al Qababt
Egypt
The street market was packed with people, jostling, laughing, and haggling for everything from rugs to Tupperware to stuffed animals. It was late morning and the heat of the day was already descending, mixing the stench of sweat with the aroma of spices and cooking meat to create an atmosphere that felt oddly comfortable to Randi Russell.
It was ironic that Muslim countries had become the easiest environments for her to operate in. Covered head to toe in a hijab, surrounded by the constant roar of Middle Eastern life, she could move around with almost ghostlike anonymity. For all the chauvinistic morons looking right through her knew, she could have a rocket launcher strapped to her back. But why would they worry? What could they possibly have to fear from a woman?
“Okay, Randi. He’s right in front of you. No more than four or five yards.”
She acknowledged the voice in her earpiece with a short nod, though she wasn’t sure it would be visible from her teammates’ position in a multistory hotel to the east.
She felt sweat break across her forehead, but it wasn’t from the sun beating on her black headgear. It was a mouth-drying, heart-pounding sense of childlike excitement. Four or five yards. She’d started to doubt whether she’d ever get this close.
Charles Hashem had grown into a top al-Qaeda operative whose evil was matched only by his infuriating competence. It had taken the CIA two years even to place him in Egypt and her another five grueling months to find her way to this particular market on this particular morning.
“Got him.”
His gray shirt, sunglasses, and average-length black hair didn’t provide much to differentiate him from any other man in the street, but she’d had every existing photo of him stuck to her wall for the last year and a half. Oddly similar to her bedroom as an early teenager except that fantasies of being whisked away by Luke Perry on horseback had been replaced with dreams of ending the life of the man hurrying toward a narrow souq in front of her.
It was a shame she didn’t actually have that rocket launcher. Seeing his burning body parts cartwheeling down the cobblestones would have been one of the happiest moments of her life. And she had her camera phone with her. Best CIA Christmas card photo ever.
“Can we get him to a viable extraction point?” the voice in her ear said. An unwelcome reminder that her mission was significantly different from her fantasy.
“Are you kidding?” Randi mumbled, counting on her throat mike to pick it up. “Look around me. Eight hundred people would see us toss him in the van and then where would we go? Traffic’s moving slower than I am.”
She lost sight of him and panicked for a moment, pushing ineffectually through the unbroken mass of people ahead. She was stronger and faster than most men, but her 125 pounds just didn’t provide sufficient inertia to penetrate.
A man whose coffee she jostled looked down at the stain on his shirt and grabbed her arm. A moment later he found himself falling backward over an enormous bag of pistachios with that hot coffee now in his face. She slipped away in the commotion, knowing that no one would ever think a woman could have done such a thing to a big strong Muslim man.
“Damn it! Where is he, Bill? Talk to me!”
“Don’t get your panties bunched up, Randi. He went under the awnings to your left while you were screwing around with that guy at the nut stand. We’re temporarily blind, so get your ass in there. If we lose him after getting this close, we’re going to be the ones getting water boarded.”
Again she felt the panic rising in her. Hashem was not only brilliant at staying out of America’s crosshairs, he had a master’s in biology from Stanford, where he’d graduated with a 3.95 average. Losing him was not an option.
A familiar profile flashed into view behind a pile of colorful scarves and she had her target again. “I see him. Moving in.”
“To do what?” The wariness was audible in Bill’s voice amid the static. “Like you said, we have no shot at an extraction here. You’re just going to have to stay with him until we get to a workable location.”
Despite the fact that there were numerous women on the street who were utterly indistinguishable from her, Hashem was eventually going to figure out that he was being followed. And when he did, his six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame was going to cut through the crowd at a speed she simply couldn’t match.
“Come on, Bill. You know as well—”
Randi fell silent when a powerful hand clamped onto her arm and spun her violently around. She went reflexively for a knife hidden beneath her hijab, but then recognized the coffee-stained shirt and burned cheeks. Pistachio man.
Normally she’d have used her considerable language skills and a little groveling to quietly extricate herself from the situation, but today she just didn’t have time to screw around.
In a smooth motion not quite fast enough to look unnatural, she grabbed one of the fingers wrapped around her upper arm and broke it. The man howled in pain and dropped to one knee, cradling his mangled digit.
“Someone help!” Randi shouted in Arabic. “I think he’s having a heart attack!”
People surged in, once again ignoring her and allowing her to back away.
“Where is he?” Randi said when she broke free. Ahead of her the souq split. “Which way?”
The fact that there was no immediate reply was understandable. An assassination had specifically not been authorized, for two reasons. The first was hard to argue with: an opportunity for an extended interrogation would likely turn up all kinds of interesting information. The second, though, was more bureaucratic. Charles Hashem was an American citizen.
And not just some disaffected naturalized immigrant. He’d been born in Cleveland to a nice Persian couple who were grateful as hell to America for giving them the opportunity to escape Iran. In fact they were the ones who had originally tipped off the government about their son’s increasingly radical political and religious leanings.
The next words she heard were muffled, as though Bill was talking to his partner. “No, no. About an hour from now.”
Randi smiled. An hour from now would be 11:00 a.m. Hashem was at her eleven o’clock.
She weaved gracefully, using skill to make up for her lack of heft, until she was right behind him. In place of the RPG she was sadly lacking, she retrieved a pen from her pocket and clicked the top, making sure to keep it pointed away from the innocent people jostling by.
Hashem jerked at the sudden sting in his lower back but by the time he looked back, Randi had put two people between them and was heading for a stand lined with barrels of olives.
The pain would subside in a few seconds and the tiny red mark in a few minutes. The microscopic pellet, though, would be slowly dissolving in his bloodstream. When it finally broke down it would release a poison that would cause what she had been assured was an extremely unpleasant death.
Word was that the whole thing was based on some kind of ocean-dwelling predatory snail. What would those guys at Langley think of next?