Building trust between them could turn out to be harder than securing the missing fissile material. Just because she hated ISIS didn’t necessarily mean that she had any love for Uncle Sam. It was entirely possible that she despised the idea of America even more than the reality of the men tearing her world apart. He’d seen it a hundred times before.
A nearly inaudible click sounded in the front room and Rapp raised his head from Jesem’s filthy pillow. The rhythm of the girl’s breathing continued, just loud enough to be heard over the howl of the wind outside. He was starting to settle back in when the creak of ancient wood reached him.
Rapp rolled out of bed and padded silently to the bedroom’s empty doorway. A sliver of desert moonlight gleamed around the old towel hanging over the window, making it possible to see the hazy outline of Laleh on the floor but not much else.
The next sound was hard to mistake-the dull scrape of the front door sliding against an uneven floor. He moved quickly across the room, keeping to the edges where the floorboards had the most support, finally halting next to the apartment’s only entrance.
The door moved slowly inward, finally stopping when the gap was large enough for a person to squeeze through. Rapp remained motionless as a man with an AK-47 entered. A moment later, a second man appeared and carefully pushed the door closed. Now that they were inside, Rapp expected them to spread out-one going for the bedroom while the other cleared the kitchen and bathroom. That didn’t happen.
He watched with momentary confusion as the two men just stood there, crouched and frozen. After a couple seconds, he figured it out. They’d used too much light getting up the stairs and were now waiting for their vision to adjust.
That brought Rapp to an obvious question: What were a couple of amateurs doing creeping around Eric Jesem’s living room at three in the morning?
He stepped forward and slammed his fist into the back of the trailing man’s head, dropping him like a sack of potatoes. The other turned toward the sound, but Rapp twisted the assault rifle from his grip and arced the butt toward his head. He only needed one of them alive for interrogation. Two would just double the chances of a problem.
“No!”
Laleh’s shout was accompanied by her throwing herself in front of the man. Rapp barely avoided caving in the back of her head, redirecting the weapon’s trajectory at the last second.
He flipped it around and slid a finger through the trigger guard before lighting the kerosene lamp. “Do you know them?”
When she didn’t answer, he raised the rifle butt to his shoulder, taking aim at the head of the man behind her.
“Stop!” Laleh said immediately. “They’re my bothers.”
She moved to the unconscious one, rolling him on his back and cradling his head in her lap. Rapp kept the AK trained on the other.
“What are they doing here?”
The man in his sights answered in Arabic. “Coming to save our sister and kill a godless ISIS pig.”
“What did he say?” Rapp said, deciding to keep playing dumb on the language front.
“That they weren’t going to harm you. That they just came to take me home.”
In a lifetime of being lied to, that may have been the least credible one he’d ever heard. Setting aside for a moment the unvarnished hate in the man’s voice, he was rocking from side to side, apparently trying to decide whether running straight into automatic fire was worth the possibility of getting his hands around Rapp’s neck.
“Are they part of the resistance to ISIS?”
“What resistance?” she responded. “They are devout Muslims who welcome the coming caliphate. They were just protecting our family’s honor.”
Rapp tightened the butt on his shoulder and centered the man’s face in his sights. “I’m going to count to three, Laleh. Either you start telling me the truth or you’re going to spend the rest of the night scrubbing your brother’s brains off the wall.”
“Please!” she said, the panic rising in her voice. “They fought when ISIS first came, but they’re doing nothing now. They’re in hiding. We’ve lost. You’ve taken everything from us.”
Rapp lowered the weapon to his hip but kept the barrel lined up on the man. “Whether your brothers are part of it or not, is there an active resistance?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“Tell this animal nothing!” the man said in Arabic. She responded in the same language. “I’m not telling him anything he can’t see with his own eyes, Mohammed. You are no threat to him and his army.”
She switched back to English. “My brothers and the men loyal to him talk. But that’s all they do. Talk.”
It was likely true. The combined forces of the entire world weren’t sure how to fight ISIS. A small group of untrained men huddled in a basement weren’t going to be able to do much more than get themselves killed. With the right mission and the right leadership, though, a compact, inexperienced force might be able to make a difference.
“I’m an American agent tracking nuclear material stolen from Pakistan,” Rapp said, deciding that there was no more time for caution. “I believe that ISIS is going to use that material in an attack and that the attack is being run out of Al-Shirqat.”
The man in front of him clearly understood and looked at Laleh. She shook her head slowly and spoke in Arabic. “I don’t know, Mohammed. He saved me from being burned. And I can tell you that he hasn’t touched me.”
“He’s lying,” her brother responded. “We know all about Eric Jesem. About the things he’s done. He’s not an American agent. Even CIA men have lines they don’t cross.”
“My brother doesn’t believe you’re an American agent,” she said.
“You mean he doesn’t believe that Eric Jesem is an American agent.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What do you know about him? About Jesem?”
This time her brother answered directly. His English wasn’t as good as Laleh’s but it was easily understandable.
“We know that he’s a butcher of women and children,” he said, his eyes scanning the room.
Rapp would have smiled if his lips hadn’t been so badly damaged. Despite no hope of closing the distance between them, the man still seemed to be searching for an opportunity to attack. Not well trained, but motivated. That was better than nothing.
“I had one of my men snap Eric Jesem’s neck and then we stuffed his body down a garbage chute.”
Laleh’s brow knitted for a moment and then she started to understand.
“He asked me what city this was,” she said in Arabic. “And the lamp! He let me hit him in the face over and over before he took it from me. He wanted me to do it! He wanted me to damage his face!”
Her brother just shook his head. “No. He’s clever. We know about him. He’s from a rich family in America. He went to college. Then he came here to kill people who have nothing to do with him. Don’t believe him, Laleh. He’s the devil.”
“Did Eric Jesem speak your language?” Rapp said, switching to flawless Arabic.
They just stared silently up at him.
“Like you say, he was a thirty-two-year-old American who grew up in Colorado, went to college, and then took a job as a Realtor at his father’s company.” Rapp pulled up his shirt, revealing not only the recent damage done by Maslick but years of healed battle wounds: puckered bullet holes, jagged knife scars, and the more precise lines created by surgeons’ scalpels. “Do men like Jesem look like this?”
They were too stunned to respond.
“What’s the name of the general who brought me to the square?”
Laleh finally found her voice. “Mustafa. Ali Mustafa.”
Rapp vaguely recognized the name. Not one of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, but still high up in his army. Artillery, if he was thinking of the right man.