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“He was a photographer trying to get a picture of Sergeant Fuelm and me, together. He tried to take our photo down on the street when we came back to the hotel earlier, but I sent him away. Apparently he found out what room I was in, and climbed up to my balcony. It cost him his life.”

“The phantom in your suite shot him?”

“Someone did,” McGarvey said. “I think your ballistics people will confirm that the bullet didn’t come from either of our weapons. Which will leave you with something of a problem, compounded by the fact you’re allowing an al-Quaida killer, who probably climbed down the tree outside my room, to walk away.”

Capretz wasn’t impressed. “Are you aware that the prince’s yacht suddenly left La Condamine one hour ago?”

“Was Salman aboard?”

“I don’t know,” Capretz admitted.

“Then I think I would like to contact my government.”

The police lieutenant’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and answered the call. “Oui,” he said. He glanced at Liese and then back at McGarvey, and nodded. “Bon. Merci.”

Liese stared at McGarvey, trying to gauge his mood. Unless the French meant to put him in jail, he wasn’t finished. He would continue going after the prince until one or the other of them was dead.

Bin Laden’s threat was real. No one believed any differently. And the attack would happen very soon. No one had any doubt of that either. Nor was there any question that the strike would be every bit as big as 9/ 11.

Liese knew her career was almost certainly on the edge of disaster.

Capretz broke the connection and put the phone in his pocket. He turned to the cop who’d brought McGarvey up. “Did you examine his gun to see if it has been fired recently?”

“It did not appear to have been fired, sir. The magazine is full, and there is a round still in the chamber.”

Capretz turned his attention back to Liese. “But you fired two shots — at your phantom. Can you explain why there is no body and no blood? Are you that terrible a marksman, Mademoiselle?”

Liese felt lightheaded. “I must have missed,” she replied, evenly.

Capretz shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said. Once again he looked at McGarvey. “A representative from your Federal Bureau of Investigation is waiting downstairs.You will be turned over to him. There is a warrant for your arrest.” He grunted. “Unless, of course, you wish to fight extradition.”

McGarvey shook his head. “That was fast work,” he said. “What about Sergeant Fuelm?”

Capretz shrugged. “A representative from her service is here as well. As soon as we finish our ballistics test to ensure that her weapon was not used in a crime of bodily injury, she will be returned to Switzerland.”

“I suppose it would be useless to ask for help from Action?” McGarvey said.

Capretz shrugged again. “Totalement.”

Liese felt miserable. It was obvious that she would have to do whatever she could to help Kirk, even if it meant first returning to Switzerland without creating a fuss to somehow make amends.

Looking at him, her resolve hardened.

Whatever it took, even if it meant sleeping with Gertner.

THE COUNTDOWN

Muhamed Abdallah sat on a plastic chair in the screened patio behind the trailer, letting his nerves wind down in the cool evening mountain air. Working with explosives was a tricky business. The Polish-made Semtex was in itself not unstable. In fact, the dead gray, puttylike substance could be thrown against a wall, struck with a hammer, or even put into a fire, and yet it would not explode.

It was the triggering mechanisms that were extremely delicate and dangerous.

A wrong move at this stage — when he was wiring the twenty kilos of bricks to a single trigger so that at the proper time the entire mass would explode at the same instant — would be disastrous.

He extended his right arm and raised his hand in front of his face so that it blocked a section of the not-so-distant mountains. When he spread his fingers, he could see strips of the highest, snowcapped peaks.

Mountains were power. Dear Osama had a perfect understanding of this when he first went to Afghanistan to drive the infidel Russians from the righteous land.

The jihad had taken ten long years. But what was that compared to the eternity of Paradise?

When the word came, the attack would take place in seventy-two hours. It would be a second blow against the Satan America. More important even than 9/11, as it was explained to Muhamed. This time they would strike at the heart of the people.

“It will be much the same as the Israeli attacks on our refugee camps in which our children are targeted,” the man from Pakistan told them at the Nablus meeting.

He said his name was Ghulam, after the secretary to the former defense minister Aftab Mirani. No one believed it, of course, but it didn’t matter. He had come to offer them certain salvation as soldiers of God.

“Take me,” Muhamed had cried, his enthusiasm bubbling over. “I must go for my mother,” he added, shyly.

No one in the small courtyard apartment in one of the few buildings that hadn’t been damaged or destroyed by rocket attacks laughed. And Ghulam was patient with him.

“But you don’t know what the mission is,” the Pakistani mujahideen said, not unkindly. “It may be too difficult. Too terrible for you to contemplate, let alone carry out.”

His eyes were kind and understanding. Much the same as Muhamed imagined Osama’s eyes were. They had seen unimaginably horrible things, and yet al-Quaida’s resolve was strong because the jihad was just and the men at the core were strong.

“What can be more terrible than what the Israelis are doing to us?” Muhamed said to the other young men gathered in the apartment. “They kill our soliders and old men, and now they even kill our children.” Muhamed looked back to Ghulam. “What can be worse than that to contemplate?”

“Killing the infidel’s children,” the al-Quaida recruiter answered, quietly.

Muhamed was shaken. But just for a moment. He shook his head. “There can be no innocents in the battle for the will of Allah.” He looked at the others now, none of their enthusiasm damped. “Insha’allah.” He looked Ghulam directly in the eye, his own gaze steady. “Tell me what I can do for the jihad. My life for the cause.”

They had driven north that night out of the West Bank and all the way across the border into Lebanon, passing through the Israeli checkpoints on the strength of Ghulam’s credentials almost as if they were ghosts. During the two hundred-kilometer drive to Beirut, Muhamed learned that in return for his giving his life to Allah’s cause, his parents would receive fifty thousand American dollars when the mission was completed. He was also told that his sacrifice would not take place in Israel or Palestine. In fact, he would never see those places again, nor would he see his family until they joined him in Paradise. But that would be as if only an eyeblink in time.

In Beirut, Muhamed was placed aboard a Liberian-registered freighter, where he was confined to his tiny cabin in the bowels of the ship for five days and nights until he was finally taken ashore in a small boat in the middle of the night.

“Welcome to Algeria, my brother,” his guide welcomed him. “It is here that you will begin your journey.”

His journey to Paradise.

Gazing up now at the Front Range above the college town of Fort Collins, Muhamed could feel his anxiety subsiding. His hands no longer shook. Nor did he suffer from the despair that had gripped him for many weeks after he had learned the true nature of his mission here in the U.S. He knew that he was not alone, that there were others who would be carrying out similar attacks at exactly the same moment.