Fortunes Obsession (27 page)

     The timing was exquisite.  Fahd got into a cab just as the pursuit car came around the corner.

The second agent, running at full speed, was able to get in and the pursuit continued.

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     The switchboard operator at the FBI, assured him that Agent Yamashita was definitely on call and that he should keep trying.  Peter was getting more frustrated by the moment.  He didn't know whom else to call .  He was as frightened and confused as he had ever been in his life.  He decided to continue on to Paramus and take the matter in his own hands.

He hoped he had guessed right as to who had abducted Dara and where he was taking her.

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     Larry Yamashita heard the page alright. His beeper was sounding loud and clear.  The problem was that he was sitting at a picnic table with his two children and his wife had left to go to the ladies room.  He was patiently waiting for her to come back to the table so he could get to a phone and not leave the kids alone.  His cellular was sitting in his car.  There was so much kid paraphernalia to take to the park that he had flat out forgotten it.  He knew that the page must have been urgent , since this was strictly an FBI pager and nothing personal would be on it.

As soon as his wife came back he raced for the car, not trusting a public phone to be available or operational.  He dialed the number on his pager frantically and Peter babbled the whole story to him.  Yamashita was angry.  " Damn it, didn't we tell you to keep her out of town? Well never mind, it's happened and we have to act.  I'm going to try to get a helicopter team to that property as soon as possible.  It may take some time.  Meanwhile, I'd like you to continue toward the house.  Ordinarily, I would tell you to keep out of it altogether but I need you as a watcher.

Do not, under any circumstances, get physically involved.......Do you understand me?"

Peter had no intention of not getting involved but promised Yamashita anyway.  The FBI agent disconnected from Peter and called headquarters too make arrangements.  They promised to have a helicopter and a team of men there within the hour.  He raced back to the park to round up a very disappointed wife and two children and drive them home.  After hastily throwing on a pair of slacks and a sport shirt, he raced toward the Paramus house at high speed, his flashing light fastened to the roof.  He figured it would take him forty minutes , including jumping lights and stop signs.  He feared greatly for Dara' life.  After doing the arithmetic on the time elements, he felt that the situation was hopeless for the girl but the policeman in him thought that

they could at least collar the terrorist.  He found himself in impossible traffic and felt it was taking forever to reach his destination.

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Bokaar drove as if he were a man possessed.  He had his prize and his elation was beyond comprehension.  He flew through the traffic but always maintained legal speed.  He salivated at the thought of the pleasures that would soon come to him.  The stupid bitch had struggled in the trunk at first and even screamed to be heard but of course no one on the road would here a screaming girl in the trunk of a moving car.  He had crossed the Washington Bridge about ten minutes ago and had heard no movement in the trunk for some time.  He knew that she would not be dead but was certain she would be groggy and disoriented, making it easier to get her into the house.  In the trunk Dara was feeling just that way.  She had struggled and hollered as soon as the feeling of hyperventilating had left her.  She was hot and although there was air in the trunk she had the feeling of not getting enough oxygen and at some point feared that she would die from carbon monoxide poisoning.  She felt herself lapsing into periods of hallucinatory sleep.

She dreamed intermittently and hallucinated that she was on the boat with Peter and this had never happened.  When the trunk finally opened and the fat, leering man reached for her, she was barely conscious.  When she awoke, she was on a bed.  She was crudely tied with clothes line to the headboard  She was naked.  There was no air conditioning and the windows were closed and she could feel the sweat running down her body.  The blinds were closed and there was very little light in the room. When her eyes were accustomed to the dim light, she could see that the door to the room was closed.

She wondered if she had already been raped but could not recall ever being one hundred percent unconscious.  She was vaguely aware of being carried into the house through the garage and of .

being dumped on the floor while he probably looked for the clothes line. She was further aware of being thrown on the bed and her clothes being ripped from her body while the man laughed..

She didn’t remember what happened next and lay here now, tied to the bed , listening for a tell tale sound that would tell her if the fat man was in the house.  She thought that possibly he might have left, until she heard the sound of a shower running.  The son of a bitch was bathing before he raped her!  She concentrated on the clothesline that bound her hands.  She remembered that as a child playing games, having much trouble keeping a good knot in a clothesline.  She struggled against her bonds and was having good luck loosening them when the door opened.

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Peter was approaching Paramus and tried to remember which block the house was on.  He was hopelessly confused.  Every block looked the same.  He was sure he would recognize the house but he didn’t even know the address number.  He drove around aimlessly for fifteen minutes, thinking that every second he was wasting meant a step closer to doom for Dara.  A few months ago, he didn’t even know her but now he knew that he loved her desperately and he felt that she would  be gone forever.  Suddenly, he remembered the diner that he and Lance had eaten in, the day he first rescued her here.  He knew how to get to the house from the diner and he knew the name of the diner.  He asked the first person he saw for directions to the diner and sped towards

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She heard the sound of wet feet padding on the floor and looked up at his fat, naked body.

He was half wet, having toweled himself hastily after the shower and his hair was almost soaking wet.  Dara fought the faint that she felt herself going into.  She had never been this scared in her life.  He was leering and uttering words in a strange language she didn't understand.  He sat

by her side and she could see the rolls of fat on his hairy body.  He ran his hands over her body for what seemed like an endless time.  At first, he was gentle, seemingly enjoying the contours of her body and the texture of her skin.  Suddenly, he became rough, pinching her nipples brutally and ramming his fingers in her vagina, painfully.  All the while, she was struggling with the bonds, loosening them little by little.  Suddenly, the fat man sat bolt upright.  Dara had heard it too.

