Authors: Raymond Khoury
The choice had been made for him. The right to decide had been bequeathed to him by someone far more deserving than he had ever imagined himself to be.
But he had surprised himself.
He had done his best, tried his hardest, to discover what the missing pages of the codex had contained and wrest the ancient book’s lost secrets.
He’d managed to evade his accusers in
Portugal
. He’d searched in
Spain
, and in
Rome
. He’d traveled to
Constantinople
and beyond, to the Orient. But he hadn’t found anything to advance his quest.
He had failed.
He’d thought a return to the land of his birth would help him decide on what his next step would be. Di Sangro’s interruption had put pause to all that.
And in the fog that clouded his mind, one thing glowed with certainty: that holding the man who was sitting before him in contempt and keeping him in ignorance was a choice he was happy to make.
The rest of the world, well…that was another matter.
“Well?” di Sangro snapped, his hand wavering slightly under the weight of the pistol.
The man who called himself
Montferrat
leapt out of his chair and hurled himself at his adversary, reaching out and pushing his pistol away just as di Sangro pulled the trigger. The charge exploded in a deafening roar as both men grappled over the gun, its lead ball bursting out of the upper muzzle and whistling past
Montferrat
’s ear before biting into the paneling on the wall behind him. The two men slammed into the table by the fireplace, still fighting for the gun, as the door to the bedchamber swung open. Di Sangro’s henchmen rushed in, swords raised.
Montferrat
caught the momentary distraction in his adversary’s eyes and exploited it, hammering the
principe
with a fierce back-elbow that caught him in the throat. The prince recoiled backwards under the blow, loosening his grip on the pistol just enough for
Montferrat
to wrest it from him.
Montferrat
pushed the prince away and raised the pistol, rotating its barrel and cocking its firing arm as he moved away from the first of the henchmen, who was already charging at him, and fired. The round struck his attacker in the chest, causing him to twist sideways and drop to the ground at
Montferrat
’s feet.
Montferrat
hurled the empty pistol at the second attacker and swiftly picked up the fallen man’s sword. The prince had recovered somewhat, and despite being unsteady on his feet, he drew his own sword. “Don’t kill him,” he hissed, inching forward to join his henchman. “I need him alive…for now.”
Montferrat
gripped the sword with
both hands
, holding it up defensively, flicking it left and right to keep his attackers at bay. The two men facing him were impatient, and in his experience, poise was as effective a weapon as a sword. He would wait for them to make a mistake. The henchman was eager to prove his worth and lunged forward recklessly.
Montferrat
blocked the strike with his sword and kicked the man with all his might, his bare foot catching the man in his thigh. The man howled with pain, and from the corner of his eye,
Montferrat
noted that the prince had held back mindfully. He decided to stay on his attacker and swung his sword, catching the faltering man’s blade with the full brunt of his own and knocking it out from his hand. The prince screamed in anger and rushed forward, interrupting
Montferrat
, whose sword was now needed elsewhere.
Montferrat
managed to kick his first attacker back before quickly spinning to face di Sangro. The henchman reeled backwards, crashing into the table and slipping off it into the large fireplace.
Sparks
and embers flew out from the hearth as he yelped from the pain in his seared hand, with which he had tried to catch his fall.
Montferrat
saw the man’s sleeve catch fire just as the lantern, which had fallen off the table, ignited the carpet in a swath of fire.
The false marquis struggled to parry the resurgent di Sangro’s thrusts as the flames from the carpet grew furiously and licked at the thick velvet curtain before taking hold of it. The heat and the smoke in the bedchamber were infernal as the prince fought on relentlessly and surprised
Montferrat
with a ferocious strike that knocked the sword from his hands.
Montferrat
stepped backwards, trying to avoid the edge of di Sangro’s blade, which now loomed too close to his throat. Through the rising smoke in the chamber, he noticed that the thug with the burnt hand had managed to extinguish the flames on his coat and was now rising to rejoin the fray. The man moved sideways, positioning himself by the bedchamber door to block any attempt at escape by
Montferrat
.
Montferrat
was outnumbered and outgunned, and he knew it.
Darting nervous glances left and right, he saw a possible way out and decided to chance it. He raised his hands and sidestepped towards the burning curtain, his eyes locked on di Sangro.
“We need to put this fire out before it spreads to the other floors,”
Montferrat
shouted, his feet circling cautiously towards the curtain.
