Upon hearing the explosion, Ali ran back up the stairs and detonated a second device, blowing the welded door right out of its frame.
He stepped into the freight area and saw the blackened elevator doors standing open, but nothing else. It was like an enormous gaping mouth with smoke billowing from its throat.
His weapon up and at the ready, Ali began his search for Mohammed. Moving quickly, he swept into the first three offices along the hall and finding them empty, moved on. In the fourth, he found a television set, a cooking area with a sink as well as a table, chairs, and some couches, but nothing more.
The next door was marked with both the English and Arabic words for washroom. He pushed the door open and quietly slipped inside. Having looked inside every stall and confident that they were all empty, he exited and continued his search. There were only about five offices remaining. The next was empty, as was the next after that. As Ali quickly moved toward the last three rooms, he found the next one he approached was locked. A handwritten sign identified its function as a sterile treatment room and listed a set of instructions to follow before entering. Abdul Ali kicked it open and inside found a surgical table, a medical recovery recliner, a wheelchair, various first aid supplies, and right in the center of it all a high-end Nova Medical Systems dialysis machine.
The next room was the nerve center of the interrogation operation. The walls were covered with dry-erase boards, maps of the Middle East and Africa, multiple photographs of the al-Qaeda hierarchy, as well as various organizational and relationship diagrams. Desks were laden with audio and video equipment as well as monitors tuned to cameras that must have been positioned all over the floor. Seeing the image on the largest monitor, Abdul Ali turned and fled.
Bursting into the room across the hall, he was ready to weep with joy. There, bound to a small, wooden chair was Mohammed bin Mohammed. Next to him, unconscious and severely beaten, was a man Ali had never met but most definitely knew of. The last he’d heard, the man had been in Canada. He had no idea Mohammed’s nephew, Sayed Jamal, had been taken prisoner.
As he rushed to Mohammed’s side, he saw that he was naked from the waist down, his penis red and swollen beyond belief. “What unspeakable acts have they done to you, my brother?” he asked as he removed a knife and begun cutting away the restraints.
At first, Mohammed didn’t want to believe his eyes. His body was so racked with pain and his mind was clouded by the horror of his torture. Surely it was some sort of trick. Then he saw Ali holster his weapon and remove a knife to help cut him free. It was Ali, wasn’t it? At this point, he didn’t know what to believe. “Is it you?” he asked, his voice hoarse from his screaming.
“Yes, Mohammed, it is I. I have come to take you home,” replied Ali.
Looking in the direction of his nephew, Mohammed asked, “And Sayed?”
Ali reached over and felt the man’s pulse. It was weak, too weak. “I’m sorry. There is nothing we can do for him. He is not going to make it.”
Mohammed hung his head. “At least his family is already waiting for him in paradise.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Americans took each one of his children and killed them. Then they took his wife. They made us both watch it on television, hoping it would force me to tell them what they wanted to know.”
“And what did you tell them?” asked Ali, concerned that everything he had been through, everything they had risked might now be for nothing.
Mohammed’s face was a block of implacable granite. “I told them nothing. Even while they killed Sayed’s family one by one, I told them nothing.”
Ali looked at Jamal once again. His trouser legs had been sheared away, and his knees were a mass of bloody pulp. “What did they do to him?”
“They used a drill,” he croaked.
Ali had no intention of making his colleague relive any more of the brutality. “Can you stand?” he asked as he helped Mohammed to his feet. “I have a safe place I can take you.”
Mohammed shook his head. “My pain is too great. They stopped my dialysis as a part of the torture. You’re too late. Soon I will follow Sayed.”
Ali shook his head. “I have a hotel room near here with a small dialysis machine. You are not going to die, my brother. Not today. But we must get to safety quickly.”
“I fear I won’t be able to walk very far. I have grown too weak.”
Ali thought about it for a moment and then told Mohammed not to move. Leaving him, Ali went back out into the hallway and made his way to the dialysis room.
After unfolding the wheelchair, he rifled through the cabinets until he found a pair of surgical scrubs big enough to fit Mohammed. He gathered a few additional supplies and was putting them all in a small bag, when he heard a voice from behind him say, “Don’t even think about moving.”