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Kennedy noticed it was more a demand than a question, but nonetheless nodded politely. Jones had been thoroughly defeated and there was no sense rubbing it in.
When the chief of staff was gone the president addressed Kennedy and Flood. “I’m sorry about that. Politics comes first for Valerie
. She can’t help it.”
Flood shook his oversize head and grumbled something. Kennedy watched the general with pursed lips and then added, “No need to apologize, sir. You need people who will watch out for the political ramifications.”
“That’s true,” agreed the president, “but that doesn’t mean we have to check our morals at the door.” Hayes’s face twisted into a disapproving frown. “Valerie’s tendency is to try to control everything. She doesn’t understand that the American people will cut you a lot of slack as long as you’re up front with them and they know you had the right intentions. In this situation it’s pretty cut and dried.”
Hayes laid his hands flat on his desk and moved several pieces of paper around while he pondered precisely how to proceed. “I want to do the right thing here. I want to be up front on this, and I want to move very quickly. I don’t want some hotshot reporter breaking this before we get out in front of it, otherwise I’m afraid Valerie will be proven right and I’ll be crucified on the Hill.”
“If I may, sir?” asked Kennedy. The president nodded and she said, “You might not want to wait for tonight. The general and I could begin briefing select members of the various committees this afternoon. Then when you meet with them tonight, you can give them the entire story. I would caution you, though, that we need to keep General Moro and his involvement out of this.”
The president’s expression went from keen to confused. “Why?”
Kennedy hesitated and then said, “Mitch has come up with a solution for dealing with the general. If you have time, I think we should get him back in here so he can explain it to you.”
The president eyed the director of the CIA with great curiosity. Since diplomacy was far from Mitch Rapp’s area of expertise, the president was very curious about what his top counterterrorism operative had in the works. Two Navy SEALs were dead, a family of Americans were still held hostage and his presidency was on the brink of scandal. Right now, the idea of retribution seemed very appealing.
12
The little girl sat huddled in the corner, wrapped in a white robe, clutching herself tightly. David was sweating profusely under the black hood that covered his face. He grabbed one of Hamza’s legs and arms and pulled him to the center of the bed. Hearing a muffled sob, he looked up to check on the girl. Her face was covered by the oversize white folds of the hotel robe. He felt a genuine ache in his heart at the agony she was suffering. He knew it wasn’t just physical pain. Even worse, anguish and nightmares would probably follow her for the rest of her life.
David guessed that she couldn’t be more than ten years of age. Right about now guilt and self-recrimination would be working their way into her innocent mind. She would begin to wonder what she had done wrong to warrant such treatment. The Muslim world dealt very harshly with sexual stigmas where women were concerned. In David’s patriarchal society the distinction between a woman who willingly commits adultery and one who is forcibly raped is often lost. The honor of the family, which really means the honor of the father, is above all else.
David looked down at the poor frightened kid in the corner and struggled over what to do with her. He knew he should have never untied her. He should have simply shot Hamza in the back of the head, dispatched the two bodyguards and left. If he’d stuck with his original plan he’d be long gone by now; miles of safe distance between himself and the crime. The maid would show up in the morning and find the young girl, and she would be taken to a hospital. Everything would have turned out just fine for her.
As much as he wanted to believe it, though, he knew that was far from what would really happen. The maid would have called the police, who would very quickly discover they had a dead Iraqi general on their hands. The media would find out shortly after that, and this little innocent girl would get swept up in the maelstrom that would follow. The police and reporters would talk to her parents and the entire neighborhood would find out that the young girl had been sexually assaulted. Through no fault of her own she would be shunned and treated as a pariah for the rest of her years.
David wasn’t about to let that happen. When he’d started down this dangerous path years before, he’d made a promise to himself. David hadn’t grown up in the camps, but his mother had been sure to bring him along whenever she visited the various clinics. She wanted him to see firsthand the squalor that Palestinian people were forced to live in. His mother, unique in more ways than he could ever count, used the long car rides to and from the camps to enlighten her only son on the politics of the most contested region in the history of mankind.
The camps were a breeding ground for discontent, corruption and anti-Semitism. The Jews were blamed for everything, both real and imagined, consequential and inconsequential. They were the evil greedy Zionists who had stolen the land away from the Palestinian people. The propaganda was insidious but his mother had been very careful to teach David about the complicated history of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews. In her mind there was more than enough blame to go around.
For a brief period in 1948 the Palestinians actually had a state, but instead of taking what the United Nations had legally mandated, they decided to attack the fledgling country of Israel with the help of five Arab armies. The decision proved disastrous. Israel trounced the Arab armies, seized the land that had been set aside for the Palestinian state, and deported most of the Palestinians who hadn’t already left.
David’s mother liked to point out that it was a little disingenuous of their people to cry that Israel had stolen their land. She was fond of asking him, “If we had won the war back in forty-eight, do you think we would have allowed the Jews to keep their land?” She never waited for him to answer. The reply was always a resounding, “No. The Arab armies would have killed every last Jew.”
