NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The world’s finance funneled into Manhattan, and Manhattan funneled that into a few square blocks of Lower Manhattan. Within a few blocks of one another were the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, and a headquarters of every major financial institution on earth.
Lower Manhattan was also rife with skyscraper apartments, home to many of the financiers and attorneys who serviced those institutions. Residents didn’t need a car; they could walk to work. The beach and amusement park on Brooklyn’s Coney Island were an endurable subway ride away. The proximity to a great park, Battery Park, to a beautifully landscaped esplanade that ran up much of the west side of the island, to world-class restaurants, to the Statue of Liberty, to a major airport-Newark Liberty, just fifteen minutes across the Hudson River-and to the rising colossus of the new World Trade Center site also made this one of the most desirable places to live in the city.
None of which was known to Yasmin Rassin, or mattered.
After crossing an old iron bridge, the car moved through the thin nighttime traffic among the zigzagging canyons. The buildings flashed by, some of them stone titans, others spindly giants of glass, all of them lit with squares of light, window after window, stack after stack. The woman had been in cities before-London, Istanbul, Shanghai, Sydney, and others-but none of them had created the same strong impression of a place that could have been designed by an assassin or a sociopath. So many people, so many dark streets, so many vantage points. It was a miracle civilization existed in this place, let alone thrived. Money clearly was a root of evil, but not the murderous kind. It was a shield against evil.
Two men sat on either side of Yasmin. En route, they had changed into street clothes. They resembled nothing so much as young businessmen. It concerned her more than a little that her escorts had not sought to blindfold or handcuff her. They were letting her know where she was going, which meant one of two things. First, they expected her to be entirely cooperative. And second, they did not anticipate her leaving. These men had been in the room with the American woman at the airport. They knew about her daughter. Perhaps they also knew that was all the leverage they needed.
Though she saw her only two or three times a year, Kamilah was the center of her life. She was the product of a situation Yasmin had created for herself twelve years earlier. She was Cara Sumaida’ie then. An orphan, a young “pleasure girl” for the Syrian police, she had given herself to those men in their barracks-or in a lavatory or an alley or an automobile, wherever they happened to be. In exchange, they had shown her how to use firearms because she was oh, so afraid for her security in the poor neighborhood in Damascus where she lived, a ghetto overrun with Iraqis and Pakistanis looking to escape war and sectarian violence in what was then a relatively peaceful nation. That was how she had come there, with an uncle. He was an automobile mechanic; she was barely able to read. When he was killed in a robbery-only his tools were stolen-she was left alone.
She was twelve when he died. Two years of poverty, of begging, of digging through trash for food, of being threatened by police, drove her to their embrace. It wasn’t that she felt safe with these men; to the contrary, they did not understand rules or boundaries. More often than not she left with fresh bruises, sore and bleeding, her back raked raw by whatever she had been lying on. But at least she could eat and she was able to sleep in something other than a doorway or a cart.
And something more, something that came to dominate her thoughts, her actions. Their weapons. Not just the guns, but the batons, the knives, the garrotes.
These men were feared because they had the power of life and death, liberty and captivity. People were not frightened of them, because the police patrolled in packs. These groups were like the sea, usually calm, usually motorized, moving through a place and leaving. It was the individual, the rogue, the angry breakaway, the religious fanatic who civilians avoided. Yasmin envied that power. Not because she yearned to dominate others, but because she wanted to control her own life, her own safe zone.
She spent all her unrestricted time learning everything she could about weapons and tactics. She learned the basics of shooting. She was a natural marksman with a supernaturally steady hand. She helped some of her mentors win bets that she could knock a bottle from a wall or pick off a bird in flight. She also learned how to stab and strangle. The police thought it was cute, adorable, to see her choke a rubber dummy or stab a bale of hay tied in the shape of a man. She retained her ability to please, and to convey enthusiasm she did not feel, just so she could stay among them. When they were not instructing her, she was watching them train, even as she lay on her back with the sergeant in his office, moaning and looking out the window at the compound.
She was all alone. Except for one ally. A former Israeli Defense agent, Abrahem Bar. Bar was not an exceptional man: he stood several inches under six feet; had thick, dark hair with a low hairline, a rough face with a matching beard, and thick chapped lips; and his skin was gritty and tanned from spending years in isolated combat zones. He was merely a good man who had been trained well by his country. Perhaps too well.
Disagreeing with orders he’d been given to remove the presence of peaceful civilian demonstrators near his post near Kiryat Shmona, Bar had gone AWOL from the IDF and had met Cara while he was hiding out in the slums of Damascus, waiting for the heat from his desertion to die down. In spite of her past experiences, Cara was remarkably genial at the time, her hair was much longer, she kept it combed and delicate for her many mature handlers, and her body had only recently developed into womanhood. Bar had propositioned the then nearly sixteen-year-old girl, and when she met with him for what she thought would be intercourse, the multilingual, twenty-eight-year-old Israeli explained that he intended only to take Cara under his wing, to help her along what, in his eyes, seemed to be a serrated road she was traveling down.
