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Ambassador Stearns was sitting stiffly on the floor next to Big Al Prejean. They hadn’t been in the room for more than ten minutes when the door opened and Earl Parker was thrust into the room.
After the door slammed shut, Kate said, “Are you okay? We were worried.”
Parker sat heavily on the bed and said, “I’m fine. He just stu
“Did you see any of my crew?”
Parker nodded. “They were herding them into the mess hall. A couple of your people tried to resist.” His lips curled. “They shot them like dogs.”
Kate swallowed. “How many?”
“Five, maybe six. Everybody else settled down. I think they’ll be okay for now.” He shook his head sadly. “I know that’s not much consolation.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not.”
Parker didn’t reply.
“The guy who’s in charge says he’s Abu Nasir,” Kate said. “It seemed like you knew him.”
Parker nodded. But Kate detected something else behind his silent confirmation, something he was leaving out.
“Do you know what he wants?”
“He hasn’t told us yet.” Parker hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to continue; then, deciding that he would, he lowered his voice to a whisper that only she could hear. “But it’s my fault this is happening.”
“Your fault?”
“The man who calls himself Abu Nasir . . . his real name is Tillman Davis. He used to work for me.” Parker looked away in apparent shame as he went on to tell her about the secret mission he had initiated. He told her about Tillman’s transformation from covert operative to unrepentant terrorist, and about how he had enlisted Gideon Davis, who had come to Mohan with Parker to retrieve his brother. “Trusting Tillman was the biggest mistake of my life. And now Gideon . . .” His voice cracked with regret. “I should have left him out of this.”
Suddenly the steel door slid open, and an Asian man wearing a Sky TV T-shirt walked into the room, pointed at Kate, and barked in heavily accented English, “You! Come with me.”
Kate didn’t move.
“Just do what they tell you,” Parker said softly.
“Come!” the guard yelled. He yanked her toward the door, and she saw Big Al coiling to spring at him, but she shook her head sharply, stopping him before he did anything stupid.
“It’s okay, Al. I’ll be fine.” The sentry pulled a black cloth hood over her head, tying it loosely at her neck. Kate’s heart began beating faster, and her mouth felt dry as sandpaper. Were they going to hurt her, beat her, chop off her head?
The sentry guided her out the door and into the passageway. She couldn’t see through the blindfold, but the man exerted just enough pressure on her arm to steer her down the hallway without her tripping or banging into anything.
Her footsteps echoed as they moved slowly through the passageways. She tried to figure out where they were heading, but after winding around inside the rig for a while, she lost track. Eventually the man stopped.
She stood silently for what seemed like minutes. Finally another man spoke. He was behind her. “Knees,” the man said. She recognized his voice. It belonged to Abu Nasir, the man who had boarded her rig by impersonating Cole Ransom. “Knees,” he said again.
Before she could respond, someone kicked the back of her right leg, buckling the joint and forcing her to land on her knees.
“We have clear and simple objectives here, Ms. Murphy. We will not waver in those objectives. Harming you is not one of them, but if you try to get in the way, I will not hesitate to kill you.”
Only yesterday Senator McClatchy had been questioning her about Abu Nasir, a man who had seemed to her more mythical than real, the stuff of urban legend. And now she not only knew his real name and what he looked like . . . but he was on her rig, threatening her life.
“Please indicate that you understand me, ma’am.”
“I understand English,” she said, “if that’s what you mean.”
Someone punched her in the stomach. She gagged, almost falling on her face, but managed to remain upright.
“You may think that being flippant does not interfere with our objectives,” Abu Nasir said. “You would be wrong in that assessment. Are we on the same page now?”
She nodded.
“Outstanding.”
The blindfold came off. She blinked. She was in the mess hall, a trio of halogen work lamps blazing in her face. Squinting to better see the silhouetted terrorists, she made out an approaching figure whose features came into relief as he drew closer. He was carrying a crisply folded square of bright yellow material, which he tossed toward her, the momentum of his throw causing it to unfurl partially. It was some kind of jumpsuit.
“Put this on.”
Kate offered no response.
“If you don’t do it, I’ll do it for you.” His voice was flat, no
She picked up the jumpsuit and said, “I need somewhere to change.”
“You have a place. Right here.”
She held his look for a long, defiant moment, then kicked off her shoes, unfastened her skirt, and let it fall to the ground. She unbuttoned her shirt and peeled it off, until she was left wearing only her bra and panties. She held Abu Nasir’s look the entire time. Not once did his eyes leave hers, not even for a flickering moment of voyeuristic curiosity about what her seminaked body looked like. She pulled on the jumpsuit, shrugging her arms into the sleeves, then stepping back into her shoes.
As she zippered the jumpsuit, Abu Nasir nodded toward the man just behind him, who now adjusted a tripod-mounted monitor toward her. Displayed on the screen in large capital letters were the words: MY NAME IS KATE MURPHY. A video camera was mounted on another branch of the tripod. “All you have to do is read the teleprompter, like those phony politicians in Washington.”
“No.”
“Fine. We’ll shoot you in the head. I’m sure Ambassador Stearns will be happy to read the statement.”
Kate tried navigating through her swirling emotions. Anger, fear, humiliation. Whatever message he wanted her to read—was it really worth dying for? She didn’t think so. Especially since whoever saw it would certainly understand that she’d read it under duress. “Okay,” she finally said, her voice soft as a whisper.
“See how easy that was?” Abu Nasir pointed toward the man holding the cue cards. “When he points at you, start reading.”
The man operating the monitor pointed at Kate, who began to read in as flat a tone as she could muster.
“My name is Kate Murphy,” she read. “I am the executive in charge of the Obelisk, which is now under the control of Abu Nasir.” When she read the next sentence on the scrolling text, Kate stopped and her mouth went dry.
“Just read what’s on the screen, Ms. Murphy. Please don’t make me shoot you in the head. I’m trying to save ammo.”
She didn’t want to continue, but short of dying on the
When Gideon was ten years old, he and Tillman had whittled spears out of hickory, sharpening the points with Case knives and playing a game of their own invention called Spartan. The rules were simple. You stood about thirty yards apart and threw your spears at each other. If you had to move to get out of the way of the other person’s spear, you lost.
Since he was Tillman’s junior by two years, Gideon couldn’t throw quite as hard or quite as accurately. So he usually lost.
One crisp fall day, he hurled the spear, and before it even left his hand, he knew that he had done everything right. The spear was heading straight for Tillman.
But Gideon’s euphoria vanished as quickly as it had appeared when he realized that Tillman wasn’t going to move. The spear arced gracefully through the air, seemingly as slow as a feather carried on a soft breeze. Gideon had watched his brother’s face. Tillman knew the spear was coming, too, knew it was going to hit him. But he didn’t so much as flinch— he just clamped his mouth shut and let it come.