He saw his brother pause, as if there was an answer there on his lips. An answer he would not speak.
At length, Jamal walked back to the couch, standing behind him hesitantly. “Forgive me, brother…family should not argue like this. What’s happened to me? I have found a faith that I once thought I’d lost,” he whispered, a reverent intensity in his voice, along with a shadow of the brother he once had been. “And it has given me purpose in this life of ours. That’s all I want for you.”
He reached down, squeezing Nasir’s shoulder. “That’s all our father would have wanted.”
And then he was gone, leaving Nasir sitting alone in the cramped, now-darkened living room of the small apartment.
Family. That meant everything — their only lifeline back to the world they had once known. No matter their differences, he couldn’t betray that…which was why Jamal’s name had never appeared in the reports he left in weekly dead drops in exchange for his freedom.
And yet he knew, much as he had tried to deny it — had tried to lie to himself.
It has given me purpose…
His brother was involved.
“…we knew we couldn’t go after Yusuf without the Israelis’ help, and the last thing Bill Clinton wanted to do was offend Arafat in the very twilight of his presidency.” Kranemeyer snorted. “For all I know, he might have even thought of pardoning the dirtbag, but someone convinced him that we could make the snatch. Grab him in the West Bank, throw a bag over his head and fly him out to Egypt. Let Mubarak’s boys give him a going over.”
“Extraordinary rendition,” Tex remarked quietly. It seemed strange to refer to Mubarak now, years after his fall from power, but he had once been the face of Egypt.
A nod from the DCS. “Exactly, but things didn’t go as planned.”
“Does it ever?” Thomas asked, a caustic edge to his voice. He glanced down at the glass of brandy in his hand, his third drink of the night. The liquor was starting to affect him, he knew that — but hang it all, what a day!
“On the day of the operation, Nichols went into Ramallah before dawn, carrying a Kalashnikov and dressed as a Palestinian fellah. We didn’t hear from him for hours. I suited up with Avi ben Shoham and an assault team from the Sayeret Matkal. We were going to head into Ramallah in the back of a pick-up truck, black balaclavas over our heads and flying the green flag of Hamas. Any luck, the PLO and Hamas would blame each other, not us.”
The DCS paused to take a sip of his drink. “With twenty minutes to go, Nichols made contact. Free fall. That particular emergency code had been designated as the signal for mission abort. Turns out we’d been walking straight into a trap. At first we thought our informant had sold us down the river, but five days later, the man’s body was dropped off in front of the embassy gates in Tel Aviv, his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth.”
That was the Middle East for you, Thomas thought, glancing around the bar in hopes of catching the eye of a waitress to refill his drink. They played hardball. “What happened to Yusuf?”
“Six weeks after the abort of RUMBLEWAY, Yusuf stepped into his car and it blew up, killing him, his bodyguard, and his fourteen-year-old son. Our best intel was that it was a Mossad hit.” The DCS shook his head. “Moral of the story? Don’t mess with the Jews.”
Tex cleared his throat. “What’s all that got to do with today?”
Thomas smiled to himself, turning his glass between his fingers. Right to the point, as always. No beating around the bush. That was Tex.
“Just to be honest with you, I don’t know,” Kranemeyer replied. “But it was the only operation that Lay, Nichols, and I were all involved in — before I became DCS.”
“A signal?” Thomas asked.
The older man nodded. “Ten minutes after the attack on Lay’s SUV, a call was placed from an encrypted satellite phone in the area. From what Fort Meade has been able to decrypt, the caller used the phrase Eaglefire. That was also a RUMBLEWAY code.” He leaned across the table. The music was changing in the bar, a hard beat replacing the slower vibe of happy hour. The voice of Bruce Springsteen belting out “Born in the U.S.A” served to further obscure Kranemeyer’s words.
“I’m not going to ask either of you if you know where Nichols went,” the DCS began. Neither of them looked at each other. “But I know how these things go. Everyone in this business has a fall-back plan. We did back in my Delta Force days, I still do. The FBI catches up with Harry, they’re going to toss him in a cell and throw away the key. And if my suspicions are correct, if he’s acting on orders from David Lay, we need to talk to him first.”
“And you want us to find him for you?” Tex asked, his eyes a dark void as he stared across at their boss.
“Officially,” Kranemeyer replied, closing the netbook and returning it to the satchel at his side, “no. Everyone knows the CIA can’t operate on U.S. soil.”
His eyes hardened, a look of determination passing over his features. “Unofficially…don’t come back without him.” Kranemeyer rose, pulling on his overcoat. “And if it turns out he is part of the problem, well, you know what to do. Good huntin’, boys.”
And he was gone…
Chapter 6
She could feel him, there in the darkness. Could feel his eyes, watching her. What time was it?
A hand pressed gently down on her shoulder. “Time to leave.”
Harry’s voice. Carol rolled onto her back, stretching wearily as she looked up at him. She could barely make out his face against the darkness.
“Get any sleep?”
Her only reply was a shake of the head. She unzipped the sleeping bag and swung her legs out over the side of the bed. “You?”
“Not so’s you’d notice it.” A mirthless chuckle punctuated his words. “Got six inches of snow last night, still coming down.”
His voice had changed, she noticed. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Could be,” he responded, looking at her as he rolled up the sleeping bag. “Might be a blessing — the snow is going to ground their choppers, but they’ll fling out a wider dragnet today all the same.”
She reached for the Kahr and slipped it inside her jacket, close to her body. “Do you have a plan?”
“Might call it that.”
The morning was cold — cold and dark, falling snow highlighted against blue and red flashing lights. The metal barrel of the Mossberg 500 in the hands of Sheriff’s Deputy Ricardo Sanchez was colder still.
Murmuring an oath under his breath, the twenty-seven-year-old Sanchez laid the shotgun across the hood of the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s car and reached for a thermos of coffee.
Four hours. Three to go. Man, it was raw. The form of his partner materialized from the other side of the two-car roadblock on the Virginia side of the mountain bridge.
“What’s the news?” Sanchez asked, spotting the cellphone.
“Nada, Rick,” Deputy Matthew Wilkes responded, slinging his department-issued AR-15 over his shoulder. “That was the wife. Wondering when I’d be back. She’s cold.”
Sanchez laughed at that. He just had to. “Married three months, right? How’d she stay warm before she ran into the likes of you?”