“To hell with the other floors,” di Sangro fired back, “just as long as what you know doesn’t go up in flames.”
Montferrat
had managed to edge his way over to the burning curtain. The henchman’s
discarded,
half-burnt coat was lying there, smoldering.
Montferrat
made his move. He grabbed the coat and used it to shield his hands as he reached into the flames and yanked the curtain off its rail before flinging it at di Sangro and his lackey. The flaming cloak landed heavily on the prince’s man, who yelled out in horror as he furiously tried to bat it off him. It enshrouded him in its flaming embrace until he managed to flick it to the floor, where it created a barrier of fire between them and their quarry.
Montferrat
didn’t wait. He yanked open the door to the balcony and rushed out into the night.
After the intense heat in the bedchamber, the chilly air coming in from the bay hit him like a slap. Casting a quick look back inside, he saw di Sangro and his half-burnt henchman trampling feverishly on the flames and edging around them to follow him. Di Sangro raised his gaze and locked eyes with
Montferrat
.
Montferrat
nodded, and with his heart in his mouth, he climbed onto the railing and flung himself off it.
He landed with a thud on the balcony of an adjacent chamber on the floor below. The landing sent a jolt of pain searing through his jaw and teeth and rattling in his head. He shook it off and sprang to his feet, climbing over the wrought-iron railing before hurling himself onto the roof that jutted out two floors below just as di Sangro made it onto the balcony.
“Get him,” di Sangro yelled into the darkness as he stood there, backlit by the flames like a demon from hell.
Montferrat
glanced over at the palazzo’s entrance and spotted two men rushing out into the darkness, silhouetted against the light coming from a lantern one of them carried. He clambered across one roof and jumped onto the roof of an abutting structure, sending tiles clattering to the ground below. He looked at the rooftops and chimneys ahead, mapping out his escape route. In the darkness of the densely built city, he knew he could lose his pursuers and disappear.
What concerned him more was what he knew had to come.
Once he had retrieved the precious trove he kept tucked away in a safe spot, far from his palazzo—a precaution he always took—he would have to move on.
He would have to find himself a new name and a new home.
Reinvent
himself
.
Yet again.
He had done it before.
He would do it again.
He heard di Sangro bellowing “
Montferrat
” into the night like a man possessed. He knew he hadn’t seen the last of him. A man like di Sangro wouldn’t give up that easily. He’d been infected by a feverish greed that, once it took hold of a man, would never let go.
The thought chilled
Montferrat
to the bone as he slipped into the night.
“Sir, we’ve just gone over the ten-minute mark.”
Captain Eric Rucker of the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry Regiment, checked his watch and nodded. He looked at the faces around him, grimy and tense, dripping with sweat. It wasn’t even ten in the morning and the sun was already beating down on them with murderous heat. The heavy protective gear didn’t help either, not when it was 110 degrees in the shade. But they couldn’t do without it.
The deadline had passed.
It was time to go in.
With eerie synchronicity, a call to prayer from a nearby minaret cut through the dusty, stifling air. Rucker heard a creak behind him and looked up to see an old woman with half-graying, half-hennaed hair lean out from a window in a house across the street from the target. She studied him with grim, lifeless eyes before swinging the window’s shutters closed.
He gave her a few moments to find shelter deeper in the house, then, with a curt nod to the XO, he initiated the assault.
A Mark 19 grenade launched from the lead Humvee whistled across the wide street and obliterated the main gate to the compound. Squad leaders rushed in with twenty or so soldiers close behind and immediately came under small-arms fire. Bullets snapped around them as they fanned out through the courtyard and ducked for cover behind anything they could find. Two men fell before the rest had managed to secure safe positions on either side of the house’s entrance. They soon unleashed a torrent of gunfire onto the house as cover while the wounded were swiftly pulled back out to the relative safety of the street by men with big biceps and bigger hearts.
The house’s front door was barricaded, its windows blocked out. Over the next twenty-two minutes, thousands of rounds were exchanged, but little progress was made. Another soldier was hit as the car he was crouching behind was peppered with bullets from the house.
Rucker gave the order to withdraw. The house was surrounded. The men inside weren’t going anywhere.
Time was on his side.
LIKE SO MANY OF THE OTHERS that followed, it had all started with a walk-in.