Listening to her lurid stories of abuse, rape, and torture and disgusted by the treatment she was receiving, but unable to help her financially or even afford her a safe place to stay, Bar helped her to train harder, to find her self-worth, to fight for herself. To fight back.
In the early mornings, before the sun broke over the horizon, the pair would trot alongside each other for miles into the desert, where Bar would work with Cara to perfect her long-range shooting ability. She learned to recognize her surrounding conditions and adjust accordingly-something as slight as the direction and intensity that a target’s hair was blowing started to give her killer insight. She learned to be a one-woman militia, a sniper without need of a spotter, a captain without the assistance of soldiers, a killer without use of her conscience. Some mornings consisted of simply skull dragging for hours in the desert heat. Moving slowly, undetected, dragging her stomach, legs, and face in the dirt and sand to get close enough to her target, a true test of her will. On more than one occasion Bar would spot Cara moving too quickly, or moving at all, and would send her back to the starting point. Although she sometimes thought he was being cruel, this proved to be an invaluable technique.
Between the jogging in and the walking out of the improvised training grounds, it wasn’t long before their teacher-student relationship crossed their respective barriers and the two became romantically involved. This was the first time a young Cara felt that sex could be enjoyable for the female, too, that it wasn’t just about letting a wolf feed off the remains of a carcass, but about finding a rhythm with a partner and working together to match strides and momentum. Making love. Making mistakes met with laughter rather than hostility.
During their many nights together he taught her how to contain her impulsive rage and maintain focus by using Krav Maga techniques he had learned throughout his IDF training to concentrate on pinpoint precision, counterattacks, and neutralizing her enemies without losing crystal clear awareness of her surroundings.
“The hardest part is the escape. Don’t ever lose sight of that. Or your target,” he’d tell her. Bar’s friendly eyes would crinkle and his crooked smile would actually make her lose focus when he joked. But he never distracted her for too long before giving her something else to consider. Bar loved her because she was rough like him. She was beautiful, but in many ways she was ugly, and he was fond of that, too.
He always reminded Cara to attack before being attacked, which was ironic because Bar would be shot in the back of the head by a jealous Barzeh police officer who wanted a piece of Cara. He would have told her to learn from his mistake.
Her name, Cara, meant fortress, and that was what the young woman became. Emotionally closed off, she was single-minded in her purpose. Shortly after Bar was killed, Cara realized that she was pregnant. Desperately hoping it was his, she put all of her accumulated hostility into killing a courier for the Central Bank of Syria, stealing the ten thousand in al-l ra as-s riyya he was carrying, and used the currency to buy her way into Egypt. People had compassion for a pregnant girl on her own, and money bought those for whom that wasn’t enough. It was there that she gave birth to her daughter, in the hovel of a midwife who was recommended to her. She was barely seventeen.
Egypt’s capital was a place where one could find-or be-anything one wanted. What Cara wanted was a new life. She began with a new name. She drew it from separate articles on the front page of a newspaper she found in the trash. The compost pile seemed a fitting place from which the new woman, Yasmin Rassin, should arise.
In retrospect, that had been a terrible, possibly fatal error.
Who could have known that one day newspapers would be searchable online? she thought. Inputting her name would not only place her in Cairo at that time, on that day, but it would suggest, strongly, that she had been there under another name. Most likely in a poor section, if she was looking to start over and picked her name from a newspaper without bothering to change it legally.
The midwife, Akila Fazari, was probably still delivering babies there. The CIA had Yasmin’s photograph from when she was captured by the British. That could have been how they learned about her daughter.
Will either of us ever be free of the Americans now? she wondered.
The car stopped across the street from Battery Park, an open area at the foot of Manhattan. Yasmin saw Castle Clinton, a circular fortress whose function was once to defend New York from the British. Beyond it stood the Statue of Liberty, aglow in the spotlights that surrounded her. Yasmin felt that this symbol of freedom should mean something to her; it did not. She was a captive here, most likely about to be coerced into killing. The irony was that if the Americans had simply been true to their capitalistic nature, they could have hired her to do their dirty work. They didn’t have to threaten her daughter.
A chill rolled from her shoulders down her back.
What if that isn’t why you’re here?
“Here.”
Yasmin looked to her right. The man to her right held a plastic water bottle. Beyond him she saw a short block of tall old buildings.
“I’m not thirsty,” she said.
“I don’t care,” he told her. “You’re to drink it all.”
She noticed the top was not sealed. The water had been spiked. They wouldn’t have driven her this far to kill her, and they also knew she was going to cooperate. Why drug her?
And then it occurred to her: it wasn’t water. The men had a scenario to enact.
She drained the vodka, sat back, and waited for it to take effect.
Blurry snippets of image and sound flashed through Yasmin’s mind. A solicitous doorman, a look of concern as they helped their inebriated friend to the front desk.
