Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [91]
She continued to be all business, however. After they left the gym, she called Brendan Lapworth to let him know she was still alive.
“Who?” Jack asked as they took a cab to the terminal.
She quietly explained that the man Jack had seen Sara talking to at the rave—Curly—was a hardened former Central Scotland Police constable named Brendan Lapworth who had been working antiterror for at least a dozen years. He was Sara’s task force leader, and had been on the other end of the line when she made her call outside of al-Fida’s flat.
“There’s a problem. We need to talk.”
“When I realized I was being followed,” she told Jack, “I knew I had to warn him off. Too many of us have been getting ourselves killed. We were supposed to rendezvous again after I either lost you or took care of the situation. But that obviously didn’t happen.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Took care of the situation? You mean shoot me?”
“If it came to that, yes.”
His brain didn’t know if that should excite him or be a deal-breaker. Fortunately, his body didn’t give a damn.
“When you said you were in Abdal’s flat I thought you might be working for Zuabi,” she told him. “A homegrown terrorist. Of course, I didn’t know who you were, then.”
“Believe me, I didn’t know what to make of you, either. That little crying act was quite a show. You were very convincing.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” she said softly.
Without having said a word, Sara and Jack adopted the roles of lovers on holiday. They boarded the Eurostar to Paris and spent the nearly three-hour ride trying to get as much sleep as possible. They both still felt the lingering effects of the ape’s magic wand, and Jack only wished he’d been a little more thorough with the guy and put him out for good.
Maybe that’s the difference between us and them, he thought. People like us were raised to be empathetic and understanding, to use violence as a last option, always looking for reasons not to kill. But mercenaries like Swain and his men, or extremists like Zuabi, looked at people as nothing more than a way to earn a buck, gain power, make a political point, or achieve some false religious nirvana that really had nothing to do with God at all. They used greed and faith as weapons, their concern for humanity never stretching beyond the limits of their own selfish interests.
Jack remembered what the Reb had said about al-Fida at Cousin Ohad’s dining table.
“He’d just as soon see people like you and me buried under a pile of rubble.”
Thugs like Swain and Zuabi and al-Fida and Haddad had no qualms about killing. Why, Jack thought, should he?
Because that’s one of the only things that separates human beings from animals, he reminded himself. And if that didn’t matter, then the bad guys had already won.
As it said in Jeremiah, “In truth, in justice, and in righteousness; then shall the nations bless themselves by him.…”
Paris, France
“Good to see your bonnie face again,” Lapworth said to Sara, with only a hint of the rolled rs that signaled a Scottish burr. “We were afraid we lost you.”
“You nearly did,” she told him. “If it weren’t for Jack, I’d be rotting in a chair right now.”
Brendan Lapworth had picked them up at the Paris train station, the Gare du Nord, in a battered Citroën Berlingo panel van. Up close, Jack noted that the curly hair was flecked with gray, and there were lines in Lapworth’s ruddy face—the roadmap of a hard life. But his eyes were clear and blue and unflinching.
Jack sat in the backseat, watching the sun drop below the horizon as he absently wound his watch. Ironically, his last visit to Paris had been for a story, when the city was plagued by Muslim riots. It occurred to him that, except for the trip to London with Rachel, most of his world travel had been accompanied by war or political upheaval.
At some point in his life he’d have to take a real vacation, assuming the world would