That small delay, no more than two seconds in duration, was all Storm needed. As Ahmed brought the gun back up and fired, Storm was diving to his right. The deadly blast of pellets sailed over his head and to his left, hitting only the air where Storm had once been standing and then the door behind him.
Storm rolled and came up with Dirty Harry drawn, as he had trained himself to do. From the light of the quarter moon that leaked in the small windows, he could make out Ahmed pumping the shotgun, ejecting one cartridge and loading the next one. He again was bracing it against the floor as he performed this maneuver. Storm didn’t give him the chance to fire it again. He aimed for the man’s left shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
The impact from the bullet spun Ahmed in a counterclockwise direction. He fell back and to his left, slamming into the wall before ending up on the floor. The shotgun was still within his grasp, but Ahmed didn’t have a working arm with which to reach for it.
Storm covered the ground between them in three strides. He kicked the shotgun across the room, then went for a light switch.
The room was bathed in a sallow glow. Storm went over to Ahmed, who was desperately struggling to get into a sitting position. But it was difficult without either arm to prop himself up. The pain from the wound had to be excruciating, yet the man did not make a sound.
Blood was already soaking his nightgown. If only to speed things up, Storm reached under the man’s armpits and propped him against the wall. He yelped in agony.
Storm pointed the gun at his large nose.
“Please, please don’t,” Ahmed whimpered, then got his first good look at Storm. “You’re…you’re the man from the desert today. You’re the one who shot all my men.”
Storm did not reply. He reached down and tore away Ahmed’s sleeve, exposing his badly mangled left shoulder. Dirty Harry had made a neat mess of it.
“Please, sir, please,” Ahmed was rambling from somewhere above his two ruined arms. “What is it you want? Do you want the promethium? You can have it. It’s still in the truck. Please, sir, whatever harm I have done to you, I beg your forgiveness. Perhaps we can make an arrangement of some kind? I have a lot of money. It is yours for the asking. Just, please, let me live.”
Storm ripped the sleeve into two long strips. “Your ulnar artery is severed,” he said calmly. “You’re already in shock. If I don’t stop the bleeding, in ten minutes your blood pressure will start to fall rapidly. In twenty, you’ll probably be dead. I’m making a tourniquet right now, but I’m only using it if you tell me exactly what I want to hear.”
Ahmed greeted this news by bursting into tears. “Oh, Allah, it hurts so bad. I will tell you anything.”
“Very good,” Storm said. “Tell me about the Medina Society.”
Pain was no longer the dominant emotion on Ahmed’s face. Confusion was. Confusion with, perhaps, a dash of desperation.
“The Medina…the Medina Society?” he said. “But I don’t…I don’t know anything about—”
“Playing dumb isn’t going to help you, Ahmed. And you may have less than ten minutes before it’s all over. That was just an estimate on my part. But I’m no doctor and you’re losing blood pretty fast. So, again, tell me about the Medina Society.”
He was breathing heavily, hyperventilating slightly and shivering as the shock plunged his body’s temperature. “Okay, okay…The Medina Society…They are a group of extremists who want to set my country back two hundred years…They…They don’t seem to like women very much…They are giving Islam, a very gentle, peace-loving religion, a very bad reputation. I don’t know, is this what you’re looking for?”
“You really don’t have time to play cute with me, Ahmed. I know you think right now that maybe your life isn’t worth saving. But depending on how good your information is and how cooperative you’re willing to be, you could have a very good second career as an informant. I already know most of it. The Medina Society has been using the promethium to make the high-energy laser beam that has been shooting down airplanes. Just tell me how the society is organized and where the headquarters are.”
The tears were coming harder now. “Please, sir. I am not trying to be cute. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t inform on anyone. I am a scrap-metal dealer. I know nothing about these terrorists.”
“Then what’s with the Ahmed Trades Metal signs everywhere? I know what that means.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about. My name is Ahmed. I trade metal. My family has traded metal for several generations now. Before that, we were farmers. That is all.”
“Yeah, sure it is. You want to explain that truck full of promethium sitting in your driveway?”
“Yes, yes, happily. The professor, Dr. Raynes, he sells it to me. He has sold me many hundreds of pounds of it. I don’t know where he is getting it from, but he has found a great amount of it.”
“And what do you do with it?”
“I resell it for a nice profit, of course. I did not know anyone was using it to shoot down airplanes. Please, sir, I am telling you the truth. I am a metal dealer, that is all. Please, sir. Please help me.”
Storm looked down at the pathetic figure slumped beneath him. Much as he told himself he shouldn’t believe these lies, there was a part of him that couldn’t help it. It wasn’t so much what Ahmed was saying as it was everything Storm had seen and done over the last few hours.
Taking out the guard had been too easy. Getting in the compound had been too easy. Breaching the house — despite the little hiccup with the security system — had been too easy. Taking out Ahmed had been too easy.
At every turn, he had met far too little resistance. He knew it while it was happening, but he hadn’t been able to quite make sense out of it. Now he could. If the Medina Society really was so savvy that it had successfully resisted penetration by the combined might of the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States military for several decades, there was no way Storm would have been able to waltz in and take over one of its cells using little more than an iPad, a two-by-four, and some foul-tasting chewing gum. If it was that straightforward, a group of Green Berets would have done it a long time ago. The real Medina Society would have protected its assets far more fiercely.
What’s more, there was Ahmed’s behavior. If he was really a terrorist, would he be sniveling and begging for this life? No, he’d be saying his prayers to Allah, preparing to meet twelve and threescore virgins — with an emphasis on the score.
“So, if you’re just a metal dealer, then you shouldn’t mind telling me: who is your buyer for all this promethium?”
“I…I don’t know for sure. They always insisted I wear a blindfold.”
“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” Storm said.
“I’m trying…I’m trying, please. They…they arranged all the meetings. Always different places. I just followed their instructions. I would talk to them on the phone. I talked to a man if it was a matter of where and when to make a delivery. But if it was a matter of money, I talked to a woman. I got the sense she was the one in charge. The buyer was a woman.”
“A woman. So you’ve narrowed the potential identity of your buyer from seven billion to three point five billion. You really want to bleed out, don’t you, Ahmed?”
Ahmed was shivering more violently. His entire lower half was covered in blood, which was now pooling on the ground beneath him. “No, no, please. Wait. It was a woman, and sometimes she would be outside when she spoke. I got the sense she was on a boat. A very large boat. You could hear the waves and engine. And one time I heard a horn blast of some kind. It was a very distinctive sound. I asked her, ‘Is that a trumpet?’ and she said, no, it was made to sound like a French horn. Then she talked about how much she enjoyed the sound of a French horn.”