It was after midnight. Alan Spencer leaned against the slope of the hill above the dry wash north of the town and looked up at the stars. The sky was black, but there were enough stars to make an explosion of light, maybe twice the number he could see on the clearest nights in Toronto. He saw a meteor streak across his vision and disappear, and decided to take it as a sign.
He sat up and shifted the burden of the .45 pistol, its suppressor, and the extra magazines in his belt. He stood and stared at the road and let his eyes follow it to the town. He could see the buildings, looking like a pile of boxes. Most of them were low rectangles, but there were a few now that had three or four stories, and even two he could spot far off on the south side that looked like office buildings.
It was late enough now so he could take a look at Faris Hamzah’s compound. He walked toward the paved road into town. As he went, he found a stick about four feet long and used it as a walking stick, guessing that it would help make him look from a distance like a harmless old man.
When two sets of headlights approached behind him on the road from the north, he sat and waited for them to pass. They were probably trucks on their way in from Benghazi, but they both had closed-in cargo bays, so he couldn’t tell what they carried. Neither driver seemed to see him, and the trucks rumbled past without a change in speed.
Spencer walked into the village without seeing anybody else. He made his way to the street where Faris Hamzah’s compound was. He stood still for a time and searched for people, but nobody was out on foot tonight, so he began to walk. He stayed far from the compound as he walked up nearby streets, studying it from all sides. While he made his circuit, he searched for guards, and for any monitoring equipment that might have been installed to protect the place. In the thirty-five years since his last visit, the age of cheap alarm systems, surveillance cameras, and other devices had come, and Faris Hamzah would be the ideal customer.
Spencer found cameras. They were all installed at the corners of the buildings, aimed outward at the wall that circled the compound. He looked for glowing lights along the walls that would be the two ends of an electric eye beam six or eight inches above the tops of the walls, and he found those too.
Since he had last seen the place, the gate into the compound had been widened to about twelve feet to accommodate cars and trucks. It was now a set of iron bars with what looked like steel plates welded in behind them to give the gate armor. He stepped close and looked in through the half-inch space between the two sides of the gate. There was an electric motor to open and close the two sides. He supposed that in an emergency the gate could be barred.
The house was grander than he had anticipated. Whatever Faris Hamzah had done since the fall of Gaddafi, he must also have been doing something lucrative earlier, during the regime. The building reminded Spencer of the palaces in Iraq where Saddam Hussein had hidden from assassins and air strikes. The entry had fifteen-foot marble columns, and the walls were stone for the first eight feet from the ground and stucco above. The building missed being luxurious only by the omission of windows on the ground floor. The ones above were small and high, like the gun ports on a fort.
Spencer walked to the dark space between two buildings about 150 feet away across the road, and sat down in the shadows to watch. After a moment he realized the façade of the one beside him was a bricked-in rectangle that had once been open, and then recognized it as the old mechanic’s shop where he had watched the compound thirty-five years ago.
He sat there staring at the gate of Hamzah’s compound, and then he realized that he knew the way in. The walls were too high and smooth to climb and there were electric eyes along the top. But the gate wasn’t smooth, and there were no beams of light running along the top. He had been close enough to study the house through the space between the two sides, and the space between the door and the wall. There had been no wiring, no beams of light.
Spencer ran his eyes over the buildings in the compound. There were no lights on in the second floor of the house, or the other two buildings. There was only a dim light that seeped under the front door of the main house. The occupants, other than the night watch, if there was one, seemed to be asleep.
Spencer thought about his situation. If he didn’t do this tonight before the town woke up, he would be giving Hamzah’s friends and relatives a chance to notice him and report that a suspicious character had appeared. But if he tried to accomplish his purpose tonight, he was probably going to fail. He would get one chance.
He looked at his watch in the moonlight. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. If he was going to make his attempt, this would be the best time to begin. He stood and walked across the street outside of the wall and reached the iron gate. He grasped two of the vertical bars and used the horizontal bars of the frame as footholds, crouched near the top, pulled himself over the gate, and dropped to the ground. He stayed on his belly and crawled into the garden beneath the olive trees. In seconds he was in the center, where the tiled fountain, the big potted plants, and the low, thick canopy of the trees hid him from the cameras.
