Gwyn grabbed the airline magazine out of the seat pocket in front of her. No one with their own reading material ever cracked the cover of these magazines. They were advertising space masquerading as culture and entertainment. She felt like a proletarian anytime she read the drivel and knew that her father would have disapproved, but she had to occupy her mind with something. Otherwise, she felt like the emotions of the last few days would come flooding in and leave her sobbing uncontrollably.
Her eyes landed on an advertisement for a dating service for professionals. The tagline resonated with her, and she hated herself for it.
Helping you find the needle in the haystack—for people long on choices and short on time.
She skimmed the article. Directed at wealthy young professionals, too busy with their careers and the demands of the corporate elite to find time for meaningful relationships, it promised a comprehensive personality profile recommended by leading psychologists who praised it as the surest route to compatibility and happiness in relationships. The company guaranteed a match of interests, temperament and worldview. She continued reading up until the phrase “women join for free.” She shook her head in disgust and closed the magazine.
So, the men have to pay, just like in the slave markets, and the women are still auctioned off like commodities, except that now we put ourselves on the block willingly.
It made her sick. It also made her think of Matt Connor, and the hole he had left in her heart.
They’d had everything in common, well almost . . . They were both easy-going, fun-loving people with an appetite for adventure. They both enjoyed sports and the outdoors. They were voracious readers who appreciated poetry, especially Dickinson, as well as history and the classics. The only passion she didn’t share was his obsession with military history and action cinema. It was a guy thing, so it wasn’t a problem.
There had been a problem though. She closed her eyes and played it back again for the umpteenth time. “What exactly is the matter?” he had asked. “I don’t get it.” After patiently listening to her pour out her heart, he had said, “Metaphysics? You are breaking this off because of a philosophical difference?” What he called ‘metaphysics’ was what she called atheism, a train wreck waiting to happen, and the real reason she left the man everyone said was the catch of a lifetime. He probably was, but not in her lifetime. The bitterness of their separation had left her jaded. She still longed for a healthy, fulfilling relationship, but it was a longing she had lost all hope of fulfilling.
Everyone said her standards were too high, that no one was perfect, and that she was being unrealistic.
Are they
?
Of course not
, she told herself once again.
This is love. If it can’t be the fairytale variety, what is the point anyway?
For her, it could never be a reproductive hook-up or a financial arrangement. She wanted a real, authentic soul-mate. Nothing else. That was what she had been taught about marriage. Somehow knowing that her mom and dad would agree didn’t make the loneliness any easier to bear.
><><><
F
OLKESTONE
, E
NGLAND
None of the passengers coming in and out of the Chunnel Station paid any attention to the burly man wearing jeans and a sleeveless sweatshirt at the entrance, or to the wispy, dark-skinned fellow on the platform, dressed like a businessmen and talking non-stop on his cell phone.
In his London office seventy miles away, Salih sat with his headphones on, listening intently for any indication from their man in Folkestone that the two brothers had shown up.
“We’ve been here at the Chunnel station for over half an hour. There’s no way they could have gotten here before us. They haven’t entered the building” said the smaller dark-skinned man.
“How long until the train leaves?” asked Salih. He already knew the answer.
“Six minutes.”
“Have Mohammed check each of the cars again. I want to be absolutely sure there’s no mistake.”
“Yes sir.”
“If they don’t show, text Ahmet and tell him that his prey is a goose and his is the chase.”
“But, . . .” The man started to say something and Salih’s voice silenced the thought before it could be formed into words and leave his lips.
“Just do as you’re told.”
><><><
Z
URICH,
S
WITZERLAND
What Gilbert loved about airports was the fact that they never sleep, not even at two o’clock in the morning. He had been watching a group of Africans across from the La Carbeille café and bar against the window overlooking the tarmac. Their country of origin was still a mystery to him. They wore colorful tribal robes, and their speech had an exotic singsong lilt. A tall, beautiful black woman directly across from him lay stretched out on two chairs, resting on a pillow she had clearly pilfered from an Egypt Air flight. Beside her sat a lady reading a French newspaper in a pair of shimmering silver pants so tight and a top so low it she looked like she belonged on the front of a mechanics magazine.
The woman occasionally stood to stretch her legs and then sat back down. He would have guessed her to be about forty-five, and she was clearly trying to cope with the effects of a biological clock that was winding down, doing everything within her power to wind it back up again. She had the body of an athletic twenty-one-year-old, sported a pair of classy Bvlgari designer eyeglasses and wore dark burgundy lipstick that accentuated their fullness as well as complementing the color of her glasses. Her efforts had paid off.
It was really just a diversion, his people-watching. He was merely trying to keep from thinking about the storm brewing in his soul. It was a feeble attempt at keeping the pain at bay. He had tried to read the materials from Gwyn on the flight from London, but it all seemed so surreal. He had never even heard of this 400-year-old book and could hardly believe there was any connection to the death of his father and the kidnapping of his family. It was like a Phoenix that had risen from the ashes with the power to kill centuries after the fact. He looked down at his watch. Their plane was scheduled to take off in an hour. He tapped Gary on the shoulder.
