Samir nodded, lowering the flashlight for fear that Mahmoud would see his hand shaking. “Yes. Insha’Allah.”
CHAPTER 61
Nick picked his way through the network of airport roads toward the back of the airfield. The colonel had come through with an exfiltration plan using a fly-by-night CIA cargo operation. Nick didn’t relish riding on today’s version of Air America, but at this point, he was grateful for anything that would get him out of England.
On the way to Farnborough he had briefed Walker, going over every detail of the failure at the mosque and Kattan’s disappearance with the vaccine. He also got an update from Heldner on his stricken team members.
Scott was stable, but in a medically induced coma. The doctor would not know the extent of the damage to his brain and nervous system until she brought him out of it and, for the moment, she was unwilling to do so. Quinn, on the other hand, had become the bane of her existence. Forty-eight hours after having his stomach ripped open and his guts jumbled around in the back of a cargo jet, he thought he was ready to get back in the game. While Drake chuckled in the background, Nick advised Heldner to take the kid off his morphine. Removing Quinn’s pain medication was a sure way to temper his youthful delusions of invincibility.
There were two nondescript cars in the gravel lot next to the CIA hangar. The once-white walls were stained red and brown with rust. Peeling white lettering on the glass door to the office read AIRDROP INC., WORLDWIDE CARGO SERVICES.
“Only slightly less obvious than Air America,” said Drake, shaking his head.
The full-length blinds on the other side of the door were drawn. The window blinds were drawn as well, bent and dusty, with cobwebs and bugs pressed up against the tinted glass. Nick pushed the yellowed button on the doorbell. “Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it?”
They heard no sound, but a few seconds later, a thumb and forefinger spread the blinds apart at eye level, held them for a moment, and then disappeared. A dead bolt clicked back and the door cracked open. “Name?”
“Art Vandelay,” said Drake without missing a beat.
The door cracked slightly wider and a long suppressor jutted out.
Nick frowned at his teammate. “Fryers,” he said, using the name Walker had given him. “Eddie Fryers.”
The blinds banged uncomfortably against the door as a sandy-haired CIA agent with leathery features pushed it open and nodded for Nick and Drake to enter.
The office was mostly faux-wood paneling and dingy Formica countertops, dimly lit by a single incandescent bulb with no shade. This place had probably been in the Agency’s hands since the eighties, and it appeared they had never redecorated. Or dusted. Nick wondered if the spooks put the same level of care into the aircraft that was about to carry him across the Atlantic.
An old cathode-ray-tube TV sat on the counter, tuned to the local news. The impish imam from Fleet Street stood in front of his damaged mosque with a reporter. There was a picture of Rami in the corner of the screen and a headline across the top that declared COPTIC RADICAL DIES IN SUICIDE ATTACK. The imam looked deeply saddened. “This man shot one of my congregation and blew himself up in our place of worship,” he told the reporter. “I do not know what could have motivated his attack other than irrational hatred of Islam.”
Nick angrily punched off the set, nearly knocking it off the counter.
“Easy, tiger,” said the agent. “That’s an antique. And we like to keep it on… for the ambiance.” He pulled the switch out, turning it on again, but the coverage had moved on to the impending total eclipse in Israel.
The group turned to a beat-up metal door, and the agent shifted a gun to his back to punch a code into its cipher lock. “We don’t normally take in strays,” he said. “Especially strays wanted by Scotland Yard, but my boss owes your boss a favor.” He pulled the door open. “Let me show you gentlemen to your ride.”
The agent motioned Nick to go ahead, and he stepped over the threshold into a completely different world — stark white walls lit by powerful induction lights, a spotless gloss floor studded with an in-floor fire suppression system. Apparently the money saved on office furniture and cleaning supplies had been invested in the hangar.
Their ride, as the agent put it, took up most of the floor space. She was a C-27 Spartan, a miniaturized version of a C-130 Hercules with only two propellers instead of four. The whole aircraft was painted slate gray with no tail flash or lettering.
Drake surveyed the cargo plane with a skeptical eye. “A trash hauler? That’s our exfiltration plan?”
“Oh, she’s a little more complex than your run-of-the-mill trash hauler,” said the agent, pulling the door closed behind them.
Nick winced. He was in a hurry, and this cargo plane didn’t exactly scream speed. “How long will your prop job take to get us back to DC? Does it have the legs, or do we have to stop for gas in Iceland?”
The agent looked at him sideways. “DC? My orders are to take you to Cairo.”
As the Spartan climbed through ten thousand feet, the sandy-haired agent nodded to his copilot and got up from his seat. He passed between Nick and Drake, motioning for the two of them to unstrap from their webbed seats and follow him to the next bulkhead. “Like I told you,” he said, pausing at the door and raising his voice over the pulsating thrum of the huge propellors outside, “this baby is a little more complex than your average trash hauler.”
They passed through into what should have been the cargo bay. Instead, they found a high-tech command center. The walls were baffled with black foam, so that the din of the engines faded to a low hum as soon as the agent closed the bulkhead door behind them. A ninety-four-inch screen, convex like an IMAX, dominated the right wall, and two short rows of black leather seats were set in front of it, each with a trackball and data-entry panel on one arm.
“Welcome to the EACC,” said the agent. “The CIA’s European Airborne Command Center. We can communicate with Langley from anywhere, and we have extra fuel bladders in the back for extended range and loiter time. At this point, I should remind you that you never saw any of this… or me. Of course, I never saw you either, so I guess we’re even.”
“You guys play Call of Duty on that screen, don’t you?” asked Drake, nudging the agent. “Come on, you can tell me.”
Nick took a seat in the center chair and eyed the controls. “How do we connect to our headquarters in DC?”
“Already done.” The agent pressed a green button on a wall pad, and the huge monitor flickered to life. Walker’s crew-cut head filled the screen from top to bottom. He was turned to the side, scowling at some unfortunate tech offscreen. “Are they up yet?” There was a muffled response, and then the colonel’s right eye, big as a cantaloupe, shifted toward the monitor. The scowl turned to follow.
“Baron!”
Drake jumped at the greeting. Then he bent down close to Nick’s ear. “Now I know why the cowardly lion ran away.”
“I heard that, Merigold.”
“Sir, why are we going to Cairo?” asked Nick.
Walker mercifully backed away from the monitor. “I’ll let Molly explain.”
The analyst rolled into the shot on a desk chair, clutching a large coffee cup in her small hand. “Do you recognize this man?” she asked, clicking the keyboard.
A head shot appeared on the left side of the screen, an older Middle Eastern man sporting a Hitler-esque mustache and a slicked-back dome of white hair.