by Greg Rucka
“Kufr,” Matteen murmured.
“Kufr,” Sinan agreed.
Blasphemy.
22
Yemen—San’a’, Old City
9 September 1103 Local (GMT+3.00)
She’d worn the balta, hijab, and veil, checking herself in the bathroom mirror to make certain nothing would give her away before venturing out of the hotel. In the lobby, no one gave her a second look; in fact, most of the people there actively avoided looking her way altogether, afraid of giving offense. Vision behind the veil was remarkably good, even on the periphery, and Chace was relieved. One less thing to worry about.
Only three million, seven hundred thousand, and twelve remaining, she thought.
Beneath the balta, Chace wore her trainers, black stockings, her long skirt, and her long shirt, but this time she’d tucked the shirt in instead of letting it hang out. In the front of her bra she had stuffed the surgical gloves Hewitt had given her when he’d delivered the weapon. She hadn’t bothered with a different head scarf; the hijab she wore with the balta was common, and she had confidence that, if something was going to betray her, it at least wouldn’t be that.
The Walther she taped to the inside of her upper left arm, the silencer to the inside of the upper right. If she walked modestly, there was no possible way they could be seen, and that concerned her more than being able to access them quickly. The plan, such as she had, would require her to wait for Faud, and she intended to use that time to prepare the gun.
She had debated taking another handful of rounds from the ammunition box but in the end had rejected the idea. They would be hard to carry, they could conceivably collide and jingle in a pocket, calling attention to her, and it would take too much time to reload the weapon. If the six in the clip weren’t going to be enough to do the job, then the job wouldn’t be done, it was as simple as that.
•
She made her way through the Old City unmolested. Her worst fear was that someone, most likely another woman, might try to strike up a conversation or in some other way delay her, force her to speak. Her intention, if that happened, was to continue on her way without responding and hope that her rudeness would be enough to dissuade further contact.
As it happened, it didn’t come up, and when she reached the Great Mosque, the muezzin was just finishing. She came from the north side this time, and again she saw the SUVs parked as they had been the day before, but instead of three there were five of them, with the fifth just then pulling up. Behind the veil and virtually anonymous, she stopped long enough to watch two men emerge, and one of them she immediately recognized as Muhriz el-Sayd, from his size as much as from a remembered file photo. El-Sayd was an unusually large man, six foot two, long in the torso and thick around and, depending on which source you believed, either thirty-eight or forty-one years old. The other man with him, comparatively much shorter, appeared younger, too, and Chace didn’t recognize him.
She waited until both men had passed through the main entrance of the mosque before she made to follow them. The expected doubts were doing their best to clutter her thoughts, in particular the fear that Faud wouldn’t, in fact, be at the Great Mosque today but rather worshipping in one of San’a’s hundred others—one hundred and four others, at last count. But el-Sayd’s appearance reassured her, because she agreed with Yosef’s assessment. El-Sayd would want the minimum exposure possible.
She walked the block once, to give prayers time to get fully under way, then entered herself, moving quickly, as if late. She passed through the doors, her eyes falling on the rows and rows of rifles and boots set along the wall. She stepped out of her shoes, reassuring herself that the stockings were doing their job, concealing her Caucasian ankles, then quickly looked around. The service was well under way, and all eyes were on the mihrab, and Chace had hopes that they would remain there.
The tension in her stomach contracted, cramplike, and she blew a steady breath out her nose to drive it back, wishing for the millionth time that she’d been able to find some sort of map or diagram of the mosque’s interior. But of course, there had been none to be found: from here on out, she’d need a combination of luck and skill.
She began moving slowly, staying against the wall. The mix of shadow and sunlight helped and hindered at once, but with the noon sun, the shadows were in her favor, and the balta certainly didn’t hurt. The most important thing was to keep moving, she told herself, to look like she knew where she was heading, even if she didn’t. She had time to find a position, at least until the service ended, but after that, it would be extremely hard to move about.
She wished she knew where she wanted to go, but she remained confident that she would know it when she saw it.