“Let’s go to the gate.”
Gary nodded and closed the laptop. Gate A-86 was at the very end of the concourse, so it was a long walk. As they passed the high-end shops, Gilbert remembered all the times he had stopped in at the Swiss chocolate legend Lindt or one of the fashion shops to pick something up for Ginger, and even this harmless memory was too painful to entertain. He plodded past mountains of duty free whiskey. As he looked at the amber bottles neatly stacked in mounds down the center walkway, he thought of people who sought solace in the bottle, and for the first time, his own pain gave him an inkling of the desperation that drove people to drown their sorrows in the golden liquid that seemed to hold out the promise of forgetfulness.
It was a ten-minute walk to the gate after the first security check and when they arrived, there was yet another, more thorough than the first. Still, Gilbert noticed how discreet the Swiss were compared to their American counterparts. They had a partitioned area with a curtain just past the metal detector anytime a physical pat-down was required and he thought they were doing a better job of guarding human dignity against terrorists than his own country.
CHAPTER
40
M
ONDAY,
U
KRAINE
Situated in the midst of well-kept spacious grounds that boasted a dozen varieties of rose as well as cherry and apple trees, the whitewashed villa on the outskirts of Odessa was protected from prying eyes by a twelve foot wall. In the daytime, only the steep, red tile roof could be seen from outside; at night nothing at all. Though it was still almost two hours until sunrise, the entire house had been awake and dining on a spread that included soup, olives as big as walnuts, a smorgasbord of cheeses both hard and soft, fresh bread topped with sesame seeds, a huge tray of meat pastries,
halal
sausage, tomatoes, cucumbers, fruits, butter, honey, omelets and tea.
Breakfast was winding down and the men began moving to a large sitting room to recite the Qur’an and perform their ritual prayers while the women retired to their bedrooms to do the same. The sexes were not allowed to mix, even at meals, because non-blood relatives were always present. Once it became light enough outside to distinguish a white thread from a black one, total abstinence from worldly pleasure would commence until sundown, which meant forgoing the mundane pleasures of eating and drinking. Even swallowing one’s saliva was forbidden, as were the more obvious carnal cravings. The holy month of fasting had begun, allowing the faithful to express their contempt for this world and their devotion to Allah by abstaining from food. They hoped that their sacrifice would win Allah’s favor and that He would forgive at least some of their sins.
His prayers finished, Bekir summoned two of his companions out to the balcony. A few trucks could be heard on the highway a little over a mile to the south. The noise of traffic was the only thing Bekir regretted about purchasing the villa. At the time, however, he had not been focused on the fact that the largest bazaar in the world was located just a few miles south of his new house. Traffic never stopped on Highway T1604 on its way to the Seventh Kilometer Market. A more uninspired name could hardly be imagined, but a visit to the site never failed to impress. It was over one hundred and seventy acres of raw jungle capitalism, bursting with cheap Asian goods unloaded at the port of Odessa for distribution throughout Eastern Europe. This market had it all, including the electronics they needed to build their communication devices and explosives. There was even an underground arms dealer there. Allah always provided.
The market was an economy unto itself with its own rules and rulers, consisting mostly of a homegrown mafia Bekir considered insufferably pig-headed. In spite of his instructions to keep a low profile, on several occasions, his men had come close to getting crossways with the locals. He had no intention of muscling in on their territory. All he wanted was a safe haven for his four wives, two concubines and nineteen children. In the end, he managed to recruit the local ruffians. They helped him transport girls to Istanbul and points further south. Bekir had a particular genius for manipulating events and people, regardless of their moral persuasions, to serve his own ends. He believed it was inherited from his father, who had used it to make millions; he used it to spend these millions and win favor with Allah.
Without turning his head, he spoke into the night sky.
“Five hundred years ago, our brothers, the Tartars, raided throughout these lands every year, gathering slaves for the Mediterranean markets. The harvest of the steppe. Every Ottoman family of consequence owned several of these slaves either for labor or pleasure. The harems of the Sultans were filled with flaxen-haired maidens. As they say, ‘to the victor go the spoils.’”
Abdullah, his second in command, grunted. “Yet, I find it distasteful that we, the warriors of the faith, must peddle flesh to finance jihad.”
Bekir only smiled, “It is the way of war. Do you imagine it was any different for the ghazis of old?”
“Of course it was. They took more than slaves. They took cities, land, gold and more importantly they instituted
jizye
, which made the entire non-Muslim population of the subjugated country part of jihad. Yes, it was different. They had a huge base of labor and materials with which to finance never-ending war against the infidel. Millions of Christians in Southeast Europe were turned into vassals, tools used in our victories against their brothers. Today, we have no such resources. Yet, Allah has decreed that we must submit to Him and the world to us. It is our destiny to reign as Sultan of the world. The Turk is the crown on the Sultan’s head.
“When we were conquering and leveraging the intellectual and physical assets of the infidel, the jihad was unstoppable, but when we lost our zeal for spreading the glory of Allah, it gave our adversary, the devil, time to hone the shrewdness and cunning of the infidel and the armies of Islam were put to flight.”