by Jason Elam
“You must take care, my dear old friend,” al-’Aqran said as he examined a deep purple eggplant from a street vendor’s cart. “It seems your footing is getting a little more shaky of late.”
Asaf nodded. “I am sorry, sayyid.” The three men began walking again, ignoring the voices of the proprietors beckoning them from the small shops they passed. “Our asset on Riley Covington says that he has a foolproof plan he has been formulating. Covington will be dead in forty-eight hours at the latest.”
“Don’t talk to me about foolproof plans,” al-’Aqran said loudly, striking the pavement hard with his walking stick. “Every one of his plans was supposed to have been foolproof, but somehow Covington still seems to keep besting the fool’s plans! We will give this asset one more chance. If he fails again, we will send Babrak over there to finish Covington and him.”
“Yes, sayyid.”
As they continued to weave their way through the crowded streets, al-’Aqran said, “Hamad, what is the schedule for the missions to the schools? You said that they are ready to go. Give me a timeline.”
Out of the corner of his eye, al-’Aqran watched as Asaf carefully weighed out his words. Either he is sufficiently scared of me, or he is going to try to bluff. And if I catch him in a bluff, it will be the end of a good, long friendship.
Finally, Asaf answered, “A timeline is hard to give, sayyid. As I told you before, we have everything ready to go. We are waiting right now on the perfect timing. We are confirming that our target schools will all be full for our time of attack. Once we have that information, we will set a date, then wake our sleepers.”
“Tomorrow,” al-’Aqran said.
“What?” an alarmed Asaf responded.
“Tomorrow you will wake the sleepers. Tell them that the attack is set for a week from today. You have told me that everything is in place. Make it happen.”
“But—”
“Make it happen!”
“Yes, sayyid, it will happen,” Asaf acquiesced.
“See that it does,” al-’Aqran threatened, “or else you and I will—”
Seemingly out of nowhere, a man bumped into al-’Aqran, almost knocking him over. The stranger reached out for the old man, catching him before he fell. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he kept saying over and over in Turkish.
Zahir grabbed the offender and roughly pulled him away. “Get your hands off him! What is the matter with you? I have a good mind to beat you in the street like the dog you are!”
The crowd had opened up, and Zahir was violently pushing the man when al-’Aqran called out, “Leave him alone, Babrak. He’s . . .” There was something about the stranger that made the old man pause—a familiarity that seemed to shout from the deep recesses of his mind, though not loudly enough to be clearly heard. “He’s apologized. Go in peace, friend.”
Al-’Aqran watched as the man hurried off, disappearing into the mass of people that seemed to swallow him up. “Babrak,” he said to the young man, “I have something I’d like you to do.”
5:51 P.M. EEST
The tension was almost unbearable as Scott listened to the action on his earpiece. His leg was bouncing so violently from nervous energy that the whole car began squeaking. Scott closed his eyes when the contact was made—Johnson repeating “Özür dilerim, özür dilerim”— the Turkish words for “I’m sorry”—over and over. The sound of the confrontation filled Scott’s head, and he visualized the action. An Arabic voice began shouting at Johnson: “hands off . . . beat you . . . like the dog you are.” Scott’s Arabic wasn’t good enough to accurately follow along. Then al-’Aqran spoke—there was no mistaking whose voice that was.
Finally, it was done. Scott began to relax.
Thirty seconds later, Johnson said, “Velvet One, Velvet Eight.
The dot is planted. I’m just doubling around to my car, then I’ll—oomph!”
Scott’s eyes opened wide as the sound of a scuffle assaulted his ear. But as he listened, it began sounding less and less like a scuffle and more like a beating—and Johnson was definitely getting the bad end of it.
A voice sounded in the earpiece. Scott recognized it as the same one that had been screaming at Johnson earlier. At first the man yelled in Arabic, then Turkish, then, finally, heavily accented English, “Who are you?”
Johnson kept saying, “Özür dilerim, özür dilerim!” But the words sounded slurred now.