He had been tense, waiting for the blare of an alarm. Now he waited for the rapid footsteps of a squad of armed bodyguards pouring out of the buildings to kill him. He lay still for a long time and then turned his watch toward the moon so he could read it. Ten minutes had passed. He began to crawl again.
He crawled beside the fine path of pulverized gravel, among the potted palms and agaves. He never lifted his head, simply made for the side of the big house, where the security cameras were turned outward and wouldn’t pick him up. When he reached the side of the house, he sat there resting and rubbing his knees and elbows after his long crawl. He stood and listened, and then moved on.
He stayed beside the house, touching it most of the time to remain in the cameras’ blind spot. It took him another few minutes to reach the back of the house, which had not been fully visible from the streets he had walked earlier.
There was a balcony above him. It was on the second floor, overlooking a small ornamental pond. The pond was a surprise. He ducked closer and saw in the moonlight that there were lily pads on the surface, and he thought he caught the silvery flash of a scaly fish as a slight ripple disturbed the surface.
Spencer looked around him, and noticed that there was a tiny toolshed about the size of an outhouse along the wall, and near it a long, narrow wooden bench, where a person could sit and watch the fish. He opened the door of the shed and tried to see, but it was too dark to make out much. By touch he found a workbench, and on it was a toolbox that consisted of a metal tray with a handle, and some tools. He found a long, narrow screwdriver and stuck it in his belt. He went out again and looked up at the balcony.
He tried lifting the long, narrow bench, and found he could. It was just a thick board with a support at each end. He used the screwdriver to remove the support at one end. He lifted the end that still had its support, rested it on the roof of the toolshed, and climbed it like a ramp. When he was on the toolshed he dragged the bench up there with him.
Spencer stood on the roof and lifted the bench so its remaining support hooked over the railing of the balcony. This time, his ramp was a bit steeper, but he was able to climb hand over hand on the long board as his feet walked him up to the spot where he could grasp the railing.
He climbed over the railing to the balcony, and then looked through the sliding glass window into the room. It was a bedroom, large and luxuriously furnished. He could see into it fairly well because the bathroom had some kind of night-light, and the faint illumination was much brighter than the rest of the compound tonight. This had to be Hamzah’s room. He stepped to the side and looked at the corner near the window. There was nobody in the bed.
Spencer was overwhelmed with disappointment. He felt a weight in his belly, and a sick sense of futility. He had come so far, tried so hard, risked so much to throw away his life because he’d come on the wrong night. Spencer thought about going back the way he’d come. After a moment, he decided that was wrong. He would almost certainly be caught and killed. And maybe he’d simply come to the wrong room.
He tested the sliding door, but it was locked. He used his stolen screwdriver to bend the metal trim around the sliding door outward so he could slip the blade of his knife beside the door and pry the latch up. He slipped it off its bar and slid the door open. He entered and closed the sliding door.
Spencer took out his pistol, screwed the silencer on it, and went to the door that led to the interior of the house. He opened it a crack, looked, and listened. The house was designed in a European style, with a hallway upstairs lined by doors that probably led to bedrooms. But at the center of the upper level the rooms ended and there was a curved staircase leading down to a foyer. He could see that the dim light he had detected from outside came from a chandelier hanging above the foyer. He moved to the railing to look down and see who was awake.
In the light, just inside the large double doors of the front entrance, two men sat on identical armchairs. They wore military battle dress, but their only weapons were holstered pistols. Spencer was sure that somewhere very close to them, possibly in the closet by the door, there would be assault rifles. There was a buzz, and one of the men took a cell phone from his breast pocket and spoke quietly.
Spencer could tell from the rhythms of his speech that he was speaking Arabic, but he couldn’t hear the words from where he was. The man ended his call and said to his companion, “Ten or fifteen minutes.”
Spencer retreated from the railing and moved up the hallway, quietly opening the doors of the rooms. If Hamzah was sleeping in one of the other rooms, he had to find him now. He looked in each room he passed. Only three of the eight rooms were furnished as bedrooms. The others were an office, a conference room, a couple of storerooms, and a lounge of a sort, with a big-screen television, a couple of couches, and a refrigerator.
Spencer slipped inside the nearest of the storerooms, to see if it contained any munitions he could use to rig a bomb. If Hamzah wasn’t here now, sometime he would be.
