‘You’re his father,’ I said quietly. ‘Your son is your responsibility – save him.’
I had learned long ago in Geneva that love wasn’t weak, love was strong. Now I had gambled everything on the power of it. The Saracen said nothing, immobilized – unable to think or decide – caught between his grand plan for the future and his son’s life.
I had to force him, and I reached down into my fragmented mind and remembered what I had to say. ‘What value is a promise,’ I said, ‘especially one to a dying wife? But go ahead if you want to – break a promise made before Allah.’
He stared at me, breathing in shallow gulps, scared. ‘How do you know that? Who told you about Gaza?!’
I made no reply, and he turned away from the two of us. He was lost in darkness, trying to find a way out of the prison, thinking – I was certain – about holding his dying wife, how his son was his last tangible link to her and the sacred promise he had made to her and to God to protect him.
I saw his shoulders slump, and then his voice broke with sudden anguish. ‘What do you want?’ he said, turning towards me. ‘Tell me what to do.’
Cumali, sobbing in relief, threw her arms around him.
‘I have to let the man on the phone know that I’m alive and safe,’ I said. ‘Untie me.’
The Saracen hesitated – once he released me he knew that there was no going back – but he didn’t get any more time to think about it. Cumali stepped forward, released the leather straps that bound me to the board, took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the cuffs.
They fell to the ground and I almost passed out from the flood of pain as the circulation started to return to my swollen hands. I managed to grab the side of the trough and haul myself upright. As soon as I touched my battered foot to the ground, the explosion of crushed nerves almost sent me back into the mud, but somehow I stayed on my feet and put my hand out for the phone.
The Saracen gave it to me, but I didn’t raise it to my face – instead I reached my hand out to the two of them.
‘Weapons,’ I said.
They both handed over a pistol – the cop’s was a standard Beretta 9-mil, but the Saracen’s, probably provided by Nikolaides, was a SIG 1911 Stainless, made in Switzerland, as good a weapon as you could ever buy over the counter.
I shoved the Beretta in my pocket and kept the SIG held loosely in my swollen fingers. Given the state of my hands, I wasn’t sure I could even fire it. I shifted the weight on my damaged foot, fought back a wave of nausea and raised the phone to my mouth.
‘Ben?’ I said, my voice rasping and broken, probably barely recognizable to him.
‘Is that you?’ he asked.
The sound of the cop’s voice, something I thought I would never hear again, almost overwhelmed me. I slumped for a moment and realized how they had nearly destroyed me.
‘Sort of,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I’m gonna open the mic, Ben,’ I continued, trying to remember the details I had so meticulously planned. ‘You’ll hear whatever is going on. If something happens to me, shoot the nanny – okay?’
I saw the information register with the Saracen and Cumali, and I lowered the phone. Despite the freshly dug craters in my mind, I knew I had to move fast. I turned to the woman.
‘Go down the tunnel, stay hidden and watch the beach. When you see the others, head back fast and warn me. Remember – get smart and sign them up to attack me and the man in Bodrum will hear. You know what he’ll do.’
She nodded and ran, desperate to make it work, desperate to save the boy. In her anxiety and fear, I doubted she even realized she had become my closest ally.
I turned and looked at the Saracen. I knew that, no matter how much agony I had gone through, the really difficult part lay ahead: I had to get him to tell me the truth and not defeat me with lies and disinformation.
‘My name is Scott Murdoch,’ I said, through the pain of my injuries. ‘I am an American intelligence agent. I am going to ask you some questions.’
Chapter Forty
I HAD LAIN awake in my hotel for hours the previous night thinking about how I would interrogate Zakaria al-Nassouri if I ever got the chance.
I decided my only hope was to ask a relentless wave of questions, never giving him the opportunity to guess which ones I knew the answer to and which ones I didn’t. I had to mix knowledge and ignorance so effectively that he would be loath to risk any lie at all, and I had to do it so fast that he wouldn’t have time to think and weave.
I knew it would have been difficult a few hours ago but, wounded in body and mind, I had no idea if I could manage it now. One mistake, one successful deception, and it would have all been for nothing.