“Then what?” Adara asked.
“The women will give you the details,” Hasad said.
“And when we’re all finished?” Rashid asked.
“You go to ground, stay clear of the law for a few years, and you’ll be relocated—set up anywhere you want.”
“Who’s behind all this?” Rashid asked.
“No questions,” Hasad said.
He stared at Adara a long hard moment.
She met his gaze, her eyes expressionless. She and Hasad had been lovers, known each other, and now there was nothing to say.
“I still don’t—” Rashid started to say.
“Then there it is. Go with God.”
The man turned his back on them and returned to the farmhouse.
“He’s a cold motherfucker,” Rashid said to no one in particular.
“What did you expect?” Adara asked. “Hearts and flowers?”
“After what we’ve been through, he should have said something more.”
“He did,” Adara said. “You just weren’t listening. We have a van, IDs, weapons, money, a full tank. The licenses and registration are good. That’s all that counts. They’ll come up clean if a cop runs them through his computer. When this is over, we’ll get set up in foreign countries.”
“But what’s the job supposed to be about?” Rashid asked.
“Our survival, which means we focus on the business at hand. Which means we get in the car and drive as safely as we know how. We don’t do anything to make the cops stop us. We have ordnance in that van that could get us decades in prison. We get through this, we play our cards right, and we’ll both live like kings and queens in an island paradise.”
3
“Killing two decadent Western women … will present no challenge at all.”
—Colonel Abdul al-Hakeem, Pakistani Special Operations Commander
Shaiq ibn Ishaq and Lieutenant General Jari ibn Hamza were in the general’s office. The ISI special operations colonel, whom Shaiq had met before in the Afghan mountains with Hasad, was there. The man made him nervous. Still, Jari had said—indeed had insisted—that Colonel Abdul al-Hakeem was the only man for the job. That Jari, who’d spent his entire life in the most violently dangerous special operations imaginable, held this mysterious “colonel” in such esteem was impressive, if disconcerting.
They sat at the conference table. Shaiq showed the colonel photos of the two women, Jules Meredith and Elena Moreno. “You know what we want done?”
“Yes, but you also told me the president and his CIA director claimed they would handle it,” the colonel asked.
“They’re too indecisive, too hesitant,” Shaiq said. “They’ll find some way to fuck it up.”
“You’re saying that the president and his men are stupid little girls?” the colonel asked.
Jari nodded. “They lack the necessary resolve.”
“I can’t stress enough,” Shaiq said, “how important this is. I read an unpublished article that Jules Meredith wrote for The New York Journal-World. It’s based on secret interviews with the CIA’s Elena Moreno, head of their Pakistan desk. The newspaper and the White House are trying to suppress the story, but it will undoubtedly get leaked. Even worse, what I saw was only the iceberg’s tiniest tip. I’m convinced that those two women can get enough dirt on Caldwell, Conrad, and me to take us—and no telling who else—down. If they don’t have the dirt to do it now, it won’t take them long to get it. So everything depends on removing them from this equation.”
“I’ve known men like this American president,” the colonel said meditatively, “and I understand completely. When a man is trapped in a pit with pit vipers, he must become a pit viper himself and strike like a pit viper to survive. But this man, Caldwell, cannot accept that. He still believes he can flutter like a butterfly and warble like a lark in this new pit viper world.”
“We cannot trust them to eliminate the threat these two women pose,” the general said.
“Their culture is weak when it comes to women,” the colonel explained.
“Which our culture, thankfully, is not,” Shaiq said.
“A great Western thinker, named Nietzsche,” General Jari observed, “once wrote that in all dealings with women one must bring the whip.”
“Subhan Allah!” the colonel shouted, laughing and slapping his thigh. Glory be to Allah. “This Nietzsche, was he of the faith?”
“No,” the general said. “He did not believe in any God.”
“That is too bad,” the colonel said. “He would have made an excellent jihadist.”
“Seriously,” the general asked, “can you handle these two women?”
“But of course,” the colonel said cheerfully. “You will supply my adjutant with everything you know about their current activities, photos of them, their comings and goings. We will follow them for a day or two, then handle the situation.”
“I feel so much better,” Shaiq said.
“We’re about to commence Operation Flaming Sword,” the colonel said, “and that’s a complex operation. Killing two decadent Western women, however, will present no challenge at all.”
4
“Close enough for rock and roll.”
—Adara Nasira
After purchasing additional clothing and supplies, Adara and Rashid came out of the Walmart, which was across the street from their meeting place with the two women in the big mall. They were dressed in dark, loose-fitting bush jackets and black baseball caps. Rashid’s cap featured a Baltimore Orioles logo, Adara’s that of the Nationals. They headed over to a McDonald’s for coffee and cheeseburgers to go. At 10:00 P.M., the Walmart’s and the mall’s parking lots were down to fifty or sixty cars.