“Tell me who you are! Tell me!”
There was pleading now in Johnson’s voice. “Özür dilerim, özür—”
The words were cut off by the other man growling something in Arabic. Johnson cried out; then Scott heard a sound that chilled him to the bone and would return to him every night for the next six months as he closed his eyes to sleep—a low, wet gurgling that lasted for about forty-five seconds. After that, there was only silence.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
FRIDAY, MAY 29, 10:14 A.M. MDT FRONT RANGE RESPONSE TEAM HEADQUARTERS DENVER, COLORADO
“Thanks, Tara. And thank Evie for me too,” Riley said. He and Tara Walsh were walking through the full parking lot outside of the building that housed the FRRT. It wasn’t until after returning to Denver that Riley had realized his Yukon was still up in the mountains. Driving a government-issue vehicle was a good way to place a target on his back, so Khadi had called the team of analysts. All of them had quickly offered up their vehicles for Riley’s use—all except for Gooey, who for some reason considered his 1986 Toyota Tercel hatchback a “classic.”
“Anything we can do to help—seriously.” Tara spoke with a smile, but Riley could see that any happiness she may have been showing was forced. “Are you doing okay, Riley? Khadi said you spent the night in the woods.”
Last night had been miserable. He had hiked at least six miles in the dark, and his face and arms were covered with irritating little scratches from low-hanging branches. At 3:00 a.m., when Riley had finally met up with Khadi and Skeeter at a trail lot by Dillon Lake, the joyous reunion had been brief. Skeeter had lost a lot of blood but had refused to go to a hospital until Riley was found. The ride down the mountain had been mostly silent with Khadi driving the Suburban, Riley nodding off in the passenger seat, and Skeeter stretched out in the back.
“Yeah, it was a longer hike than I thought. But I’m fine—no permanent damage.”
Tara nodded.
It’s either work or personal that’s got her down, and if it’s work, I want to know about it. Riley decided to go fishing a bit. “So, what do you guys in the Room of Understanding hear from Scott and Jim?”
Tara stopped and placed her elbow on the roof of a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle. She took a deep breath. When Riley saw water form in her eyes, he began getting very nervous. “What’s happened? Is it Scott?”
“No,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Scott’s okay—he’s invincible. It’s . . . I can’t, Riley. You’re not cleared for any of this. It’s a breach of protocol.”
“Listen, Tara, I don’t want you to compromise any of your oaths. But given all that’s going on, if Jim were here, what do you think he would say?”
“No, you’re right, you’re right! Jim’s certainly one who believes in situational ethics.” Tara took another deep breath. “Chris Johnson is dead. His . . . his throat was cut.”
“Oh, man,” Riley said, leaning against an SUV. His mind immediately flashed to a time when he and Johnson had gotten into a lighthearted argument about which was the best album by The Cars—the eponymous first one or Candy-O. Riley had really enjoyed the conversations he’d had with Johnson. The man had struck him as very intelligent, very well read.
Then he remembered something else, and Tara’s mood made perfect sense. Scott had told Riley that there was the beginning of an office romance forming between the lead analyst and the very intelligent ops man. Scott, who for a long time had harbored an interest in Tara but considered her out of his league, had tried his best to mask his jealousy.
Reaching out his han
d to Tara’s shoulder, Riley said, “I’m so sorry, Tara. He was a good man.”
“Of course he was a good man, but it always seems that the good ones are the first to go,” she replied brusquely. She didn’t pull away from his touch, but she didn’t move closer either.
“I know. Trust me, I know.”
“I know you do, Riley.” Tara finally moved into Riley’s embrace. She let out two sobs, then breathed in deeply to get control. “I just keep picturing him bleeding to death, alone, in some dirty alley in Istanbul.”
Istanbul? How in the world did they end up in Istanbul? “Were they able to recover . . . ?”