Spencer heard an unexpected noise, the sound of engines. He stepped to the narrow window of the room and looked out to the courtyard. He saw the automatic gate swing open slowly. As the gate opened inward, vehicles began to nose their way in.
There were three cars, three identical black SUVs. Spencer knew security men liked that method of transport, because it was a shell game that made the enemy guess which cup held the pea. Somebody important was in one of the cars. Was a dignitary about to visit Faris Hamzah, or did he rate this kind of treatment?
Spencer watched the first two SUVs clear the gate and follow the paved drive to approach the front of the house. The first two SUVs pulled forward to the second building and stopped, but the third stopped in front of the main house’s entrance. The headlights went out, returning the courtyard to night.
Spencer was mesmerized. He had been imagining a moment like this for the past two years. He had pictured this compound and thought of ways of getting in, and what he would do if he had the chance. But the place had changed, and there were so many men in these vehicles, and now there were cameras. He had come to the compound tortured by the idea that he might simply study the place all night and not find a way in. Then he was sure he had chosen the wrong night. But maybe this was the time.
He heard the car doors open and watched the occupants jump to the ground, and then step away from the vehicles. He watched men emerge from the first two vehicles before they shut the doors and the dome lights went off. They carried assault rifles as they walked to the farther two-story building and went inside. The first men into the building turned on lights, and he could see through the open door that the place was furnished like a barracks, with rows of bunk beds.
Spencer counted six men in each vehicle. The routine, the way this convoy had been organized, reminded him of the day when he had seen Hamzah going ahead of time to the place where he had agreed to meet. He had a growing hope that the important man in the vehicle parked below by the entrance to the house was Faris Hamzah.
The pair of watchmen he had seen on the first floor opened the main entrance’s double doors, letting a patch of light from the house spill out to the courtyard. Then they stood on the portico stiffly with their eyes straight ahead like an honor guard.
The two front doors of the SUV opened and the driver and a man in the front passenger seat got out carrying rifles. They took positions facing each other a few feet apart in the eight-foot space between the front steps and the side door of the SUV, their eyes scanning the middle distance, rising to look at nearby roofs, then to the side.
The side door of the SUV opened. Spencer could see a pair of legs wearing low black shoes and pressed khaki pants like a summer dress uniform ease out so they dangled from the seat. A thin metal shaft came out beside the right leg. A rifle? It extended farther. A cane?
Spencer stared. It was a cane. Faris Hamzah had been at least forty-five when he had met him more than thirty years ago. Of course he would be old. The two feet and the cane reached the ground. The man was visible from above, standing in the light from the open doors of the house, but Spencer couldn’t see his face.
He wanted to be sure. If this man wasn’t Faris Hamzah, Spencer was about to die for nothing. He gripped his pistol with his left hand and waited.
The man took a step, and then another. He pivoted to his right, toward the barracks, and looked at it for a moment. Then he turned to the left toward the rear of the SUV, and Spencer could see his face.
The face was old, and the hair, beard, and eyebrows were white, but he was Faris Hamzah.
Spencer slipped out of the storeroom and moved quickly down the hall to the space at the railing near the staircase, then looked down at the front entrance. Faris Hamzah stepped into his foyer and watched the two night watchmen close and lock the big double doors, and then slide the dead bolts into the floor. He spoke to them in low tones, and the two of them nodded, turned, and walked to one of the hallways leading away from the foyer.
Spencer hurried back to Hamzah’s bedroom, went into the walk-in closet, and shut the door. He knelt behind the large island that held drawers for clothes and shelves for shoes. In the darkness, he set the pistol with its silencer on the floor beside him and took out his knife. He had been hopeful for a minute that Hamzah would be alone in the house. The building was all stone and stucco, and he was sure he could fire his silenced pistol without being heard outside. But he couldn’t be sure that the two men downstairs would not hear a suppressed shot.
He waited. He heard footsteps, and then the door opening. A light came on in the room. He heard feet passing on the way to the bathroom, and then heard the door close. The toilet flushed and he heard the feet walk out and approach the closet.
The closet door swung open, and he heard the footsteps enter. He heard a drawer open, and then he stood and moved toward Faris Hamzah. There was a folded pair of pajamas in Hamzah’s hand when he half turned and saw Spencer. His eyes widened, he dropped the pajamas, and started to turn to run. Without his cane, he was too slow, and Spencer was on him in a second. Spencer pulled Hamzah’s head back and said in his ear in Arabic, “You should have left me alone.” Then he drew the blade of the knife across Hamzah’s throat and dropped him to the floor.
