Enzio turned back to view the open sky, the micro expressions on his face telling Hakam that he was warring with himself and losing.
“Do I have your loyalty?”
Enzio nodded. When it came to surrendering moral fortitude for the lives of his family, he saw no other alternative. “And what exactly are you asking from me?”
Hakam felt overwhelming shame. As much as he prayed and pled his case to Allah, his courage escaped him. So he had to place his faith in a most unlikely ally. “Within the hour, the Americans will inform me on whether or not they have followed through with my demand. If they have, then they will plead for more time so they can follow through with additional plans. And I will grant them three hours, and no more. At the end of the third hour you will redirect Shepherd One over the center of the city and take her down to ten thousand feet. Is that clear, Captain Pastore — to ten thousand feet? If you fail to do that under any circumstances, then my people holding your family have been ordered to take their lives and place their heads along the sidewalk in front of the Polizia De Stato as I promised you earlier.”
Enzio felt highly vulnerable. Hakam had played him well. “And I have your promise that my family will be fine?”
Hakam placed the flat of his hand on the laptop. “You have my solemn word,” he lied. And then he left the cockpit.
Imelda Rokach had no idea she was being targeted for assassination. Nor did she realize that her death would serve two purposes for the president of the United States, a man whom she had never met. One, she would become the mechanism to deactivate a nuclear weapon, if Hakam was to honor his word. Two, her death would give the president much needed time to re-explore his position regarding the four additional targets — perhaps as much as five hours, which was ample time to evacuate Los Angeles.
It was amazing how a single person became the unwitting key to the salvation of tens of thousands in a city across the country. But in the business she was in, getting blindsided was the norm, even by her allies.
Inside a heath food restaurant she toyed with her salad as she read the Washington Post, her eyes focused on the printed page rather than her surroundings, as taught by Mossad no matter the circumstance. But she was in America, which was unlike her beloved Israel that was always under constant threat. Here, there were no volleys of rockets or suicide bombers.
Less than ten feet away a man dressed in suit and tie was sipping a latte while staring at the busy D.C. streets, the weather warm, sunny, the day turning out to be wonderful. On the table was a folded copy of the Post. And positioned within the paper was a.22 caliber Colt automatic with an attached suppressor.
The operative waited for the abort command through his wireless earpiece. If it did not come within the next twenty minutes, then he was to take her out. At that time he would grip the weapon, keep it shielded beneath the paper, and as he walked by put a bullet in her head with the gun sounding no louder than a spit. By the time she was discovered slumped forward in her salad he would have already immersed himself with the crowd.
The man checked his watch.
He had almost fifteen minutes to go.
He sipped his latte.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Arab moved slowly down the aisle with his head moving in such a way it appeared that he expected nothing out of the norm. When he rounded the bend to the kitchen his eyes vaulted to the size of communion wafers. He did not expect to see Kimball standing there waiting.
Before the terrorist could begin to raise his weapon, Kimball came across with his KA-BAR and cut the man’s throat before he could utter a warning cry. He then followed through with an uppercut thrust with the second knife and jammed the blade beneath the man’s chin, driving the point upward into the man’s brain and through the cap of his skull, killing the terrorist within two heartbeats.
After the man slid quietly to the floor as dead weight, Kimball removed the KA-BAR and wiped the blade clean on the man’s white shirt, leaving a bloody stripe. He then grabbed the man by the collar and dragged him to a lavatory where he deposited the body between the basin and stainless steel toilet. He then returned to the kitchen to reexamine his position.
The Garrote Assassin sat on an armrest overlooking the bishops like a sheep herder, once in a while leveling his firearm at a bishop and making a mock gesture of firing his weapon. This guy was a real prick, no doubt.
If Kimball was going to take him out, he knew he would have to do so from a distance. And this was his forte, what he had become elite at. Repositioning the knife so that the pointed end of the blade was pinched between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the perfect balance and weight of the hilt, Kimball was ready to let it fly.
So when the Garrote Assassin got to his feet, he did just that.
The terrorist never saw the flight of the knife as it punched into his shoulder, the sudden white-hot pain causing the Garrote Assassin to go dizzy before he realized what happened. When he looked up and noted the flight of the second knife, the weapon turning over with the slowness of a bad dream as it got closer, the sound of its revolutions sounding like a heartbeat waning to its last thump as it traversed the distance between them, he knew his life was coming to an end the moment the knife pierced his throat with the point exiting through the back of his neck.
For a fleeting moment the motion of his good arm became choppy as it searched blindly through open air, his hand finally coming to rest on the lodged hilt in his throat, which he was too shocked to remove. In an instant of blurred vision, as his world began to spiral out of control, he saw a man standing before him bearing a look of apathy. He was wearing a Roman Catholic collar so white it gave off a halo glow. On his shirt and equally emblazoned was the insignia of the silver Pattée and the symbol’s flanking lions.
Vatican… Knight.
It was the assassin’s last thought when an all-consuming darkness finally overtook him.
“I don’t know how you got up here, but that’s hardly significant.”
Kimball turned to see Hakam standing ten feet away. In his hand was the BlackBerry, his thumb on the center button.
“Take one step, Vatican Knight, and I will depress this button. Life as you know it will cease and desist. And you know what I’m talking about.”
Kimball knew exactly what he was talking about. He was talking about the payload.
“And the one who was making the rounds of the plane?” asked Hakam.
“He’s stuffed away in one of the heads in the back.”
“No doubt in the same shape as my friend here,” he said, tipping his chin in the direction of the Garrote Assassin. That left him with two disabled soldiers. “I will say this, you are good. And I don’t say that lightly. These men were the best at what they did. I’m not talking about typical warriors who train in al-Qaeda camps, either. These men were seasoned fighters from leading military factions.”
“They were complacent and fought like pussies.”
If the Arab was taken aback, he did not show it. “Now what to do with you,” he said.
From the corner of their eyes they saw the Wounded Leg Assassin with his arm raised, a firearm pointed in their direction. He was leaning against the partition that separated the holding area from the cockpit, using the wall as a crutch. He was gray-faced with dark rings circling his eyes, the look of a man with one foot in the grave. He was sickly and weak; his eyes having the red and rheumy look of fever to them. In his hand the gun wavered unsteadily.