The Shield of Darius (7 page)

Falen arrived to find the hotel, restaurant and Ishmael overwhelmed by the beef raisers. The normally unflappable Israeli was trapped in a corner between an Angus breeder from Kalona, Iowa, and a Texas Charlais rancher who were flashing loose wads of hundred dollar bills and arguing over the merits of warm beer. If Falen were going to kidnap tourists for money, he’d throw in a few Angus breeders. But there were no cattleman among the DWATs, and no one from towns the size of Kalona, Iowa.

As Falen now watched his latest data mesh into the three factor categories like the teeth of a precision gear box, he knew he was right. The thing hinged on demographics. Mix by race, sex, community size, geographic region. Whoever was taking these people was being very selective and wanted the whole country represented.

Swiveling his chair left, Falen examined the large wall map of the United States that covered the center of the east wall above the dresser. The multicolored states were dotted with twenty-seven stickpins, each indicating the home city of a DWAT, and each color-coded to indicate race and gender; white, black, brown and yellow, with a pink dot on the top of those representing women. The pins could just as easily represent major U.S. population centers and Falen’s studied eye scanned the distribution for the hundredth time. Virtually every major city from Portland to Atlanta displayed pins. Two disappearances from New York; one white, one black. Houston and L.A. both had a white and an Hispanic. All the rest were singles, with the Asian American from Honolulu.

Falen had guessed wrong about the new guy, expecting the next one to come from the Southwest; Phoenix or Albuquerque. Or possibly Florida. He had overlooked the Greater Washington D.C. area, and Benjamin Sager filled that gap.

Sager was the first disappearance since Falen had picked up on the DWAT pattern. Number twenty-eight. The computer-delivered message from Fisher simply read, “American Benjamin Sager, Baltimore MD, disappeared from Sherborne, Dorset, England, May 19. Passport used from Manchester to Paris same day. User not confirmed. If more desired, please contact.” 

Falen called as soon as he opened the message and knew Fisher would answer. He always did. Twenty-four hours a day, any day of the week, Fisher answered.

“I need some information. I got the Sager data and would like everything you can dig up on the man.”

“Your hunch paying off?”

“Looks like it. These people aren’t just running away. And there are some unusual patterns to their disappearances. By the way, your printouts haven’t included insurance information. Could you run all these people through Equifax?”

“Will do. Any sense that whatever this is might compromise national security?”

“Possibly. That’s not apparent yet.”

“Keep me informed,” Fisher replied and hung up.

A dozen sheets of paper were in his box the next morning. Equifax, the national insurance clearinghouse, hadn’t turned up anything noteworthy. All the DWATs were insured – some for huge amounts. But there were no new policies, and no changes of beneficiaries. Some of the women weren’t insured well at all, and even the men weren’t carrying more than Falen would expect for people with this kind of money. Dead end there. Falen slipped the pages into the shredder.

The file on Benjamin Sager had everything; date and place of birth, family history back two generations, school records, every residence since birth, same information on wife and children, business history, memberships. Even minor league baseball stats. The guy had been a pretty good fielding second baseman, but apparently couldn’t hit big league pitching. Sager’s information filled six pages, with two dozen items referenced with asterisks, indicating that additional data was available if needed. A computer-generated letter attached to the file outlined what little was known about Sager’s disappearance, and the activities of his wife Katherine since May 19
th
. 

Falen’s brow furrowed as he read the report. This Sager woman was a persistent little wench. Every other spouse had cried and complained, but eventually accepted the State Department’s line that the disappearances were unfortunate, but unexplainable… and most likely related to personal issues of some kind. “We can find no reason or motive for the disappearance,” the official State Department letter to Katherine Sager explained. “We will continue to investigate the disappearance but are only left to assume that this may have been a matter of personal choice.” Mrs. Sager still doggedly insisted that her husband had not just walked away, but was the victim of an abduction. She had pursued her claim through the maze of State Department offices until she had been granted a brief audience with the Secretary two days earlier. The Secretary’s sympathetic support and assurance that the government was doing everything possible hadn’t satisfied Mrs. Sager and she had announced upon leaving the office that she was “going public.” Shit! Falen usually tried to give this type a wide berth, but if someone didn’t sit on Katherine Sager in a hurry, she might screw things up royally. Falen had no idea why the DWATs were disappearing, but whatever the reason, it was not something he needed to have some wonder woman getting the press all excited about right now. Hell, the media would probably miss the connections all together, but they were a nosy and tenacious lot and he couldn’t take a chance. He had to find a way to quiet Katherine Sager.

