Carmen and Tony fell in behind me. A block up the street, Carmen borrowed a garden hose from a front yard and looped it over her shoulders. Tony found a pile of bricks, shoved one in each pocket, and carried several more. Douglas looked confused at their actions. I didn’t bother to explain anything; I just kept pushing him to show us the Syrian lair.
“That one,” he said when we stopped at a corner.
A cube-shaped brick apartment house stood at the end of the street. Douglas said the Syrians had his daughter on the second floor, corner apartment. The rest of the building was abandoned.
“OK, Douglas,” I said. “You stay right here until you hear gunshots. Then you come running as fast as you can. Do not look at anyone. Do not duck or hide or get scared. You run to the door, pick up your girl, run around the side of the building, then run down the street. Do not look back. No matter what happens to me or my team, no matter what you see or hear, your priority is to get her to safety. We clear?”
He nodded without looking at me.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him to look at me. His frightened eyes rose to meet mine.
“Dougy, this is for her. One mad dash up to the building. One mad dash down the street. No matter how scared you are. No matter how dangerous it is. Can you do this?”
He swallowed, clamped his jaw tight, and straightened up as tall as he could get. “Yes. Yes, I can.”
“Now tell me—how many are in there?”
“Two.”
“Any of them hanging out in other apartments?”
“No. A meth lab blew up in there, musta been a year ago. Stairs was concrete, same as the landing, but the floors was wood. That was the only one still has a floor.”
“Any names?”
“Hussein was the one I spoke to. I don’t know the others.”
I patted his shoulders and turned away.
My friends’ faces were tight, set on the fight ahead of us. The risks were understood, and we knew we would win. We just had to stay chill and execute the plan.
We took the long way around, coming at the building from the opposite corner. No one was on the roof, no one patrolled outside the property, and only one man was posted on the ground floor. As we pointed out our separate paths to each other, the ground floor guy stepped outside.
He cupped his hands around his face and lit a cigarette. I darted him from far beyond the dart’s effective range and yet managed to tag him. He slipped to the ground, sitting upright with his back against the door, propping it open.
I’d like to claim it was my excellent marksmanship, but there’s no denying it—sometimes I get lucky.
We took it as a good sign.
At that distance, the gunshot was no louder than a slammed door, but the missing man would draw attention sooner or later. We went into action. Carmen flew straight to the fire escape at the back. Tony ran to the side of the building. I went for the back door and stopped with my back to the brick.
Carmen scampered to the top and onto the roof in a flash. She found a good position and reported over our earbuds. Tony stepped out in front and threw his bricks—one into each corner of a window, knocking the sharp edges out of the way. Carmen was over the side, dangling by her garden hose. When the last brick went through, she followed it. By then, I was already on the landing. I knocked politely.
A burst of three rounds answered my knock. Disciplined shots—an amateur under attack from the window would have emptied half the magazine. That meant Douglas was wrong, there were more than two guys in this deal. I reached across and knocked again.
In Levantine Arabic, I said, “Hussein, let me in. Hussein.”
Another blast. This time, half his magazine shredded the door. His pattern started in the middle of the door and went across the handle, through the jamb, and continued through the paper-thin walls. Most people will stand on the knob side to avoid getting shot through the door. I always stand on the far side. It’s an illogical spot because of the longer reach and, therefore, less likely to become a target. It worked.
I cried out in a howl of pain that would have won me an Academy Award if Tarantino had been filming it. I followed up in Arabic, “Hussein, I’m hit! You shot me!”
Light flashes under the door indicated someone close inside. I slammed my foot into it, and it splintered out of the lock and bashed him hard in the face. He recoiled and tried to bring his Colt SMG up to fire. I reached around the frame and fired three darts. He fell.
Carmen stepped into the tiny hall behind him, her gun leveled at me. She lowered it.
“Damn it, Jacob,” she said. “You wanted one of them awake.”
“You already darted the other guy?”
“Other two. They still had their backs to the window, dodging bricks when I came in. They had sawed-off shotguns. What was I going to do?” She turned and ran down the hall. “C’mon, I found the girl.”
A surprised girl with wide eyes tracked our every move. She sat in a chair with a coloring book and crayons. We moved in slowly, Carmen saying gentle words as Douglas came charging up the stairs. The reunion was quick. Raya tossed her crayons aside and flew off the chair into Douglas’s arms. At least the man cared about something. With his daughter clinging to him, Douglas looked at me, speechless.
“I told you to take her and run. I meant it. This is not a secure location.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I squeezed his shoulder. “You’re welcome. But I can’t trust you. I need you out of here.”
He nodded and ran.
We secured the Syrians and left them for the FBI.
Carmen returned the borrowed garden hose while Tony and I combed the apartment—bare wood floors, water-damaged drywall, dirty windows, and a layer of dust on the floor. One folding chair, one plastic lawn chair, a wad of bubble wrap, and a padded bill folder from Visa were the only loose items in the building. Inside the folder was a waiter’s pad with a sandwich order written on it and Sabel, no later than 3:00 p.m. in Arabic. Both parts looked like the same handwriting.
My watch read four thirty.
I called the Major. “That goateed waiter at the café—have Miguel try some Arabic on him. If he answers, hold onto him.”
She turned to someone and made it happen before asking me for details. After some background discussions, she came back on. “Turns out he owns the place.”
When I filled her in on the pad, she agreed, my handwriting analysis implicated him. Not a smoking gun, but definitely a sign the café owner had not yet chosen sides. Part of me understood him. If we lost the war, the Syrian retribution would be terrible.
By the time I got to the café, Miguel already had the guy in tears. As I thought, the café owner was under the same pressure as the others and had done whatever the Syrians had asked of him.
He told us that after Ms. Sabel walked away from Patterson’s meeting and headed into the dry cleaner, Hamoud arrived at the café’s back door and stayed until he had watched the drive-by shooting. The café owner took a cold compress to Ms. Sabel with the idea of warning her, but he chickened out at the last minute and said nothing. He swore his allegiance to us and admired the number of armed security people we’d brought. But as far as I was concerned, he was just another spineless guy in the hood.
I had more respect for Ishmael and his crew.
Hamoud had to be one cold SOB to kill his own men. There had to be something driving the Syrians we had yet to understand. Since they had diplomatic immunity, Hamoud feared what his people would tell Sabel agents more than what they would tell the police. We don’t have the Bill of Rights hanging over our heads; we can question people all we want.
The Major and I speculated on the cryptic note about Ms. Sabel.
“The Syrians were planning to hand her off by three,” the Major said. “They took her a little after two thirty, so they handed her off twenty minutes from here.”
“You could barely make the Beltway in twenty.”
“You could make the State Department building.”
“True.” I contemplated that idea for a minute. Obvious, but secure. Still, it would take one seriously rogue secretary to do something that dicey. “I think that’s unlikely. I’m thinking suburban—a safe house. A Silver Spring condo? No privacy. A farm in Prince George’s county? Too far. Oxon Hill?”
“Suitland would make sense,” the Major said. “Anonymous neighborhoods and lots of forest off the parkway there. Plenty of places for a transfer.”
But we were both wrong.
Agent Carter called in from headquarters, and the Major patched him in.
“Ms. Sabel’s secondary phone just came on. We had a lock on it for a few seconds. Then it went dark again. Last position was three hundred feet above the runway at Andrews Air Force Base, heading southeast at 110 knots, climbing and gaining speed.”