Hamzah lay on the floor bleeding, gripping the wound in both hands. At first the arterial blood spurted between his fingers, squirting the white dresser, blond hardwood floor, and white walls a few times, but he lost consciousness quickly and the blood flowed into a growing pool beside him.
Spencer wiped his hands and his knife on a suit that was hanging from the clothes rack, closed the blade, and put it in his pocket. He looked in the mirror to be sure his clothes hadn’t been painted, but they had. His left arm was red, and there was a streak of blood across his chest. He noticed a row of civilian outfits that looked like his own hanging nearby, and decided on the solution. He went through the bedroom into the bathroom, took off his bloody shirt and washed his hands, arms, and face. He checked his pants and shoes, and then he went back into the closet, took a long Libyan-style shirt, put it on, and then picked up his pistol and turned off the light as he left the closet.
There was a knock on the door, and then the two men from downstairs swung it open and stepped inside. One carried a tray that held a plate and some food, and the other held an open bottle of red wine and a glass. When they saw Spencer, the man with the tray squatted to put it on the floor to free his hands, and the other dropped the glass and wine and tried to draw his gun.
Spencer fired once at that man and saw a hole appear in his forehead, and then shot the other man twice and saw him fall backward.
Spencer dragged the two the rest of the way into the room and closed the door. Then he went through their pockets. One of them had a key fob with a silver stripe along the edge that said RANGE ROVER. Spencer pocketed it, and then stepped back into the closet and fired one round into Faris Hamzah’s head.
He hurried to the storeroom where he had watched the cars arrive, and looked out the window. He could see no lights in any of the windows of the other two buildings in the compound. He could see the three SUVs—two parked by the barracks building, and one still parked at the front entrance to the house. Maybe it was parked there intentionally because Faris Hamzah walked with a cane, or maybe the watchman was supposed to park it somewhere else. It didn’t matter. He made his way down the stairway to the front of the building. He unlocked one of the twin front doors, stepped out, and closed it.
He went to the driver’s door and found it unlocked. He climbed in, started the engine, and drove toward the gate. As the car moved forward he searched the dashboard, the wells on the door panels, and finally found the remote control for the gate clipped to the sun visor. He pressed the button and the gate swung open toward him.
The mechanism seemed incredibly slow, and as the gate inched its way inward, he steered to the center so he would not waste a moment. As soon as there was enough space he steered between the two sides and pressed the button again so the gate stopped and began to close.
He glanced in the rearview mirror to see if anything had changed inside the compound. There were no new lights, no sounds of gunfire, no figures running yet. He drove on, adding speed as he could.
He was afraid someone had heard him driving out, and would run to the house and notice the men lying in Hamzah’s bedroom. He hoped that the bodyguards would assume the man who had murdered their employer was a member of a rival faction, and Spencer knew those factions would be fifty miles to the northwest of the village, engaged in the competition to control Benghazi. He must head east for Tobruk, the place that was held by Faris Hamzah’s friends and allies.
Spencer kept his speed conservative for a few blocks until he reached the turnoff toward Tobruk, the same route that he and Abdullah had traveled early this morning. Then he began to add speed, driving with both hands on the wheel and his eyes ahead.
The distance to Tobruk from Benghazi was nearly three hundred miles. But Abdullah had not taken him all the way to Benghazi, so he didn’t know how much closer than that he was now. He pushed the speed as hard as he dared, paying more attention to controlling the car than to the speedometer.
Minutes went by, and each time he saw another one pass on the dashboard clock he celebrated. He wished the SUV could fly, or that he could take it off the road and head east across country instead of bouncing along and twisting and turning. He strayed from the center of the highway only to hug the curves. As he came out of one he would aim for the next one he could see ahead, making as much of his head start as he could.
His minutes became an hour, and he was sure now that Hamzah’s men must have sped off toward Benghazi to pursue his killer. He couldn’t be so lucky that they had all fallen asleep and not heard anything.
Spencer was at the end of his second hour of driving and judged he must be nearly halfway to Tobruk when he came around a curve and saw lights about a quarter mile ahead on a long, straight stretch. After a few seconds he could see the lights were a military checkpoint. There were two Humvees parked a few feet apart with a wooden bar between them, and two uniformed men visible in front of them.