On that sweltering spring evening, a middle-aged man in a tattered suit and a swath of soiled cloth around his head had walked up to the soldiers manning the gate at FOB
The man had information regarding the whereabouts of a “person of interest.”
The hunt was on.
Tracking down Saddam’s gang of hard-core Ba’athists was priority one for the military in
Iraq
. The “thunder run” had been swift, the city had been taken sooner and with far more ease than expected, but most of the bad guys had skipped town. Few on the Pentagon’s deck of fifty-five most-wanted Iraqis—not the Ace of Spades himself, nor his two sons—had been captured or killed as yet.
Safely ensconced in a briefing room in the base, the man in the headdress was agitated when he spoke.
More than agitated.
He was downright terrified. The interpreter pointed this out to the base commander, who didn’t read too much into it. For him, it was expected. These people had lived under a monstrous and ruthless dictatorship for decades. Squealing on one of their tormentors wasn’t exactly a casual undertaking.
The interpreter wasn’t so sure.
The base commander was disappointed to find out that the regime member being shopped by the man in the headdress wasn’t on the Pentagon’s most-wanted list. In fact, no one had ever heard of him. They didn’t seem to know anything about him at all.
The man in the headdress didn’t even know his name. He only referred to him as the
hakeem.
The doctor.
And even nestled in the safety of the forward operating base, he could only utter the word in a cowed, hushed tone.
He didn’t have a name to give them. He didn’t have much in terms of hard detail, except that before the
invasion,
men in darkened, official-looking cars were often seen driving into his compound in the middle of the night. The fearless leader himself had been to see him on a few occasions.
He couldn’t even really describe him, except for one chilling detail that intrigued all those in the room: The hakeem wasn’t Iraqi. He wasn’t even an Arab.
He was a Westerner.
And there were certainly no Westerners on the deck of cards.
For that matter, only one person on the list was not part of the military or the government. Curiously, she was also the only queen in the deck—biologically speaking, anyway. The lowest-ranked card in the deck was a
woman,
a scientist named Huda Ammash, affectionately nicknamed Mrs. Anthrax, the daughter of a former minister of defense and rumored to be the head of
Iraq
’s biological weapons program.
The elements were all there.
Doctor.
Close to Saddam.
Westerner.
Terrified local.
It was enough to get the ball rolling.
Intel was requested and delivered that very night.
Plans were drawn up.
By first light, Rucker and his men had secured the outer cordon with ground forces and armored vehicles. The target location, as pinpointed by the man in the headdress, was a three-story concrete house in the middle of the Saddamiya district of Baghdad. The area hadn’t always gone by that name. It had once been a hard neighborhood. Saddam had grown up on its mean streets, attended school there, and that was where he’d forged his unique take on life. After taking over the country, he’d brought in the bulldozers and had the whole area flattened before redeveloping it as a closed community of imposing modernist concrete and brick houses set behind arcaded walkways and virtually walled off from the rest of the city. It took on his name and became home to those he deemed worthy. The battalion had been in charge of the area since the troops had taken
Baghdad
and had treated it with caution, given the obvious aversion to the invading forces from the loyalists who still lived there.
The weapons squads took up their positions, the snipers were in place. The assault was ready for initiation.
Rucker had, as per the newly adopted standard procedure in these cases, used the “cordon-and-knock” approach. Once the perimeter was secured, troops had advanced to the house and made their presence known. An interpreter, using a bullhorn, informed those inside that they had ten minutes to come out of the house with their hands up.
Ten minutes later, all hell had erupted.
AS MEDEVACS TENDED TO the wounded, Rucker gave the order to “prep the objective,” to minimize further casualties during the inevitable reentry attempt. Two OH-58D Kiowa choppers flew in and rained down 2.75-inch rockets and machine-gun fire onto the house, while the ground troops unleashed more Mark 19s and a couple of more potent, shoulder-mounted AT-4 antitank missiles.
Eventually, the house fell silent.
Rucker sent his men back in, only this time, two Humvees charged in ahead of them, their .50-caliber machine guns smoking. He soon realized the objective was more than well prepped. His men made their way in with little difficulty, finding several dead bodies and only encountering three solitary and shell-shocked Republican Guards, who were swiftly taken out.
Relief washed over him when he heard the shouts of “Clear” over the radio. His advance troops had confirmed overall control of the site.
