Tlass was up on one elbow when he heard the passenger door of the SUV being thrown open. He felt the Saracen’s powerful hands grab him by the lapels and haul him across the console into a sitting position in the passenger seat. He tried to resist, but it was to no effect.
The Saracen extended the passenger seatbelt and kept looping it tight around the prisoner’s bloodied neck and arms, holding the exhausted man upright in the seat, binding him tight. He snapped the buckle of the seatbelt home, checked that Tlass was completely immobilized and scrambled out of the vehicle. He ran across the parking lot, scooped up the plastic containers with the eyes and sprinted back to the vehicle.
As soon as he turned the engine on the phone began ringing again. The Saracen would have liked to switch it off but, knowing nothing about the system, decided not to touch it. He backed the SUV out hard and made sure the wheels crushed the glass from the broken window. He would have preferred to pick it up, leaving no evidence at all, but he wasn’t willing to spend the time. First, the disembodied voice and now the drumbeat of the phone told him the hounds were loose and, while he had no idea how close they were, the delay in searching the building and his shredded nerves were screaming that he needed to change his plan fast.
He swung the wheel and hit the gas, fishtailing out on to the access road. Instead of joining the freeway and heading towards a longterm parking lot at the airport, where he had intended to execute Tlass and abandon the car among thousands of others, he decided to trigger the fall-back plan and ditch the vehicle as fast as possible.
It was for that reason, and that reason alone, that everything went to hell for the rest of us. He kept going around the access road and sped out the back of the complex. Tlass’s sons, pistols in their laps, came off the freeway and through the front entrance and missed seeing the black Cadillac by no more than ten seconds.
Ten seconds – nothing really – but it was enough. It meant, not for the first time, that the lives of countless people would turn on a tiny event. If only the bomb hadn’t been placed under an oak table in the Führer’s conference room. If only the Tsar of Russia hadn’t executed Lenin’s brother. If only – but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention, and that fate favours the bad as often as the good.
The men in the Toyota arrived those few seconds too late and didn’t see their father’s car, which meant they didn’t give chase, they didn’t capture the Saracen and nobody ever discovered that six small glass vials were missing.
Chapter Twenty-one
EVEN BEFORE THE sons had finished searching the cluster of parking lots, the Saracen had found the road he wanted. He turned on to it, switched off the Cadillac’s headlights and was swallowed up by the long, pot-holed blacktop.
On one side was a municipal dump, and the Saracen made sure that he travelled slowly enough not to raise the flocks of seagulls that attended it or scare the wild dogs constantly roaming its perimeter. On the other side was a wasteland of scrub, its only landmarks the hulks of abandoned vehicles and a canal overgrown with reeds and full of fetid water.
The Saracen slowed at a chain-link fence, nosed the Cadillac through a gate hanging on its hinges and pulled to a stop in a deserted cul-de-sac which serviced what some optimistic realtor had once called an industrial estate. Fronting the road was a shamble of buildings forming an auto-repair yard which was probably a chop-shop, a low-slung warehouse selling reconditioned washing machines and five converted garages used to package lamb delicacies. With food, sometimes it’s better not to know.
Thanks to the pain, the seatbelt around his neck that was as tight as any garrotte, the fever and a galloping infection from the unsterilized scalpel, Tlass had plunged into a twisted and psychedelic unconsciousness. The Saracen opened the door, untied the belt and pulled him out into the rotting silence. The warm air Tlass dragged into his lungs allowed a splinter of reality to enter his fevered world and he managed to hold himself upright, tottering.
‘You do good work with the garrotte – one professional to another,’ he said through his damaged larynx. With which he collapsed to the broken asphalt and started whispering in weird fragments about God and the heavenly light show.
The Saracen knew where it came from: like people who have had arms amputated and can still feel their fingers, a person who had lost the use of their eyes often saw displays of spectacular lights. The Saracen left Tlass to his private aurora borealis, gathered the things he needed from the back of the SUV then dragged the prisoner by his collar to a garbage skip full of refuse from the meat works.