“Fucking bitch,” the Frenchman said savagely. “I should make you clean that up.”
He grabbed hold of the chain linking her wrists and pulled her back into her seat, then rose and went into the toilet. Sarah heard the sound of water splashing into the basin. When Jean-Michel emerged he was holding a damp linen towel, which he used to punitively scrub the vomit from her lips. Then, from a small leather case, he produced another syringe and a vial of clear liquid. He loaded the syringe without much care for the dosage, then seized hold of her arm. Sarah tried to pull away, but he hit her twice in the mouth. As the drug entered her bloodstream, she remained conscious but felt as though a great weight was pressing down on her body. Her eyelids closed, but she remained trapped in the present.
“I’m still awake,” she said. “Your drugs aren’t working anymore.”
“They’re working just fine.”
“Then why am I still conscious?”
“It’s easier to get answers that way.”
“Answers to what?”
“Better fasten your seat belt,” he said mockingly. “We’ll be landing in a few minutes.”
Sarah, the model prisoner, tried to do as she was told, but her arms lay limply in her lap, unable to obey her commands.
SHE LEANED her face against the cold glass of the window and looked out. The darkness was absolute. A few moments later they entered the clouds, and the plane pitched in wave after wave of turbulence. Jean-Michel poured himself another glass of whiskey and drank it in a single swallow.
They emerged from the clouds into a snowstorm. Sarah looked down and studied the pattern of the ground lights. There was a mass of brilliant illumination wrapped around the northern end of a large body of water and strands of lesser light laying along the shoreline like jewels. She tried to remember where Zizi had said she’d be going. Zurich , she thought. Yes, that was it. Zurich…Herr Klarsfeld…The Manet for which Zizi would pay thirty million and not a million more…
The plane passed north of central Zurich and banked toward the airport. Sarah prayed for a crash landing. It was obscenely smooth, though-so smooth she was unaware of the moment of touchdown. They taxied for several minutes. Jean-Michel was gazing calmly out the window, while Sarah was sliding further into oblivion. The fuselage seemed as long as an Alpine tunnel, and when she tried to speak, words would not form in her mouth.
“The drug I just gave you is shorter in duration,” Jean-Michel said, his tone maddeningly reassuring. “You’ll be able to talk soon. At least I hope so-for your sake.”
The plane began to slow. Jean-Michel lowered the black veil over her face, then unlocked the handcuffs and the shackles. When they finally came to a stop he opened the rear cabin door and poked his head out to make certain things were in order. Then he seized Sarah beneath the arms and pulled her upright. Blood returned painfully to her feet, and her knees buckled. Jean-Michel caught her before she could fall. “One foot in front of the other,” he said. “Just walk, Sarah. You remember how to walk.”
She did, but barely. The door was just ten feet away, but to Sarah it seemed a mile at least. A few paces into her journey she stepped on the hem of the abaya and pitched forward, but once again Jean-Michel prevented her from falling. When finally she reached the door she was met by a blast of freezing air. It was snowing heavily and bitterly cold, the night made darker by the black fabric of the veil. Once again there were no customs officers or security men in evidence, only a black Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates. Its rear door hung ajar, and through the opening Sarah could see a man in a gray overcoat and fedora. Even with the drugs clouding her thoughts, she could comprehend what was happening. AAB Holdings and the Saudi consulate in Zurich had requested VIP diplomatic treatment for a passenger arriving from Saint Maarten. It was just like the departure: no customs, no security, no avenue of escape.
Jean-Michel helped her down the stairs, then across the tarmac and into the back of the waiting Mercedes. He closed the door and headed immediately back toward the jet. As the car lurched forward, Sarah looked at the man seated next to her. Her vision blurred by the veil, she saw him only in the abstract. Enormous hands. A round face. A tight mouth surrounded by a bristly goatee. Another version of bin Talal, she thought. A well-groomed gorilla.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m unimportant. I’m no one.”
“Where are we going?”
He drove his fist into her ear and told her not to speak again.
THIRTY SECONDS LATER the Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates sped past a snow-covered figure peering forlornly beneath the open hood of a stalled car. The man seemed to pay the Mercedes no heed as it swept by, though he did look up briefly as it headed up the ramp to the motorway. He forced himself to count slowly to five. Then he slammed the hood and climbed behind the wheel. When he turned the key, the engine started instantly. He slipped the car into gear and pulled onto the road.
SHE DID NOT know how long they drove-an hour, perhaps longer-but she knew the purpose of their journey. The stops, the starts, the sudden double-backs and nauseating accelerations: Eli Lavon had referred to such maneuvers as countersurveillance. Uzi Navot had called it wiping your backside.
She stared out the heavily tinted window of the car. She had spent several years in Switzerland as a young girl and knew the city reasonably well. These were not the Zurich streets she remembered of her youth. These were the gritty, dark streets of the northern districts and the Industrie-Quartier. Ugly warehouses, blackened brick factories, smoking rail yards. There were no pedestrians on the pavements and no passengers in the streetcars. It seemed she was alone in the world with only the Unimportant One for company. She asked him once more where they were going. He responded with an elbow to Sarah’s abdomen that made her cry out for her mother.
He took a long look over his shoulder, then he forced Sarah to the floor and murmured something in Arabic to the driver. She was lost now in darkness. She pushed the pain to one corner of her mind and tried to concentrate on the movement of the car. A right turn. A left. The thump-thump of rail tracks. An abrupt stop that made the tires scream. The Unimportant One pulled her back onto the seat and opened the door. When she seized hold of the armrest and refused to let go, he engaged in a brief tug of war before losing patience and giving her a knifelike blow to the kidney that sent charges of pain to every corner of her body.
She screamed in agony and released the armrest. The Unimportant One dragged her from the car and let her fall to the ground. It was cold cement. It seemed they were in a parking garage or the loading dock of a warehouse. She lay there writhing in agony, gazing up at her tormentor through the black gauze of the veil. The Saudi woman’s view of the world. A voice told her to rise. She tried but could not.
The driver got out of the car and, together with the Unimportant One, lifted her to her feet. She stood there suspended for a moment, her arms spread wide, her body draped in the abaya, and waited for another hammer blow to her abdomen. Instead she was deposited into the backseat of a second car. The man seated there was familiar to her. She had seen him first in a manor house in Surrey that did not exist, and a second time at a villa in Saint Bart’s that did. “Good evening, Sarah,” said Ahmed bin Shafiq. “It’s so nice to see you again.”
32.
IS YOUR NAME REALLY Sarah, or should I call you something else?”