by Bentley, Don
I craned my head out of the way of the killing stroke from his rifle, but the blow still caught me in the upper shoulder, rendering my left arm a tingling length of useless flesh. If my attacker had continued forward, further closing the distance between us and allowing his body weight to drag me to the pavement, the fight would have been over. Instead, another strobe of orange light showed the rifle stock rising upward as he reversed the stroke, preparing to hammer a fatal blow across the bridge of my nose.
This time, I closed the distance.
I pounded his kneecap with my forehead. The blow left me woozy, but his knee gave way and, with it, the foot clamping my pistol to the ground. My wrist shrieked, and my trigger finger was slow, but it still moved the requisite three-quarters of an inch. The suppressor spit three times, and three holes blossomed in my opponent’s groin, stomach, and chest.
He collapsed, the AK-47’s barrel clattering against the concrete. I pushed the suppressor against his forehead and squeezed the trigger a final time. Without pausing, I switched gun hands as my left arm flickered back to life, and I sighted down the barrel at the remaining fighter. Something had caught his attention, and he was now facing me, rifle lifted, stock welded against his cheek in a shooter’s stance.
But he didn’t fire.
Maybe the flashing hazard light had robbed him of his night vision, or maybe he couldn’t make out who was who in the dark huddle of bodies. Or maybe, for the first time in this goat rope of a mission, luck favored me rather than my enemy.
Whatever the reason, I took advantage of it.
Like I’d practiced thousands of times on the firing range, I shot with my off hand, squeezing until the man trying to kill me was nothing but a sack of flesh and blood crumpled against the concrete. Only once I was certain that my two attackers were good and truly dead did I allow myself the luxury of taking stock of my wounds. Judging by the swelling and pain, I knew my wrist was probably broken. Besides that, my head hurt like a son of a bitch, and my shoulder throbbed.
But I was alive.
I released the Glock’s empty magazine with my thumb, reloaded one-handed, and then began a rudimentary frisk of the body closest to me, searching for information on my two attackers. While my probing fingers didn’t find a wallet or passport, they did discover something much more interesting. Handcuffs. The jihadi was carrying handcuffs.
Why?
I removed the metal shackles and slid them into my pocket just as my cell phone began to vibrate.
Einstein.
Placing the device against my ear, I croaked a barely audible hello.
“I’m at the truck, and you’re not,” Einstein said, his Oxford-educated English more precise than my own. “I trust you have a good reason.”
For the first time in a long time, I began to laugh.
THIRTY-NINE
Now what?” Einstein said, glaring at me across the truck’s darkened interior.
His voice had lost some of its haughtiness, but I suppose finding your rescuer sprawled on the ground next to two dead bodies tends to induce humility. Even so, he still sounded a bit too entitled for my taste.
“Now you start the engine and drive,” I said, glaring right back at him.
“Where?”
“Anywhere but here. Chances are, your two dead friends were supposed to report in. When they don’t, someone’s going to come looking.”
Einstein’s face wrinkled with distaste at the mention of the two dead men. Since I now boasted a shattered ankle, a bullet graze to my leg, and a badly sprained, if not outright broken, wrist, I’d been in no condition to load the bodies into the kiosk I’d used as an ambush site. Truth be told, I hadn’t really wanted to. It was about time Einstein got some blood on his hands—metaphorically speaking or otherwise.
Einstein started the engine, put the Toyota in gear, and began to drive. Coming to the first intersection, he turned left—away from the ambush site and the wave of reinforcements that would soon be coming.
“Shouldn’t you be giving me directions to the exfil spot?” Einstein said.
“Exfil spot—how cute. You’ve brushed up on your espionage lexicon. No, I’m not taking you to the exfil spot.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m not sure you’re worth saving.”
Einstein’s head snapped toward me, his confusion evident.
“What do you mean?”
“Take a left here,” I said as we wound our way out of the neighborhood and back onto the main thoroughfare. “Let’s cut to the chase. I gave you a chance to join my team, and you turned me down in favor of shopping your expertise to the highest bidder. So be it. I’m a capitalist, too. But now you’ve experienced a change of heart. Call me cynical, but I don’t think that’s because you’ve suddenly found religion. I’m more inclined to believe that, somehow, I’m the only thing standing between you and an unmarked grave. That’s fine, too, but before I rescue your sorry ass, you need to convince me that your skin’s worth saving. Get it?”
“I bloody well get it,” Einstein said, biting off each word.
“Good. So tell me what you know and how you know it. Start at the beginning, but talk fast. Our extraction window is closing.”
Einstein shot me a look of pure malevolence, but he began to talk. They always do.
“My original job was for Assad. He wanted a novel chem weapon—something not detectable by conventional methods. Something that used nontraditional precursors.”
“Because he needed to bypass the sanctions,” I said.
Another look from Einstein, this one with more surprise than anger.
