The Secret Servant

two rolls of bandaging, and two liters of bottled water. She held out her cuffed hands to the one she thought of as Cain. He shook his head.
    “I can’t do this with my hands cuffed.”
    He hesitated, then removed them.
    “The drugs you gave me after you kidnapped me—you have more, I assume.”
    Another hesitation, then a reluctant nod.
    “I need them. Otherwise, your friend is going to suffer terribly.”
    He walked over to the van and returned a moment later with a syringe wrapped in plastic and a vial of clear liquid. Elizabeth looked at the label: KETAMINE . No wonder she’d suffered such terrible hallucinations while the drug was in her system. Anesthesiologists almost never used ketamine without a secondary sedative such as Valium. These idiots had given her several injections of the drug with nothing to blunt its side effects.
    She loaded an appropriate dosage, two hundred and fifty milligrams, and injected it into the wounded man’s upper arm. As he slipped slowly into unconsciousness, she broke the needle off the syringe and placed it in the plastic sack from the chemist shop where Cain had purchased the medical supplies. The name and address of the shop were written on the bag in blue lettering. Elizabeth recognized the village. It was located on the Norfolk coastline, northeast of London.
    She lifted the blanket and adjusted the lamp, so that the light shone directly into the wound. The round was lodged within the fracture fragments. She opened the bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured a generous amount directly into the wound, then wiped away the puss and other infectious material with a cotton swab. When the wound was sufficiently clean, she sterilized the straight razor and used it to debride the ragged necrotic material along the edges. Then she sterilized the tweezers and spent the next twenty minutes carefully removing fragments of shattered bone and filaments of embedded fabric. Finally, she sterilized the needle-nose pliers and slipped them carefully into the wound. The round was out a moment later, deformed from its impact with the terrorist’s tibia but intact.
    She gave the bullet to Cain as a souvenir and prepared for the final stage of the procedure: the dressing and the splint. First she flushed the wound thoroughly with the sterile water, then covered it with a four-by-four sterile pad. Last, she laid the two strips of wood along each side of his lower leg from the knee to the ankle and bound the splint tightly with the rolls of bandaging. When she was finished, she propped the leg on a pillow and looked at Cain.
    “When he wakes up, give him two of the cephalin tablets. Then give him one tablet every four hours. Keep the leg elevated. I’d like to see him every two hours, if that’s possible. If not, I’ve given you seventy-two hours at the most. After that he’s going to need to go into a hospital.”
    She held out her hands. Cain applied the cuffs and led her downstairs to her cell. As she lay down on her cot, she felt an almost drunken sense of elation. The crude surgery, the brisk commands: she had been in control, if only for a few moments. And she had managed to uncover a single piece of valuable information. She was still in England, still within reach of the British police and intelligence services.
    She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but an hour later she was jolted by a knock at the door. We have a present for you , the note said. Lay down on your cot . She did as she was told and watched as Cain and Abel entered her cell. They put packing tape across her mouth and a hood over her head. She fought them. She fought them even after they gave her the needle.

15
     
    C YPRUS : 10:15 A.M. , F RIDAY
     
    M uch can be gleaned about the value of a source by the accommodations that are made to handle him. For the debriefings of Wazir al-Zayyat, the Office had purchased a lovely whitewashed villa on the southern coast of Cyprus with a small swimming pool and a shaded terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Gabriel and Chiara arrived several hours before the Egyptian was due. Gabriel had hoped to spend the time relaxing, but Chiara, alone with him for the first time in weeks, wanted to use the opportunity to discuss wedding plans. Place settings and flowers, guest lists and music—this is how Israel’s legendary secret agent passed the time before the arrival of the Egyptian spy. He wondered what Haaretz and the rest of the Israeli newspapers would write about him if