“Tell me what you know about Zaman.”
“You’ll be dead soon,” the Arab man groaned. “My friends will kill you.”
“They already tried. Tell me where he is.”
“You…don’t…understand…”
Those were his last words.
Crocker left him there and hurried to the garage. He was looking for intel—computers, flash drives, notebooks, letters, anything that could potentially help the Agency locate AZ.
The bottom floor was filled with junk—an old boat, garden equipment, cardboard boxes. He was ripping through the cartons—which contained cans of motor oil and plastic bottles filled with water—when he heard something moving above.
Along the far side of the garage, he climbed a rickety wooden stairway to the second floor. The door was unlocked. The moment he opened it, he was hit with the stench, a thick combination of disinfectant and human excrement.
Several strange pieces of equipment stood in the central room—a weird-looking bench with straps and a harness of some sort. Plastic buckets on the floor. Paper towels on a bench. An old metal desk in one corner. Bottles of pills on top of it. A syringe.
What the hell is this?
He saw six little wooden cells like cages along the far wall. Then heard a whimper, like a dog’s.
Strange place to keep dogs.
Looking through the metal bars of the first two cages, he saw they were empty. Dirty mattresses lay on the floor. In the third, he made out something pale. It was a bare human leg, thin and shapely like a young girl’s.
“Hello. Can you hear me?” he whispered through the bars. The person didn’t move, though he could make out breathing.
Moving to the next, he saw a naked girl covered with what looked like dirt, feces, urine, and bruises. Judging from her eyes, she’d been drugged.
Jesus Christ!
The cages contained four women in total, scared and half alive. More like animals than human beings.
“I’m an American. I’ve come to save you,” Crocker said in a whisper.
All he got back were whimpers.
“Do any of you speak English?”
They didn’t answer.
He tried again. “The keys. Do any of you know where the keys are? Tell me where the keys are, and I’ll let you out.”
As smoke from the house drifted in the open door, they hid their heads and moaned—except for one bold girl, tall and thin, with matted hair, who stared at Crocker defiantly, then pulled herself up and spat through the bars.
At least one of them had some fight left in her.
Crocker wiped off the spittle that had landed on the front of his shirt. “I’m an American,” he said again. “I’ve come to save you.”
“Don’t touch me! I’ll kill you!” she screeched back in heavily accented English.
“I’m not going to touch you. I want to get you out of here.”
“You’re a liar. A fucking liar! I know what you want!”
“I’m not lying to you. Listen to me. Listen…”
Her delicate long nose sniffed the air. “Is something burning?”
“The house. I set it on fire.”
Her expression changed to curiosity. “Where are you from?”
“USA.”
“You’re American.”
“Yes, I am.”
She nodded and scratched the skin under her pale right breast. “I have a cousin who is studying veterinary medicine at George Mason University.”
“That’s not far from me,” he whispered back.
She grimaced, pointed past his shoulder, and said, “The keys, I think, are there, in the desk. Try the top drawer.”
“Thanks.”
He heard a creak on the stairs and froze. Holding a finger up to his mouth, he hid against the wall near the door.
The footsteps got closer.
The girl he had been talking to recoiled to the back of her cage and hid.
He readied the AK and waited, his heart pounding hard.
“Boss,” someone whispered. “Boss, are you up here?”
It was Akil.
Chapter Twelve
And whosoever shed man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.
—Il Duce, The Boondock Saints
CROCKER WANTED to get away from the farm before the French authorities arrived. But there were things he had to take care of first.
Continue the search for intel, and question the four female captives.
He and Akil had literally given two of them—the ballsy one from Romania who said her name was Dorina, and a rail-thin brunette who hailed from a small town in the Ukraine—the shirts off their backs. The sweaty, soiled, bloodstained polos hung over the girls’ skeletal torsos to the tops of their thighs. The other two sat in the corner, wrapped in a dirty blanket, their eyes staring blankly at the cracked linoleum floor. One hailed from Georgia. The fourth, who had a mole above the corner of her mouth, couldn’t remember her name.