SIX

Ben stood on one of the stools, looking down through the unpainted upper half of his cell window into the walled enclosure across the alley.  A woman dressed in a long black sweater and headscarf squatted flat-footed beside the back door of the house, rhythmically sloshing clothes up and down in a galvanized tub.  He had watched her for nearly ten minutes and she still hadn’t looked up.  She washed three or four garments, wrung them out by hand and pressed them against a flat stone that sat beside the step.  When satisfied the material was as dry as she could get it, she rose stiffly and waddled on bowed legs to the back of the yard to Ben’s right where she hung the clothes loosely over a line stretched diagonally across the corner of the high compound walls.

“We need to get out of here,” Ben said partly to himself and partly to Jim, who sat silently thumbing through a magazine on the bed behind him.  “I’ve been here over three weeks now and nothing’s happening.”

“There’s no way out,” Jim said, still looking down at his magazine.  They had held some version of this conversation almost daily since Ben arrived and now recited it without thought.

“There’s always a way out.  Like I told you yesterday, it wouldn’t be that hard to get out of here.”

“You seem to be forgetting my little episode with the man in the suit.  He gave you the same speech I got, but had improved on the visual aids.  I thought I was a goner.  So did you.  Next time, they’ll kill us.”

“They’re lying about that,” Ben said, continuing the dialogue.  “They’re keeping us here for something and whatever it is, it must be important.  Look at how they feed us.  I don’t think they can afford to kill us.”

“We can’t take that risk,” Jim said, still leafing through his magazine.  “You didn’t have that barrel down your throat.”

Ben turned on his stool to face him, his hands clasped behind his back.  “I don’t think they’ll kill anybody, Jim.  Whatever we’re here for, they need us alive and in good shape.  This is something big.  Look at how careful they are about the guards not knowing anything.  We get a whole new set every four days, just like clockwork.  We don’t even change clothes that often.”

“We don’t change clothes at all,” Jim muttered. “And that still strikes me as kind of odd. If they’re trying to keep security tight, I’d think they’d keep the number who knows about us as small as they can.”

“Probably think there’s greater security in making sure we don’t get to know any of them.  The guards see us only eight times and aren’t allowed to speak. The two outside guys don’t even look in, and the man who brings in the tray doesn’t ever look at us. That’d still keep things pretty secure.”

“Could be,” Jim said, completing the obligatory dialogue.  Ben turned again to the window.  The woman had moved from the tub to the corner of the walled yard and was hanging three large semi-circular
chadors
across the line, the full-length wrap that traditional Muslim women wear to cover themselves.

“I think one of us can get out without them knowing we’re gone,” he said.  Behind him he heard Jim close his magazine and stand up.  This was a new twist to the conversation.

“How?  You mean not know for a few hours?”

“Not know at all.”  Ben continued to look down at the old woman.  “You remember I asked yesterday if the guards who brought dinner the first night I was here had been into the room before?  You said they had, but not since I was brought in.  The thing that struck me about them, though I wasn’t really tuned in to it at the time, was that none of them seemed surprised to see me.  Didn’t you find that odd?”

“I wasn’t paying much attention.  And I imagine the guy that gave us the little demonstration told them you were going to be here.”

“But if you’d been the guards and were told there was a new prisoner, wouldn’t you have been a bit curious?  Taken a good look at the new hostage? But they didn’t even glance at me.”

“They don’t get paid to be curious,” Jim said from beside the stool.  “Just to keep us here.”

“Yup.  That’s just it.  I’ve watched the groups that replaced them.  Even when they come the first time they don’t look us over.  They just leave what they bring and go.  I don’t think they have any idea who’s in the room, or if there are one or two of us.  In fact, I think they try
not
to know.  They’re scared.”