Rucker made his way into the hakeem’s house as the dead bodies were being lined up for identification. He looked at their dirty, bloodstained faces and frowned. They were all clearly local men, Iraqis, foot soldiers long abandoned by their commanding officers. He called for the man with the headdress to be brought in. The man was spirited in under heavy guard and allowed to check the dead. With each one, he shook his head, his fear more visible
with each negative identification
.
The hakeem was nowhere to be found.
Rucker scowled. The operation had required considerable resources, three of his men were wounded, one of them seriously, and it looked as if it was all for nothing. He was about to order another sweep when a voice he recognized as belonging to Sergeant Jess Eddison crackled over the radio.
“Sir.”
Eddison’s voice had an unsettling quiver in it that Rucker hadn’t heard before. “I think you need to see this.”
Rucker and his XO followed a squad leader to the inner vestibule of the house, from where the grand, marble-clad stairs ascended to the bedroom areas above. A door off to its side led to the basement. Using torches to light up the windowless passage, the three men made their way carefully down the steps and met up with Eddison and a couple of PFCs from the Second Platoon. Eddison directed his flashlight’s beam into the darkness and led them down the hall.
What they found wasn’t exactly a standard rec room.
Unless your name was Mengele.
The basement covered the whole footprint of the house as well as its outer courtyard. The first few rooms they found weren’t particularly distressing. The first was an office. Its contents seemed to have hastily been cleared out. Shredded papers littered the floor, and a small stack of burnt books lay in a mound of black ash and bindings in a corner. Next door was a large bathroom, followed by another room with sofas and a large TV set.
The room they entered after that was much larger. It was a full-fledged operating room. The fittings and the surgical equipment were state-of-the-art. Its relative cleanliness belied the squalid state of the rest of the house. Presumably, the guards manning the house hadn’t ventured in there.
Maybe by choice.
Or maybe by fear.
Its floor was wet with a bluish liquid. Rucker and his team followed Eddison, their boots squeaking against the damp stone tiles. The passage led to a lab where, lined up on a white Formica drawer unit along the room’s long wall, sat a row of clear vats filled with a green-blue solution. A few of them were shattered in what seemed like a random, hasty cover-up. The others were intact.
Rucker and his squad leader moved in for a closer look. Tubes fed into the liquid, and suspended in the undamaged vats were human organs: brains, eyes, hearts, and some smaller body parts that Rucker didn’t recognize. A worktable nearby was littered with petri dishes. They had meticulously marked labels that were indecipherable to their untrained eyes. Next to them sat a pair of powerful microscopes. Cables that would have connected to computers led nowhere. All the computers were gone.
Off to one corner, Rucker found another room, long and narrow. Stepping inside, he found several large, stainless-steel fridges lined up side by side. He thought about whether to check them himself, or to wait for a hazmat team. He decided there wasn’t a risk, given the lack of locks or markings, and opened the first of the fridges. It was filled with neatly stacked vats containing a thick red liquid. Even before he saw the labels marked with dates and names, Rucker knew the vats contained blood.
Human blood.
Not the small, medical pouches he was used to.
This was blood by the barrel-load.
Eddison led them through to the part of the basement that he had initially signaled them about. A narrow corridor led to another area that must have been excavated under the courtyard, though Rucker couldn’t be sure, the dark maze confusing any sense of direction he may have enjoyed aboveground. It was, for all intents and purposes, a prison. Cell after cell lined either side of the passage. The interiors of the cells were decently furnished with beds, toilets, and sinks. Rucker had seen far worse. It felt more like a windowless hospital ward, if anything.
If it weren’t for the bodies.
There were two in each room.
Shot in the head in a final, desperate act of insanity.
There were men and women.
Young and old.
Children, at least a dozen of them, boys and girls.
All wearing identical white jumpsuits.
The last cell would mark Rucker to the end of his days.
On its bare, white floor lay the supine bodies of two young boys. Their heads had recently been shaved clear. They stared up at him with unblinking eyes, small, round punctures cratering their foreheads, acrylic-like pools of blood, thick and shiny, framing their hairless skulls. And on the wall of the cell, a crude drawing, carved into the wall as if with a fork or some other blunt instrument.
The etching of a desperate soul, a silent scream to an uncaring world from a horror-stricken child.
A circular image of a snake, curled on itself, and feeding on its own tail.