Assad reached for his holster. Sam’s nerve failed him just long enough for the man to pull the gun free, but he finally squeezed the trigger as Assad was leveling the weapon to fire. As he did, someone grabbed him from behind, and he felt them both tumbling backward as two blasts rang in his ear, deafening. He felt a powerful blow to the back of his head, as if someone had torn open the base of his skull, and his last fleeting thought was to wonder how Assad had managed to hit him at such a poor angle, and with such a devastating exit wound.
Then, for the second time in as many days, he was out, oblivious, erased from the moment.
30
Anwar Sharaf watched in agony as the numbered lights flickered in sequence, floor by floor, as the elevator rose to twenty-one.
“Stay behind me when the doors open,” Mansour said to his left.
“Are you crazy? I’ll be the first one in if I have to kill you.”
The elevator slowed. Sharaf raised himself up on the balls of his feet. Just as the doors began sliding apart, two gunshots echoed sharply, and he cried out in anguish. He shoved through, banging his shoulders. The Tsar and Hedayat were stumbling toward him in an open doorway, looking confused and disoriented. Some goon was coming through in their wake. Sharaf didn’t even pause. He ran past them, gun raised as he looked wildly about him, trying to take in the whole scene at once.
Laleh lay on her back to his right, her eyes open. Keller was on top of her, faceup, eyes also open but horribly fixed and glazed. Assad was sprawled across a chair at the far end, blood gouting onto the long wooden table. He groaned, clutching his chest. The redhead, Miss Weaver, stood next to Hal Liffey by the windows in a far corner. Their hands were raised. Mansour rushed around the table to detain them. Sharaf dropped to one knee and grabbed Laleh’s hand.
“Laleh! Are you—?”
She pulled her hand free and struggled from beneath Keller, then raised herself onto her knees, gasping like an exhausted runner. Her clothes were bloody, but Sharaf realized joyously that the blood wasn’t hers. Then his relief turned instantly to shame as he saw that the blood was Keller’s. The young man still wasn’t moving a muscle. Mouth slack, eyes locked. Sharaf dropped his gun, but Laleh was a step ahead of him as she checked the American’s pulse.
“I think he’s all right,” she said.
“But he’s—”
“Out cold. His head hit the table as I was pulling him down. Assad was about to shoot. He’s been hit in the shoulder, but nowhere else. Call an ambulance.”
“We can use the one downstairs. What could you possibly have been thinking, Laleh?”
They embraced on their knees, and he felt her relax into a sob.
“Brave girl,” he whispered. “And a damned fool. If you think Assad was dangerous, wait until your mother sees you.”
They shook together in laughter and relief. And that was the scene that Sam Keller opened his eyes to, seconds later. Looking up sideways from the floor, he saw the blur of father and daughter embracing, yet kneeling as if in prayer. At first he was groggy enough to believe it was a dream.
Then Sharaf looked down at him and smiled. The man looked exhausted, grateful. Or he did until Laleh reached down and gently stroked Sam’s cheek, at which point the father frowned. Only then was Sam convinced that this must all be real.
31
It took one day of hospital treatment and two days of paperwork for Sam Keller to convince Hal Liffey’s consular replacement that he wasn’t really dead.
By then, Liffey, Nanette Weaver, and Lieutenant Assad had all begun pointing fingers at one another, while the mobsters kept their own counsel. The conspirators might well have maintained a united front of silence if not for the digital recorder that Laleh had been wearing on the evening they kidnapped her. But as soon as its contents became known, the accused began spouting a flurry of conflicting cover stories, too complicated for anyone but well-trained attorneys to puzzle out, at the rate of $500 an hour.
Still, the rogues were making progress of a sort. Of the ten people arrested that morning, only two of the hapless goons hadn’t yet mustered enough money and connections to be released on bail.
Fifty young women from Iraq, meanwhile, had arrived dehydrated and seasick early Tuesday morning aboard the container ship
You might say that Sam Keller was doing the same thing, albeit under more posh circumstances at the Shangri-La. His new passport had finally arrived only an hour earlier, delivered by courier along with a ticket for an Emirates nonstop to New York. Economy class, but he’d take it. The airport taxi was due in an hour.
As Sam sipped a gin and tonic in the lobby bar, luggage at his feet, he was already wondering who would prove to be more difficult—the consular officials who had grudgingly sorted out his details or his old employers at Pfluger Klaxon. Innocent or not, in the eyes of each group he had unpardonably damaged reputations by exposing the misdeeds of valued employees. He might need a lawyer as much as Nanette.
But at least two people remained indisputably on his side, and Sam watched as they approached him across the palatial lobby. They were quite a sight amid the gathered opulence and Western fashion—a slender young woman sheathed in a black abaya and a pudgy fifty-something cop, in uniform, with a droopy mustache and a stupid red beret. A few tables over, a trio of cosmopolitan-looking Euros had already drawn a bead on the pair, and one was snickering behind his drink.