“The Jews are racists,” she used to tell him, “but the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Iraqis and the Saudis are all worse. The Jews hate us because we’ve given them no reason to like us, but what excuse do our Arab brothers have? They have none. We are beneath them, that is the way they feel. They have kept our people in these camps and stoked the flames of hatred toward the Jews to serve their own corrupt governments. We are servants to them. A useful tool in their campaign to keep their subjects’ anger focused not on them, but on the evil Jews.”
His mother’s teachings had made David wary of all propaganda. He refused to allow hatred to drive his ambition. He would never allow himself to turn a blind eye to the truth. He would never allow himself to become just another cold-blooded killer. That was why he didn’t just shoot Hamza and leave the poor girl to be discovered in the morning. David truly was a unique man. He was a pragmatist with a heart. The girl would be brought with him now, and an explanation and some cash would be given to her father later.
He finished tying the general’s wrists and ankles to the bed and then hovered over him for a moment. General Hamza had spent the better part of thirty years inflicting pain on people, destroying lives and ruining dreams. A bullet in the head was too good for him. Hamza needed to experience the fear he had so perversely meted out to so many souls. David wanted to see real fear in the man’s eyes.
He pulled his knife from its leather scabbard with his right hand and slapped Hamza’s cheek with his left. The Iraqi thug’s jaw hung loose. Reaching in with his thumb and forefinger David grabbed the tip of Hamza’s tongue and pulled it taut. The general started to stir. David tightened his grip and angled the tip of the four-inch blade into Hamza’s mouth. A quick upward slicing motion and a good seventy percent of Hamza’s tongue was severed from his mouth. With perfect timing, the general’s eyes shot open just in time to watch David tear the rest of his tongue out.
The Iraqi general, his eyes ablaze with fear and agony, let out a low guttural moan that because he no longer had his tongue never quite elevated itself to a scream. Immediately, he began to slash about like a landed fish in the bottom of a boat. He struggled against his bonds, trying to break free, st
ruggling to comprehend what was happening. His last memories were deliciously good ones, and now he was tied to this bed with some masked man sitting on his chest dangling a piece of meat in front of his face. Making matters worse, his mouth was on fire with a pain that his brain could not identify. A warm liquid trickled down his throat and caused him to gag when it dribbled into his windpipe. Suddenly, the pieces fell into place. In a panic, Hamza lifted his head off the pillow and tried to speak. All that came out were a jumble of primitive noises. The masked man sitting on top of him wasn’t holding a piece of meat, he was holding Hamza’s tongue.
David dropped the fleshy organ onto Hamza’s bare chest and reached into his own pocket. He grabbed a pack of crisp counterfeit hundred-dollar bills and waved them in front of the general’s face. He didn’t need to speak. Neither did the general, although he tried. There was instant recognition in his eyes. David crumpled a dozen of the new bills into a ball and with the tip of his blood-soaked knife he pried open the general’s lips. He crammed the wad in and then added two more fistfuls of money until Hamza’s mouth was overflowing with bills.
Moving quickly, he shoved another pillow under Hamza’s head and then got off him. Taking a moment to relish the sadistic bastard’s fear, David looked down at him and shook his head in disgust. He wondered if this butcher of Saddam’s had ever granted someone a reprieve, if he had ever felt an ounce of guilt over his actions or pity for the people he had so brutally tortured. As David looked into Hamza’s fearful eyes he knew the answer was no. Monsters like Hamza were wired differently. Their brains worked in ways normal people could never understand.
David felt no shame in what he was about to do. He felt no pity for Hamza. This would be justice in its purest form. Hamza would die in a manner commensurate with his crimes of brutality. David tossed the rest of the hundred-dollar bills onto the bed. They lay strewn about from one side to the other. Hamza looked down at the bills and tried to signal something with his eyes. David ignored him and walked to the foot of the bed, holding the knife up in the air. He stopped in between the general’s spread legs and looked down. Placing one knee on the bed, he reached out with his gloved hand and grabbed Hamza by his genitals. The general’s entire body convulsed in fear. Straining against his bonds he thrashed his head from side to side, a hideous noise rising up from his chest only to be stifled by the bloody bundle of worthless bills in his mouth. David did not hesitate or waver. He pulled hard with his left hand and reached out with the knife.
It took four slices, and there David stood with General Hamza’s genitals in his hand. He held them before the Iraqi’s horrified eyes and then simply dropped the bloody mess on his chest along with his tongue. Standing over him, David contemplated finishing him off, but decided against it. It was unlikely anyone would visit the room before morning and by then Hamza would surely have bled to death. It was more fitting to let him slowly die while staring at his lifeless sex organs, unable to scream for help, unable to move a limb to stem the bleeding. He would know the same helpless horror of his victims. And if someone came earlier and managed to save him, that wouldn’t be all that bad either; Hamza would spend his remaining days a castrated, prickless mute.
13
