When she came to, she was lying across the backseat with what seemed to be a pair of dress socks in her mouth, her feet now zip-tied too. Her arms burned from lack of blood flow. Her ribs ached with every breath. Her face was so swollen that she could barely open her left eye, and it was sticky from drying blood.
The cabin of the rented Cadillac was thick with cigarette smoke. Pavement clattered by beneath. Yancey was on the phone.
“…about fucking time we caught a break. Hold position until I arrive-I want to be there when you go in.” A pause. “No, I’ll call the boss myself and let him know.”
They jounced over a set of train tracks and Cameron was momentarily airborne. Her cheek slammed into the armrest on her way down. The pain was excruciating. Her eyes watered. Her vision went spotty. She cried out involuntarily, but it was stifled by the gag in her mouth.
Sometime later-five minutes? an hour?-the Caddy rocked to a halt. Yancey put a hand on the passenger-seat headrest, turned around, and favored her with a manic smile. His cheeks were flushed. His eyes were wide. “Sit tight, darlin’. Daddy’s got some work to do. But don’t you worry, he’ll be back soon enough. And then you and me are gonna make your buddy pay.”
He engaged the backseat child locks and climbed out of the car.
As soon as she was reasonably sure he was out of sight, Cameron began to move.
“What’s the sitrep?” Yancey asked, out of breath from having trotted across the parking lot. He’d left his rental car around the corner of a nearby building because he couldn’t risk the girl making noise and compromising the mission-or seeing something that she shouldn’t.
“Heat signatures indicate two people inside,” the man who’d called him-Osborne-said, “which is consistent with our intel.”
“Armed?”
“Hard to say. It looks to me like they’re asleep. Near as we can tell, they have no idea we’re here.”
The imam, it turned out, had been telling the truth; he’d had nothing to do with the bombing or the men who perpetrated it. But then, Yancey’d already known that, just as he’d known the men in question did, in fact, attend that mosque while they were in town. Eventually, though, with enough cajoling, that imam coughed up a list of names-almost literally, in fact, along with a pint or so of malt liquor and the contents of his stomach-of congregants who might be sympathetic to those espousing extremist views. Bellum dispatched a team to each, and they repeated the process. Eventually, one interview bore fruit. Yielded an address. The man who gave it to them had-along with his family-been taken into Bellum custody until Yancey’s people could determine whether his information was legitimate.
The address was of a shuttered body shop in South San Francisco. Bellum’s source said it was where the remaining members of the True Islamic Caliphate were hiding out and planning their next attack.
It’s no wonder the business didn’t last, Yancey thought now-the place sat in a desolate stretch of self-storage facilities, warehouses, and old factories, train tracks slicing up the parcels of land at odd angles.
That was good.
It meant fewer witnesses.
“Are your men in position?” Yancey asked.
“Yes, sir. We’ve got teams stationed at all three entrances, and snipers on the adjacent roofs. All we’re waiting on is your go-ahead.”
“You’ve got it,” Yancey replied.
Osborne gave the order. His men breached all three entrances at once. For a moment all was chaos. Shouting. Screaming. Frenzied action. Yancey hung back and braced for gunfire-but there wasn’t any. It was over in seconds, the men inside subdued without a shot.
“Clear?” Yancey called from just outside the door.
“Clear!”
He dropped his cigarette. Ground it out beneath his boot. Picked up the butt and slipped it into his pocket before he entered.
Two Arab men were hog-tied on their stomachs in the middle of the floor, their backs arched, ankles in the air. Gags stretched across their mouths. Both were young, skinny, and hollow-eyed. One was quiet, still. The other sobbed. Surrounded by armed men in riot gear, they looked more frightened than frightening. That was always the way, Yancey thought. In the end, every monster he’d ever met was just a man, full of hopes and fears and weaknesses of mind and flesh. But that didn’t mean they weren’t also monsters.
Flashlights swept across the darkened space as Yancey’s men searched the building. It smelled of sweat and motor oil. Three sleeping bags lay beside the bound men, two open and mussed, one rolled neatly, its nylon straps clipped and yanked so tight that its ends flared out. A camp stove and a couple pots sat nearby. Empty cans were scattered all around-SpaghettiOs, fruit cocktail, Coca-Cola. Funny to think of terrorists eating like four-year-olds. Yancey wondered if any of the food qualified as halal. Maybe their God didn’t care. Maybe bombing the bridge earned them their virgins no matter what they ate.
“Sir!” one of the men called. Who, Yancey didn’t know. Bellum’s matte-black ballistic masks rendered them indistinguishable from one another.
“What is it, son?”
“Come look at this.”
The man panned his flashlight across a digital camcorder on a tripod and the filthy sheet that it was pointed at, which hung from the wall, a makeshift backdrop. Beside the sheet was a workbench. Yancey wandered over and inspected it. On it were two combat knives. Three handguns. A Kalashnikov. A MAC-10. Assorted maps, blueprints, and bomb schematics. A cling-wrapped brick of plastic explosive the dusky orange of Wisconsin cheddar. And two partially assembled suicide vests festooned with braids of multicolored wire and studded with ball bearings.
Yancey poked at the vests. Examined the schematics in detail. Hefted the MAC-10, testing its weight. He ejected the magazine, peeked inside, and reinserted it with a click. Then he trotted over to where the terrorists lay and crouched beside them so he could see their faces.
“Evenin’, gentlemen,” he said. “Long time, no see.”
One of the men stared at Yancey, hatred glimmering in his eyes. The other’s eyes were shut tight. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
“Jesus, Waheeb. I never pegged you for being such a whiny little bitch. You should take a lesson from al-Nasr here and man up. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Al-Nasr attempted to reply, but the gag prevented it. Yancey watched him with amusement for a moment, and then removed it.
“Do not speak to Waheeb this way,” he said, his English heavily accented. “He is ten times the man you will ever be.”
“If you say so,” Yancey said. “Since you two are still alive, I’m guessing Bakr must’ve been the one piloting the boat. Does that mean he drew the short straw or the long? I can never tell if you people are serious about dying for your God or if you’re all just beating your chests and secretly hoping one of your buddies will volunteer.”
“Bakr was a hero,” al-Nasr said. “He died with honor. We should all be so fortunate.”
“You think? Because I think he was a fucking coward who killed a bunch of innocent people for no reason. A worthless piece of human trash too dumb to realize he’d been misled for his whole miserable life. I bet he died with shit-stained trousers.”
“I would not expect you to understand his sacrifice.”
“Let me tell you what I understand. I understand that Bellum brought you here to train you to better fight Assad, and in return you promised us intel and freedom to operate within your territory. I understand you disappeared from the safe house we set up for you right around the time a massive cache of Semtex went missing from our training facility. I understand a member of the local mosque we recommended told you that this place was vacant and suggested you could hole up here without attracting attention. What I don’t understand is why you decided to dick us over or where you got the boat and bomb schematics, because they sure as shit didn’t come from us.”