by Sean McFate
Abdulaziz was seething.
“You care about your son, Prince, to the detriment of your judgment.” Winters leaned in. “I fear him.”
“I’ll shoot you in the face for this,” Abdulaziz growled angrily. “I’ll strangle your children.”
“Maybe. But I cannot sit aside while you let Farhan walk to the ISIS Caliphate with the key to a nuclear arsenal. I’m not going to wait while your son gives ISIS the power to destroy us all.”
“Farhan is changed.”
“Is that why he fled your men in Istanbul?”
“Do you think I’m a fool? I trusted him to exchange the $5 billion for the nuclear controller key. I trust his loyalty.”
“Do you trust him enough to risk the world? Because that’s the stakes.”
“I know my son,” Abdulaziz snarled.
But he glared at Winters, grinding his teeth. Winters could tell the man wanted to shoot him in the face, as promised. If they’d been in a torture cell, he might have done it. He was that angry. But a portion of that anger, Winters knew, was because he was right. It was foolish to trust Farhan with the world, and the prince knew it.
“This is not a game, Prince.”
“I never thought it was.”
“Then why did you send your boys to play it?”
Winters could tell from the expression on the prince’s face that the man was beat. He had come in blaming his American advisor, but Winters had turned him with the truth. The problem was his sons. Now the father was blaming himself. It was the leverage Winters needed.
“Who else could I trust?”
“I advised you against it. So did your majordomo.”
Abdulaziz looked away.
“I am doing this for my family,” he said. Winters knew this was a lie. Abdulaziz did everything for himself. He wanted to live on through the success of Farhan and Farhan’s sons and grandsons, so he had manipulated the boy and given him far too many chances. He believed that was love. “Would you not do everything for your sons?”
“It’s time to cut the ties,” Winters said. He had no sons. He didn’t share Abdulaziz’s weakness.
“It’s the Iranians,” the prince said, suddenly slamming his fist on his ornate gilt desk for the third time. “The Persians are behind this.”
Brad Winters relaxed, although not that anyone noticed. The dangerous part was over. He’d saved his own ass. But there was still hard work to do. “We have been over this, Prince Abdulaziz,” he said calmly. “It was not the Iranians. The original operation was too precise. The thieves knew where to hit Mishaal’s convoy. They knew when he would arrive. They knew what he was carrying. It was an inside job.”
“It was not Farhan,” Abdulaziz said, halfway between resignation and anger.
“Then it was the work of someone else with inside information, and surely you are not suggesting the Iranians have someone inside the upper level of the General Intelligence Directorate.”
“Of course not,” Abdulaziz barked. A castrated dog is still dangerous, maybe even more so, especially in the moments after the snip. Winters made sure not to forget that.
“Maybe it was the Pakistanis,” Abdulaziz suggested.
“It was not the Pakistanis. Why would they betray you? You framed it as an official back-channel request from the Saudi government. They have their money, and they have no incentive to renege. It was Farhan”—Abdulaziz growled, annoyed at Winters’s persistence—“or it was the Wahhabis.”
He let the suggestion hang in the air, hoping the choice between Farhan and the Wahhabi faction would pull the prince’s mind in the right direction.
“You know this is true, my Prince. They are inside the Saudi government, even on the security council. Their numbers are growing in the royal family, even among those near the throne. You know the Wahhabi faction wants their own king on the throne and hates what you stand for. They have eyes and ears everywhere. I realize this was your operation. I know it wasn’t sanctioned by your government. Believe me, I also take matters into my own hands, when the opportunity arises. Every good and important man does.”
He paused. We are the same, Prince, you and I.
“But the Wahhabis would sense things in motion. Prince Khalid . . . your abhorrent rival . . . is a Wahhabi sympathizer. The Mabahith would be the first to hear rumblings. Who else but Khalid would attempt to intercept the nukes instead of exposing you? Only a savvy prince. A brilliant prince. You would do it that way yourself, if the Wahhabis were planning a similar move.”
