Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) Read Online Free PDF Page B

alive with his mind intact. And that meant feeding Grale tidbits of information.
    Of course, he’d betrayed organizations and other terrorists with whom he had the least connection. The names and addresses of certain rogue members of the Irish Republican Army. Plans for suicide bombings in Muslim countries that he considered inconsequential to his grander plans to establish a Muslim caliphate.
    He’d been prepared to go on with further betrayals, but after the first hour, Grale’s eyes had clouded over and he’d gripped his head with both hands and moaned. “Get him out of here,” he’d screamed, waving a hand at al-Sistani.
    As he was hustled out of the cavern, al-Sistani wondered if he might outlast his captor. He’d seen Grale coughing up blood— probably tubercular, he thought—and the man had so little flesh between his skin and bones that he looked almost skeletal.
    After the interrupted session, a week had passed with no more contact with Grale. He’d asked Paulito why, but the dwarf just shrugged. “He’s in one of his moods. Believe me, you don’t want to talk to him when he’s like this. Not unless you want to feel his knife. When he’s like this, he hunts the others above and below the streets, including some of them you told him about.”
    Imagining the gaunt, spectral figure rising from the shadows, his knife raised, al-Sistani had shuddered. Better them than me, however.
    Many days had passed since that conversation, or at least what hebelieved were many days—in the darkness it was impossible to tell exactly how long. Then the rat had attacked him and Jeremy and Paulito appeared to bring him back to Grale.
     
    As they entered the cavern, the people there stopped what they were doing to watch him walk past. Many were disfigured and cripples; they were missing teeth and sometimes arms or legs. Quite a number were obviously mad as they muttered to themselves, twitched, hopped about, and looked at him with confused, frightened, or angry eyes. Their unwashed bodies and foul breath made him nauseous.
    Most of them appeared to be men, though some were so disgustingly buried beneath stained rags and dirty faces it was impossible to determine their sex. However, there were some women, and even children and teenagers. In his eyes, they were a loathsome, scabrous people—the end product of decadent Western civilization and proof that all it needed was a push into oblivion from true believers such as himself.
    He thought of them as human garbage, unwanted even by their fellow Americans. But they seemed to see themselves as a community of equals; their pathetic shows of affection for one another, and the way those who appeared more or less mentally and physically competent took care of those who weren’t, disgusted him.
    Grale’s hovel was at a far end of the cavern in a cave dug into the wall at the back of some sort of raised cement platform that al-Sistani guessed had once been part of the subway system. Usually, the madman sat on the platform in front of his shack in an ancient, overstuffed leather chair, watching over his flock. He dressed in a cowled monk’s robe that shadowed his gaunt face so that the hollows beneath his dark and feverish eyes were accented against the nearly luminescent quality of his skin.
    As they approached, he saw that the madman held a chain leash attached to a leather collar that was fastened around the neck of a naked and prostrate man.
    Grale yanked on the leash, forcing the prisoner to raise his filthy head. Shocked, al-Sistani found himself looking at Azahari Mujahid,sometimes called Tatay, a mujahedid holy warrior. He was from the Philippines and was noted for his spectacular bombings of infidel targets throughout his home country and Indonesia. He’d been brought to New York to assist with al-Sistani’s plan to destroy the American economy.
    So that’s at least part of why my brilliant plan failed, al-Sistani thought. Somehow Tatay had been discovered and