Werner isolated Zaidi’s calls from among the millions of other calls and messages being relayed between towers, satellites, and cell phones.
The super computer knew which keywords to look for, in which geography. It was working in tandem with several supercomputers in Langley, the Pentagon, Britain, and Israel.
The combined computing power of those machines enabled it to pick the words up almost in real time.
Americans. It understood Zaidi’s words despite the vendor’s pronunciation. Green eyes. Sisters. Those were enough for Werner to lock onto the call just a few seconds after it had started.
Zaidi’s voice boomed out on Broker’s screen and got picked up by the earpieces of the operatives in both vehicles.
‘Where?’ they heard a rough voice ask the caller.
‘Near Tal Abyad. I just served tea to them, five minutes back. I can still see the dust raised by their trucks. They didn’t pay me,’ he grumbled.
‘Was it Bedar Araz?’
‘I have never seen him before, sayidi. But I saw them.’
‘Who?’
‘The Americans,’ the caller yelled out, pronouncing badly. ‘I saw green eyes, sayidi. So deep green. Like a lake.’
‘You fool. Calm down or I will put a bullet in your head.’
Where is it coming from? Zeb gestured urgently.
Broker leaned forward and punched in the coordinates to the caller’s location.
Forty-five minutes away, the map showed him. Just on the edge of Tal Abyad.
Zeb accelerated.
Shadows were lengthening, but there was still enough light. Good visibility.
The caller was still talking to the unknown man as the two SUVs rolled through the Syrian countryside.
‘I swear, sayidi, it was green eyes. She was in an abaya. There was another woman, also in an abaya. The second one didn’t come to me.’
‘Who else was with them?’
‘Twelve people, sayidi. Four YPJ soldiers and eight men.’
‘Thirteen, if you include Araz.’
‘No, sayidi, eleven without him. Fourteen with the Americans.’
‘Five minutes ago, you said.’
‘Yes, sayidi. They left in the direction of Tal Salam.’
‘Don’t tell anyone else,’ the voice threatened. ‘Let me know if anyone comes asking.’
‘What’s in Tal Abyad?’ Zeb yelled above the noise of their growling engines.
‘Nothing. Just a settlement. He sounded like a street vendor.’ Broker frowned as he searched maps and databases.
‘Can you get satellite images? Video feeds?’
‘Just drive, Zeb,’ Broker hissed. ‘Let me do my job.’
Zeb couldn’t help grinning, the smile quickly fading away as he pictured a map of the region.
They were forty-five minutes from Tal Abyad.
Tal Saman was a further ninety minutes away.
There’s time to question that caller.
Mufeed Zaidi used an ordinary cell phone, one of those smartphones, but not a fancy brand.
It had enough tech in it, however, for satellites to triangulate his call and place his location.
‘Outside Tal Abyad.’ Broker winced as Zeb overtook a military truck, sounding his horn continually.
The Syrian interior minister owed Zeb big-time, and he had put out the message that the operatives’ vehicles weren’t to be stopped. By anyone.
‘I ran that caller’s voice as well as the other dude’s voice. No hits on any database.’
‘You didn’t expect a tea vendor, if that’s who he is, to be in any database, did you?’ Chloe smirked.
‘You never know,’ Broker replied darkly.
Tar road and occasional concrete flowed like a river behind them. Traffic scattered at their approach.
They had turned on their headlights and honked whenever they approached other vehicles.
They didn’t encounter any bottlenecks and made good time to Tal Abyad.
Five fifteen pm. They split up as they slowed down and went through the town.
Broker insisted that the call came from outside Tal Abyad, to the north, in the direction of Tal Saman. But Zeb wasn’t taking any chances.
He wanted to scout every tea vendor in the settlement.
However, after one pass through the town, he agreed with Broker that it was a waste of time.
There were several vendors in Tal Abyad, but all of them were in crowded marketplaces.
Bedar Araz will not go to them, not with two captives.
They rushed out of the city in the direction of the vendor, going where their GPS directed them.
Mufeed Zaidi was wrapping up for the day.
He usually kept his stall open till seven pm, but he’d had enough excitement for the day.
Besides, he wanted to enjoy the memory of those green eyes, all by himself.
He was bending down and washing cups in a bucket of water beneath the aluminum counter when he heard two vehicles race from the direction of the town.
He ignored the sounds. There was a lot of military traffic, and he figured these would be army vehicles.
The sounds grew louder, and when they stopped near his stall, he raised his head cautiously.
His heart sank when he saw two men alight. A large black man and a bearded one.
The two men were so large that he felt fearful just at seeing them.
More men came out, and one woman too, but his eyes were fixed on the first two.
They came up to him, their eyes flicking over him, assessing him, looking beyond and around him.
No one said anything, and when the black man removed a handgun and placed it on the counter, Zaidi moaned.
An older man pushed forward and pressed a button on his cell phone.
I saw green eyes, sayidi. Zaidi recognized his own voice and he moaned louder.
‘That’s your voice?’ the black man asked him.
‘Yes, sayidi,’ he replied, instinctively using the honorific term.
‘You saw them?’ The arrivals seemed to tense expectantly for his answer.
Zaidi was no fool. He hadn’t survived in ISIS country without using his wits. He knew who the interrogator was asking him about. He knew danger when he saw it. He realized it was healthier to answer than to lie or keep silent.
‘I saw one of them, sayidi. I saw her eyes. The other one didn’t come near me. But she was the same shape and height.’
‘Who were you speaking to?’ Another man stepped forward.
This one was slightly shorter than the black man. He was brown-haired and lean. His face was expressionless, but there was something about him.
Zaidi had once watched a TV show in which a panther had stalked its prey. It had patiently lain in wait and had then exploded into speed in a split-second.
This brown-haired man reminded Zaidi of that panther.
‘They will kill me.’ He swallowed.
The bearded man brought out a knife and placed it on the counter.
‘We won’t. We will only cut your testicles off.’
Zaidi urinated in his pants. He couldn’t help himself, his fear was so deep.
‘Pasha,’ he stammered. ‘Marwaan Pasha.’