“Maybe they always expect two.  And how can they come in eight times in four days and not know how many’s in here?  These guys may be slow, but they’re not stupid.”

“You were in here alone for over a year.  Nobody ever said, ‘Where’s the other guy?’  There must be other rooms with just one.”  Ben turned again on the stool.  “Look at it this way.  They’ve been warned they aren’t supposed to talk to the prisoners.  They’re probably afraid of each other, so they go overboard and don’t pay any attention at all.  Suppose there are twenty rooms.  Some with two.  Some with one, so that makes it even harder to keep track.  And the numbers may not be constant from day to day.  Some moving in. Some moving out.  You notice the trays only have one spoon and one knife?  All purpose.  I might be off base, but I think the guards don’t pay attention from one visit to the next who’s in what room.”

Jim shook his head skeptically. “Get down off of that stool. I feel like you’re preaching to me. Sit over on the bed and let’s talk this over.”  Ben jumped energetically from the stool.

“Damn, you make me tired with all your bouncing around.”  Jim waited until Ben was still on the bed across the room.

“There can’t be twenty rooms with people. I’d have heard more moving around.”

“It could be a big place. Looks like an old hotel.”

“So they don’t know who’s in here…assuming you’re right.  What difference does that make?”

“What if one of us could get out without any sign of a break?  We just weren’t here when a new shift came the next day.  If they did notice one was gone, the other would just say someone came during the night and hauled him off.  I don’t think they’d question it.”

“Two problems,” Jim said, still unconvinced.  “First, how do you get out without it looking like a break?  Then, what do you do once you’re outside?  You seem pretty sure now that we’re not in some city in Europe, but in some A-rab country. Right?”

“Yeah,” Ben said thoughtfully.   “It’s the mud walls across the alley.  I don’t think we’d be seeing those, even in some ethnic section of a western city.”

“So that’s just my point,” Jim insisted.  “We’d stick out like warts on a pretty girl’s nose and they’d pick us up in a minute.  I know these rooms aren’t the most secure in the world, but that’s because they know there’s no place to go once you get out.  Sort of like Alcatraz.  The cell’s only part of it.  Then you’ve got the damned sharks and undertow to deal with.”

“Not likely to run into sharks in San Francisco Bay,” Ben objected.  “Could be one once in awhile, but not enough to keep you in.”

“So there’s no sharks.  Hell, I was just using it as an example.  Nobody ever got away anyhow.  Even that guy in the movie never turned up again.  But forget that.  How you gonna get out of here?”

Ben pointed at a square wooden panel below the high window.  “I think there must have been an air conditioner up there once.  If we’re careful about it, I think we can get that panel off without messing it up, take off the one on the other side and voila, we’re home free.”

“But we’re on the second floor.  Voila, we drop in a dead heap into the alley.”

“Minor problem.  One of us could lower the other down using a blanket, pull it back in, replace the panel and make the spare bed.”

“And the guy on the outside becomes invisible I suppose.”

Ben slapped the bed in exasperation.  “You’ve got to start thinking positive here Jim.  If we don’t get out, we’re going to rot away in here.”

The gray bearded truck driver frowned.  “Don’t think I haven’t thought about getting out.  But we’re different types, Ben.  Hell, I’m one of those guys who spent my whole life in the same town, married the girl next door and never went anywhere.  When I drove truck, I stayed at truck stops so I wouldn’t have to deal with other kinds of people.  And I’m meaning
American
people.  I don’t feel comfortable going downtown in Portland, let alone Beirut or wherever the hell we are.  My wife’s the big social person. She’s involved in everything. Hell, I hated every minute of that trip to Portugal.”

”I can do it,” Ben said, hesitating.  “But it’d mean I’d have to go out alone.”

“You can disappear? You’ve been keeping something from me.”

“No, seriously.  You’ve been telling me since you first walked me around this room what a little guy I am.  And I’m as dark as most of these people….”

“Yeah, but you don’t look like them. You’re a damned gypsy.”