Winters paused again. Flattery will get you everywhere, especially with princes.
“Khalid,” Abdulaziz hissed.
“The Paris convoy was hit by a secret faction within the Mabahith, operating illegally outside the Kingdom. They stole the nuclear weapons controller from Mishaal. Last night, they acquired Farhan’s key.”
Abdulaziz started to object.
“Surely they were the ones helping Farhan escape, my prince, which means Khalid’s men also have your son.”
Winters said it softly, as if he hated the obvious. He knew this was delicate. The prince might crack, or swerve in the wrong direction.
“Impossible,” Abdulaziz said.
“Not if Khalid has infiltrated your inner circle.”
“My inner circle is impenetrable.”
“No circle is impenetrable.”
Abdulaziz shook his head. “I pick my men when they are pups, and hand-feed them until they are wolves, loyal only to me.”
“It is the only plausible explanation.”
“My circle is tight.”
“What about these guards?” Winters said.
The prince looked at them, hesitated. “My circle is tight,” he repeated. “Even these guards have proven their loyalty to me time and again. I trust them because I’ve tested them. I test everyone, Mr. Winters. Except, of course . . . you.”
“Finally,” Winters said, with exaggerated exasperation, “you are beginning to think. Everyone is suspect. Everyone. Don’t think I haven’t wondered if you are playing a back door game.”
Abdulaziz laughed harshly. Winters had knocked him off track again. “There is nothing in it for me,” he said.
“True. But what about the majordomo?”
“He is a son to me,” Abdulaziz snapped.
“He wanted to be a son to you. You turned him away.”
Winters saw the recoil in the old man’s eyes, the moment of doubt. He’d hit his mark. Never underestimate the importance of due diligence.
“No,” Abdulaziz said. “No. He is loyal to me. He is my right hand.”
Abdulaziz stopped.
“Have you spoken to him since last night?” Winters asked calmly. He had received a call from the Apollo team just after midnight. He knew what Campbell had seen, that the majordomo was dead, and he had made an educated guess on the rest: that Locke had outsmarted them all.
“Your majordomo is not a traitor,” Winters said. “He is dead. Killed last night in Iraq.”
Abdulaziz breathed deeply, and Winters saw his anger and despair. Despite turning away the marriage proposal, the old man had cared for his majordomo.
“Your men killed him,” the prince muttered.
“No. It was another.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. He left only one message. Al-kafir mmayit.”
“‘The infidel is dead,’” Abdulaziz said.
“ISIS,” Winters muttered.
“Or Khalid,” the prince replied, and Winters’s heart did a triumphant backflip. Abdulaziz had reached Winters’s own conclusion, as planned. The prince would never doubt him now.
“Or the two of them, together,” Winters added.
They sat in silence, letting that possibility percolate. The Saudi Wahhabis were Sunni fanatics who agreed with ISIS in principle, if not always in practice. They were the group’s primary financial backers. Winters had never, in his most optimistic scenarios, thought such titanic screwups would accrue to his adva
ntage quite like this.
“We have to call it off,” Abdulaziz said suddenly. “If Khalid is involved, the Wahhabis are too close and the danger too great. We need to wait. Send the nukes back to Pakistan. Try again later.”
“There is no later,” Winters said. “The operation is in play. The Pakistanis won’t trust you again. The ship is en route. All this work—”
“The work is meaningless. We have to protect the Kingdom.”
“The Americans know, Prince Abdulaziz. The Americans know a deal has been made. They have informed people in your government. Worse, Khalid has stolen both nuclear controllers. He can hang you for the Pakistan deal.”
“Then I must inform my government. Cut my losses.”
“No, Prince, you must go forward. Victory is the only way to save your neck, and it is within your grasp. If everything goes right, I might even be able to save your son.”
