Rapp knew she was right. The auctioneer she’d partially blinded would take her and immediately put her to death by the most painful means possible.
“Then just leave. Better to die trying to save yourself than waiting for death to walk through the door.”
She had a beautiful smile, even in the semidarkness. “A woman alone? You know this place as well as I do, Mitch. It’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible, Laleh.”
“And how would you explain my absence?”
“I’ll come up with something.”
“You could say I escaped but Mustafa wouldn’t believe you. And if he did, he would begin to question his decision to allow you to go on this mission. Your only other alternative would be to say that you sold me, but I think he would be interested in to whom, no? He might kill you. Then the people you’re trying to save will be lost. And for what? The small chance that I can make it hundreds of miles through ISIS territory and call your friend to be rescued? I don’t want your blood on my hands. Or my brothers’. Or anyone else’s.”
Rapp was accustomed to being in charge. To solving problems quickly and permanently. Now he found himself standing in front of this girl with no solution to offer.
“Come,” Laleh said. “The jambalaya is getting cold.”
She disappeared back into the kitchen but Rapp remained motionless, trying to find a way out for her. Finally, he followed and sat at the table, watching her eat. When the inevitable sound of a fist against the door finally started, she didn’t even seem to notice.
He walked into the outer room and opened it, taking a step back as three men entered. Mustafa had come personally, something Eric Jesem would have seen as a great honor if he hadn’t been rotting in a Pakistani garbage chute.
“It’s time,” the general said.
Gaffar hadn’t asked for his gun back and Rapp hadn’t offered. It was now stuffed into his waistband near the small of his back. He could put all three men down in less than a second, get supplies from Laleh’s brothers, and steal a truck. Let Saudi Arabia and the world deal with their own problems.
“Where’s the girl?” Mustafa asked.
“I’m here,” Laleh said, appearing from the kitchen. She still had a bit of what Rapp suspected was chili on the side of her mouth.
Mustafa indicated toward one of his men, who grabbed her by the arm. She didn’t resist when he began dragging her toward the door.
“I’ve negotiated a very good price for you from Zaid Salib-the man she blinded. There was no amount of money he wasn’t willing to part with in order to once again possess-”
“Pig!” Laleh shouted as she was dragged past the general. Something flashed in her hand and Mustafa suddenly fell silent. An expression of confusion crossed his face as he looked down at the knife hilt protruding from his stomach.
The man holding Laleh jerked her back with a startled shout, while the other lowered the general to the floor. Despite the considerable width of the chef’s knife and the depth it had penetrated, Mustafa was still capable of speech. His voice was barely a whisper, but Rapp could make out enough to know that he was ordering the man kneeling over him to get someone named Najjar. Likely a doctor they had imprisoned somewhere.
Rapp looked up and focused on the girl. She met his gaze and fought to keep it as she was wrestled through the door. For the first time in their short relationship, her eyes were full of fear. Rapp pulled the Smith & Wesson from his waistband and when he took aim, that fear turned to tranquility.
The round struck her directly in the heart and she crumpled to the ground with an arm still gripped in her captor’s hand.
Expressionless, Rapp looked down at her body for what was probably too long. It had always bothered his late wife that he could sleep so well after everything he’d done. She would be happy to know that those days were likely over.
The man next to Mustafa leapt to his feet and Rapp shoved him roughly back. Weakness was not an admired trait in this part of the world. Mustafa’s injury at the hands of a woman and his pathetic demands for medical attention were undermining what little authority he had left. That created a power vacuum Rapp could use.
“The general has been martyred. Leave him. We have God’s work to do.”
The man still holding Laleh’s arm gave a short nod and translated for his companion. A moment later both were retreating down the stairs. Before Rapp followed, he knelt next to the man now begging for help in breathless English.
Leaning into the Iraqi’s ear, he spoke quietly.
“How do you like spirited women now?”
CHAPTER 48
AL-HOFUF
SAUDI ARABIA
GRISHA Azarov sat in a chair next to the apartment’s dirty windows. It was a small two-bedroom, crammed with brightly colored rugs and a mishmash of peeling furniture. Hardly what he’d grown accustomed to, but unquestionably more anonymous than his normal suite at the Intercontinental. The street below, which had been bustling only an hour ago, was now largely deserted. Night was falling and the wind that was such an integral part of Maxim Krupin’s plan was gaining power again.
He wiped away some of the grime from the glass and peered out at the world’s most poignant reminder of America’s reach: the golden arches of a McDonald’s. The sign’s lights flickered on, pushing his thoughts from the task at hand to Mitch Rapp.
Krupin would tell him that he was suffering from paranoia with regard to the man. That even if the CIA had managed to piece together a picture of his plan, it would be impossible for them to drill down to the level of detail necessary to lead Rapp to Saudi Arabia. The Geiger counter in the hands of the U.S. Coast Guard boarding party suggested the Russian president would be wrong, as did the nervousness in the pit of Azarov’s stomach. The closer he got to the oil fields, the more strongly he felt the American’s presence.
Azarov’s cell phone was docked in a bulky case that gave it satellite and radio transmission capability. The screen depicted a map of Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing region with blue circles glowing at six locations. Each had been selected by using a combination of weather forecast data from the Russian military and oil reserve estimates from his own consulting firm. A single ISIS team would be sent to each of these locations in order to detonate the dirty bombs he would provide. Overnight, Saudi Arabia would go from being the world’s second-largest oil producer to having capacity less than that of Norway. This would generate a violent economic collapse that would open the door for ISIS and radical antiroyal factions inside the country’s own population.
With no economic motivation, it was unlikely that America would expend much energy protecting a fundamentalist monarchy fond of funding terrorists. More likely, they would move to stabilize the surrounding energy-producing states. But would it be possible? ISIS wasn’t just an external threat in the region. Its growing popularity and deft use of social media made it a cancer that grew in neighborhoods and mosques throughout the Middle East.
The U.S. would struggle to contain the chaos and to shore up the world’s economy, while Maxim Krupin fanned the flames of collapse. Russia would rise from its grave like the bloodsucking ghoul of its folklore.
Azarov focused on the most central of the blue circles on the map and switched to satellite view, zooming in on an abandoned tangle of pipes and tanks more than three hundred meters square. It was the destination of the team he was being forced to lead personally. According to Krupin, it was an optimal position from which to coordinate the operation and deal with any problems that arose.
Much of the steel was still bright silver despite the facility’s having been abandoned almost five years ago. He’d commissioned a 3-D computer model of the structure and had spent endless hours memorizing every staircase, enclosure, and blind corner. In the end, it would likely prove to be a pointless precaution, but he hadn’t survived this long by being careless.