Spencer slowed down and opened the glove compartment to see if there were papers for the SUV he was driving. He felt under the seat, glanced for more storage wells in the doors, but found nothing. He quickly shoved the silenced pistol and its spare magazines under his seat.
He knew his best chance was to bluff. Maybe his age and his good Arabic would make him seem innocuous. He slowed to a stop at the roadblock and kept his hands visible on the steering wheel.
A sleepy-looking man in camouflage fatigues stood and walked to Spencer’s window. Spencer opened it and smiled at him expectantly.
The man said, “Where are you going, uncle?”
“I’m driving toward Tobruk, sir,” he said in Arabic.
“I can see that. What is the purpose of your trip?”
“I want to see the doctors at the Tobruk airport from a Canadian relief organization. I heard they’ll be there for another forty-eight hours.”
“Let me see your identification.”
Spencer thought about how carefully he had planned his trip. He had made sure to carry no identification so the Canadians would not be arrested as accomplices if he were killed. Now he regretted the precaution. “I don’t have any with me,” he said. “But my name is Mahmoud Haruq.”
The soldier looked weary. “Get out of the car.”
Spencer got out and stood beside the car. The soldier patted him down, and found nothing except a thick sheaf of Libyan dinars in his pocket.
“You have a lot of money and a new car. Why don’t you have papers?”
“It’s an emergency. I’m supposed to drive to Tobruk and bring back one of the doctors.”
“For whom?”
“Is that who owns this vehicle?”
“Yes, sir.”
The soldier smiled as he turned to face his companions. “He works for Faris Hamzah.”
The others grinned and shook their heads in disdain. The man sitting on the rock by the road stood up, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and approached. “You work for Faris Hamzah?” he said. “Faris the Great?”
It was clear that these men were not fans of Faris Hamzah. He couldn’t decide how far the enmity went. Would they harm him just because they had contempt for Hamzah?
The second man walked to the side of the SUV and looked in at the empty seats, and then walked to the rear door. He pounded on it with his fist.
Spencer leaned into the open door, grasped the fob of the keys, and pressed the button that opened the door locks. The man lifted the back hatch and said, “Ah. Take a look.”
The first man walked back and joined his comrade at the rear of the vehicle. The men began taking things out. There were three M4 rifles. Spencer glanced at the roadblock ahead, where there was only one man left in front of him. The men in the back leaned the rifles against the bumper and lifted a couple of olive drab ammo cans. He could see they were heavy, which meant they were full.
Spencer scrambled into his vehicle, started it, and threw it into reverse. The two men behind the SUV dived to the side to avoid being hit, and then scrambled to rise as Spencer threw the SUV into drive and roared away from them. He hit the wooden barrier so it swung into the front of the right Humvee and bounced on the ground.
Spencer never let the vehicle slow. As he sped off, there was some yelling and then a burst of automatic weapon fire. He heard the staccato reports, the bang of bullets hitting the steel of the SUV’s interior, its bumpers, its roof. The unsecured hatch flapped up and down as he drove. It absorbed one burst, some of the bullets punching holes in the sheet metal and others pinging up into the sky. Then another short burst came just as the hatch flew open again. Bullets hit the windshield, leaving big blooms of pulverized glass in front of Spencer’s face and to his right.
As Spencer reached the first curve in the highway the hits were fewer, and then there were none. He drove as fast as he dared along the dark highway, trying to put some miles between him and the roadblock.
In his rearview mirror, far behind him, a pair of headlights appeared, and then another. He switched off his headlights and turned the SUV off the road. He drove between low, dark hills that looked like piles of rocks strewn across the hard, dry surface of the Jabal Akhdar plateau. He bumped over slopes, always taking them head-on to keep from tipping the SUV over on its side. He got into ruts so deep that he had to stay in them until he could wrench the wheel to the side and bump out of them.
After a short time, he swung between two low hills and his SUV tilted to the side. The wheels spun and began to dig him in deeper. He rocked the vehicle forward and back, but couldn’t get it out of the holes the wheels were digging. He looked around, and realized the SUV was hemmed in and surrounded by rocky hills that hid it from the road. He reached down to find his pistol, silencer, and magazines still jammed under his seat. He took them and ran around to the rear of the vehicle to see what was left of the weapons and ammunition the soldiers had found. There was nothing.