Chapter 34
We made it back to our hideout before sunrise and slept hard. The sound of the Yazidis making breakfast woke me up too soon. Children were playing and the adults were doing chores. It looked like village life, in an old garage, in a war zone. Wildman and the Kurds sat in our Humvees’ turrets cleaning the “Ma Deuce” fifty-caliber machine guns, or fifty-cals, while I sat at the back of the garage, pondering. The presence of Apollo Outcomes caused cognitive dissonance in my head, but I had to ignore it. I needed to figure out our next move.
I considered the prince’s story: a recovering jihadi, escaping a ruthless father, returns to the Caliphate to rescue his pregnant wife . . . while possessing a key that arms fifteen nuclear bombs.
I had to assume the nukes were real. Why else would an Apollo Tier One team and a Saudi black-ops unit be on his tail? Why else would the majordomo offer me a million dollars to find a disgraced son? It was never about Farhan; it was about the nukes. It was about possessing the power to redraw the Middle East map.
So what was I supposed to do?
I needed to figure out all the pieces, to make sure they fit together. It was math, all angles and degrees, and if my calculus was wrong, the impact could go far beyond my own death. The smart move was obvious: kill Farhan, burn the bodies, and buy back my life with the key. Or I could just leave them here without the key, to find their own way to whatever life was waiting for them.
But my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to kill the prince, much less a pregnant woman, and leaving them behind wasn’t much better. The prince’s father, even if he was only half the tyrant everyone claimed, would never let them get away. Not after what Farhan had stolen from him.
And I couldn’t forget the Apollo team. I kept trying to cut them from my calculations, but my thoughts always circled back to the same conclusion: Brad Winters knows I’m here. That realization was like swallowing a sandbag. All our efforts to dust our tracks after Ukraine didn’t matter. I was never off the grid. Brad Winters knew where I was the entire time.
Then the realization hit, harder than the one on the roof: Winters had hired me.
Or he had told the majordomo to hire me, which amounted to the same thing.
Winters hadn’t just been watching me. He had been playing me like a grand piano. He had been keeping an eye on me, waiting for me to become useful to him again.
And I was useful to him, I admitted. How else did that Apollo team locate Farhan in Sinjar so quickly? After all, I was the company’s best man by far, and those yahoos at the house didn’t have the subtlety to develop the kind of contacts necessary.
It had to be me. Was that pride? Hell yes. But I’d earned it.
And what did you use it for? I chastised myself.
Brad Winters was the mastermind, not me. He had been manipulating the situation all along. He manipulated every situation. It was what the man did.
And I’d never realized it. In the nine years I’d worked with him, I’d never fully grasped who he was. And in the four months he’d been following me since Ukraine—laughing at my pathetic efforts to disappear, no doubt—I’d never suspected he could still control me.
He had trapped me. Again. He had tried to kill me again, just like in Ukraine. He would have killed me if I hadn’t been testing Farhan’s story and his father’s men. I thought of myself as a great mission tactician. A master in the field. But for the second time in four months, I had been outwitted by a . . . a businessman . . . and I had been lucky to survive.
“Oy!” Wildman yelled at one of the small kids. They were running around, playing terrorists and mercenaries. “If you’re going to low-crawl, get your fockin’ arse down. Do it right! And when you shoot, aim for center of mass, not the head.” He made a gun with his hand and aimed at the child’s chest. “Center of mass. Chest.” He thumped his chest. “More likely to get a kill that way, mate. And fire in short, three-round bursts. Bang, bang, bang. Got it? Bang, bang, bang!”
The children looked excited, even though they spoke no English. They were just happy to have this big merc talking to them. Ban, ban, ban, they screamed, running after each other. I was surprised, after all they’d seen, they still wanted to play war games, but what else did they know?
“Can’t teach kids anything these days,” Wildman lamented, as he turned back to his work.
Unbelievable. We were sitting on a nuclear key, in the middle of ISIS hell, and Wildman couldn’t have cared less.
Boon? Yeah, he cared. He’d badgered me for an hour, trying to figure out what we should do. Then he’d gone on walkabout.
“Don’t forget these people,” was the last thing he said.
