92

JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA—23 MAY

For the first time, Marcus began to fear that he’d met his match.

Abu Nakba wasn’t the leader of a country. He wasn’t a president, prime minister, king, or crown prince. The man was a street thug. A common criminal. A cold-blooded murderer. And yet a tactical wizard, Marcus thought. Always two steps ahead of him, if not more. And innocent people were dying because Marcus couldn’t outsmart this guy.

Marcus pulled out his satphone and dialed Annie’s mobile phone but got no answer. He tried her home number, then her office line, to no avail. Finally he left her a brief message, telling her they were all safe and heading back, having exhausted Noah’s leads in the region.

He saw Jenny crossing the tarmac to the Gulfstream and caught up with her. “Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for everything you did back there.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Seems like you’re always getting me out of a scrape.” He smiled.

She smiled back. “Seems like you’re always getting me into one.”

Jenny turned and boarded the plane. Marcus was about to do the same when he heard a familiar voice. Wheeling around, he found Prince Abdullah, dressed in his traditional robes, striding across the tarmac.

“Agent Ryker, the crown prince asked me to thank you.”

“For what? I’m not sure we accomplished anything.”

“You took down Ruzami. That is enough for now.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“His Royal Highness invites you to come back when this is all over to visit him.”

“I’d be honored,” Marcus said. “In the meantime, don’t kill my prisoner.”

“Never,” the prince laughed. “But I will definitely make him sing.”

“How’s the king?” Marcus asked.

The smile faded from his friend’s face. “Not well, I’m afraid. Say a prayer for him.”

“I will.”

“Goodbye, habibi,” the prince said, giving Marcus a bear hug and a kiss on both cheeks. “And Godspeed.”

The pilots dimmed the cabin lights as they cleared Saudi airspace, heading west. Soon they had reached their cruising altitude of thirty-two thousand feet and were flying over Cairo. When the lights of the Egyptian capital disappeared behind them, Marcus stared into the black void, punctuated only by the small flashing red light at the end of the left wing.

Feeling miserable, Marcus decided to make a checklist of all that had gone right with the mission. It might not be much, but he needed to see it written down. In a small leather-bound journal that he’d brought with him from the States, Marcus made his list.

• I didn’t die.
• I didn’t get arrested.
• None of my colleagues died or were captured.
• None of my team was injured.
• We captured a prisoner—he could end up knowing something useful.
• Nine terrorists met their Maker.
• Badr Hassan al-Ruzami was one of them—his reign of terror is over for good.
• We even hauled in a few oysters—maybe Noah can find a pearl of great price.

Suddenly they hit a patch of severe turbulence. The Gulfstream began to shudder and pitch. The cabin lights flickered. It was over quickly, and when it was, Marcus tucked his journal away in his backpack and headed to the galley. There was no way he was going to be able to sleep no matter how exhausted he was. The only thing he wanted to do now was review everything they had seen and heard and try to redeem this trip. There had to be something they were missing, some clue to Abu Nakba’s whereabouts or plans they had stumbled upon, however small, however seemingly insignificant. There had to be. Or the entire exercise could prove to have been an enormous waste of time and money.

He grabbed a cold bottle of water from the refrigerator and returned to his seat. Taking a swig, he closed his eyes again and mentally walked back through the compound in the wadi. The Saudi intel had been accurate. There had been a Kairos cell on-site. With a high-value target. Badr Hassan al-Ruzami was a big fish. One of three deputy commanders of the group. And arguably the most important.

Marcus knew he was going to catch hell back in Washington for not bringing him in alive. But only a fool could believe this guy was really going to talk. Hopefully the man’s phones and computers would.

Marcus didn’t regret Ruzami’s death, but he had no doubt Ruzami had known all. He’d known everything Abu Nakba was planning and the details of the plan. Abu Nakba was the group’s CIO, the chief inspiration officer. But for all the hype, he was not a world-class strategist. Nor a brilliant tactician. That was Ruzami’s forte. That was why Abu Nakba had recruited him in the first place.

Yemen was too small a stage for Ruzami to play on. The man longed to be a global player, and in the sick and perverted world of international terror, he deserved to be. He was that good. Up there with al Qaeda’s KSM—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—and the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Maybe better. And Ruzami knew it. He had already pulled off some of the deadliest and most spectacular attacks in recent memory and done so in some of the biggest and most secure cities in the world. Washington—twice. London. The Israeli-Lebanese border. Beirut. Aden. And if that had not been enough, he had nearly pulled off the mother of all terror attacks in Jerusalem, coming this close to blowing up the president of the United States, the prime minister of Israel, and the king of Saudi Arabia, and doing so amid a Middle East peace summit that was being broadcast live around the globe.

Having been thwarted at the last possible moment, what would Ruzami want next? Revenge, of course. But not so much against Israel. The Jewish state was just the Little Satan in Ruzami’s eschatological worldview. The United States was the big prize. America was the Great Satan. Yet shooting up a church in the American capital or murdering three Christian aid workers was small potatoes for such a man. The chief of operations for Kairos had to be planning something far bigger. Was that not what he had told them in the video released to Al-Sawt and on YouTube?

“We are coming for you—all of you—every enemy of Allah shall burn,” Ruzami had shouted. “You have been warned.”

That, of course, was standard operating procedure. It was what all terrorists said. Yet in Ruzami’s final moments, with Marcus’s gun to his head, knowing he was certainly going to die—or at least spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement—he had said essentially the same thing. Marcus pressed his eyes shut tighter and rubbed his temples, trying to bring back the exact words.

There was something about being prideful. Paying for their pride as Americans. Paying their due, or . . . no, Marcus recalled.

Arrogance.

That was the word Ruzami had used.

“Arrogance! You will pay for your arrogance—all of you. I told you. You cannot stop this. We are coming for you. Infidels. Enemies of Allah. You shall burn. All of you. And soon. Very, very soon.”

It could all be rhetoric, of course.

Boilerplate.

A “Terrorist TED Talk.”

Yet the more Marcus played the words over again in his head and recalled the tone and visualized the body language, the more convinced he was that this was not an idle threat. The man was not pontificating. He was boasting. He had a plan. It was already in motion. The target was unquestionably the United States. And the plan was going to be executed soon.

The question was: Where?