Now the beggar thought he had him cornered, bowing all the time as he came closer, holding out his saucer for money, murmuring the traditional greeting ‘Eid Mubarak’. Tlass gave the greeting back, as tradition demanded, but that was all he was giving – he brushed the saucer aside and turned to continue down the path.
The Saracen’s arm exploded across the tiny distance between them and, in one blurred moment, it locked tight around Tlass’s neck, startling and choking him in equal measure.
The deputy director’s first thought, born out of fury, was that there was no way he was letting him have any money, the refugee would have to kill him to get it. The second was how could a beggar, living on nothing more than garbage, be so fucking strong?
Already Tlass was gasping for breath and, as he dredged up from memory the unarmed combat move to counteract a choke hold, desperately trying to implement it, he felt a searing pain rip into the base of his neck. Blinded by the swelling heat of it, he would have screamed if he could have found the air. He knew immediately it wasn’t a knife – that would have slashed his throat and sent the warmth of his own blood streaming down his chest. The thought had barely formulated itself when a ball of fire burst into the muscle of his neck and started bullying into his bloodstream.
The pain staggered him, but he knew now what it was. A syringe, with the plunger being driven down hard. Given the circumstances, it was an impressive piece of reasoning – entirely accurate too. Confused and terrified, Tlass knew he had to yell for help quickly, but whatever chemical was flooding his body suddenly meant the muscles of his mouth wouldn’t say the words that were screaming in his head.
The chemical flood hit his limbs – he realized with a wild rage that nothing could stop it now – and he saw his car keys fall from the jelly that used to be his hand. His attacker’s fingers flashed out and caught them in mid-air and it seemed to tell Tlass, more than any other thing, that he was in the hands of a master.
Chapter Fifteen
TLASS BUCKLED AT the knees. The saracen caught him before he fell and half carried him towards his vehicle – a black American SUV, the same one whose windshield he had washed so many times. Halfway there, he stopped.
He smacked Tlass hard across the face and saw the prisoner’s eyes spark with pain and fury.
During the planning, one of his major concerns had been that intravenous sedatives recovered from a body might contain a chemical marker that would allow them to be traced to a batch number. Such a number would lead to the regional hospital he had been working at in Lebanon, and it wouldn’t take diligent investigators – a team from the Syrian secret police, for example – very long to start working through the list of employees and find that he was supposedly on vacation during the relevant period.
There were, however, enough donkeys hauling carts in Beirut for the city to have developed a large and unregulated market in veterinary products. As a result, it was an ampoule of an untraceable horse tranquillizer that was ripping through Tlass’s body now, and the Saracen only hoped he had calculated the dose correctly – enough to inhibit any muscle control but not so much that it caused the victim to pass out. If Tlass’s eyes glazed over, the man would be useless – whatever else happened, the prisoner had to stay alert.
Whack! The Saracen hit him across the face again for good measure, then resumed hauling him towards the SUV. Just as he had learned by observing Tlass while he washed the windshield, he used the button on the key to unlock the doors, opened the rear one and bundled the prisoner inside.
The interior of the vehicle was like a cave. All through the searingly hot countries that extend from the Mediterranean down past the Arabian Gulf, there is one unfailing way to work out who has wasta and who doesn’t. The slang word for it is makhfee, and it means tint – as in the coating you put on car windows to keep the sun out. Restricted by law to 15 per cent, the more wasta you have, the more makhfee you can get away with.
Tlass had a great deal of wasta indeed, and the windows of his Cadillac were tinted to an intimidating 80 per cent – making the cabin almost completely private, ideal for what was about to take place within. The Saracen swung in behind his prisoner, slammed the door, climbed into the driver’s seat, put the key in the ignition and turned the engine on. He wasn’t going anywhere, but he needed the air-conditioning blowing as cold as possible. He flicked the switch that operated the rear seats and watched the bench lie down until Tlass was flopping about on a flat platform like a tuna on the deck.
Working to the choreography he had planned for weeks, he pulled rolls of thick electrical tape out of his pocket and scrambled on to the platform. Tlass watched in mute terror as the master grabbed his wrists, taping them to grab handles on the doors, spreading him out face up, just as Tlass had once done to a naked woman he had taken great pleasure in ‘interrogating’ until she became too exhausted to scream and he had grown bored and garrotted her.