He stepped on the rocks near the foot of a pile, then hurried along the side into some thick brush. He began to run. Spencer ran hard, asking his body to forget its fatigue for just this hundred yards, and then for the next hundred. When he was a mile from the spot where he had left the SUV, he could see headlights on the road he had left. As he watched, he saw them drift along, and then stop. Slowly, the first Humvee, and then the second, turned off the road and began to bounce across the open land. They were following his SUV’s tracks.
He ran on below the endless glittering specks of stars. He found the Big Dipper, and then followed the line from its cup to the North Star. For a long time he trotted and then he walked, using the last hours of darkness to make his way northeast toward Tobruk.
When the sun came up he slept in the shade of a rocky shelf. When he woke it was afternoon. He stood and walked to the east, stepping toward his own shadow, the western sun falling on his shoulders and his head scarf.
Spencer knew he had not traveled far since he had declared himself to be halfway to Tobruk. He was at least two hundred kilometers from Faris Hamzah’s compound, but he was still that far from the airport at Tobruk, where the Canadian People’s Relief Corps would be waiting for their resupply flight. He had used up half of his seventy-two hours.
His night had left him dehydrated, and he could not go on much longer without water. He was on a stretch of land where he could see no buildings, no sign that human beings had ever been there. There was nothing in sight that suggested he was near water—no trees, no green brush of the sort that grew near wells and streams. His only possessions were a pistol with a suppressor and two full magazines, a good pair of shoes, and his white Libyan clothes. The soldier at the roadblock may not have intended to rob him, but he had never given back the two thousand dinars that Spencer had been carrying. He had only eleven dinars in his pocket, left over from tipping Abdullah.
He would have to keep going a few hours to get far enough from the roadblock he had escaped, then try to find a village where he could get water. If he failed, he would die. The rule of thumb was that it took three days to die of dehydration, but he had spent much of his first night running.
Spencer set a marching pace by counting cadence. He kept his head up and picked a hill that lined up with his shadow and walked toward it so his course would be straight. The road to Tobruk was an arc that swung to the north and then back down, all of it roughly parallel to the sea. If he aimed his steps correctly, then at some point he would intersect with the road.
It was late night when he saw something new ahead of him and to the left. A set of headlights was moving along, the beams shooting into the darkness. From this distance he couldn’t actually see the vehicle. He had no idea if it was a car, a truck, or a bus, but it didn’t matter. It was what the vehicle was driving on that mattered. He had met the road.
He kept walking, unable to resist swinging farther to the left to meet the road sooner, and then he was there, stepping-onto the pavement. He felt the luxury as he walked along on the pavement toward the east. Now there was nothing to trip him, no irregularities or loose stones to turn his ankles. He walked steadily and made better time, always listening for the sound of an engine.
At five thirty in the morning another set of headlights illuminated the road ahead. A car was about to overtake him.
He was starving and parched, and he knew that if he didn’t get help he would be dead by midafternoon. He stepped into the middle of the highway and waited. He watched the headlights grow nearer and brighter, and when the car was close enough to see him he waved his arms.
The car slowed to twenty miles an hour as the driver looked him over. When the car reached him, it stopped.
Spencer leaned over to look into the car. The man behind the windshield was dark, with a short beard and close-cropped hair, about thirty-five years old. He was a little bit chubby, certainly not a laborer.
The passenger window whirred down. The man said in Arabic: “What are you doing out here?”
“My car got wrecked,” Spencer said. “I lost control and it ran off the road and crashed. Praise Allah I’m alive. I thank you so much for stopping.” He bowed deeply.
“If I take you to the next village, what will you give me?”
“I’ll buy gasoline, and if you’d like me to, I’ll drive your car so you can rest,” said Spencer. “If you’re going all the way to Tobruk, I would give you two hundred and fifty dinar to take me with you.”
“Did you say two fifty?”
“Yes. Two fifty.”
“All right. Get in.”
“On this side or the driver’s?”
“That side. If you crashed your car, I don’t want you driving mine.”
Spencer got in beside the man and felt his legs release their tension in the soft cushion of the seat while the man accelerated, moving along the road toward Tobruk.
They drove for a few miles, and then the man said to Spencer:
“You must be rich, huh?”
