Fuck.
The shitty motorcycle that Sylvia had commandeered for me musta been ninety per cent putty. Bald tyres skidded on dirt. The engine gave a sad groan with each turn of the throttle. Yet somehow its sputtering cylinders delivered me to the mile of scrub that fringed the Alcor compound, before dying in a cloud of black smoke.
"Cover your face." Sylvia's voice crackled in my ear as I heaved the excuse for a bike into a drainage ditch before the poor fucker exploded on me. "Are you at the perimeter fence?"
I tucked my black keffiyeh tight over my beard and pulled my hood lower. "Almost."
Five minutes of belly-crawling through dirt and scrubby bushes, and I saw him. The first ring of Alcor's security system: a sniper lounging against a balcony built high into a fir tree's canopy. Stupid motherfucker was checking his phone. How many times had I told my men never to take their eyes off the approaches to the Alcor complex? I'd expected standards to slip since my arrest, but I hadn't expected the new Head of Alcor Security to be a negligent fucking idiot. I crawled on, unseen.
Sylvia's voice wavered. "You should have taken more weapons."
Five months since I'd held a gun, the cold metal of Sylvia's pistol bit my palm. I shook my head to dispel the creeping nausea. "I got all I need."
If she got between me and Dante, I'd shoot her in a heartbeat. I'd have to.
"Jason, remember. Abort mission as soon as you get news that Dante has rescued Rayan. Sergeant Jones's squad is ready on the outskirts of the city with explosives. She'll move in once you've gotten out."
"If I can't get out, I'll tell the Marines to blow this entire fucking place to ash."
"If you can't get out," Sylvia's voice was like lead, "I'll order Kate Jones to drag you out."
"It's OK, Sylvia," I whispered. "Really."
Wasn't scared of dying for Dante. Besides, if the unthinkable happened and he didn't make it outta there, then nor would I. And nor would she.
Thorns and scrubby branches caught at my hair as I crawled to the weakest point in the system—the sewer. I'd often campaigned for tighter security, Zaki acquiescing until we'd lifted the inner courtyard's drain cover and had peered into a waterlogged and shit-filled sewer tunnel. We'd concluded that nothing inside the Alcor complex was tempting enough for intruders to endure that haraam journey.
But I wasn't an ordinary intruder. Everything I loved was on the other side of that wall.
The concrete-set manhole cover slid aside with an ear-piercing scrape, decades of dust billowing into the sewer tunnel beneath. I closed my eyes, murmured a quick "Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim," and leaped down the stinking hole.
The tunnels wound in endless loops, filth seeping into my boots until my socks squelched. Unidentifiable sludge and debris bobbed past me in the slow-flowing stink. But I knew the sewer's every twist and turn like I knew its mirror image of pathways above ground. I trudged on until the cavernous chamber of the Alcor complex junction ended. In front of me lay a single tunnel upward to the complex's inner courtyard.
My heart sank into my boots. The tunnel exit was constricted by a mountain of filth, the tight ladder up toward the courtyard blocked by a brown mass the size of me, and then some. Only one way into Alcor: I had to clear the blockage.
Fanboy reveries of Dante on the clock tower kept me sane as I plunged my hands into the putrid mass of sludge and shit and fuck-knew-what else. My hands hit something hard: bone. Shit-covered fingers slithered along the ridges of broken ribs. Clawing away fistfuls of watery sewage revealed more bones beneath. A stringy skeleton lay decaying in the water, both femurs broken, one hand chopped off at the wrist. Dread raked through my mind like claws.
It wasn't mere sewer-shit blocking the manhole exit. It was a mangled corpse. The remains of some poor fucker who'd succumbed to Alcor was blocking my exit. I kicked at the rotten thing, my boots skidding desperately in mud and grime to carve out a path to the manhole beyond. My palm landed on cold metal as I shoved at the corpse's chest. Armour? A weapon?
Grasping at the slippery metal, I tugged it out of the dripping brown mass and stared at the object in my hand in horror. Covered in filth, still I knew it. Its dull glint had been burned into my gray matter years earlier. The nicked blade of my kris stared back at me. He'd been one of my victims.
Some unfortunate bastard, marked for death by her, had been mutilated by one of my wavy blades in the depths of a Demon-frenzy and flung into the sewer by Alcor's fixers. Who was he? A debtor? A spy for another gang? An employee who'd fucked up? Whoever he'd been, I'd killed him for her.
As haraam a gesture as it was, I held out my hands and recited four takbirs for the man I'd murdered, before pushing his body into the deepest of the sewer's pissy streams of water. The most pitiful burial, performed by the murderer of the deceased, but it was the best I could give him.
How many sewers, drainage ditches, shallow graves in Riyadh, hid the rotting corpses of my victims?
The kris tucked into my belt loop, I hauled myself up the first steel rung of the step ladder to Alcor. Lucky me, the manhole cover popped up in the inner courtyard just as a security guard turned a corner to face me.
Barely outta his teens, his eyes bulged in terror like he was staring at a fucking swamp monster and not a man. I flung the manhole cover away and ran straight at him, shit and filth flying off me before he could even wrestle his gun from his belt. A low kick to the ankle, two blows to the chest, and I grabbed his rifle. A sharp twist, and I drove the stock into his temple before dragging his knocked-out ass into the courtyard's gloom.
I adopted my victim's little trot through the inner courtyard, throwing a noncommittal "Salaam" to a guard atop a gantry, before hurrying to the shadow of the courtyard wall. A deft swipe of my tattoo at the scanner checkpoint, and I sailed through the gate before he'd so much as turned from his station. Security protocols had taken a dive since I'd left, alhamdulillah.
