92

FIVE DAYS EARLIER

ADEN, YEMEN

Saleet crashed through the gate of the parking garage and swerved to the right, barely missing the bumpers of the cars parked at an angle. He stopped for a moment as the call to prayer echoed in the garage, so loud Wyatt could barely think. Wyatt knew they couldn’t stay here. One drone strike would take out the entire three-story structure, and they would be buried in the rubble and ashes.

“They’ll expect me to exit over there,” Saleet said, pointing to the other side of the garage. “But we will surprise them.”

He hit two cars as he turned around in the cramped space.

“You’ve been watching too many movies!” Wyatt said.

But Saleet was staring straight ahead, his face calm, as if the call to prayer were putting him in a trance. “Allahu Akbar. I am ready to die for Allah.”

“Not if I have any say in it,” Wyatt said. “How far are we from that mosque?”

Saleet did not respond. His hands were frozen on the wheel, arms straight, as if steeling himself to exit the garage.

“Let me drive,” Wyatt suggested, trying to break through to the man. “You can give directions.”

Still the imam didn’t move.

“Saleet, they’re going to kill us here!” Wyatt reached over and shook the imam’s shoulder.

Saleet turned to him. “You should drive,” he said.

Wyatt jumped out of the vehicle to change places with Saleet. But as soon as he did, Saleet reached over and pulled the passenger door closed. Too late, Wyatt realized what was happening.

“The world will listen to you,” Saleet said through the passenger-side window that had been shot out earlier. And before Wyatt could climb back in, Saleet took off.

“Stop!” But the imam wasn’t listening.

He hit the gas and burst through the same entrance they had entered a minute earlier, and the world slowed down for Wyatt. As if choreographed to the final Arabic strains of the evening call to prayer, Saleet bounced across the sidewalk and turned left in front of oncoming traffic.

“Hayya alal Falah . . . Hayya alal Falah . . .”

Wyatt felt the heat and the ground shake at the same time that he saw the blinding blast. He ducked away, covering his eyes. Ashes and smoke filled the air.

“Allahu Akbar . . . Allahu Akbar . . .”

Wyatt breathed in and started coughing. On the street where Saleet’s vehicle had been was a crater and smoke and chaos. People were screaming and running and the concussion from the blast had crumbled part of the facade of the parking garage.

“La ilaha illallah.”

The call to prayer ended, but the air was filled with the bleating of horns and the shouts of desperate people running scared. Wyatt’s ears were ringing, but he gathered himself and walked out the back of the garage, keeping his head down, avoiding eye contact with anyone. He had nowhere to go, but he knew the locals would be taking pictures of the devastation and the American drones would capture the scene in high definition. The farther away he could get from the devastation, the safer he would be.

For the next two days, he lived in the shadows of Aden—hungry, tired, and thankful he was still alive. Though he was bone-weary and famished, he began to develop a sense of invincibility. For some reason, his life had been spared. He had no doubt that he would get out of Yemen alive.

Forty-eight hours after the explosion, Wyatt took matters into his own hands. He made his way back up to the nice houses on the cliffs overlooking the city. He stayed in the shadows and watched for an entire day to better understand the rhythm of life here. He waited until the evening prayer time and then broke into two of the houses whose owners had gone to the mosque, helping himself to a meal and taking whatever money he could find. He didn’t even understand their currency, but he figured he had enough now. Before he left the second house, he also invaded the man’s closet and took a long white robe, a belt, sandals, and another red-and-white cloth to cover his head, replacing his grimy and charred head covering.

That evening he took a chance. He tried four different stores before he found somebody who spoke English. He negotiated for a phone that could make international calls and pulled the currency from his pocket, spreading it on the counter. The man looked him over and eventually started separating the pieces that he needed to pay for the phone. To avoid doing paperwork, Wyatt bribed him and told him he could keep the rest.

He believed that Paige’s and Wellington’s phones were tapped and so he called Gazala Holloman and swore her to secrecy. Following instructions from Wyatt, she drove to the home of Daniel Reese and told him what had happened. Within hours, Reese called Wyatt back. He said he would go to Admiral Towers, who would run it up the chain. Reese was fairly certain they could have a Special Forces extraction team in Aden within twenty-four hours.

The following night, the SEALs landed just up the coast and met Wyatt at a designated rendezvous spot. Six hours later he was at the U.S. military base in Stuttgart, Germany, decompressing. He was questioned by Navy intelligence and a special investigator for the Justice Department. Notably, he did not talk to anyone from the CIA.

When he learned the outcome of Paige’s argument at the Supreme Court, he hatched an idea. Wyatt knew that either Cameron Holloman’s computer had been illegally tagged by the CIA with some kind of GPS device or else the journalist’s e-mails and phone calls had been illegally monitored. Either way, Wyatt had downloaded the information from Cameron’s computer, and he knew where the computer itself was located. Gazala was entitled to possession of it as a matter of law. Once he obtained it, forensics would be able to tell him whether it had been hacked or tagged. He might have lost the Anderson case, but now he had an even better one.

He quickly put together a rough draft of the lawsuit for the wrongful death of Cameron Holloman and talked Daniel Reese into allowing him to use it to add a little drama to his Skype reunion with Paige. Wyatt embedded a link on exhibit D, which would take Paige to a Skype call. Wyatt would be waiting on the other end.

VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA

. . . joy. Pure, unmitigated joy. Her hand cupped over her mouth, Paige stared at the screen, speechless.

“I heard you lost our case while I was gone,” Wyatt said.

“Oh. My. Gosh. Is that really you?”

“I mean, a man goes out of the country for a week and it all hits the fan. His case gets blown away and his star witness has to plead guilty for divulging classified information.”

Paige looked up at Daniel Reese, who was smiling broadly.

Paige took her hand down but couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. “Wyatt Jackson, you had me worried sick.”

He didn’t look well. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his face looked more drawn than it ever had before. He had a bandage on his forehead. And there was one other thing.

“What happened to your eyebrows?” Paige asked.

“It’s a long story,” Wyatt said, cracking a smile. “And unlike a lot of my stories, this one is mostly true.”