Silver by Steven Savile Read Free Book Online Page B

the arm of the wheelchair. The rhythm sounded like the funeral march of Geppetto’s wooden toys. His nails clacked and clinked and thunked against the leather, steel and wood. He found his thoughts drifting.
    He hadn’t been there for Orla’s debriefing, but he’d read Orla’s file a thousand times since.
    He knew all of the intimate details of Tel Aviv and exactly what had happened to her. Knowing didn’t make it any less potent. It didn’t purge or cleanse or offer redemption or retribution.
    She had been taken during the second Intifada. After a series of suicide attacks the IDF believed stemmed from the Palestinian camp, she had gone in. They were after Mahmoud Tawalbe, a father of two who owned a record store. He also headed an Islamic Jihad cell and was responsible for a string of deaths through suicide bombings at Haifa and Hadera. Intelligence suggested Thabet Mardawi and Ali Suleiman al-Saadi, two other top-level Islamic Jihadists were also sheltering in the camp.
    Orla’s brief had been simple: infiltrate the refugee camp, establish the presence of the primary and secondary targets, and get out. She made her reports, but she didn’t get out. She was dragged away from the makeshift streets of the encampment to the heart of Jenin, the Hawashin district, as the first assault hit on the morning of April 2, 2002. Explosions triggered by the bulldozers as they rolled in buried the sound of her screams.
    They had told her she was already dead, that there was no place in heaven for her soul, but promised to keep her alive one more night if she gave herself up to them. They used her. Every night they made the same promise, one more night. They kept her for nine days, and though time lost all meaning for her, she suspected that at least five people raped her every night. Often it was two or three at a time, sometimes one man came alone. She didn’t fight them. They would beat her, enjoying her pain. They would taunt her, goading her to tears. They would abuse her, violate her. But they refused to kill her even when she begged. Somehow she had made it through, night after night, until the IDF “liberated” the camp.
    She hadn’t worked for four months when Sir Charles rescued her. The annotation in her service record said simply: Torture victim. Unstable. Suggest continued observation. If no change in subsequent months recommend transfer out of active service.
    In less clinical words, Orla Nyrén was the quintessential “damaged goods” that could quite easily keep a psychiatrist fed and watered for years.
    That didn’t change the fact that during their few years together Sir Charles had grown to think of Orla as the daughter he’d never had. He knew her as well as anyone could, and that natural paternal instinct drove him to at least try and protect her, despite the fact that doing so only served to rile her all the more. His gut instinct had been to send Noah with her. Of all of them Noah was the one he would have entrusted with her life because it was so obvious he shared the same adoration the old man did. Without question, Noah would take a bullet for Orla. But Noah Larkin was every bit as damaged in his ownway as she was, and just as likely to get them taken down a dark alley and shot as he was to save the day.
    He had deliberately stressed Konstantin’s qualifications for the Berlin leg of the operation: his familiarity with the city, with the mindset of the people, his network of contacts from both before the wall fell and after. Everything he had said could equally be applied to Orla and Israel, he’d made quite sure of that. The only difference was their relationships with the places. For Konstantin Berlin mean freedom; for Orla Israel meant torture. And because of that, he had been worried she was going to sit back meekly and let Frost take the Israel assignment. He couldn’t begin to imagine the conflict going on inside her mind as she listened to him give her city away. The war of emotions,