“No, not really,” Spencer said.
“You must be. You smashed your car and you walked away from it, as though it meant nothing to you.”
Spencer looked at him. “I’m sad that my car was wrecked, but I’m very happy that I could walk away from it without dying or having a serious injury. Now I’m even happier that a kind and good man was the one to come along the road at night and pick me up.”
The man nodded and drove on.
Spencer distrusted and disliked this man. The driver knew that Spencer had been walking through wilderness all night, but he had not offered him a drink of water or even asked about his health. But Spencer needed him to stay alive, so he was determined to keep him friendly.
Spencer decided that the best thing he could do was to lean back and appear to fall asleep, so he wouldn’t risk irritating or alienating him. He leaned against the door, his eyes closed, and he began to breathe slowly and deeply. The way he kept it up was to count. He would count to sixty slowly and call it a minute, and then count the next sixty and call that two minutes. He got to nine minutes and started the tenth, when he awoke in full sunlight, startled.
The car was stopped off the road. The driver was touching him, feeling his pockets for his wallet.
Spencer stiffened and started to sit up, but the man held a knife in his free hand, and it hovered above Spencer’s chest, where he could see it. The knife was about four inches long with a symmetrical blade like a boot knife.
“Where’s the money?” the man asked.
“What’s the knife for?” said Spencer. “I’m planning to pay you.”
“I’m taking the money you promised me. It’s my money now.”
Spencer wondered where they were, and how long he had been sleeping, but he had no idea. He said, “I’m going to pay you the two fifty as soon as we get to Tobruk. That’s where it is. Most of the money I had with me got burned in my car.”
“You didn’t say the car burned. You’ve been lying to me. I’m taking you nowhere.” The man raised the hand that held the knife.
Spencer’s left hand batted the man’s forearm to the side while his right moved to the pistol in his belt. He grasped the pistol through his loose shirt, twisted his torso, and fired through the cloth.
The heat burned Spencer’s belly as the round tore through Spencer’s shirt and into the man’s chest. Spencer opened the car door, rolled out onto the gravel shoulder, crouched, and pulled the gun out from under his shirt.
The man was not moving. He had been kneeling on the driver’s seat above Spencer while he frisked him, but now he had collapsed facedown onto the passenger seat that Spencer had vacated.
Spencer held the gun on him, stepped closer, and poked him hard. He didn’t move.
Spencer pried the knife out of the driver’s grip, used his left hand to grasp the driver’s wrist, and pulled. The man offered no resistance, and there was no sign of consciousness, so Spencer dragged him across the passenger seat and out onto the shoulder of the road. He touched the man’s carotid artery and he felt no pulse.
Spencer closed the passenger door and looked around. He stuck the pistol back in his belt and dragged the body off the road into the field of weeds beyond. The land was bleak, another series of low hills and fields, but no sign of people or buildings. The driver had chosen a deserted place to rob and murder him.
He knelt beside the body and searched it. The wallet had only six dinars in it. There was also a driver’s license, but the picture didn’t look much like the body at Spencer’s feet. He took the six dinars, but put the wallet back in the man’s pocket.
He went back to the car, removed the keys from the ignition, and opened the trunk. There was no suitcase, no extra clothes. There were only a few rags, a spare tire, and an unopened one-gallon plastic bottle of water.
He took the mat that covered the spare tire in the well, put it over the passenger seat to cover the blood, and used some of the water and the rags to clean off the blood that had spattered his face when he’d shot the man. Then he got into the car and drove. As he drove he drank. He was not sure where he was, but the clock on the dashboard told him it was nearly ten o’clock in the morning.
The man’s wallet had not contained enough money to buy much gas. The first thing he had said was to ask Spencer what he would give him for a ride. And the photograph on the license did not belong to him.
Spencer was almost certainly driving a stolen car, and judging from the way the driver had already had the knife in his hand when he’d started searching him for money, the true owner of the car was probably dead. Spencer glanced at the gas gauge. There was a quarter of a tank of gas. What was that, fifty miles?
Spencer had eleven dinars. The wallet had held another six. If there was gas available for sale to civilians, he might still reach Tobruk. He kept driving. Every mile down the road was a mile he would not have to walk.
