by Brad Taylor
That’s him. All bluster and bad attitude.
My heart rate began to hum, but I showed no outward sign. I stroked the keys, waiting on the last one, and focused on my screen, running through the mission in my head. I began to second-guess my camera angle, my distance, and everything else. We would only get one shot, and if I screwed this up there’d be nobody to blame but myself.
The man settled himself directly to my back, facing away from me, which sort of sucked because I wouldn’t get a facial recognition shot of him, but I knew the embedded microphones would pick up the conversation.
They did the usual Arabic greeting, and I hit the final key, standing up quickly to avoid spoiling the view. I slowly walked toward the restrooms, pretending I didn’t know where they were. I flagged a waiter and asked. Given directions, I made my way at a leisurely pace. I entered the bathroom and looked around, dismayed to see there wasn’t a stall I could hide behind for a time.
I was pondering how I could kill five minutes when an explosion rocked the place, sending plaster from the ceiling.
What the hell?
I raced back to the main room and saw my little corner table was on fire, with torn bodies from the meeting lying all over the place. The explosion had been small, but forcefully directed against the target table. Coming from my table, where the computer had been vaporized. Coming from a screen I should have been facing. The rage came instantly.
Those fuckers…
That’s why the damn computer weighed so much. It hadn’t been old-school technology. It had been ball-bearings and explosives. And Samir, my friend, had given it to me.
I had time later to sort it out. What I needed to do first was get out of the area before anyone remembered I was the one at that table.
I fled outside and saw I was too late. Seven of the toughs providing security earlier closed on me before I could react. Two grabbed me, and one swung a club at my head.
* * *
Sitting on a park bench down the street, Jennifer heard the explosion and stood up, trying to vector the specific location. When she saw smoke rush from the target café, she took off at a sprint.
On the opposite side of the street, she reached the front in time to see Pike exit. She shouted his name, but was drowned out. She watched helplessly as he was viciously clubbed around his head and body, a group of men kicking and punching him on the ground until a van pulled alongside. He was unceremoniously thrown in the back, and the van raced away.
She was at a momentary loss, trying to piece together the chain of events. She pushed through the crowd and caught a glimpse of the carnage at the target table, realizing what had happened. Realizing they had been used.
She knew that Pike had very little time before he was killed, and the clock was ticking. Now. She exited the café, getting free of the crowds, and saw Samir across the street. She sprinted right at him.
Samir saw her coming and shouted, “Jennifer! What happened? Where’s Pike?”
Before he could react, she wrapped one arm around his waist and grabbed his elbow with the other. She rotated around, levered her hip against his groin, and whipped his body up and over hers through the air.
He thumped the ground hard, and she straddled his waist. “Where did you take him?”
When he shouted nonsense, she began striking, just like a training day, blocking his ineffectual attempts to stop her and hammering his face over and over again, each blow bouncing his head off the concrete. One of his men arrived and grabbed her forearm, halting the assault. She rotated her arm in a quick circle, breaking it free at the same time she trapped his wrist. She violently twisted against the joint, hearing a rewarding crack as the wrist shattered and the man went to his knees.
She returned to Samir, who had now put his arms across his face, shouting, “Stop, stop! I didn’t do anything!”
“Where is he?”
When he said nothing, she began striking him again, this time with less effect as his arms prevented her from direct contact. Two other Druze arrived and began to battle her. It took three before she was pulled off of Samir.
15
The Ghost’s ears were ringing from the blast. Having lived his entire life in Beirut, his body had reacted instantly, hitting the floor even before his conscious mind knew why.
The initial shock over, he peeked from underneath his table, seeing the carnage across the café. So far, nobody in the restaurant had reacted. Still shocked, they simply cowered and whimpered. He saw the briefcase the men had brought lying underneath a body, apparently intact.
When initially given the meeting location, inside the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, he’d been happy with the choice. Reflecting on the location after he’d left the Dahiyeh, the Ghost had balked, telling the Hezbollah leadership he’d meet, but on neutral terrain. They’d come up with this café, but he still wasn’t completely satisfied.
He’d decided to send someone else to the meeting. Someone with the physical characteristics the men would be expecting. A tough guy with a swagger. He knew the main identification method would be the glasses his bad genetics forced on him. It had been very little effort to find someone in the camp who met the specifications and needed money. He’d given him instructions and paid him up front, sending him into the meeting wearing glasses with thick lenses.
He didn’t worry about missing out on any discussions, because he’d specified that all information was to be passed to him in hard form. Initially, before he’d come up with his doppelgänger plan, it was simply because he didn’t want to spend a single second more than he had to with these men. He trusted them about as much as he would the Mossad. It looked like that mistrust had just saved his life.
He’d think about the whys of the attack later, but knew one thing: There was a leak somewhere. He was willing to bet it was with the Sunnis and not Hezbollah. In Lebanon the fragmented Palestinian groups had always tended to fire before aiming. He could well imagine how many people knew about this meeting because of their bragging.