Tara stepped back from Riley and returned to her place against the yellow Beetle. She tried her best to regain her professional air. “No, the police had surrounded the scene by the time anyone got there. Now the State Department is up in arms. It won’t be long now until heads start rolling. Jim figures that in about twelve hours he and Scott will be taken into custody by their CIA contacts.”
“Twelve hours? Is that enough time to get al-’Aqran?”
“Jim seems to think so. His words were, ‘Al-’Aqran will be getting the grand tour of hell before you sit down to lunch.’”
Riley looked at his watch. Lord, please protect these men as they go into battle against evil, he prayed as he did the time calculations in his brain. “Thanks for filling me in. It sounds like a lot of stuff is happening, so I don’t want to keep you. If you can just point me in the direction of the car, I’ll let you get back to it.”
“Oh, sorry. You wouldn’t know. This is it,” Tara said, stepping away from the Volkswagen.
“It is?”
“We figured, give Riley the one car that no one will be expecting him to drive.”
Riley looked over the sunflower yellow Beetle with flower decals on the doors and a Free Tibet sticker in the back window. “I can honestly say you found it.”
Tara handed Riley a set of keys hanging from a large peace symbol keychain with the bottom rim broken out so that, by holding it with the spikes positioned between her fingers, Evie could use it as a weapon to defend herself. “Evie said that she was sorry that the gas tank is so low, and she also recommended that you occasionally talk to the car for better gas mileage.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Riley said as he used the key fob to unlock the doors. “Thanks again, Tara. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you or for Chris’s family.”
“I will. But for now, you just worry about yourself.” She turned to walk away, and Riley opened the car door. But just before he got in, Tara spun back around. “By the way, Riley, Khadi told me what you did up at the cabin—running right into the gunfire. That was either incredibly brave or insanely stupid.”
Riley shrugged his shoulders. “Honestly? I’m beginning to think there’s not much difference between the two.”
Tara looked at him for a moment and then nodded. “Take care of yourself, Riley,” she said and walked away.
7:20 P.M. EEST
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
“Who was he?” Al-’Aqran stood at the kitchen table surrounded by a hastily called meeting of his leadership team. “If you want me to leave with you—to run away from this man—I demand to know who he was!”
“But, sayyid, you were the one who recognized him,” his friend Arshad Hushimi said. “Can you not tell us the identity of the man?”
“Are you not listening to me? I said I thought I had seen his face before. It would have been nice to be able to question him, but young Babrak’s hastiness removed that option.” He glared at the younger man, who refused to return his gaze.
Hamad Asaf spoke up from the seat to al-’Aqran’s right. “If you will forgive me, sayyid. Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Maybe instead of asking who bumped into you, we should be asking why.”
“Finally, my friend, someone who is thinking,” al-’Aqran said with satisfaction as he returned to his seat. “The rest of you, answer the man’s question.”
Hushimi answered first. “It seems that he was not trying to harm you. You yourself said he kept you from falling.”
“I believe he was probably trying to steal from you,” said Tahir Talib. “It is a common technique.”
“Exactly,” chimed in Hushimi. “Could he have been one of those piece-of-garbage, pickpocket Sulukule gypsies?”
Al-’Aqran shook his head violently. “What do I know of Sulukule and its gypsies? Besides, what do I have to steal? Think, you mules!”
Asaf broke the silence at the table. “If he was not taking from you, then maybe he was leaving something with you.”
“Such as . . . ?”
Suddenly Asaf jumped to his feet. He began reaching into the old man’s pockets.
Al-’Aqran tried to swat his hands away. “What are you doing, you fool?”
“I’m checking you for a tracker or a transmitter,” he said, now running his hands up and down the long garment.
Babrak Zahir left the table and ran onto the balcony to look at the street, then quickly ran back in. He called as he passed, “Forget your searching. If they planted something on you, you will not find it. It will be too small.”
At that moment, everything fell into place for al-’Aqran. He pushed Asaf away. “That face, those eyes—he was one of the men guarding me in Italy. A second group of soldiers showed up after I had been taken. He was one of them. I remember when he watched me, it seemed he never blinked.”
