Fox Hunter Page 5

  But she met our gaze without arrogance or shame, just a calm acceptance of what had happened to her, of what might be still to come.

  I made sure to maintain eye contact while her words were translated. I could follow a little of what was said, enough to know that Dawson’s Arabic was nuanced and fluent. And also that she was giving me the story straight.

  “She was going to the market,” Dawson said. “With her mother and her sister.”

  “Do they wear the burqa also?”

  “Not the veil. Just the hijab. Her sister is younger. She would like to dress more . . . Western. But now she is confused . . . and frightened.”

  “Did you feel unsafe before this? Uncomfortable to be out?”

  Without translating first, Dawson glanced at me. “Are you asking why she wore the burqa?”

  “Yes.”

  She relayed the question, put more directly than I would have done.

  Najida hesitated, then began to speak, looking at me rather than Dawson, as though she knew I was the dubious one. One eye was clear, the other bloodshot and swollen.

  “When she was younger she didn’t mind the stares of men,” Dawson said, her tone bloodless, slightly hollow. “But after she went to university she started to resent them looking at her. They had no right. And she wanted to be judged not for how she looked.”

  I nodded, didn’t quite trust myself to speak.

  The undamaged half of Najida’s face gave a twitch approaching a sad smile. “You do not agree,” Dawson said. It was not a question.

  “It is not my place to agree or disagree,” I responded. “Your culture is far different from mine . . . but not your experience.”

  Out of my peripheral vision I saw Dawson’s head snap around, but I kept my eyes on Najida as the translation was made.

  She let her own gaze drop away and nodded, as if that made sense. As if no Western white woman would have bothered coming to see her without such a connection.

  Knowing my arguments would not persuade her otherwise at this stage, I said nothing. After a minute or so she let out a breath and started into her story.

  They grabbed her without warning, she said. One moment she was walking along the side of the street. Her mother was in front. Her sister had dropped a little way back—something on one of the stalls had caught her eye. Najida stopped to wait for her.

  The next thing, she was taken. Not hard to bind her hands, to gag and blindfold her. They used her own clothing—the very clothing she wore to give her a feeling of safety, of privacy.

  They were very fast—practiced, even. They shoved her into a van that had stopped beside her before her sister looked up or her mother looked back. The van did not hurry away but moved off slowly. So slowly the two women paid no attention to it, even as their surprise at Najida’s sudden vanishing act turned to alarm.

  Her abductors drove with her for what seemed like a long distance. There were many turns, and the road was rough—she was thrown around on the floor of the van. The man who had grabbed her stayed in the back of the van with her throughout the journey. He held a knife at her throat. She was too frightened to struggle, but she pleaded, over and over, for them to let her go unharmed.

  “Even though she knew it was probably too late for that already,” Dawson reported.

  “Is that your opinion or hers?”

  “Hers.”

  I nodded to Najida. “Tell us only what you feel able to.”

  The one with the knife, she said, was a big man—tall and muscular. They both smelled . . . foreign. When I queried this, she came back with:

  “Of foreign food, maybe? Different spices. He did not smell like her brother or her father.”

  And their voices were foreign, too. They spoke English. She knew enough to recognize a few words but couldn’t say if they were Americans or Brits.

  Eventually they stopped the van. The driver climbed into the back. Between them they stripped her, cutting away her clothes. They secured the blindfold in place with tape.

  Then they raped her, taking turns. And while they did so they laughed and goaded each other. It seemed they were more . . . excited if she cried out. She did her best to keep silent. It was not always possible.

  When they were finished, they took her to within half a kilometer or so of where she had been abducted. There they dumped her, naked and bleeding, on the roadside. She had been a virgin.

  “Was there any kind of investigation?” I asked. “If these men were indeed foreigners, surely the police—”

  “La alshshurta!” Najida said.

  I got that without any need for Dawson’s language skills. No police.

  “Whose choice was that—yours? Or your family’s?”

  “Her father said she had brought great shame onto the family name, that she must have done something to provoke these men. He told her she was . . . soiled, that no good man would ever want to take her as his wife.” Dawson’s voice was flat, level, but still betrayed the barest hint of her contempt. “Her mother wept and said she now had only one daughter. They would not let her into the house.”

  I stared at the woman, saw the untold sadness in every line of her body, in the acceptance of her disfigured features, and said slowly, “The men who attacked you did not do that to your face, did they?”

  “She would not leave the family home. She was distressed, crying for her mother,” Dawson said. “So her father and brother took up their guns, and they chased her away. And when she fell, still crying, her father walked up to her where she lay and shot her in the head. She flinched at the last minute, and the bullet hit her in the face—knocked her unconscious but didn’t kill her.” Dawson swallowed as if her mouth was suddenly dry, or to combat a rising nausea. “And when she came to, she had to dig her way out of her own shallow grave.”

  TEN

  OUTSIDE, DAWSON SAID, “YOU’RE ANGRY.”

  I stuffed the Range Rover’s keys into the ignition, cranked the engine, and sat back as the air-con sent a blast of heat into our faces. It took a moment before I trusted myself to speak.

  “Aren’t you? Not just at what was done to her, but the treatment by her own family?”

