The kid nodded.

Rapp looked over at the kid’s dusty boom box and then reached over and ejected the tape. He slid it into the case and said, “I’ve been listening to it for a week straight. Knock yourself out. I’ll pick it up when I drive back out in a few days.”

The kid was excited and lowered his rifle. “Thanks … for you … half price today.” He flashed Rapp five fingers.

Rapp paid him, smiled, slipped the little car back into gear, and drove away. It took him another twenty minutes to find the safe house. Based on the stories he’d heard from Hurley, he was surprised that during that time he didn’t run into any more armed men. As per his training, he did a normal drive-by and barely glanced at the building. All he wanted to do was go to sleep, but it had been drilled into him that these were the precautions that would save his life, so he continued past and then circled back, checking the next block in each direction.

It was a five-story apartment building among four-, five-, and six-story apartment buildings. Rapp was too tired to care if it had any architectural characteristics beyond a front and back door. He parked the car, grabbed his bag, and entered the building. He didn’t have a gun on him, at least not yet, so there was pretty much only one thing to do. Climb the stairs. If it was a trap, he’d have to throw his bag at them and lie down and take a nap. No one was waiting for him when he got to the fifth floor. There were three doors on the left and three on the right. They had the two on the right toward the back. Or so he thought. After checking above each door he came up empty, so he checked the ones across the hall and found two keys. That was when he remembered he was supposed to enter from the back of the building.

That snapped him out of it a bit. That and the lesson that he might be Ismael some day. He told himself to slow down and stop rushing things. He checked his watch. It was two-eleven in the afternoon. He hadn’t slept in more than a day, and the day before that only a few hours. He opened the door and closed and locked it behind him. He could barely keep his eyes open, but he still dug out the doorstop and wedged it under the door. Not bothering to check the rest of the place, he went into the bedroom and opened the closet. There on the floor was a suitcase that looked a lot like the one from Istanbul. Rapp placed it on the bed, opened it, and found three Beretta 92Fs with silencers and extra magazines. It was the same suitcase.

Rapp loaded one of the guns and put the suitcase away. With his last bit of strength, he stripped down to his boxers and climbed under the covers of the twin bed. He shoved the pistol under the pillow and wondered who the person was who went from city to city dropping off their tools of the trade. Would he ever get the chance to meet this mystery man or woman? Probably not. As Hurley liked to say, they were on a need-to-know basis and there wasn’t a lot they needed to know. Rapp began to drift off to sleep even though he knew that Hurley and Richards would probably be there in a minute. He figured any sleep was better than none.

CHAPTER 50

THE bag they’d placed over his head offered a mix of putrid smells—feces, vomit, snot, and blood all mixed together with the sweat of all the men who had worn it before him. And it wasn’t the perspiration of exertion, it was the ripe sweat of fear, an all-out assault on his olfactory system, designed to make him pliable to whoever it was who would walk through the door and begin asking questions. Hurley had no idea where he was, other than the fact that he was in a basement. He’d felt the stairs as they’d dragged him from the trunk of a car and into the building.

It was the second car he’d been in that morning. In the midst of his pummeling by the police he blurted out the only name that he thought might help. “Levon Petrosian! I am a friend of Petrosian!”

The clubbing and kicking stopped almost immediately, and then one of the men asked him what he’d said. Hurley could tell it was the portly one in the three-piece suit, even though he couldn’t see him. The man ordered him cuffed and placed in the backseat of one of the cars. They were not gentle, but Hurley did not expect them to be, so it wasn’t too bad. That was when they placed the first hood on his head. It wasn’t too bad, really. It could have used a good cleaning, but at least it didn’t smell like a bowl of shit.

He marked the time in the back of the car, counting the seconds and trying to make sense of the noises beyond the glass windows. The metal cuffs were biting into his skin. He twisted his wrists around and tried to see if he could get out of them, but it was no use. Twenty-seven seconds later, the car doors opened. Hurley couldn’t be sure, but he thought two men got in the front seat and one man joined him in the back. He felt something hard jabbed into his ribs.

“Don’t move, or I will kill you.”

Hurley couldn’t be sure if the object at his side was a gun or a truncheon. “Fuck you.” The object was jabbed even harder into his side.

“You shouldn’t talk to a policeman like that.”

The voice came from the front seat. It was the older pudgeball. “Policeman,” Hurley said with open disdain. “If you’re cops, what am I being arrested for?”

“For striking a police officer. One of my men has a broken nose.”

“You mean the one who was going to crack me over the back of the head with his stick? I have a great idea. Don’t bullshit me, and I won’t bullshit you.”

“Striking a police officer is a very serious matter.”

“Yeah … so is kidnapping, so why don’t you just pull over and let me go and I’ll make sure no one puts a price on your head.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“Just telling you the truth. I make it a habit not to kill cops … that is, unless they are corrupt.”

Hurley doubled over as the man next to him delivered a stinging blow with whatever it was that he was holding. Hurley recovered and said, “I can’t wait to tell Petrosian about this … the first thing I’m going to do”—Hurley turned to his right as if he could actually see the man next to him—“is take that stick of yours and shove it up your ass. Although you’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?” Hurley expected it this time and folded his arms up quickly, locking the object between his right biceps and forearm. Then he reeled his head back and smashed it in the general direction of the other man’s head. They hit forehead to forehead, like two pool balls. A loud, resounding crack. Despite the pain that Hurley felt he started laughing wildly and kicking and thrashing.

That was when they decided to pull over and put him in the trunk. Not long after that, maybe ten minutes, they stopped, pulled him out of the trunk, and stripped him down to his birthday suit. Hurley endured this part without comment. He had a sinking feeling where this was all headed, and it was bleak, to say the least. He held out hope, though, that Richards had been able to get away. They wasted no time tossing him into the trunk of a second car and speeding off. It was a bumpy ride, and it must have been an older car, because the fumes grew so strong that Hurley started to think he would suffocate. It occurred to him that that might be the best possible outcome. Fall asleep and die from carbon monoxide poisoning. He could skip all of the degradation and take his secrets with him.

Unfortunately, he had survived, and they had dragged him into this dank basement that smelled like an outhouse. They’d switched out the hood that the police had used and put this disgusting burlap bag on his head. Hurley took in shallow breaths through his mouth and focused his mind. Throwing up under this thing would be extremely unpleasant, but then again there was a really good chance that he was about to endure the most repugnant degradation the mind could imagine, so why worry?