“The Americans are here?” There was panic in Talib’s voice.
A sound from outside caught al-’Aqran’s ear. “Stop! I heard something,” he yelled. But the sound didn’t return.
“Quick—we don’t have time to listen for phantoms,” Zahir said, running for the sofa and the weapons that were laid on the floor behind it. “You must strip out of those clothes; then we have to get out of here! Talib, quit whimpering like an old woman and get sayyid a new set of clothing! You,” he commanded, pointing to Hushimi, “help him get dressed.”
Just as Zahir reached the couch, the front door burst open. Al-’Aqran watched his young protégé almost put a bullet through the head of the neighbor boy. The boy cried out.
“Why are you here?” Zahir yelled, walking toward him but still not lowering his gun. “Answer me! Why are you here?” He grabbed the boy roughly by the neck.
The boy was trembling, and tears began to stream down his face. “I’m sorry! Sayyid asked me to tell him if strangers ever came around.” The boy turned toward al-’Aqran. “I was on my balcony! They’re here!”
“They’re here? Who’s here?” But before the boy could answer, the veteran of many battles realized what the sound he had heard a moment ago was. It was the familiar clicking of sound-suppressed gunfire. A grim smile spread across his face. “The Americans.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
FRIDAY, MAY 29, 10:22 A.M. MDT DENVER, COLORADO
Riley put the key into the ignition and cranked the starter. Immediately, his ears were assaulted by music at a volume that had to be pushing the capabilities of the car’s standard-issue speakers. Fingers frantically pushed every button he could find on the stereo. A CD appeared; then the power finally shut off.
Riley pulled the CD out: The Battle of Los Angeles by Rage Against the Machine. This girl is definitely a study in contrasts, Riley thought as he tossed the CD into the center console, then quickly followed it with the fake daisy from the car’s bud vase.
He thought about swinging the car around in the parking space so that the summer sun wasn’t in his face. Instead, he just put the visor down and turned up the air-conditioning. He dialed a number on his phone, and Keith Simmons answered on the third ring.
“Listen, Pach, when you said there might be a little damage, I was thinking a broken window or two! But burning the whole place down? What happened?” Simmons was trying to sound angry, but Riley could hear the smile behind his voice.
“Would you believe a barbecue gone bad?”
<
br /> Simmons laughed. “Nah, I’ve seen you barbecue. It certainly ain’t that! Seriously, man, are you and Big Ugly okay?”
“I’m fine. Skeeter’s in the hospital, but he’ll be all right. Khadi Faroughi’s there with him.”
“Yeah, if that chick was with me, I’d be fine too.”
“Watch it, kemosabe. Listen, Keith, I know you said on your message not to worry about the cabin, but still, I am so sorry. If I knew that the whole place would burn down—”
“You would have asked anyway. Come on, man, don’t be telling me differently.”
Riley winced at Simmons’s comment. Do I really have that kind of reputation?
Simmons spared him from any more self-analysis. “But like I said, it’s only stuff. Better than that, it’s only insured stuff. A year ago, I would have gone all Donkey Kong on you—you know that. But now I know, my friend, that in this life there is more important stuff than stuff. So we’ll rebuild it—maybe this time with an indoor sauna in the basement. Just don’t go expecting an invitation to the housewarming,” he finished with a laugh.
“Well then, God bless you, brother, because you certainly have blessed me.”
“Hey, before you hang up, Z really wants to meet up with you.”
“Afshin? What does he want?” The last thing Riley wanted right now was to talk to someone he hardly knew. He still hadn’t had time to process what had happened last night, much less the news of Chris Johnson’s death. At the moment, all he wanted to do was to find a dark place and brood.
“Who knows what’s in the mind of a rookie? I wouldn’t give him your cell number, so he just told me to please, please, please pass the message along.”
Riley sighed angrily. “Do me a favor and text his number to me. I’ll give him a call.”