I admit it: I was happy that these refugees weren’t my biggest problem anymore. After four months, I was tired of bashing my brains on little things. It sucked to be nobody. What I decided now, since this nuclear key had fallen into my lap, could change the world. I could make a difference.
I’d missed that.
I closed my eyes and let my mind wander over Kylah’s breasts when her shirt fell open, the faceless girl in the sabaya bus, the shootout, the cookies, Jimmy Miles calling me a fucking butterball piece of shit with a big stupid grin on his face, and Brad Winters pulling me aside in a boardroom somewhere back home, putting his arm around me and whispering, You and me kid, you and me, together, we’ll make it right.
I felt like a fool for ever listening. I felt marooned on an asteroid, watching the sun grow smaller. My brain started humming the introduction to the second part of Stravinsky’s queasy ballet The Rite of Spring, the music disorienting, creepy, even violent, celebrating the sacrifice of a virgin girl forced to dance to her death in a pagan ritual. The Parisians hissed it offstage at its premiere in 1913, causing a riot in the theater. They didn’t realize that the primitive society was them. None of us ever did.
I could never be free, that was what my brain was telling me, not if Brad Winters cared enough to find me.
Once my utility was concluded, though, once Brad Winters had what he wanted, he would have us killed. No loose ends. None of us, not even me, could dance on their own forever.
Mercs don’t panic; they get organized. They take things one step at a time. Right now I had an opportunity, because right now my old mentor needed me.
And he was coming. He had a hit team in Sinjar waiting for us to make a move, but that wasn’t the extent of his reach. Apollo would be coming in numbers. The Saudis would be coming in numbers. They were surely on their way. We needed to get out of Sinjar as quickly as possible.
But where could we go? This was no longer a matter of escaping a war zone. Winters could track us anywhere. He had proven that.
We needed a plane, and we needed it fast. My list of favors had run dry, so I couldn’t call any pilot friends. There was only one active airport in northern Iraq: Erbil. That was a dangerous road, and an expected one. If I were Winters, I’d watch my two escape routes: north to Turkey and east to Erbil. Everything else was war zone.
I took out my map, looking for another way out. My fingers traced routes as if they were printed in
Braille. Different roads led to different dead ends: ISIS, the Syrian army, Shia militia, the lawless tribes of the interior, Winters, the Saudis.
We looked cornered, but my intuition was screaming there was a way. So I used a trick that had long helped me hear my subconscious voice: I closed my eyes and let the music flow. The Ring of the Nibelungen entered my head, faintly at first, then louder, until I recognized “Rhine Journey.” Before there were hobbits and Smaug, there were Nibelungen and Fafner, chasing a magic ring to rule them all. “Rhine Journey” is ten minutes of musical transformation, from doubt to certainty. It starts as an unformed universe and ends with the cosmos complete in seven days. The music confirms creation with trumpets of optimism and crescendos of destiny. Go to God, it told me. Go to the Father. It is the only way.
It could work, I thought. It was crazy, dangerous, and stupid . . . which was why it could work.
The prince was asleep with Marhaz in his arms when I rejoined the team. I stared at the two of them, so young, so foolish. To my surprise, I was moved by their affection, but I wasn’t surprised that I thought of Alie. She was Marhaz’s age, early twenties, when I met her, and she was smart, erratic, and very, very bad for me. We’d proven that in Ukraine, if it hadn’t been clear before. She was gone now, disappeared in Europe somewhere, but I knew I’d see her again. That’s the way this works, right? There are people you can never get away from. And really, that’s the only thing that keeps you going sometimes: the thought of seeing them again.
I was surprised to see Marhaz staring at me, trying to read my face. “We’re going,” she said. Farhan didn’t move from his unconscious embrace. The baker was sleeping sitting up nearby, his AK-47 across his lap. He was supposed to be on guard duty.
“Tonight,” I whispered, bending down beside her. “But it will be a fast run with limited space. We can’t take your friends.” She nodded. “Do you think Farhan will object?”
