Berndt let out the breath he was holding. “In the meantime we still have to deal with the issue of McGarvey’s wife. He will try to rescue her, and as you say, Mr. President, God help the poor bastards who try to stand in his way.”
Beckett had his hand over the phone. “Mr. Adkins is in a staff meeting. Do you want me to call him out of it?”
“Yes,” Haynes said. “I want him here within the hour. Then get Herb Weissman and Frank Hoover.” Hoover was chief of DC police. “Between the three of them I want to know what the hell we can do to get the Saudis to release McGarvey’s wife before he blows up the place and starts a war all by himself.”
If she was inside the Saudi Embassy, there wasn’t much that any of them could do, except try to hold McGarvey back and wait it out, Berndt thought. And neither was a very good option at the moment.
FIFTY-EIGHT
“Am I going to lose the baby?” Kathleen asked the young Saudi doctor who’d come to tend to her injuries. He’d given her an injection for the terrible pain, and she wanted to float. But she was still frightened to the core. “Please tell me.”
The doctor looked like a teenager, with a long, narrow, sad face, and a heavy six o’clock shadow. He listened to her heart. And when he was finished he sat back. “I do not know,” he told her. “You have a broken rib, and there will be much bruising.” He shook his head. “Beyond that we would need to see X-rays, and you would need a gynecological exam. Very soon.”
He had brought a pair of dark cotton pajamas for her and a Kotex pad, as well as soap, a washcloth, and a towel so she could clean up. But he had stepped outside while she changed, and he’d refused to give her more than a cursory examination.
Not out of some religious modesty that forbade him to see a naked woman who was not his wife, Kathleen reasoned. It was because he was frightened of getting involved. If he treated her and she died, it would be on his head.
And that was the most frightening part. She knew that she could die here for lack of medical attention. The bleeding from her vagina hadn’t worsened, but it had not stopped.
“I’m still bleeding.”
“How far are you along?” he asked.
“Four weeks.”
The tight expression around his eyes softened a little. “Sometimes there is bleeding in the first month. It may mean nothing—”
“Nothing?” Kathleen screeched. “The bastard beat me unconscious. What kind of fucking monsters are you people? You’re in the goddamned Stone Age.” She felt what little control she had slipping away from her. She was on pain medication, but she felt as if she were going insane. “Do you have a wife? Is this how you would like a man to treat her?”
Kathleen half rose from the cot, and the doctor gently helped her to sit back. “Please, madam. It will do no good for you to become hysterical.”
She slowly came back from the brink. She could see that the doctor was nearly as frightened as she was. “So far, being reasonable hasn’t seemed to work for me. What else do you suggest?”
“That you cooperate with these people,” the young doctor recommended, in a reasonable tone. He was dressed in a shirt and tie, with khaki slacks but no jacket, as if he had been hastily summoned from a clinic somewhere. He’d brought the few things for her along with his doctor’s bag, but nothing else.
“That man means to kill me,” Kathleen said, her own words sending a chill through her body. She shivered involuntarily. “Then God help you, because my husband will surely come down on you like the hand of God, and destroy you all.”
The doctor’s eyes had grown wide. He hastily stuffed his stethoscope in his bag and went to the door. “Do as they say, madam. And you will come out of this alive. It’s your only hope.”
“Remember what has happened here, doctor,” Kathleen said, foggily. “If I should manage to survive, I will not forget you.”
Someone was out in the corridor. When the doctor left, Khalil and another man, who carried a video camera, came into the cell. Kathleen shrank back against the concrete wall, her fear spiking.
“The doctor gave you good advice,” Khalil said.
She didn’t think she could stand another beating. She decided that if he tried to hit her again, she would gouge his eyes out with her fingers or rip his throat apart with her teeth. Anything to stop the monster.
“Your husband doesn’t know where you are,” Khalil said, “but even if he should figure out where you are, it will be too late for you. You’re going to make a statement for the six o’clock news.”
“Or else what?” Kathleen asked. “You’re going to kill me?” She was surprised at how steady her voice sounded. She had no spit left.
“If it comes to that,” Khalil said, shrugging. He held out a sheet of paper to her. “You’re going to read this aloud.”
“What is it?” Kathleen asked, trying to shrink back even farther, but there was no place in which to retreat, except to think about Kirk. Especially his eyes: kind, understanding, patient, confident.
A faint smile crossed Khalil’s full lips. “I believe you call such a thing a propaganda statement. Harmless, but it’s part of the dance.”
Kathleen shook her head. The pain medication was taking her down. “If it’s harmless, then you don’t need me to read it.”
Khalil seemed to consider her refusal. He nodded. “Perhaps I could offer you an inducement,” he said, blandly.
“Fuck you.”
“I could call the doctor back. He’s a loyal servant who does as he is told. He has the instruments and the skill to perform a simple procedure on you. An abortion.”
There had been so much pain in their lives. This thing that she had done for Elizabeth had been meant to set the scale back into balance. To bring some small measure of joy and happiness to them.
As children we’d been led to believe that monsters didn’t really exist. But 9/11 had changed that. And bin Laden’s al-Quaida wanted to do it to us again.
She reached up and took the single sheet of paper on which was typed perhaps twenty lines in fairly large print. But it took Kathleen a few seconds to get her eyes to focus so that she could make sense of what she was supposed to read for the video camera.
She read it once, and then a second time. The message was as simple as it was chilling, because it was nothing more than a repetition of the same demands bin Laden had been making all along for something that was impossible. Al-Quaida freedom fighters wanted Saudi Arabia. They wanted every westerner off the peninsula, they wanted the dissolution of the Saudi royal family as a ruling power, and they wanted control of the oil fields. Oil would be for friends of Dar al-Islam.
It is no different than in 1776 when the valiant American freedom fighters forced their oppressive masters off the land. And today America and England are partners.
All of a sudden it struck her. She looked up into Khalil’s eyes. On the cruise ship he’d worn a balaclava to hide his features. He didn’t want his face known.
But here he had allowed her to see him.
She would not leave this place alive.
From the first he had planned on killing her. The tape was to be nothing more than a goad for Kirk to walk into a trap.
She didn’t know what to do.
FITTY-NINE
It was noon by the time the cabby dropped McGarvey off at the corner of Thirty-second and Q streets in Georgetown and he made the rest of his way on foot to the Boynton Towers apartments. The place had been modern ten years ago, but though it had aged, the eight-story building was still an elegant address and the apartment rents had skyrocketed.