Yes, motherfucker, I’m smarter than I look. I might not be a scientist, but I’m not just a knuckle dragger, either. The DIA had done a respectable job preparing me for my initial Syrian assignment, including a refresher course on weapons of mass destruction. I couldn’t synthesize a nerve agent, but I understood the process enough to know that the existing sanctions made obtaining the necessary precursors a bitch. What I didn’t know was how Einstein had managed to engineer a work-around.
“Why doesn’t the weapon trigger our chem detectors?”
“Because it’s not a chemical weapon,” Einstein said with a smile. “At least not in the traditional sense.”
“Please enlighten me, Doctor Doom.”
“I found a way to weaponize dimethylmercury.”
“Come again?”
“It’s not a poison, but it is toxic. Extremely. The mercury collects in the brain and the symptoms of exposure are very similar to mad cow disease. The effects are irreversible once the compound enters the bloodstream.”
“How is the weapon introduced?”
Einstein actually smiled when he answered. “After experimenting, I learned how to aerosolize it.”
Experimenting.
As Einstein said the word, I saw images captured by the CIA paramilitary team’s body cameras. Images of the execution chamber. Frodo had forwarded the pictures to me during the flight to Syria, and I’d paged through them until I couldn’t anymore. Even now, I could still see the dead men, women, and children sprawled across the floor in heaps.
Children.
“I had no choice,” Einstein said. “By then Assad had passed me off.”
“To who?”
“The terrorists.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying that Assad knowingly gave your weapon to the ISIS splinter cell?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Einstein shrugged. “I’m not certain, but I can guess. The war is good for Assad. The longer it drags out, the more time he has to annihilate the dissidents protesting against his regime under the guise of fighting terrorism. I think that he wanted the splinter cell to have the weapon because he knew they would use it.”
“Thereby turning world sentiment in
Assad’s favor,” I said. “If terrorists used a weapon of mass destruction in Europe or the U.S., Westerners would demand retribution in the form of dead terrorists.”
Einstein nodded. “Exactly. And if some of those terrorists happened to be dissidents or Syrian rebels, do you think your countrymen would care? A dead Arab is a dead Arab.”
“Pull in here,” I said, pointing to a darkened side street.
While I didn’t share Einstein’s dismissive view of my fellow Americans, what he’d said made sense in a strange sort of way. For some time, intelligence community members had theorized that Assad, and the various splinter cells that had once been ISIS, might be in a symbiotic relationship for the exact reasons Einstein had just outlined.
Still, right now, whether Einstein was telling the whole truth didn’t matter. We would cover all this again in agonizing detail during his post-operational debrief. What I needed now was to verify that he’d lived up to his part of the deal. I needed Shaw’s proof of life, his location, and the weapon’s chemical formula.
Everything else was gravy.
“Did you bring the weapon’s formulation?” I said.
Einstein nodded. “The details are on my phone.”
“Send the file here,” I said, giving him Virginia’s e-mail address. “A chemist will review the data. Once she gives me the thumbs-up, you’re clear in that regard. What about proof of life for the captured American?”
Einstein looked away. “I couldn’t get it.”
“That was our deal.”
“To hell with your deal. The jihadis have been watching me. I suspected it for some time, and the men you killed proved that I was right. I’m a scientist, not a soldier. I couldn’t get to your friend, but I know he’s being held in the building housing my lab. I can even tell you which room, but I can’t access it myself. You’ll have to trust me.”
On the surface, the explanation seemed plausible. For some reason, Einstein had obviously fallen out of favor with his benefactors. Still, I had a feeling that the truth wasn’t as convenient as he’d like me to believe. In his heart, Einstein was a cold, ruthless bastard who’d made his living inventing new ways to kill innocents. He’d had a chance at redemption when I’d pitched him, and he’d thrown it away. I was way past extending him the benefit of the doubt.
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll wait.”
“For what? By now the jihadis will have realized I’m gone. You said so yourself. Why are we waiting?”
“Because I don’t trust you. My scientist is looking at the information you provided earlier.” I held up my phone. “Once she’s reviewed it, she’ll let me know. If she likes what you sent, I’ll trigger our exfil. If she doesn’t, you and I will have a problem.”
Einstein’s eyes widened, but for once, he said nothing. Instead, we sat in silence, waiting in the darkness as Shaw’s time ticked away.
Then my phone vibrated.
I keyed in the password to find a single-word text from Virginia.
Avalon.
She’d reviewed the data and thought the chemical formula was credible. We were in business.
“Start the engine,” I said, switching to Colonel Fitz’s chat feed and keying in the brevity code word instructing him to launch. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”
FORTY
Park here,” I said, staring out the window at our target. For a weapons laboratory and execution chamber, the building situated one hundred meters away was surprisingly mundane. The structure was two stories high and encircled by a chain-link fence. The building’s facade was weather-beaten and worn, the paint long since scoured away by wind-borne grit. If anything, the building looked a bit dilapidated, but otherwise ordinary.
Which was precisely the look I’d be going for if I were a member of a terrorist splinter cell living under the protection of a homicidal dictator while dodging the West’s prying eyes and ever-present Hellfire missiles. Like much of Syria, this building was holding secrets just below its benign exterior, assuming of course that my new chauffeur was telling the truth.