  She cocked her head on one side. “There’s more to it than that. It’s the burqa, isn’t it? It was her own choice. Why does it bug you so much?”

  “Why doesn’t it bug you?” I shot back. “Just because men are not taught to respect women enough not to hassle them in the street, spit or stare at them, or pinch their arses, or just take whatever the hell they want, it’s the women who have to drape themselves from head to foot, leaving only a mesh slit to see out through.”

  “It made her feel safer.”

  “Safer? What kind of awareness of her surroundings, freedom of movement, or peripheral vision did it give her? What kind of ability to fight back? Absolutely fucking none. And because of that, and the fact she was already wearing the equivalent of a sack to tie her up in, she was such an easy target it’s unbelievable.”

  “Girls in the UK choose to go for a night out in dresses too tight to let them run, and heels they can only totter about on, and then drink themselves halfway to oblivion,” Dawson pointed out. “Does that make them any better prepared to fend off attack?”

  “No, it doesn’t, and it’s stupid in the extreme,” I agreed, “but in both cases, why should it be the woman’s responsibility to do the fending? Why can’t it be the bloke’s job not to let his little brain do all the thinking for him instead of his big brain?”

  “Define ‘big’ there, would you?” Her dry tone was enough to break the tension.

  I let out a long, pent-up breath and threw her an apologetic smile. “Sorry. Pet peeve of mine.”

  “I noticed.”

  “What will happen to Najida now?”

  Dawson shrugged. “Nothing. Her father and brother will be seen as upholding the family honor and be respected for doing so. As for the men who raped her, they will most likely never be identified, let alone held to account. T
he feeling is that foreign soldiers in Iraq do as they please.”

  I put the Range Rover in gear, turned out of the gates of the clinic, and accelerated toward the end of the road.

  “Things don’t seem to have advanced much since the Middle Ages as far as civilization goes, do they?”

  I thought back to my own attack, the assumption that I must in some way have given the men encouragement. Unwitting at best. At worst, a deliberate act I’d then regretted and tried to escape the consequences of.

  My character—the number and frequency of my sexual partners, the way I dressed, what I said and the way I said it—had been dissected and scrutinized in court, in the newspapers, while theirs seemed to have escaped close inspection. Were all victims treated that way?

  If I had died, as had been the plan, would they still have unpicked my life to the same degree? Or was an accusation of rape seen as an attempt by the woman to tarnish men she’d had sex with, out of little more than spite? It had to be upgraded to murder before the woman was truly seen as the victim.

  Men were not expected to control their urges, but a woman—any woman—had to be chaste and modest, and offer no provocation. Provocation was justification. It made choosing to wear the hijab and the burqa more understandable, but as Najida had discovered at great cost, doing so provided little defense.

  “You think Clay was one of them?” Dawson asked.

  “Well, he was certainly a big guy. And the knife to the throat is his style, but it’s hardly unique.”

  “What you said to Najida, back there . . . about shared experience,” Dawson said at last. “That wasn’t just a line to get her to open up to you, was it?”

  I was silent for a moment, using the excuse of crossing traffic to turn out onto a busy main road to gather myself.

  I’d thought when Garton-Jones found out about my past, he’d told Dawson, but now I realized he’d been more discreet than I’d given him credit for. Her questions were more general, I recognized, and I was grateful for that, at least.

  “No,” I said at last.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, I would say that about sums it up.”

  “Did they ever . . . catch him?”

  It was, simultaneously, both not enough of a question and too much of one. I settled for leaving out all the ifs and if onlys and answering the least of it.

  “Yes. They caught him.”

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose. I hope the bastard suffered for it inside.”

  I thought of Clay’s corpse, of what had been done to him.

  “He did,” I said. Eventually.

  I felt her stare but kept my eyes on the road, my expression neutral, daring her to follow up.

  Wisely perhaps, she did not.

  For the next few klicks, silence filled the big car’s interior. It still smelled of polish and new leather. How long would it be before that wore off and it just smelled like the inside of any car?

  I glanced in the mirrors again, said to Dawson, “We’re being followed.”

  To her credit, she didn’t twist in her seat, just ducked her head a little to check out the side mirror. “The tan Toyota two cars back?”

  “Uh-huh. He trailed us to the clinic, picked us up again when we hit the main road.”

  “Not unusual. Two foreigners, women, traveling on our own. They like to keep their eye on such things around here.”

  “You carrying?”

  She shook her head, regretful, lifted her slung arm a little. “Couldn’t use it even if I was. You?”

  “No, but I did take out all the extra insurance on this thing, so if necessary I’ll use it as the world’s most expensive battering ram.”

  She laughed, a short bark betraying the tension, snuck another look in the side mirror. “Just out of interest, did you tell anyone about today?”

  I changed lanes. Two cars behind us, the tan-colored Toyota copied the maneuver.

  “My boss in New York.”

  “I didn’t even tell G-J.” She gave a taut smile. “Not officially in his employ right at this moment, so it’s none of his damned business.”

  “But I’m assuming you might want to work for him again in the future?”

