Read A Disappearance in Damascus for Free Online

grow a proper moustache,” Ahlam recalled. When he lunged at her, she grabbed him by the collar and shoved him hard against one of the cars. The man standing next to him fired a shot between her feet. “I’ve been tracking you for a year and a half,” he snarled.
    “Why didn’t you just call me?” she told him. “I would have come to see you.”
    The man didn’t like her attitude one bit. “He shot a bullet beside my right ear. He would have liked to put the bullet in my head, but they only had orders to torture me, not to kill me. He told me he’d already tried to kill me several times but he couldn’t catch me.”
    He told her she drove too fast. “I used to drive a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour on the highway.”
    “You were trying to escape them?” I asked.
    “No. I just like to drive fast.” She sighed. “I had a Volvo. My dream in life is to have another Volvo.”
    The next thing she knew, she was bundled into the passenger seat of one of the cars, a blindfold across her eyes.
    “I want to smoke,” she said, her back stiff as a pole.
    “What?” said the boy. He was sitting behind her in the back seat with his machine gun.
    “Give her a cigarette,” said the driver.
    The boy had taken her purse. Now he dug through it until he found a pack of cigarettes. “These are American,” he said suspiciously, as if this were proof of her treachery.
    “No, they are Korean,” Ahlam told him. Pine cigarettes, her favourite brand, are made in South Korea. “You have to learn how to read.”
    She didn’t have time to finish her cigarette. Pulling off the road, the men grabbed her by her feet and shoulders and tossed her into the back of a truck. They changed trucks several more times along the route, tossing her from one to the next. “They were playing soccer with me, like I was the ball.” She was handcuffed, the cuffs so tight on her wrists that her hands swelled, and she shouted until they loosened the bands. She was taken somewhere in the desert. The walls of the building were mud and the floors of sand, the wind so hot it burned her skin. She later heard that her boss at the GIC, an American major named Adam Shilling, had sent a hundred soldiers to look for her.
    Her captors began to interrogate her. They tied her to a chair and asked about contractors, military bases, interpreters. “I didn’t have any answers to their questions.”
    One of her captors beat her several times a day—“he seemed to be enjoying himself”—but she had the feeling there was some confusion. As if she wasn’t the kind of captive they had been told to expect. They had envisioned some high-value American spy, some sort of Mata Hari, and seemed utterly baffled by a mother from a respected family who had become important enough to have information they wanted. They claimed to have reports that she travelled around in a Humvee, that she was having an affair with an American colonel, that she had dyed her black hair blonde.
    “Take off my head cover,” she told them. She’d always covered her hair, it was how she was raised, and since the war began it was a matter of life or death. “See for yourself.”
    They seemed frightened by the suggestion. Killing her would be a lesser sin in their eyes than seeing her hair. That’s when she knew who they were: al-Qaeda.
    For three days she was beaten, pistol-whipped, and not allowed to sleep, but then her captors began arguing among themselves. She could hear them through the walls of her room. The man who beat her argued that she ought to be killed. Another voice, one she had not heard before, agreed. “If I were in your place,” he said, “I would just kill her. If she’s innocent she’ll go to heaven. If not she’ll go to hell.”
    Another voice, younger, objecting. Would God not want them to discover the truth?
    The younger one asked her tough questions but he never laid a hand on her. He interrogated her extensively about her central crime, working for the