the sofa was a bucket, a toilet roll and a plastic water bottle. A half-eaten tray of food sat precariously on the cushion next to her. There was nothing inside that she could use as an effective weapon and nothing she could use to attract attention. She was a prisoner.
“You have been treated well? You have food and water?” said Azrael, looking down at her.
The two men stood in silhouette in the open doorway. She could see neither of their faces, only their outlines; the senior one, the one that spoke, was short and stocky and powerful, and the subordinate younger and leaner.
“Please… I don’t know anything, you have the wrong person,” she replied desperately in German.
“Please speak English, my German is not so good. I know that you speak English.”
She repeated the same line but this time in English.
He shook his head. “No, I have the right person. You will be with us here for a few days, you will be our guest.”
“Please just let me go,” she tried again.
The senior man raised a hand to calm her. “Quiet now, please. We are arranging your transfer. Soon you will be back with your own people.”
“Please... please! I have a child… he needs me… he will be worried…”
“We know all about you, we know about your life. We will be talking to your brother’s people soon. We may need your help to persuade him, we will see. But for now, eat and rest. You are safe.”
And then the two men left the container, locking the door behind her. She folded her legs up onto the sofa and buried her head across her forearms; the sobbing started again, racking her body.
They had taken her at the airport. She had been walking towards the entrance approaching the doors when she had felt a sharp sting at the back of her thigh, like she had been shot with a pellet-gun. She had only made it another few steps, could even see the opening and closing doors of the airport concourse, when her legs had begun to falter and her mind had started to swim, to lose focus.
She remembered dropping her bag on the floor and then a hand had caught her elbow and helped to keep her upright. A man, a businessman in a suit, a good-looking man, Middle Eastern, had smiled at her and said something about getting her back to the car to get her medication. It had all happened so fast. Sabina had tried to speak, cry out, anything. She knew what this was and what was happening. She remembered making it to a dark-coloured van that must have been nearby, because there was no way she was walking in her condition and no way that they would just blatantly hoist her up that near to the airport.
The rest was blackness and sleep until she woke up here chained to a sofa, cold, frightened and desperate. All she could think about was Marco… and what would happen to him if she didn’t make it out of this alive. She was disorientated and had no idea how long she had been here or even where ‘here’ actually was.
She looked up into the gloom of the container. The rain was heavy tonight and the water was coming in through the hole. But it was all she had, that slow, constant drip, drip, drip of the water tapping on the metal. It gave her comfort and at this moment in time she would take anything that that she could get.