  “’Course.” The smile became a grin. “He’s not bad to work for. Tough, but tough on everyone, and he doesn’t seem to have the usual problem with us lumpy jumpers. In fact . . . he talks about you, you know.”

  “He . . . ? Why?”

  “He mentions you as this girl he met a few years ago. Back when he was running security teams in the UK. Said you took a bullet for someone. Just stepped in front of this guy and took two in the chest. That right?”

  Discomfited, I pointed out, “I was wearing body armor.”

  “Still . . . they could have gone for a head shot.”

  I shrugged. “If they had, I wouldn’t have known much about it, so it makes no difference now.”

  But it might have.

  I will never forget the sense of helplessness, of impotence, on a very different day—the day Sean took a round to the head. I’d been there and watched it happen . . . watched his life change forever.

  Mine, too.

  “The Toyota’s still with us. Looks like two of them in the car,” Dawson reported. “How do you want to handle this?”

  “Not much we can do besides hope it’s just a watching brief and head back to the hotel. At least there we might have some backup on hand.”

  Dawson gave a snort. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  As soon as we cleared the densely populated streets, the Toyota moved up directly behind us, not making any pretense of a covert tail. I stuck to the speed limit but bullied my way through traffic, making sure to leave myself an escape route, not allowing us to be boxed in.

  Dawson spent her time half-twisted in her seat, openly watching behind us.

  “Here they come,” she said, a moment before I caught the glint of lights coming up fast on our outside.

  “Face forward,” I told Dawson. “If they do ram us, with you like that, you’ll break your spine.”

  She pulled a face. “No thanks, I’ve broken quite enough this trip already.” She dropped back into her seat, pulling her lap belt tight across her hips.

  But they didn’t have ramming us in mind.

  As the Kuwaiti police cruisers came barreling up behind us, I pulled over obediently into the inside lane. The first car whizzed past, then swerved directly in front and hit the brakes.

  I had to stand on the Range Rover’s brake pedal to avoid rear-ending them. While I was wrestling to maintain control of the big vehicle, the second car moved up alongside. With the unmarked—but undoubtedly police—Toyota close up behind us, we were in a rolling box. I had to admit it was smoothly and efficiently done.

  I jammed my foot back onto the accelerator. The Range Rover’s automatic transmission kicked down in response. Just for a second the cruiser alongside pulled a touch too far ahead. Our front end was level with his rear door.

  I gripped the steering wheel, knowing all it would take was a twitch of my hands to sideswipe the rear quarter of his car into a deadly fishtail slide. I’d practiced the maneuver on every offensive driving course I’d ever taken until I could do it blind.

  But if I did, at this speed, the cruiser was likely to end up across the central reservation and head-on into approaching traffic.

  It might save our lives.

  Or it might see me spending the rest of mine in an Arab jail.

  I relaxed, allowed our car to be slowed and forced over onto the sandy shoulder of the road.

  And I hoped like hell I didn’t live to regret it.

  ELEVEN

  I PULLED OVER ONTO THE DUSTY SHOULDER, WELL CLEAR OF THE ROAD. As soon as I did so, the black-and-white police cruisers swerved across our front and rear, lights still strobing. The tan-colored Toyota sped on without a pause. Being seen taking part in a police stop would do its value as a surveillance tool no good at all.

  Two men cli
mbed out of the forward car. They were wearing dark uniforms and military-style berets with police insignia where you’d expect to find a regimental cap badge.

  One man carried an M4 carbine, the shortened version with the ten-inch barrel mounted into the Close Quarter Battle receiver. Easier to handle in the confined space of a car. He sighted on us over the rear end of the cruiser, resting on his elbows and using the bulk of the vehicle as cover. His movements were relaxed and steady, his forefinger lying outside the guard rather than curled around the trigger. It smacked of well-worn routine rather than high alert.

  In the mirrors I saw that the other two officers had also exited their vehicle. Again, one stayed behind with an M4, covering Dawson’s side. The other was standing behind the open driver’s door of the cruiser, radio mic in hand.

  Not the best tactics in the world if they were expecting trouble—far better to keep both police vehicles behind us to avoid blue-on-blue crossfire. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or relieved by their attitude, settled on the latter.

  I forced myself to take in air, deep and slow, let any coalescing sense of panic out with the expelled breath. I dropped my window halfway, then put both hands on the top of the steering wheel, in plain sight.

  The driver of the forward car had not immediately drawn a weapon. But he approached with his right hand hovering meaningfully over the sidearm holster on his hip.

  “Your license,” he said. He had regulation short-clipped hair and a wide mustache that hid most of his mouth. His eyes were covered by a pair of gold-framed Ray-Bans with mirrored lenses. He wore a nametag on the breast pocket of his shirt, but I couldn’t read the Arabic script.

  I dipped carefully into the center console for my international driving license. I’d shifted it there from my back pocket as soon as I’d made the decision to stop for them. No point in giving anyone an excuse to get trigger-happy.

  He barely did more than glance at the document when I handed it over. Instead he took it back to the cruiser, got on the radio. His eyes never left us as he spoke to whoever was at the other end. The mustache and the Ray-Bans made it impossible to gauge the conversation from the language of his facial muscles. The guns never wavered.