Seeing the waitstaff starting to recover, he duckwalked over to the table, screaming for someone to help him and beginning to conduct triage on the shattered bodies in the blast. He rolled one man over, ostensibly checking for signs of life, but in reality exposing the briefcase. He waited for the crowd to gather, as he knew it would.
Seconds later, he was surrounded by a plethora of people all shouting instructions, one splashing water from an ice bucket on the small fire, another throwing chairs and tables out of the way to clear the area.
He leaned over and closed his hands on the briefcase, the handle slick with the blood from the man who had been lying on it.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder, asking if the meat he was leaning over was alive. He said no and stood up.
He pushed through the crowd and reached the street, gripping the briefcase tightly in his hands.
16
The men continued to pummel me inside the van, shouting in Arabic. I protested in English, demanding to know what I had done, setting my innocence as soon as possible. I knew it would matter little, and I was in serious, serious trouble.
The van careened down the narrow roads, eventually driving without swerving left and right, which meant we were out of town. There weren’t any windows to see out of, even if they’d given me a chance to look, but I knew we were headed to the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Once past that barrier, I knew my chances of survival would be close to zero.
One of the men began shouting into a cell phone in Arabic. Seeing me watch, another shoved a coarse burlap sack on my head, blocking out the light.
Here we go. If they bring out a video camera and a knife, it’s last-chance time.
The men weren’t professional, because they’d left me both with my watch and cell phone. That was good on the surface, but could prove deadly. No training equaled no discipline, which meant I could be killed out of rage without thinking about the consequences. I hoped these guys would want to question
me at length—extending out my life, as it were—and prayed that’s what the shouting on the phone had been about. Someone with a cool head giving orders instead of leaving me to my fate with these Neanderthals.
Eventually, we stopped. I was cuffed on the head and dragged out of the van, the hood still on.
Without any concern for my well-being, we speed-walked up a flight of concrete steps. I kept slipping, banging my shins and trying to break my fall with my arms. Every time it happened, I was slapped and punched for a couple of seconds before being jerked to my feet.
I was thrown through a doorway, slamming into a wall. Two men jerked me through another door and forced me into a chair. I was rapidly tied around all of my limbs, then left alone for a minute or two.
I heard footsteps, and the hood was ripped off of my head. I faced one of the men who’d lumped me up to begin with. They still hadn’t taken my cell phone, which was good. The longer I had it, the better.
“Who do you work for?”
Here it comes.
In the movies, this is when I would spit in the guy’s face and tell him to fuck off. Because I’m so tough. In real life, I knew aggravating this man was the last thing I should do. My survival rested on my ability to convince them they’d made a mistake.
“I work for myself. I own a business. If it’s a ransom you want, my partner will pay, but we don’t have a lot of money.”
He slapped my head.
“Who do you work for in the U.S. government? The CIA? Or maybe Mossad?”
“CIA? Is that what you think? You’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m just a businessman here on vacation. I don’t work for any government, I swear. I’m not even religious, and certainly not Jewish!”
Before I could answer, another man entered. Older, and much more self-assured, with an eight-inch salt-and-pepper beard just like Osama bin Laden used to have.
The boss.
He said something in Arabic, and the tough said something back. The boss screamed at the man, and immediately he was ripping through my pockets. He found the cell phone and passed it over. They both left the room, and I prayed the phone stayed in the building. It was my last bit of hope.
I went through strategies for prolonging the inevitable, but my mind was having trouble staying focused. I felt a deep sense of fear, a pathological phobia of what was about to happen, and it was blotting out logical thought. I knew that sooner or later they were going to get rough, and I had seen what that entailed.
In 1984, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hezbollah. Months later, an unmarked videotape arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Athens. In it, a nude William Buckley was being gruesomely tortured. Another tape arrived every few months, until one came simply showing him dead, the skin puckered throughout his naked body from repeated abuse.
The tapes were classified, but I had seen them. They had left a mark on my soul, grainy images branded in my brain and guttural screams haunting my dreams, made all the more visceral because they were real. The pain, shrieks, and agony weren’t from a screenplay, but a living man. The tapes had left a disquieting mark on my subconscious that had never gone away. I hadn’t ever told anyone, but Buckley’s fate was my singular fear. And now I was going to live it. Buckley had managed to survive for more than a year of inhumane captivity. If it came to it, I hoped my demise would be much, much quicker.
Rescue wasn’t going to happen. An enormous effort had been made to locate Buckley, using the entire powers of the Central Intelligence Agency, along with help from a multitude of Western intelligence agencies and Mossad. He was, after all, the Beirut chief of station. None of it had mattered.
I had no such luxury. Nobody even knew I was missing. There would be no grand struggle to locate and recover me.
All I had was Jennifer.
