“What happened?” I asked, as Wildman stowed his detonators. I could tell he wasn’t in a hurry. He took out his canteen and drank a long gulp of water. It was the middle of the night, and it was chilly on the rooftop, but the zero percent humidity of the northern Iraqi desert would still dry you out in half a minute.
“Unexpected visitors,” he said.
Wildman had rigged the whole building, not just Farhan’s escape tunnel. He had the option to blow up as much or as little as he wanted. He had chosen a small explosion. I’d known the man for three years; it wasn’t his usual choice.
“So?”
He finished drinking. He looked around at the eight people on the roof: me, Boon, the prince’s posse, the woman he’d knocked up. We were a ragged crew.
“They were Apollo,” he said.
Apollo Outcomes?! That hit me hard. Our vantage point had given us a clear view of the front of the building and the trap we set. We had seen the majordomo, with a dozen highly trained men, rush in. We didn’t have eyes on the other group, which had entered from the back, but I knew they had done quick and violent work. They had taken out a Saudi hit team in minutes. They were professionals. But Apollo?
“You sure?”
Wildman nodded. “I went through the Ranch”—Apollo Outcomes’s private training facility and proving ground in Texas—“with two of them.”
“They may have moved on.”
“They didn’t.”
The way Wildman said it was final. He was certain. And I was going to have to accept it. My old company, Apollo Outcomes, and my old mentor, Brad Winters, were here.
Maybe the mission was a favor for a business associate. The prince’s father? Winters had business associates everywhere; of course he had Saudi princes in his pocket. But that was a full Apollo Tier One team down there. That was a snatch-and-grab operation, with shoot-to-kill authorization. And apparently, the majordomo had no idea it was coming.
Did Winters know I was here?
The thought invoked a fight-or-flight response. I reached for the ground and sat down. I needed to think this through.
Keep calm, Locke, I thought.
I reviewed what I knew. Winters had sold out my Apollo team in Ukraine. Since then, Wildman, Boon, and I had hoofed it down to Erbil, where we could lay low until I figured out how to action Winters. We’d be truly safe only with Winters dead, but killing the CEO emeritus of the world’s largest mercenary corporation was no easy day.
Maybe we got sloppy? My mind wandered to Kylah. My old Airborne buddy Bear. The oil executives. Did one of them know Brad Winters?
The majordomo. He was the linchpin. He was the man who offered me a million dollars to kidnap the Saudi princeling, whose father was the head of Saudi intelligence’s black operations division. And an ISIS special forces killer. And a lover who had a change of heart and was starting a family with an American-Persian woman in the middle of a war zone. Father uses majordomo to retrieve son, but majordomo doesn’t tell Dad about the pregnant girlfriend. Majordomo is also in love with his boss’s daughter and Farhan’s sister, Umma something or other (I still had trouble with the local names), but is rejected by the family due to his low birth—and especially by the very prince he was hiring me to find.
Then there was Istanbul. Why was Farhan there? How was he there? His father didn’t sound like the kind of man to let inmates, even his son, take a weekend pass. Farhan must have been sent there for a purpose, only to escape and return for Marhaz, his pregnant wife. Father is outraged, sends his majordomo to retrieve Farhan yet again. Majordomo hires us.
Now an Apollo team shows up, also looking for the prince. Coincidence? Or did Winters know I was here? I had smashed my satellite phone, destroyed my Apollo-registered tech, lived off cash and barter on the fringes of the globalized world for four grueling months. We had walked hundreds of kilometers, hitched rides in the back of Turkish tobacco trucks, smuggled ourselves across multiple borders, and lived like paupers in a lousy squat with no electricity and hardly any running water.
No way Winters could have tracked us. We were off the grid. The Apollo team could have been a nightmarish coincidence.
But why were they also after Farhan? How important was this prince? And why?
“What is going on?” I whispered. I saw the prince turn, trying to avoid my sight. Wrong move. He knew more than he was telling me.
“I need to know what is going on,” I said, standing to face him. “Now.”
He glanced at his wife. “I told you my father was ruthless,” he said.
“This isn’t about bringing you back to be a good son,” I said. “Those men didn’t seem to mind if they killed you. Why?”
He didn’t want to talk. I could tell. But he had information, and I didn’t have time for games.
“You’re asking me to risk my men for you,” I said. “That involves honesty. And trust. So tell me what is going on, Prince Farhan, or tell it to those men down there.”
He looked at his wife. She nodded, a hand on her belly in an instinctual protective position. The prince pulled a cheap chain from his black ISIS robe. At the end was a metal card. “I stole this from my father. In Istanbul.”
“A credit card?”
“A KSV-21 enhanced crypto card.”
“What is that?”
“A key.”
“To what?”
“Arm a nuclear bomb.”
I blinked. “Your father has a nuclear bomb?”
“Actually,” he said, “he has fifteen nuclear bombs. Or he will very soon.”