48

EISENHOWER EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.—15 MAY

Marcus had given them their marching orders.

Which was why Pete and the team were in the office so early. None of them had been home to shower or even change clothes. What little sleep they’d gotten was from catnaps on the floor. But they weren’t working literally around the clock simply because their friend had asked them to. The lives of three Americans hung in the balance, and they were determined to find them and bring them home as quickly as possible.

Hour after hour, through pot after pot of coffee, they combed through mountains of NSA intercepts, DIA files, CIA and State Department cables, and classified data from foreign intelligence services all over the world. They made phone calls, followed up leads, and fished for any scrap of information that could prove useful. They had no illusions this was going to be easy. They were searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack and doing so while battling growing anger at Stephens and Hernandez and McDermott and Dayton and everyone who had hung Marcus out to dry. Worst of all, they were having no success.

Pete made his rounds through the office, checking on everyone, asking for updates, and trying to cheer them up. “Come on, guys, this is why we make the big bucks,” he told them.

Pouring himself another mug of Jenny’s wretched sludge—how she could be so proficient with a Russian sniper rifle and still unable to make a pot of coffee was beyond him—Pete went back to his office, the one that twenty-four hours earlier had been Marcus’s. He sat down, rubbed his eyes, and tried to steel himself to plow through the latest stack of Kairos files from Langley that Noah had dumped on his desk.

At precisely noon Eastern time, however, a news bulletin on MSNBC caught his attention. Scrambling to find the remote buried beneath all the paper on his desk, Pete turned up the volume on that particular monitor and shouted for the others to come in immediately.

“This is an NBC News Special Report—and now from NBC News headquarters in New York, here’s Jim Zweigle.”

“Good afternoon—an extraordinary development out of the Middle East this hour as NBC News has just received a video from the Kairos organization, claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of three American aid workers in Yemen,” Zweigle began. “But what makes the video particularly important is who makes the announcement. Let’s run the video, and then we’ll have full coverage and analysis from our team of NBC correspondents and intelligence analysts in Washington, London, and Jerusalem.”

The footage that now aired was raw and unedited.

But the face in the center of the picture was unmistakable.

Abu Nakba, the octogenarian terror master, was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, in what appeared to be the prayer hall of a mosque. As in all the other photos and video footage Pete had seen of the world’s number one most wanted man, the jihadist wore a white tunic, covered by a classic brown Libyan robe, and sandals on his brown and bony feet. His long, flowing hair was almost silver, as was his beard.

“In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate,” the old man began in classical Arabic as someone working for NBC provided simultaneous translation. “Praise be to the Lord of All Worlds, and peace be upon our Prophet, and upon the Promised One—Imam al-Mahdi—the Long-Awaited One, and peace be upon his infallible household, and upon his chosen companions, and upon all the prophets and messengers and martyrs who work tirelessly for the sake of building the glorious final Caliphate.”

The camera slowly zoomed in on Abu Nakba’s weathered face and tired pale-brown eyes covered by the smudged gold spectacles he wore as he read from several typewritten pages of a prepared text.

“I hold in my possession three American virgins,” he said, suddenly shifting into British-accented English and setting aside the pages and looking directly into the camera. “Tanya Brighton is twenty-seven and a native of Biloxi, Mississippi. Hannah Weiss is twenty-two and a native of Tyler, Texas. The youngest, Mia Minetti of Montgomery, Alabama, is only nineteen years old. I can tell you that for the moment all three are alive—but what happens next is up to the American government.”

The video image now switched to the three women—two brunettes and one blonde—bound and gagged. Their faces were swollen and severely bruised. Their clothing was covered with blood, presumably their own. They were chained to what looked like a flagpole in the center of a courtyard of some kind.

Then the video cut back to the Kairos founder and spiritual guide.

“This is what they look like after only a few hours in my custody,” he declared. “If their parents, families, and friends ever want to see these girls alive—indeed, if the infidel government of the Great Satan ever want to see their citizens alive—then they will pay us $50 million for each of their virgins in the next forty-eight hours. One hundred fifty million total. Payment instructions are being transmitted to the State Department at this very moment. And the countdown starts now. Pay what I ask, and you can have these women returned to you alive. Fail to pay, and I will add three American heads to the collection on a shelf in my office.”

The final image of the video cut to a shelf of bloody heads. One Korean. Two Filipinos. Two Ethiopians. And four Spaniards.