“On open channels,” Ahmed said. “We both know the private market is a different matter.”
“Still, I’ve been giving it to you for nine hundred. I want a bigger cut.”
“How much bigger.”
“Eighteen hundred.”
“That’s outrageous!”
“That’s now the price,” Raynes said, leaning back in the chair, keeping his gaze steady.
Ahmed returned it. He no longer had his hand on his radio. He was now stroking his beard. It made him look thoughtful.
“You are doubling the price because this is your last shipment,” Ahmed declared.
“No, no. That’s not it. I’m just…I think it’s fair I get a bigger slice of the action. You’re still getting the promethium you want.”
Raynes could hear his own voice faltering and hated the sound of it.
“My father taught me long ago how to spot a liar sitting in that chair, and you are lying,” Ahmed said, growing more sure of himself. “That man who shot at us is now in control of your encampment. And if he is in control of your encampment, he is in control of your promethium.”
“That’s…that’s not true. I mean, yes, the dig site is…it is lost to me. But the promethium, I can get back to it. The man who shot you doesn’t know where it is. It is well hidden.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ahmed said. “In any event, I’m changing the deal. I am not buying promethium from you today. You are giving me this shipment, as a sign of good faith and as compensation for the wounds my men and I have suffered. When you return with a new shipment — as you say you are capable of doing — we can negotiate a fair price. Perhaps even a small increase. But this one is, as you Americans say, ‘on the house.’”
Raynes could feel his panic rising. He couldn’t give away his retirement plan. Without it, he’d have nothing. His credit card was already frozen. His bank accounts probably had been, too.
“No. Absolutely not. Fine, I’ll…I’ll stick with nine hundred. A deal is a deal.”
Ahmed was smiling. “I’m sorry. The deal has already changed.”
Raynes stared hard at Ahmed. Then he reached into his thobe and pulled out the Pocket Police. Ahmed didn’t know Raynes was down to one bullet. He aimed it in the direction of Ahmed’s turban-wrapped head.
“I’m not here to be pushed around,” Raynes said.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” Ahmed said. “That’s not good business.”
“Yeah? And what are you going to do about it?” Raynes demanded.
Ahmed held up two fingers. “This,” he said.
From the chamber behind the painting of the fisherman, from within Ahmed’s beloved aman — his safe place — came a single bullet. It entered the left side of Raynes’s skull and exited the right, followed by a thick spray of blood and brain matter.
Ahmed clapped and two men appeared. “Clean this up,” Ahmed said. “And take the body to the smelter. We’ll burn it in the morning.”
CHAPTER 27
ASYŪT, Egypt
ot for the first time in his life, Derrick Storm was grateful he had installed the Find My Phone app.
Often, it led him no further than his couch cushions. This time, he was hoping it would direct him to a place substantially more foreign and infinitely more dangerous: what was either a cell of — or the world headquarters of — the Medina Society.
His task, once he got there, was to disable the cell’s capacity and gather what information he could about the rest of the network, so he could disable that, too.
He had little inkling of how he would accomplish this.
First he had to get himself outfitted, which took him the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have merely bumbled his way out of the desert and into the arms of the nearest CIA station agent, dropped the name Jedediah Jones, and known that within fifteen minutes he would have one new car, two new weapons, and three new gadgets, at least one of which would be showing him satellite imagery that would allow him to count the hair follicles on his target’s head.
This time, he had to do it like a civilian, without Jones’s resources. The alternative — appealing to Jones for help — was too likely to lead to at least one shipment of promethium falling into Jones’s hands. And that wasn’t a possibility Storm could allow.
So he was roughing it. He ditched Antony — donating him to a family who promised not to turn him into camel stew — and changed his mode of transportation. This time, he left the ungulate order in favor of something manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. He found a Sixt rental car company that outfitted him in a Ford Mondeo — the closest he could get to a Taurus. Even roughing it, there were limits to what a man could withstand, and an underpowered foreign car was not among them.
His next stop was a clothing store, where he ditched his thobe and keffiyeh in favor of Western clothing. He went with black cargo pants, black boots, and a tight black T-shirt — not because he was particularly keen to show off his physique, but because an Egyptian men’s extra large, the largest size he could find, was the equivalent of a medium in America.
With the transportation and clothing taken care of, he set about improving on his digital capabilities. He drove to an electronics retailer of perhaps dubious repute and purchased himself an iPad with a data plan. Compared to the technology he was used to, it was like being perhaps one step more evolved than the first primate who picked up a rock and used it to bash off a piece of tree bark.
Still, it allowed him to tap into the Find My Phone app and harness its detection skills. He plugged the coordinates it gave him into his newly installed Google Maps app. He then checked out the address on Google Earth. Again, compared to the toys Jones gave him, it was like being an ancient sailor following nautical charts that had been roughed out on papyrus.
But Storm at least now knew his phone was inside what appeared to be a walled compound. Several buildings — a main house and other structures — were visible in the closest view on Google Earth.
That was good news. It meant his biggest worry — that his phone had fallen out of the truck’s wheel well at some point during the journey, and that therefore Find My Phone would lead him to a roadside ditch somewhere — had not come to pass.
He set out from Luxor, following both the Nile River and the pulsing blue dot on Google Maps. As he drove, he tuned into news radio. Now that he was cut off from Jones — especially once Strike ratted him out — Storm was now relying on the media for information about the laser attacks. There was nothing new. The radio was mostly filled with talk about how a rare tropical cyclone was brewing in the eastern Mediterranean. The medicane — as meteorologists called a Mediterranean hurricane — was already threatening Italy with eighty-mile-an-hour winds and huge seas.
Storm turned off the radio as he arrived in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Asyūt, a medium-sized city along the banks of the Nile River in the middle of Egypt. He negotiated a warren of haphazardly laid out streets until he arrived at a fifteen-foot-high wall with razor wire topping it.
The razor wire was actually an encouraging sign. People didn’t put up razor wire unless they were trying to keep others out. Or, sometimes, in. Either way, it suggested something nefarious was going on. And nefarious was what Storm wanted. He wasn’t hunting bunny rabbits, after all. He was hunting terrorists.
He parked his Ford on a side street and walked the perimeter of the wall on foot. His suspicion that he had found the right place was confirmed when he spied the sign outside the main gate. AHMED TRADES METAL it read in Arabic.
Storm felt his resolve steeling. This was it. He had found the terrorists’ den. Perhaps this was the Medina Society’s nerve center. Perhaps it was just one cell among many.