“Just listen for a minute.  If I could get down into the alley I could climb into that compound, take a
chador
off the line, and wrap it around me like a woman.  People would only be able to see my eyes and couldn’t tell the difference.”  Ben held his hands up to cover his lower face and forehead.  “Could you tell my eyes from one of these people?”

“Maybe I could from one of these women.  I haven’t seen one of them up close.”

“They don’t look any different.  Many of them don’t wear makeup.  No plucked eyebrows....”

Jim raked his beard with long, gnarled fingers. 

“You know how to wear one of those things?”

“It’s easy.  All they are is a half circle of cloth.  You put the middle of the straight side down over your forehead, then wrap the rest around you, holding one side up across your nose.  All that shows are your eyes.”

“But we don’t know where the hell we are.  You’d be out there wandering around as some A-rab woman and wouldn’t have any idea where to go.”

Ben leaned forward on the bed.  “We’ve pretty well decided we’re probably somewhere in Afghanistan – or maybe Syria. That’s where the hostage problems seem to be right now.  I’m thinking Syria. They’re pretty pissed off with us. I might be able to figure out which when I get into the streets.  Posters, buildings, that sort of thing.  If it’s Afghanistan, some of the writing might be in Farsi. I speak and read some Farsi and it’s a chance I’m willing to take.”

“I can’t picture all those countries very well. But what if we’re in Syria?  Then what?”

“That would be perfect. The population’s pretty divided and I should be able to find some friendly people and turn myself over to them.”

“And if we’re in Iraq? Some village where the Taliban’s still causing trouble somewhere?”

“Taliban’s Afghanistan,” Ben corrected. “Plus, it sounds too big for a village. And in a city of any size, there will be friendly troops.”

“Taliban or whatever. Sounds pretty ‘iffy’ to me.”

Ben rose and paced slowly around the room.  “You’ve been in here a year and a half now and I’ve been here going on a month. And there’s no sign of anything changing.  I’m feeling like Hansel and Gretel.  Like I’m being fattened up to go in the oven.  I don’t plan to be here a year, and I’d like to get you out.  This is our only chance.”

Jim sat quietly for a moment, looking grimly down at his slippered feet.  “This all sounds pretty well thought out.  Why haven’t you told me about it before now?”

Ben stopped pacing and looked over at the trucker from Portland.  Since Ben arrived, the two had shared every minute and almost every thought.  They’d talked about things they’d never spoken about to another person, including their wives.  As his scheme developed, he’d realized it meant leaving Jim behind.  Probably in mortal danger.

“I wasn’t sure, Jim.  I don’t want to leave you in here.  In fact, yesterday I’d decided to chuck the whole idea.”

Jim looked at him, waiting for the “but….”

“Then last night I dreamed I was with Kate and the kids picnicking by the zoo in Druid Hill Park.  I could feel the sun, Jim.  Warm against my face.   And the air smelled like fresh cut grass and hot dog relish and sliced watermelon.  I was lying on a blanket with my head on Kate’s lap, watching the kids chase a Frisbee across the lawn.  I woke up crying and knew I had to get out.”

Jim nodded soberly.  “Wish I still had them.  Mine stopped about six months ago.  Back then I used to dream up some plan every day.”  He looked up with a wry smile.  “I just couldn’t figure out how to turn into a woman.  Anyway, I’ll be the safe one.  Even if you can get out, you won’t last two days out there.”             

Ben sat again and leaned back against the wall. “When I was a kid – fifteen or sixteen – I used to wander around Tehran all the time by myself. We lived in the north part of the city and I’d catch a bus up to the open market at Niaveran, downtown to the Embassy, even out to Karaj forty kilometers west of the city. Just a kid, but wandering around on my own. If I can get out, I think I can find help.”

“But you had money. And you weren’t dressed up like a woman.”

“No. But I felt at home. It’s like meeting a strange dog. If he doesn’t think you’re afraid, he leaves you alone. I used to go to a place where they had these outside ovens, waiting for them to pull out big flat sheets of bread called
sangyak
so I could get it fresh. The people treated me like one of the other shoppers. And when the other kids were getting their hair cut at the American Club, I was at a little Iranian barbershop at
Tajrish
where I could listen to the street musicians while I sat in the chair. I felt like one of them.”