Rayan was surely in the residential compound with her. But Dante? He coulda been anywhere in the sprawling village that was the Alcor complex. As brilliant an operative as Dante was, if she knew his relationship to Stephanie Grey, she'd use him as a warning kill. I couldn't let her find him.
Her whitewashed stone compound's garden looked as pretty and well-tended as it had always been. Outta place amid so much death and hate, the sweet fragrance of jasmine and tamarisk wafted toward me on night breezes. My knees wobbled and my stomach knotted at the dissonance of the memory; the sweetest of fragrances always marked the darkest of my deeds every time she summoned me to her rooms.
But my terror could wait; I needed to be strong for Dante, and for Rayan. As well-meaning as it was, Sylvia's advice to wait in hiding until Dante or Rayan showed up was gonna get me shot in the face by a sentry. I had a better idea.
Minutes passed as sentries on meandering patrol routes skirted close by my hiding place behind a cloud of jasmine cascading over a trellis. Then, in the quiet of the garden I saw her, a bulging laundry basket wedged against her hip, her face obscured by shadows as she walked. The housemaid.
She pressed a tiny door scanner with swift fingers and swept into the building's kitchens. I made my move, springing up behind her and wedging my foot in the door. She clambered past me with a yelp and lunged for the keypad alarm to alert sentries.
"Please, sister!" I wailed in garbled Arabic, my arms raised in surrender, praying that she wouldn't scream. "Please, help me."
My heart in my throat, I tugged my keffiyeh. The fabric fell away from my face.
She blinked at me. A glimmer of recognition flitted across her face. Her expression then wavered between wide-eyed terror and what could only have been pity.
She beckoned me into the kitchen and dumped the basket on a counter before settling in a chair to fold laundry, like letting an intruder into the most well-guarded section of the compound was everyday shit for her.
I followed dumbly, my mouth gaping like a fish. "You know me, sister?"
She murmured, "You haven't been here for five months, Amrika Sayid. They said you died in Jeddah."
Of course, she knew who I was. Adept at moving silently around the house, she washed her mistress's laundry, cleaned her room, inconspicuously replenished and replaced shit, like a welcome little ghost. So quiet, she'd probably even seen me sleeping in her mistress's bed.
"Please. I need to get to Sayidaty's rooms. Can you help me?"
"If you wish to see Sayidaty, Zaki Sayid can arrange an interview for you," she said, piling neatly folded laundry onto the table with one hand, the other hand hidden under the folds of her abaya.
"No. Sayidaty took something that is not hers."
The maid put down her laundry. "So, the rumors are true."
"Rumors?"
"Rumors that the young Sayid is her brother. They say he went to America years ago, but has repented."
My heart trembled in my chest. Regardless of the bullshit propaganda that Alcor's workers had been fed, none of them could possibly believe that Rayan would want to be here. Unless they all believed it was fair punishment for running away.
I stretched out my palms in a plea. "Not her brother. Her son. He needs to get home to his father in America. Please help me."
"Her son, Sayid?" As if suddenly remembering who she was talking to, the maid whipped her head around her, furtive eyes tracking across the dark windows of the kitchen. "They are the same age. They must be siblings."
"I can't explain. But they aren't the same age. He's like a brother to me. I would die to get him back to safety. Please."
"I'm sorry, Sayid." She inched toward the scanner alarm at the kitchen door. "You must go before I tell Security."
"He isn't safe here." I followed her, my voice thin with desperation, arms still outstretched. "She will hurt him, like she hurt us."
"I'm sorry, Sayid." Her finger hovered over the alarm. "I cannot help you."
At my wits' end, I grasped at the cuff of my hoodie and yanked the sleeve up. The fabric bunched around the first exposed inches of my scar. I gestured at the maid's hand hidden in her abaya. "I know she hurt you too."
She watched me, her eyes widening. Then, she gave the faintest of nods. So good at hiding it, I had barely noticed that she only ever used her right hand. She lifted her left hand from the pocket of her abaya and turned it in the warm light of the kitchen. The digits were pink and withered, the skin mottled, like her hand had been held to a flame for a long while.
"What's your name, sister?"
"Farah."
"My name is Jay. I don't want her to hurt anyone anymore."
Farah leaned forward, her voice a whisper. "I prepared the young Sayid's rooms for his arrival. They are next to Sayidaty's rooms. There are bars on the windows and a guard at the door. The only way to him is through her."
She turned and led me through the maze of service rooms: the laundry room, the kitchens, myriad small residential areas for the guards, her fingers moving swiftly at each entry keypad. The inner rooms approached, bringing with them a fresh nausea that had my stomach bubbling. When we got to the living room Farah shrank away and fled down the corridor whispering "Ya haraam" under her breath.
I pushed open the door, my gun sweeping the room and my heart beating like a gong in my ears. A peal of laughter rang out behind me. I whipped my head around.
"You're late, Ahmar. I'd expected you here two months ago when I killed your mother."
She stepped in front of me. Long black locks, plump lips, hourglass hips, and the tiniest waist. But the look in her eyes was pure, raw, unfiltered evil.
"You're so bad at hiding everything you love, Ahmar." She nodded across the room, the cruelest smile on her lips.
The sight ripped a scream outta me. I crashed to the ground, my knees knocking against the tiles. My pistol fell from limp fingers and clattered to the floor.
At the other side of the elegant living room knelt Dante, his hands zip-tied behind his back. Zaki towered over him, a pistol pressed to a single vertebra on his neck.
Arabic Translations:
Haraam – "sin"
Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim – "In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful"
Takbir – the title of the Arabic phrase "Allahu Akbar," meaning God is great. Used in prayer.
Salaam - "peace"
Alhamdullilah - "Praise be to God"
Amrika - "America"
Sayid - "Mister"
Sayidaty - "Madame"