As they climbed into their van, Adara asked him, “See anything unusual?”
“The two black SUVs at the edge of the parking lot.”
“I know,” she said.
“They’ve been parked ever since we got here, and they aren’t empty.”
“How do you know there are people in them?” Adara asked.
“Someone’s been emptying a urine bottle alongside the van, and there are dozens of cigarette butts on both sides of it.”
“They gave us night scopes and silencers,” Adara said. “How good are you with that MP7?”
“I assume the enemy has vests, and we want head shots?”
“Definitely.”
“I’m good for at least two hundred yards,” Rashid said.
“That’s pretty damn good.”
“We’re also firing UBR 4.6mm expanding bullets,” Rashid said, “which fragment on impact. That radically increases the size of the wound cavity. It’s almost impossible to miss a vital organ.”
“Close enough for rock and roll. See that semi next to the Safeway? The driver’s taken off somewhere, and it’s been parked there for hours. The light above it is out. Get on top of it and you’ll have a perfect angle as they exit the van. When you see them pull out their guns, you can pick them off.”
“Where will you be?” Rashid asked.
“We have a van in back of the Walmart,” Adara said. “We each have a set of keys. Then I’m going back to the McDonald’s and having a coffee there. We’re supposed to meet in the parking lot in front of it. When the two women pull into that lot and get out, the shooters will exit the black SUVs. You’ll hit them from their rear flank. My guess is they’ll have a half dozen or so in each van. When the action starts, I’ll hit them from their front, off to the side just a little.”
“We trap them in a cross fire, hopefully without hitting ourselves.”
“You and I are taking on two vans filled with a dozen or more killers,” Adara reminded him.
“Yes, but we’ll each have a half dozen thirty-round magazines,” Rashid said. “We’ll have surprise on our side, and we’ll make our shots count.”
“I’ll have a better angle on the driver’s side of the two vans,” Adara said. “You take the passenger’s side.”
Putting the MP7 submachine gun into a knapsack along with extra magazines, Rashid headed for the Walmart. Adara started toward the McDonald’s. They ate their cheeseburgers on the way.
5
The president’s hands were befouled by Saudi blood money.
—Hasad ibn Ghazi
Hasad went inside and sat by himself at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a bottle of Bud.
And thought about Jules and Elena.
He knew they were in a whole world of trouble. Elena had always been shockingly smart. Hell, she had somehow divined Shaiq’s plan to nuke three U.S. cities. She hadn’t connected all the dots, but it would not take her long. That the Agency was harassing her for knowing too much came to him as no surprise. Political hacks had always run that show, not real intelligence pros. That Shaiq had showered Caldwell with so much largesse that he couldn’t see straight was also to be expected. Blinded by hubris and greed, the president’s hands were befouled by Saudi blood money, the president had no choice but to destroy Elena the Whistleblower and Jules the Muckraker. Shaiq was making idiots of all of them.
We just can’t let that happen, can we? Hasad said to himself. No, not to my little girls.
So he’d done everything he could for his two old friends. He’d lined up the best pair of operatives he could find and sent them to protect Elena and Jules. It had worked out well so far. The whole operation had cost Hasad nearly $7 million, but that was a small fraction of his net worth—in fact, a small fraction of this op, a mission that was also his last job.
That the two women and his operatives would now be committed to stopping his nuclear assault on America didn’t bother him in the least. His heart was not in this final op. Part of him wanted it to fail.
Still, the money had been so prodigious that had he passed it up, his loyalty to jihad would have been called into doubt. In his line of work, losing the trust of one’s superiors could have catastrophic consequences. So, at first, he had felt obligated to finish what he had started. You take their shilling, you do their bidding—the code of the profession.
But then they welched, threatened his sister and himself, and were now going after Jules and Elena.
No more.
He owed his employers nothing.
Especially that fucker, Shaiq.
He planned on getting him in his sights before this was over.
Hasad poured himself another double shot of JD.
6
Tortured by a gaggle of demented sadists …
—Rashid al-Rahman
Rashid al-Rahman lay prone on top of the big semitrailer. The MP7’s wire-stock was braced against his shoulder, its scope pressed on his right eye. He studied the parking lot and particularly the black van though its lens.
What the fuck am I doing here?
He always asked himself that question when he was involved with Hasad. A mutual acquaintance had first introduced them, and Rashid had had misgivings about him even then. He’d heard rumors about the man’s ruthlessness, and something about Hasad’s eyes put him off. They scared him—and nothing scared Rashid. He asked his associate what he knew about the man.
“He’s the best friend and the worst enemy you could ever have. He’ll also make you more money in a year than you could make anywhere else in a decade.”
The money had turned Rashid’s head, and he had made a small fortune during his eight years in Hasad’s employ.
Rashid had also experienced more violence and terror in those eight years than he would have known in a full century of any other mercenary work. Even worse, the money had never stuck.