Turning along the western wall, toward the north, she looked down past the colonnades and caught sight of el-Sayd again, far enough away that it was his height rather than his face that identified him. To her right, beneath the elegant arches, the mosque opened wide, voices softly mixing in prayer. To the left and continuing along to the northern wall, smaller arches opened, and as Chace worked her way from colonnade to colonnade, she could see inside semiprivate spaces, sunlight dappling onto the worn rugs spread over the floors.
El-Sayd was moving away, turning right at the end of the hall, and Chace saw him slip through a shaft of sunlight, then disappear into the dimness of one of the almost-rooms. She licked her lips behind the veil, tasted the vaguely metallic flavor of her fear and excitement, the adrenaline driving up another notch, and continued forward.
She reached the corner, looked right in time to see el-Sayd’s shadow spilling from the small room, moving back. She knew instantly what he was doing simply from the silhouette of his motion, that he was checking his back, searching for the searchers. Chace stepped lightly left, turned, pressing her back against the wall of an alcove all her own, then knelt on the carpet and lowered her head to the floor, imitating salat. Sunlight from the windows touched her balta, heating it.
She had no idea if she was being watched, and she knew that if she were seen, there would be an uproar. Certainly, women weren’t permitted in this section of the mosque. But perhaps the sight of her in devoted worship would silence any objections, at least until she was finished with her prayers.
She could hear her own breathing, and then even that seemed to fade as other noises rose, the sound of bare feet moving over stone and carpet, voices mixing, louder.
Service over, time to get on with the day.
Time to get on with it.
Still bent, she worked her hands up her sleeves, to her top, and tugged the gloves free, feeling them peeling from her skin. She fought them onto her hands, the rubber closing around her fingers, then straightened, still in her imitation of faith. Reaching up the voluminous sleeves of the balta again, she found the Walther and its suppressor. She bowed a second time, biting her lip, and pulled each free from her skin, feeling the tape pull. It would hurt less to do it quickly, but she was afraid of sudden movement and so used steady tension, until she thought her skin was tearing along with the tape.
When the gun and the suppressor were free in her hands, she bowed again, let each rest in the nest of her sleeves, and quickly cleared the tape from them, then reattached the strips on the inside of the fabric. Straightening a final time, she fingered the end of the suppressor, feeling the threads on its end through the gloves, positioning it against the barrel of the Walther, and then swiftly screwing it into place.
She held the gun in her right hand, resting against her left forearm, inside her sleeve, as she got to her feet and turned, fighting the desire to hold her breath.
There was no one behind her. She hadn’t been seen.
Chace backed against the wall of the alcove, into the small protection it afforded, listening hard. Most of the foot traffic seemed to have died down, and the voices she was hearing now seemed to float out of the air in every direction, whispering.
She edged forward, peering around the lip of the arch into her
alcove, looking toward the one she’d seen el-Sayd enter. There were no shadows to give anyone inside away now, either because it was empty, the sun had moved, or the occupants were being cautious. She glanced back down the way she had come, saw only a lone Yemeni man at the end of the hall, facing away from her, lying on a square of rug.
Chace guided the Walther out of her sleeve, pressed it against the front of her balta, concealing it with her other arm. With a deep breath, she slipped around the corner, took ten steps, and turned into the shadowed alcove to the north.
There were two men inside, both kneeling in prayer, one in a black thobe, the other in white, and neither was el-Sayd, and one of them Chace didn’t recognize at all. Either the one in black saw her from the corner of his eye or heard the rustle of her approach, but whichever it was, it was enough. He raised his head, turning to her, and Chace saw with murderous clarity the heavy lines of age in his face, the cataract blur of his right eye, the gray beard peppered with black.
Faud.
His mouth began twisting in outrage, and he opened it to speak, and Chace already had her left hand supporting the Walther, her right index finger ready on the trigger, and she had the shot, and the Walther popped softly, and the first bullet entered Faud’s brain through the right eye. She fired again immediately, and the second bullet hit lower, splitting his upper lip and driving into his mouth.