An hour later he could see he was approaching a city. And then, to his left, the sea appeared. Derna. It had to be Derna. Soon there were a few buildings. He began to see the word Derna in Arabic script. A Derna hotel, a Derna construction company, a Derna restaurant. The one thing he didn’t see was a Derna gasoline station.
He was wary about stopping. He was running very low on gas now, but the car could tie him to at least the killing he’d done, and probably the one he hadn’t. He passed an apartment building that had been bombed out, one wall gone and the rooms and staircases on that side opened like a child’s dollhouse. He knew that Derna had been taken by the Islamic State forces for a time and then won back.
The city seemed to have recovered from the fighting, and there were no sounds of gunfire, but this was not a place where he wanted to be stranded. It would be very difficult to get out if he were stopped.
He remembered that Derna was about seventy miles from Tobruk, so he decided to keep going. He drove along at a reasonable speed that he thought might stretch his gasoline supply and not attract attention from soldiers. He passed a checkpoint on the opposite side of the road with soldiers stopping and inspecting cars and trucks coming into town from the other direction.
A mile farther on he saw three armed soldiers walking along the highway. He pulled over to the side of the road near them and called out in Arabic: “Do you need a ride?”
The three men trotted to join him. Two got in the back and the other sat in the passenger seat. The man beside him said, “Thank you for your kind invitation.”
“It’s the least I could do. How far are you going?”
The soldier said, “Four kilometers straight ahead. It’s a long walk, and it feels good to ride.”
Spencer nodded sagely. He was familiar with the feeling. Then, only about a mile on, they reached another checkpoint on his side of the highway. Spencer pulled over at the checkpoint and a soldier started toward his car, but when he saw the three soldiers he opened the barrier and waved the car through.
In another few minutes the man beside Spencer said, “Leave us by the road up there. We don’t need to have the lieutenant know we didn’t walk all the way. He might think of more work for us to do.”
Spencer pulled over and said, “Allah protect you.”
The three soldiers went on their way. Spencer managed to drive forty miles farther before the engine coughed and then ran out of gas. He kept his foot off the brake and coasted a hundred feet before the momentum was used up. He got the rags out of the trunk, wiped the surfaces he had touched, and left the car unlocked with the keys in it.
He looked at his watch. He was reaching the end of his second day, and he still had about thirty miles to go. Before this time tomorrow the Canadians would receive their supply flight and be off without him. He began to walk.
Spencer walked about five miles before he reached a farming village a distance from the south side of the highway. He could see melons and some green vegetables growing on acre-size plots all the way into the village. It looked like a place where he could buy a melon and some water.
As he came into the village, he saw a young man about twenty-one or twenty-two years old. He was riding a new bicycle up and down in front of his house, apparently testing the adjustment of the chain and the gears and giving the bicycle its first lubrication. The bicycle had thick, knobby tires like a mountain bike, and it had a couple of big baskets mounted on the sides of the rear wheels so he could carry a load without affecting his steering. Spencer guessed he probably used it to deliver melons to a market stall.
Spencer stopped and stood nearby with his arms folded, watching the young man riding. He said in Arabic: “That is an excellent new bicycle.”
“Thank you,” the young man said.
“May I ask what happened to your old bicycle?”
The young man looked puzzled. “How did you know there is one?”
“Because you’re a skilled rider. This is not your first one.”
“The first one is old. It belonged to my uncle for years and years before it went to me. I still have it, but I think I’ll save it for the parts.”
“I only wonder …” Spencer trailed off.
“What?” said the young man.
“Well, the new bicycle is very good quality. If it ever needs a part, it won’t happen soon. And no bicycle ever needs every part replaced. Meanwhile, the old one is just taking up space in your house and rusting. The rubber parts are getting hard and brittle. It’s worth something, and that value is going to waste.”
“What do you suggest?”
“If you could show it to me, I might consider making an offer.”
At four forty-five on the afternoon of the third day of Alan Spencer’s absence, the people at the Tobruk Airport saw a figure on a bicycle pedaling along the road toward the cargo terminal.
The man wore Libyan clothes and he was dirty and ragged, but when he saw the row of Canadians standing by their trucks watching him, he waved at them and began to pedal harder, standing up on the pedals and pumping to build up speed like a racer at the end of a long course. He bumped up over the edge of the concrete pavement at the entrance and coasted to a stop in front of them.
“I’m sorry if I’m late,” he said. “The distances here can be deceiving.”