“Here he comes,” Omar said, interrupting Candace’s thoughts.
In the spare light of the courtyard’s torch, they spied a tall thin man with a long beard standing, once more, by the open door to Ruhi’s room.
Bin Laden incarnate, thought Candace.
The small drone descended. They heard Ahmed offer a Muslim blessing to his wayward cousin. Then they picked up Ruhi, saying, “I will see you then.”
What’s that mean? When? Where?
Candace glanced at Omar, who spoke as if he could read her thoughts:
“I doubt they’re talking about the food court at the Riyadh Gallery.”
“It definitely sounds like a meeting.”
Omar allowed that this was true. “But Ruhi won’t know where. Ahmed would never give up that information this far in advance, I can assure you of that. What he’s saying is that Ruhi should be ready to move at any time. They have plans for him. That is good.”
“What kind of plans?” Candace wondered aloud.
“They’ll be testing him,” Omar said, “even though he’s Ahmed’s cousin.”
“Testing? You mean torture?”
Omar nodded. “When you think about it, they have to. He shows up right now?”
“But it’s not a coincidence. He was tortured.”
“And now he works for you.”
“But they don’t know that,” Candace said.
“They are going to try to find out. I can tell you that much.”
But nothing went as planned, not for Ruhi and Ahmed, not even for those who had been spying on them.
The call came to Candace in her hotel room at five the next morning. The Mabahith, Saudi Arabia’s notorious secret police, had just burst into Ruhi’s room and hauled him to a windowless black van. According to Omar, Uncle Malik looked stunned, his protests muted by the attending Mabahith officer.
Candace sat up in her hotel bed, still absorbing the shock. “But Omar, these are your people! What’s going on?”
“No, they are their own people. They are very secret.”
“What do they want from him?” Candace asked.
“I suppose they want to test him too.” Omar sighed, then hung up.
Candace dropped her head back to her pillow and stared at the ceiling, whispering, “Don’t fail, Ruhi. Remember, you’re tougher than you think.”
But her whole country was going to have to be a lot tougher, she realized moments later when she received a text message from Holmes’s office: URGENT: THREAT LEVEL RISES.
It contained a link to an Islamist website.
Candace’s fingers flew over her keyboard. The following words appeared in simple white letters on a black background:
“The great jihad tells America the Defeated that martyrs are now in your homeland. They will take control of a very special group of children. There is nothing you can do to protect them. They will be in our hands soon. When our martyrs slay them, you will know that even children who defy our plans will suffer the worst retribution. They will die at the location of a great symbol of American power. At that moment you will witness what you have done to us for so many years. That is how our final attack will begin, America. With your hope for the future. With your children.
“Then we will launch your own missiles at you because we have taken control of your most powerful weapons. Your leaders know this. They are hiding those facts from you. We are telling you the truth. We will leave you destroyed forever.”
CHAPTER 14
Ruhi was sprawled on the floor of the large, swiftly moving van, surrounded by four bulky, bearded men. None was masked. Neither did they blindfold him. They might as well have announced that they would never be accountable to him for what they had done — or were about to do. They had Flex-Cuffed his hands and ankles, closed the doors, and shut off the world.
Not one of them spoke. After Ruhi’s initial outcry—“What are you doing?”—he quieted, too. What was the point? They were field operatives, doing what they did best: abduction, subduing targets.
The seconds ticked away. He felt the miles adding up. The men leaned against the walls, he presumed. He could not, of course, see them in the complete blackness. But he sensed their breath and body heat receding.
His worst suspicion was that the men hailed from the Mabahith. No sane Saudi wanted to trouble the nation’s secret police. But he, Ruhi Mancur, American and Saudi citizen, had traveled 6,750 miles to put himself into this painful predicament.
You’re a real wunderkind, Ruhi. He shook his head in the darkness. What was I thinking?
He told himself that he’d been caught between a rock and a hard spot, and that he’d experienced the rock, right? In America. Well, this was the hard spot.
They must have Ahmed, too, he thought. First, the son-of-a-bitch cousin leads American intelligence services to my doorstep. Now he’s brought in the Mabahith. Ruhi was no expert on the Saudi secret police, but just about every reasonably educated Saudi knew the Mabahith held people at Ùlaysha Prison, or Al-Ha’ir Prison, both within a few dozen miles of Riyadh.
Mabahith… The very word made him shrink inside. In the furthest reaches of memory, he recalled Deputy Director Holmes saying that he was tougher than he thought. But Ruhi knew better. That dog had scared him nearly senseless back in the States. But now—
The van turned a corner so sharply that Ruhi’s thoughts rolled away as he pressed against one of the men’s legs. Then the vehicle went airborne — or so it seemed — as it started down a steep decline. A hill? Possibly. Riyadh certainly had some. But Ruhi concluded from the smoothness of the descent that they were now speeding into an underground facility.
Moments later, the van slowed and came to a stop. The men stirred. One pressed the flat of his hand on Ruhi’s shoulder, the universal language of “Don’t move.”
The door flew open. Ruhi blinked. The sudden glare of artificial light almost blinded him. In Arabic, a man asked simply if he was Ruhi Mancur.
“It is him,” said the man whose hand had not shifted from Ruhi’s shoulder.
The next thing Ruhi knew, two men grabbed his feet and dragged him across the floor of the van. No one reached to support his upper body. He saw the fall coming, which did nothing to ease the drop to the concrete floor. He managed to cushion the blow partly with his right elbow. But his head crashed hard, and the bright lights above darkened in an instant.
WE’RE TRYING, Holmes texted Lana at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. Encrypted, without question. BUT WE HAVE TO GO THROUGH CHANNELS. IF WE GO DIRECTLY TO THE MABAHITH, THEY’LL KNOW HE’S WORKING FOR US. AND THEN THEY’LL KNOW WE’RE, ONCE AGAIN, VIOLATING ALL KINDS OF AGREEMENTS NOT TO OPERATE IN THE KINGDOM WITHOUT THEIR APPROVAL. THAT WILL MEAN…
Lana tuned out even as her eyes scanned the rest of the message. She knew what it meant when one of your own fell into the hands of another country’s secret police.
She quickly replied: AGENT ANDERS IS WORKING WITH THEIR MILITARY INTELLIGENCE. CAN SHE FIND A WAY?
It wasn’t as if they weren’t prepared for this kind of contingency. The problem was that in the delicate dance of the spy trade, every situation was unique. There were no formulaic solutions.
Lana walked down to one of the washrooms. She splashed water on her face, wondering what the hell they were doing to Mancur right now. She admired him. Yes, she knew he’d been boxed into a corner by the one-two punch of the NSA and the FBI, but he still could have refused, or been so fearful that they wouldn’t have dared use him. He was a young man for such a weighty mission, and deeply inexperienced. Which is probably the only reason he agreed to take it on.