She pivoted to her right without pausing, saw the astonished look on the other man’s face, the man who wasn’t el-Sayd and was simply in the wrong place at the worst possible moment. She shot him twice, two more pops from the Walther, sounds like a child’s clapping hands, and hit him in the left eye and left ear. The man collapsed, still astonished, and Chace fired a third time, at the back of his neck, where it met the skull.
Then she pivoted back and put the remaining bullet from the Walther into Faud, also at the base of the skull. She dropped the Walther onto the rug, not hearing it land, and with her foot shoved it beneath Faud’s body.
Chace turned and walked from the alcove, head down, stripping the gloves from her hands and tossing them aside into the shadows. She made her way back along the colonnaded walk, trying to keep her pace steady and normal, fighting the urge to run, mind whirring through the last minute of events. El-Sayd had to have already departed, he couldn’t have known the hit was coming, or else he would have warned the others. Which meant that whatever the business el-Sayd had come to conduct, it had been brief, or postponed, perhaps.
The Israelis wouldn’t be happy, but that wasn’t her problem. It would be Crocker’s and would remain Crocker’s whether or not Chace could make it home. At least she’d hit Faud.
At the corner, turning toward the entrance, Chace heard a shout of alarm and felt her insides turn to ice. A man shouting, and then again, but the tone wasn’t what she expected, not a cry of outrage but one of anger, and she heard someone rushing up behind her and lowered her head farther. The old Yemeni she had seen before moved to her side, shouted at her, and she nodded, understood, and he gestured sharply toward the entrance, and Chace moved faster.
Not fast enough, and the man shouted at her again, cuffing her along the back of her head. Others were sitting up, looking to the spectacle, and when Chace stopped to try and retrieve her shoes, the Yemeni man cuffed her again, then reached for the jambiya tucked at the sash on his belt.
Fuck the shoes, Chace thought, and she moved quickly through the doorway and onto the street. The bodyguards were to her right, waiting, bored, and she turned left, moving into traffic, feeling the ground grinding the stockings at the soles of her feet. The Yemeni man was still shouting at her, and she heard others laughing, and she dropped her chin all the way to her chest, fighting the urge to break into a sprint. Something dug into her right foot, a sharp pain that made her gasp, and she was sure it had drawn blood, and she wondered when she’d last had a tetanus booster.
Then she was past an ironmonger’s stall and down into an alley, and there was no laughter and no shouting, and she slowed, heading west, then turned south down another narrow street, past the San’a’ Palace Hotel, one of the old tower buildings that had been converted to accommodations, the first few floors built of basalt, with brown brick for the higher levels. Chace doubled back, taking the ground-floor entrance to the restaurant, then headed for the stairs.
On the second floor she found one of the shared bathrooms, empty. She locked the door, stripping off her veil, hijab, and balta. There was no wastebasket, and she bundled the whole kit together, slipped it behind the back of one of the few Western toilets she’d encountered outside of the Taj Sheba. She untucked her shirt, took a moment to check her foot, and discovered that a shard of glass had embedded itself in her heel. Blood and dust had caked over the wound enough to slow the bleeding, and she cursed silently, debated, then decided there was nothing for it.
She limped back downstairs and caught a cab back to her hotel.
•
She departed Yemeni airspace three hours and twenty-seven minutes later. She’d removed the glass from her heel before checking out of the Taj Sheba and rose twice during the flight to Frankfurt to change the bandage. It looked worse than it was, and it felt even worse than that, and Chace wondered idly if she could convince Crocker to give her a couple of days off.
After all, she reasoned, job well done and all that.
23
Hertfordshire—St. Albans, Crocker Family Residence
10 September 0114 GMT
Paul Crocker had snuck into each of his daughters’ rooms, first Ariel’s and then Sabrina’s, part of the ritual he performed every night he was home, and wished them each a whispered good night. Neither woke, but that was hardly the point, and convinced that both were safely asleep, he turned to his own bedroom, where Jenny had fallen asleep, book open in her hand, the television murmuring nonsense.