“What now?” Einstein said, his voice giving the question a hard edge.
He’d not been in favor of returning to his lab, and he was clearly edgy. His fingers tapped out a nervous beat on the steering wheel as he slouched low in his seat, desperate to keep his recognizable profile from sight.
I took this as a sign that he was telling the truth, but at the same time, there was no way I was sending Colonel Fitz and his boys in blind. Einstein and I weren’t a squad of Rangers, but we were the closest thing Fitz’s operators had to a sniper team providing overwatch. We weren’t going anywhere.
At least that was the plan.
“Now we’re going to have what we infidels affectionately call a come-to-Jesus moment,” I said, turning from the building to Einstein’s dark form. “Based on your information, a team of killers is heading this way. At my say-so, they will fall upon this building and make what Moses’s angel of death did to the ancient Egyptians look like a schoolyard brawl in comparison. But first, I need to know that you’re telling the truth.”
Einstein opened his mouth, but I waved him to silence. “Before you speak, I want you to understand what’s riding on your answer. With me?”
Einstein nodded.
“No, you’re not,” I said, picking up my phone. “But you will be.”
I scrolled through the stored photos until I found the set I wanted. The set I’d asked Frodo to get for me when I’d outlined my intentions during our VTC on the Gulfstream. As usual, Frodo had found a way to come through, even though my request had necessitated the activation of surveillance teams in two different countries for a half dozen targets. Gaining approval for, not to mention executing, such a complicated tasking on such abysmally short notice should have been impossible for anyone short of the DIA’s director.
But for Frodo, this was just another day at the office.
Clicking on the first image in the series, I held up my phone so that Einstein could see.
“If you’re lying, you’ll die. That’s a given,” I said, thumbing through the pictures one by one. “But so will your mother, your father, your three brothers, and your baby sister, who is right this minute taking notes in her economics class at Oxford. Pretty girl, by the way.”
“You’re threatening my family?” Einstein said, anger contorting his face.
“I don’t threaten. I inform. For instance, I just informed you that the veracity of your words holds considerable power over your family’s well-being. But I think that’s only fair, don’t you? After all, if you’re lying and this is a trap, the men who are heading this way will probably die, and me with them. Then again, so will every human being who has the misfortune of sharing your DNA. Do we understand each other?”
“I understand you’re a bloody barbarian.”
I grabbed Einstein by the front of his shirt and jerked him toward me.
“A barbarian is the person who did this to innocent women and children,” I said, trading the image of Einstein’s sister for the pictures from the CIA paramilitary team’s body cameras. Einstein paled and tried to look away, but I was having none of it. Switching my grip to his thick black hair, I forced his head back to my phone.
“Look at this, you motherfucker. Women and children. Babies. You did this. You. A barbarian would have brought you your mother’s head in a box and a video of your pretty little sister getting gang-raped. A barbarian would have put a bullet in your skull as soon as you gave him the information he needed. But I’m not a barbarian. I’m a man of my word. And my word is that I will extract you from this mess alive, and leave your family untouched, if you’re telling the truth. But that’s a big if. If just one syllable turns out to be a lie, my vengeance will be biblical. So, now that you’re properly informed, I’m going to ask again—are you telling the truth?”
“Ye
s,” Einstein said, the answer coming out in a hiss.
“Good,” I said, releasing his hair. “I’m glad we had this talk.”
FORTY-ONE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Peter followed the faded navy carpet leading to the Situation Room with a bounce in his step. So far, the deception plan he’d leaked was still holding. The talking heads at MSNBC, CNN, and the rest had lamented the loss of American life, but were also using the deaths as evidence that America could not afford to get further entangled in the Syria mess.
As a result, Senator Price was once again on the defensive. His surrogates were sparring with TV commentators over the Senator’s increasingly unpopular proposal to commit a significant U.S. boots-on-the-ground contingent to Syria. From Peter’s perspective, the longer the conversation centered on the Republican’s ill-conceived strategy, the less time between now and Tuesday the President’s campaign staff would have to spend addressing the economy’s anemic growth.
On the operational front, General Hartwright, the DIA Director, had removed Drake from Syria, leaving Charles firmly in command. In a final piece of good news, Shaw’s capture was still a closely guarded secret. Even the paramilitary operator’s next of kin didn’t know the truth.
Taken in sum, the carefully engineered pieces of Peter’s plan had begun to yield results. The latest poll numbers showed the President edging back into safe territory. Peter was fairly brimming with joy, and it was all he could do not to whistle as he deposited his phone on the appropriate storage shelf, keyed his personal security code into the cipher pad, and entered the Situation Room.
Unfortunately, his newfound euphoria was short-lived. The length of table he’d expected to find empty boasted four people in addition to the President.
That was three people too many.
This meeting was supposed to be a notional update on the status of the CIA’s attempt to rescue Shaw. Notional because the update Beverly would be providing to the President had been written by Charles and approved by Peter.