Why is that? Rashid now wondered.
It probably had something to do with the tsunami of hard liquor, the legions of fast women, and the horde of slow horses he’d gone through. Throw in a nose for coke, a weakness for bad cards and cold dice—all of it aggravated by a life spent living on “the edge”—and he could see, in retrospect, his entire sordid history.
But even given all that, why had he hooked up with someone as terrifying as Hasad? It wasn’t that Hasad was a loyal, stand-up employer. Rashid had never known that side of the man until recently—the Hasad who was reputedly such a great friend. For the most part, all he’d seen of him was the brutal, relentless enemy whose genius for retribution seemed to be limitless.
But once more, here he was working for him—something he’d promised himself he’d never do again—and, as usual, the hounds of hell were at his back. First he’d been captured and tortured by a gaggle of demented sadists; now he was on top of a semitrailer in a dark, high-end shopping mall in Washington, D.C., with the most seasoned killers in the FBI, CIA, and Pakistan’s ISI closing in on him.
Why? Is it all due to my greed?
No, Adara had him right. He had always been hell-bent on fucking any woman with a pulse, anything female and breathing … which also explained where most of his money had gone.
Which also explained why he was lying here on the semitrailer in a dark parking lot like a piece of bait.
And all because of that bitch, Adara. She’d torture you half to death one minute, then fuck your brains out the next. But, God, she was hot. Just thinking about her—up here on this semitrailer—got him aroused.
What’s wrong with me, anyway?
Pretty much everything.
Facing almost certain death, all Rashid could think of was his … lust.
Come on, he thought to himself, you have to concentrate on the job at hand—something other than money and pussy.
He finally returned his focus to the parking lot in front of him and the black van filled with killers.
7
“We gotta get out of this place.”
—The Animals
Elena Moreno pulled their Chevy SUV into the McDonald’s parking lot and came to a stop. Across the parking lot was a Walmart. Next door was a huge sprawling mall filled with ultrachic stores.
“I’m hungry,” Jules said, reaching for the door.
“Wait. I don’t like the Cadillac Escalade and the big black Ford van parked about forty feet apart in the mall lot.”
“I don’t like not eating for hours,” Jules said, pulling on the handle. “No way anyone could be following us. Our car’s clean, our hair is cut and colored, we have great fake IDs and sunglassese. They’re just cars, Elena.”
She exited the Chevy.
The doors of both vans immediately opened, and five men in baseball caps, black T-shirts, and matching pants began piling out, armed with automatic weapons held next to their thighs. The other vehicle disgorged six similarly clad men.
Eleven men in all.
“Or maybe not,” Jules said, climbing back in.
One of the men exiting the Cadillac wore a black New York Giants cap. He took a round in the forehead just under the cap’s bill, slamming him onto his back and knocking the cap from his head. Then the next round hit the second man behind the head, driving him forward and onto his face. The third shot hit a man on the van’s other side just under his right eye, and when the fifth man turned toward the car, looking for cover, he instead took a bullet in the side of the neck, whipping him the rest of the way around, a full 180 degrees, blood geysering around the lot as he spun. A sixth shot—the coup de grace—caught him in the back of the head just as he was starting to collapse.
Simultaneously, the six men leaving the black Ford van dropped the moment they got free of the vehicle, the shots also flash- and noise-suppressed.
All the shots were surprisingly silent. The men simply fell where they stood, on the spot, just like that—dead before they hit the ground.
All head shots.
Whoever the shooters are, Elena thought, they’re good.
On the sidewalk and in the big parking lot, only a handful of people were heading toward their cars, and they were now hitting the cement, rolling under vehicles, diving out of sight. One man directly in front of them lost it. Falling to his knees, he
shouted, “Please God, I know I’m a sinner, but don’t let them kill me.”
A nearby woman dropped her grocery bags, clutched her chest, and started shrieking and screeching over and over like an insane owl.
A blind priest’s seeing-eye German shepherd panicked and bolted, leaving his master alone, helpless. Wandering the lot, his hands in front of him, the bewildered priest stumbled between the parked cars, yelling, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
Elena opened the door, leaned sideways, and stuck her head out. She spotted one of the shooters. He was on the roof of a semitrailer parked in an alley beside the Walmart. He was giving her a thumbs-up.
“‘We gotta get out of this place,’” Jules said under her breath.
“‘If it’s the last thing we ever do,’” Elena said, finishing the old Animals’s song lyric.
People throughout the mall and the McDonald’s were having the same thought. Almost every car in both lots started up and was rushing toward exits—more than fifty cars and trucks, all at once.
The two women weren’t getting out of that lot anytime soon.
And then Elena saw a tall woman approach their car, her dark ponytail hanging out the back of her black Washington Nationals baseball cap. She was wearing a dark bush jacket. It did not require much imagination to infer she had a weapon under her coat.
And Into the Fire Page 13