Only a very few hours ago, Bashir would have been shocked and somewhat threatened by the exhibition he had just witnessed. Now was different… now he was different. The face Bomani stared into as he pulled himself back into the driver’s seat held his attention for what felt like an inordinately long time. For once, in a long, long while, Bomani stared into the eyes of another man who made it seem as if he was looking into a mirror. “Are you with me or are you against me?”
Bashir calmly replied, “What’s your name?”
Bomani remained silent, his question had been replied to with a question. It was no longer a boy, a young man, who sat next to him, it was something else. He needed to find out what. “Bomani.”
“What’s your full name… Bomani?”
A short period of silence. “My name is Akins Bomani. Are you with me or against me?”
“Akins… a strong man. You are well named, my brother. I’m with you… Akins.” Bashir placed his hand, palm up, in between himself and Bomani. He then tensed his fingers and drew them in together like a bird of prey tightly clenching its claw. “Let us crush these American infidels in the name of Allah!”
Bomani felt the rush of power and victory flood through his veins. He placed a hand on his fellow Takfir’s shoulder… and smiled.
Matt Lilburn and his team left the injured caterer on the side of the road amid the man’s pleas to get him to a hospital. Lilburn explained medical help was on its way and they couldn’t offer him the specialist assistance he required. After prying his fingers loose from the sides of the Jeep the men left the caterer half bent over and hurling outraged abuse. Lilburn had no other option — the virus was his priority.
As he sat in the front passenger seat, Lilburn looked around. The sun was losing its warmth. He glanced down at his wristwatch. Why hadn’t he heard that the drone had picked up the van? It was heading in the same general direction inland. Police were everywhere; there were eyes on the ground, in the sky. “Pull up over here.” The driver brought the Jeep to a standstill on the side of the road. Getting out, Lilburn moved a few paces from the vehicle. Looking down the road and deep in thought, he wondered. Where the hell are you? His phone rang. “Lilburn.”
“Matt, it’s Allan Hall. We haven’t picked the cell back up. Have you anything to report?”
“We’ve just come from the victim they released and we’re now back on the trail but it’s gone cold, sir. I would have assumed the drone would have made contact by now.”
“So would I, Matt. I spoke to Syracuse and they’ve been systematically searching out from your last position but they’ve come up with jack-shit. We have local enforcement on the ground, road blocks, still nothing.”
“What’s the drone’s search pattern?”
“Concentrating on a one-eighty-degree arc from the victim’s position, momentum in the same general direction they’ve been traveling. We pretty well have that area saturated.”
Lilburn bent down and picked up a stone. Holding the phone to his ear with one hand, he juggled the egg-shaped stone in the other. The day had been one frustration after another: they seemed to get close to the cell then the next thing they would lose them. Quite forgetting whom he was on the phone to, Lilburn suddenly spun around and threw the stone as hard and as far as he could. “Ah fuck it.” The stone held an angle parallel to the ground for a considerable distance before contacting a road sign. The rock bounced off with such a force that it rebounded back on its original flight path. Lilburn realized what he’d just seen. “Holy shit!”
“What? Now hang…”
“No, sir, not you. Listen. The third man, the driver, the one we know next to nothing about. I think he’s the brains, the leader. He would have been handpicked for this job — a cunning fox with two chickens. This operation he’s carrying out, it’s well planned. The reason the drone’s not picking him up is because he’s not heading in the same direction as before. He’s trying to throw us off the trail — again. Sir, I reckon he’s backtracked.”
“Damn! I think you’re right — anything else and we’d have been right on top of them by now. Let me talk to Director Lopez, meanwhile you follow your instinct, see if they did double back. I’ll divert some assets towards you.” Hall hung up.
Lilburn walked back to the Jeep. “Let’s see that map again. Open it out on the hood.”
The four agents gathered around the front of the Jeep. Lilburn explained what he thought might have happened. “There’s where we just left that man on the side of the road. Here’s where we are now so where’s the best and quickest place to turn around and double back the way you came?”
One of the agents had an idea. “Just turn around the way they come after doing surgery on the caterer.”
Lilburn shook his head. “Nah. The caterer would have seen them. Much too risky, it would give away their new route. They left him alive… why? Why not kill him… unless you want him to tell the authorities he saw them take off in the same direction they were initially heading. Right? So you carry on, down the road and take a side road, one that’ll lead back to where you want to go. So where is the nearest road they would have taken?”
One of the agents tapped the map. “This intersection, right here. They go down here then turn again down that road.”
Lilburn looked up from the map. He gave a wink. “And where’s that road?”
The men looked up at the road sign the rock had bounced off. “Right there, sir.”
Chapter Twenty-five
“Well, it makes goddamn sense to me, Director.”
“It doesn’t to me.” Director Lopez lowered her voice until just above a whisper. “And don’t go getting all high and mighty. You do not outrank me and let’s be quite clear; you and your staff are to work in conjunction with my staff, on an equal footing.”
“Why won’t you even consider the possibility, Suzanna?” Hall could see some staff in the ops room had stopped talking and were listening. “Let’s go into the meeting room and discuss this.”
Inside the room Hall closed the door behind them. “We have one of this country’s best field operatives on the ground. We have police swarming around the place and a fucking great drone buzzing around the sky. All giving us diddly-squat. Lilburn has a damn good point, the man thinks like one of them. There was a good reason why the President asked for him by name to head the field ops on this.”
“He’s just one man. One man’s opinion. Which I do not share!”
“Lord give me strength. If you don’t like it, and it’s plain to see you don’t — if you can’t even see it has potential — then… go fucking complain to the President!” Director Hall turned and strode off to the door. He stopped and turned back to face Director Lopez, his finger raised in the air — pointing, shaking as if to punctuate a fact. He lowered it, then walked out the door. Suzanna Lopez stood still, staring at the open door.
Director Hall wasn’t about to spend any more time arguing. He had worked alongside Lopez for some years now and had never had a reason to question her capabilities or plain common sense. One thing he knew for sure was he didn’t have the time right now to delve into her mind for answers. Gut reaction, intuition, it couldn’t be discounted and coming from an experienced operative like Lilburn, then to discredit it outright was wrong, just plain wrong. He picked up the phone and spoke to Syracuse. The drone was re-routed. If he were wrong…