He was as far as putting on his pajama bottoms when the phone on the nightstand rang, and he lurched for it, trying to catch it before his wife woke, an exercise doomed to failure. Jenny sat up with a start, glanced at the alarm clock, and frowned.
“It’s bad,” she said. “It’s always bad when it’s this late.”
Crocker nodded, answering the phone, and expecting the Duty Ops Officer.
Instead, he got Angela Cheng.
“How’s Chace?” Cheng asked him.
“Not on this line.”
“See, I know how she is,” Cheng continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “That’s just to give you a taste of what I know. And I know something else, Paul. What I know is that you need to get your ass into your office in like, say, the next hour, and have an escort meet me in the lobby so I can come up to see you.”
“Your President decided to invade some other oil-rich country, that it?”
“Ha ha, you’re funny, you’re a very funny guy. One hour, Paul, I mean it.” Cheng hung up.
Propped on her pillow, Jenny’s frown deepened. “There was a time when we would make love at night.”
“Did we?” Crocker moved to the closet, pulling down a fresh suit and laying it out at the foot of the bed, then going back for a shirt and tie.
“Must’ve done. There are two proofs asleep in their respective rooms below us.”
“Who are almost, but not quite, as lovely as their mother.”
Jenny retrieved her book, marking her page before closing it, then scooted forward beneath the bedclothes, toward her husband. He had his pants on by then, and the shirt, and he stopped buttoning the front to reach out and run his fingers through her dark hair.
She didn’t move, then kissed his hand as he moved it back. “Tie doesn’t match.”
“The shirt is white, Jenny. Any tie goes with white.”
“Your shirt is not the problem.” She threw back the covers, grinning as he looked at her bare legs, then disappeared into their closet. “The suit is the problem.”
Crocker sat on the bed, pulling on his socks and shoes. “You’re the only person who cares
about these things.”
“Someone must.” She returned with a simple navy silk tie, draped it around his neck, then kissed him on the forehead. “See you tonight?”
“God, I hope so,” Paul Crocker said with a sincerity that surprised him.
•
“Who died?”
“Funny you should ask,” Cheng said, and then slapped the folder she’d hand-carried from Grosvenor Square onto Crocker’s desk.
He finished lighting his cigarette, then flipped the folder open. The routings along the top of the paper were CIA standard, but the subheading declared “U.S.–U.K. Eyes Only,” and it reassured Crocker somewhat that Cheng wasn’t sneaking him anything he shouldn’t be privy to in the first place.
As he read, he said, “Chace is fine. Suffered an injury to the right foot, impaled herself on a piece of glass. No tendon damage, had it stitched up as soon as she was back.”
“I know,” Cheng said flatly.
Crocker stopped middraw on his cigarette, staring down at the paper.
“Ah, just go to the juicy bit.”
“This is confirmed?” he asked.
“From three different sources.”
“Why am I finding this out from you?” Crocker glared at Cheng, but only because she was the only one there. “Why the hell didn’t I learn this from Simon?”
“I don’t know how you run your stations, Paul.” Cheng gave up on waiting for an invitation and sat, tucking her legs beneath her seat. “All I know is what I get from Langley, and Langley says that two people were murdered in the Al-Jami’ al-Kamir in San’a’ yesterday, each of them shot at point-blank multiple times. Dr. Faud bin Abdullah al-Shimmari and Salih bin Muhammad bin Sultan.”
Crocker closed the folder in disgust, rocked back in his chair, almost spitting smoke. “What the hell was he doing there?”
“Chace didn’t say? Did she even file?”
“Her after-action was filed immediately on her return,” Crocker replied angrily. “Before she went to the bloody hospital, she came in here and filed her after-action. She said she missed the window on el-Sayd but was able to take Faud and had to take one other as collateral. She couldn’t shoot Faud and leave the other one just kneeling there.”