He didn’t know them. He had to call up to announce them.
A walk through a lobby whose ceiling reminded her of the Sistine Chapel’s, but with a maritime theme. The bing of several elevators coming and leaving, the three of them waiting for one. It arrived. They emerged. There was a floral-pattern carpet on the floor. Then it was above her, then below again…
You’re just dizzy.
She was being carried now. There was darkness. Then she was motionless, lying on something soft. Her arms and legs were being moved…
Yasmin awoke in absolute darkness. Her head hurt on the left side, above the eyebrow, like someone was striking the inside of her skull with a brick.
Hangover.
She tried to move; that was when she remembered being bound. With leather, she could tell from the feel of it. She did not bother to struggle, but lay back. She was on some kind of foam that conformed to her body. She did not sink deeply into it, but she moved her hips slightly from side to side and felt it give with her motion, like soft clay.
She had not been brought here to rest.
Yasmin thought through the pain, realized that she was no longer wearing the clothes in which she had arrived. She was in what felt like flannel pajamas. She did not feel as if she’d been violated. Yasmin was obviously here for a test or experiment of some kind; whoever was behind it wanted her to feel as if she could trust them.
She became aware of a slight pressure on her chest, over her heart. Yasmin rolled her left shoulder several times. There appeared to be something hard in her shirt pocket. She was able to increase the pressure on the fabric by raising herself from the foam slightly. Yasmin felt an object in her pocket, and it was round. It moved slightly. She arched as far as she could in a failed attempt to let it roll out. After a moment she relaxed.
All right, she thought. At least nothing had been implanted in her flesh.
The idea of giving herself to the police in Cairo or to the American authorities now in exchange for something made it still a matter of choice. But being fitted with a device that could stop her heart or explode against her rib cage-that was untenable to her, the idea of it miserably suffocating. She did not know how she would react to what spies called an “off switch.” She had always assumed that if she were captured, it would be by some legitimate, rule-of-law agency, like Interpol.
The hammering in her skull drew her attention once more, and she lay back, listening to the hollow silence around her. She wiggled from side to side; whatever she was on was fixed to the floor. Even that level of restraint gave her some anxiety.
Was that part of the reason for incarceration? she wondered. To distract me and break me down?
The headache prevented her from falling back asleep. Yasmin lay back again, with her eyes shut. She had no idea how long she lay there. She tried the wristbands again, giving little tugs, then an extended pull, and finally putting all her will into a long, fruitless struggle-first up, then sideways in both directions, then slumping.
“Hey!” she shouted.
Yasmin didn’t expect anyone to answer, but she thought the sound of her voice might tell her something about the size or composition of the room.
Her voice sounded unusually flat.
Sound-absorbent material, she thought. Her captors didn’t want her to be heard outside the room.
She looked around as far as she could see to both sides, raised her head to gaze between her feet. There was no light, anywhere. Maybe the soundproofing was black curtains. For all she knew, they could be hanging just a few feet away. She didn’t feel a breeze, any kind of stirring, heard no exterior sounds, even though she was in Manhattan. She was definitely closed off within a room.
She flopped back and folded her thumbs in, squeezing her hands into narrow wedges. She tried to draw them through the restraints. The leather was too tight. Like the shouting, that, too, had been anticipated. She noticed then that even her nails had been trimmed. It was tougher to dig into someone’s eyes this way.
Over the years, Yasmin had evolved a three-tiered approach to captivity. Until she was apprehended at Heathrow, it had been theoretical. First, try to escape. Failing that, play on their compassion. Failing that, pretend to cooperate. Escape had failed. She sucked air through her open mouth several times to tighten her throat.
“Please!” she cried. “Anyone? I thirst.”
No one came. She repeated the plea. She did not even hear the shuffling of feet, the click of a light switch, the beep of a cell phone or a computer, the chug of a water pipe, the hum of an elevator, the passing of an airplane. She might just as well be locked in a coffin buried in six feet of frozen earth.
Her thoughts about captivity had always been about what she would do to get free, not about what someone would do to her. Women were sexually abused by jailers, and she was mentally prepared for that. It wasn’t about a man taking her; it was about a man putting himself close to her so she could hurt him. She had learned that from studying kung fu during an extended mission in Hong Kong. When someone presented his body in an aggressive way, any part of it, you let him in. And by locks and strikes you kept him from getting away. Even bound as she was, she had teeth, fingers, her head, affected submission, the vanity of the male lover who wanted to win legitimately what he had taken.
She had not contemplated isolation. Were the men from the plane waiting for someone to arrive or trying to unnerve her? She considered both with increasing anxiety. Though she realized that weakening her was probably the goal, she couldn’t help herself. Either one accepted a situation and thought about something else or one tried to accumulate information, understand motivation, replay what had been seen and heard in search of clues.
She did the latter, for what seemed like an hour or more, long enough for her headache to subside somewhat.
And then the world went suddenly, painfully white.