Someone was trying to get into a window. 

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Peter had no indication that either Dara or the fat man were here.  The Lincoln was nowhere to be seen.  It might be in the garage though.  He thought that his best bet was to break in through a cellar window and try to get upstairs into the house.  He had a tire iron in his hand to use as a weapon.  He pried the iron under each cellar window but they were all locked.  The only  way in was to break the glass.  In the movies, they always put a piece of cloth or paper on the glass and then broke it quietly.  He took off his shirt and laid it against the small window pane. He then tapped it hard with the tire iron and the small pane broke.  It wasn't as quiet as he would have liked though and he felt that it  could be heard for miles around. Before he could react, one of the windows in the house opened and he could see the fat man, shirtless, holding a gun in his hand. Suddenly, he felt as if he were being knocked over by a two hundred eighty pound lineman and he could feel himself falling down a bottomless pit as he lost consciousness.

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Dara heard the shot and hoped someone had killed the fat man.  When he walked in the room, she felt utter despair.  He had a diabolical smile on his face as he said, " I have just killed your boy friend.  This is a great day for me."  He then burst into uncontrollable laughter as Dara started

to cry.  He climbed onto the bed and straddled her neck with his knees. "Open your mouth, whore", he said, a look of triumph and conquest on his face.

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Yamashita was now in touch , by radio, with the FBI assault team.  They were close to the house, perhaps five minutes from touchdown.  They would hover close to the ground and the team would swiftly enter the house.  Yamashita knew that he could never get there at the same time and barked instructions to the team.  Some of them had been in on the initial search of the house and knew it from memory.  They were the best he had and they had assembled, on a Saturday in the summer, from their own homes and had mobilized this quickly.  He was proud of them and proud to be an FBI agent.  He prayed that the girl would come out of this alive and that the terrorist could be taken alive and questioned.

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Dara clamped her lips shut and turned her head.  The man slapped her face and she felt the sting but she still held her mouth shut.  He stood up and punched her in the stomach. She knew that she could not take much more of this and opened her mouth.  She could feel his smallish, misshapen penis enter her mouth and almost gagged.  She waited until the head passed her teeth and bit down as hard as she could.  She was trying to bite it off, if she could.  He screamed in agony and beat at her face with her fists.  The harder he hit, the harder she bit.  The biting was like self hypnosis as far as the pain went.  She felt that the biting was actually anaesthetic.  As he lost his erection, it was easier to bite.  She could feel his blood trickling down her throat but she was afraid to let go.  The beating had stopped and he was screaming and she thought, crying.

She could feel that she had severed the tip of his penis but not  yet amputated it.  She could

see that he was totally immobilized and knew it was time to run.  She finally worked out the last knot in the clothesline and ran from the room as Bokaar writhed in pain on the floor.  She must have severed a vein in his penis.  Blood was pouring profusely from the badly cut organ.  She was through the living room and saw the towel that Bokaar had obviously used in the shower.  She turned back and picked up the towel and wrapped it around her.  Later, she would laugh at her modesty at a life threatening time like this.

She ran out the front door and saw Peter lying on the ground.  She bent over him and saw that he had a  wound in his right shoulder.  He was half conscious and obviously in shock.  She took his shirt and made a compress to dress the wound.  While she administered to him, she was vaguely aware of an engine above her.  When she looked up to see it, she saw instead, the fat man, totally

naked, standing at the front door, holding a gun.  The gun was trained on her.  The man was hollering gibberish at her in his strange foreign language but she knew that he was speaking her death sentence.  She closed her eyes and heard a shot and waited for her life to flow out of her.

When she lifted her eyes ,she saw the fat man going down , and blood pouring from a hole in his chest.  She was then aware of the helicopter and of people gathering in the street .  She was groggy and faint and could remember the Emergency Medical Service truck coming for Peter and getting into the ambulance with him.  Soon after that she passed out.

Yamashita and the other agents looked at Bokaars dead body.  " Goddamn it, did you have to kill the bastard.  He could have made our case.  What the hell am I going to tell the newspapers?. We can’t compromise this case by telling anyone what we are really after."

" Go fuck yourself , Larry", said the sniper. " What did you want me to do........let him kill her?

You weren't even here for crissakes.  I made a decision and I stand by it. What you tell the press is  your problem.  My job is sniper.  I did my job. Now you do yours."

The TV news teams clustered around Yamashita.  " This is all I'm going to tell you.  The dead man was the last unapprehended suspect in the World Trade Center bombing.  The girl was kidnaped by him and the wounded man was her boyfriend who foolishly tried to rescue her himself before we arrived.  The dead man tried to shoot the woman and was unavoidably shot by our people.  Anything else will have to come from higher up."  He returned to his car and headed toward New York City , where he was faced with a great deal of paperwork and debriefing that he knew would further ruin his weekend.

Both Dara and Peter were admitted to the hospital.  Dara was kept overnight for observation and treatment  of her bruises and lacerations.  Peter was taken to the intensive care unit.  He had a bullet lodged in his right rotator cuff and was suffering from shock.  The doctors were more worried about the shock than the gunshot wound.  His life signs were critical when he was admitted but by morning he was listed as stable.  He was scheduled for the operating room at ten  a.m.