* * *
Jennifer fought with all of her might to prevent being thrown into the van, but it was wasted effort. With four men holding her writhing form, she made them work, but that was all. They heaved her through the sliding door hard enough to slam against the other side.
She sprang to her knees and turned to fight, striking the first man who tried to enter with two quick jabs. The back doors opened, and two men piled in. She lashed out with her feet, connecting with one and trying to slip past the other out the back, to freedom.
He slammed her above the ear with a straight right punch, causing stars. She continued to spin toward the rear, getting her hands outside the van. She pulled, and felt her legs grabbed. She was ripped inside and set upon by both men. They began to punch her all over, forcing her to curl to protect herself. She felt the van move and heard someone shouting in Arabic. The punching stopped, followed by the men simply holding her down.
She heard her name called over and over. She looked to the voice and saw Samir staring at her in concern, his lip split, nose bleeding, and the left side of his face swollen.
“Have you gone mad? What in the world happened?” he said.
She began to buck, trying to get out of the men’s grasp, spittle flying from her mouth.
“Jennifer, stop it! Look at me.”
She relaxed, her eyes on the ceiling of the van. “Looks like you got us both, you son of a bitch.”
“I had nothing to do with that bomb. I still don’t know what happened. Where’s Pike?”
She looked at him, trying to sense deception. “The computer you gave Pike didn’t only have a camera. It had a bomb.”
He said nothing, his mouth dropping open.
“I get that you have a vendetta. I heard you talk in your house, but why use us? Use Pike? He said you were his friend, and that means a lot to him. He doesn’t have many, and you used that against him.”
“I did no such thing. I would never do that. I’m not a terrorist. You are wrong about the computer.”
“Then let me go. Right now. I need to use my phone. Pike’s in real trouble.”
He turned to the men and said a sentence or two in Arabic. They released her. She pulled out her phone and called the Taskforce, knowing she was breaking every rule there was by using an open line.
A receptionist answered. “Blaisdell Consulting, how may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Kurt Hale, please.”
“I’m sorry, there’s no one here by that name.”
She mentally crossed her fingers and said, “Prairie Fire. I say again, Prairie Fire.”
The receptionist hesitated, then said, “Please hold.”
After a wait, a voice she recognized came on. “Whom am I speaking with?”
“Kurt, it’s Jennifer. I don’t have time to explain, but I need a lock on Pike’s phone. Right now.”
There was a pause, then, “Who is this? I’m not sure you have the right number. We’re a consulting firm.”
They’re going to blow me off. Even after the code word. They’re going to sacrifice Pike to protect the Taskforce.
“Kurt! Listen to me! Pike’s in serious trouble. Send me the grid. Please!”
“Good-bye. Please don’t call back.”
The line went dead. She was stunned. She couldn’t believe they would sacrifice one of their own to protect themselves. She noticed the men staring at her, waiting for her to talk. She said nothing, sagging against the metal of the van, her mind trying to find a solution that didn’t exist.
Her phone vibrated with a text message. When she looked at it, she saw a latitude and longitude displayed, along with the note “call secure immediately.”
Jesus Christ. Damn Taskforce subterfuge. Kurt’s going to pay for that.
Back in business, she barked, “Take me to the U.S. Embassy. Drop me off as fast as you can.”
“Why? The Embassy can’t help. We can. Tell me what you know.”
“Like I would trust you as far as I can throw you. Take me to the damn Embassy. Where’s my bag?”
One of the men tossed her knapsack to her. She pulled out a tablet PC and began working it.
Samir said, “I had nothing to do with that bomb. Maybe someone else sent it. This is Lebanon, you know.”
She didn’t look up, still working the tablet, saying, “And that’s why the security detail we saw before the explosion immediately singled out Pike, huh? They knew it was his computer because they saw him inside with it. They knew who put the bomb in there, and so do I.”
“Even if that’s true, it wasn’t me. I was used just like you were. Let me help. Where is Pike?”
She turned the tablet to him. “Here. Take me to the consulate right now. We’re running out of time.”
He looked at the map and said, “That’s the Palestinian refugee camp. Your consulate will be no help there. It’ll take forty-eight hours to even get permission to enter, and that permission will reach the men holding Pike long before you do. Let us help. The gates of the camp are guarded by Lebanese Armed Forces. I can get you in.”
“For what? So you can kill both Pike and me and prevent embarrassment to Hezbollah with our story? We wouldn’t want it to get out that they were behind the killing, would we?”
He said nothing for a moment, then turned and spoke in Arabic to the men in the van. The conversation lasted a couple of minutes.
In English, he said, “If you are correct, they used me just as they used you. I’m not convinced they did, but I know that Pike has been captured, and I will give my life to free him. My men as well. Is that enough?”
She knew what he said about the consulate was correct. The damn State Department weenies would pee their pants when she came running in with her story. Pike’s location was growing colder by the second, and it would take forever to get them to react. By then, his cell phone could be in the hands of a fourteen-year-old who’d purchased it on the black market.
