“Have they got radios?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Make sure they don’t get too close. If they spot them, we’re dead. They’ll vanish and we may never pick them up again.”
“I’m on it, sir. And we’re ready to roll when you are.”
“No,” said Mariano. “Let Rosetti handle it. Get me into that house. I want to see everything they’ve been doing and get it all to Al-Hassani.”
They raced to Mount Ebal in the dark of night.
By eleven local time, with the help of the Navigator’s GPS, they reached the outskirts of the Palestinian stronghold of Nablus, and in another fifteen minutes, they reached the base of Mount Ebal and realized anew what a long climb they had ahead. After hiding the SUV in a patch of brush, they gathered their equipment and began working their way up the north face.
Natasha’s maps put the summit at about three thousand feet above sea level, but they weren’t going to have to go quite that far. The two caves they had seen on the mountain’s west side in the satellite imagery were located two-thirds of the way up, and roughly a hundred and fifty yards apart. For tonight, at least, these were the targets, and they quickly began their ascent.
Mariano crept up the stairs of the Gozal house.
He held a.45 in one hand, a flashlight in the other. He didn’t expect trouble, but he hated surprises. Having already found the maps and the laptops and a dozen unwashed coffee mugs spread across the kitchen, he headed for the master bedroom and soon came across the medical supplies that had helped Erin Bennett recover over the past few days.
“Put one over there and another in the lamp,” he said, directing two of his men as they planted microphones throughout the house.
They had been listening to the Bennetts’ conversations for days using laser microphones aimed at Miriam Gozal’s windows, but they had been imperfect at best and hadn’t worked at all when their subjects had been in the basement.
Mariano’s phone began vibrating.
“Rosetti?” Mariano whispered into a headset.
“Yes, sir. We’re about a mile and a half from the base.”
“Do you have a visual?”
“Affirmative. The Barak girl is about halfway up. Mr. Bennett is close behind. Mrs. Bennett is a ways back. She’s struggling quite a bit.”
I bet she is, thought Mariano, still surprised that Erin hadn’t died from hypothermia under the DMZ.
“Stay on them,” he said, “and stay out of sight.”
He was going in alone.
Bennett doubled-checked his harness and helmet. He took another few minutes to check over the rest of his equipment as well and to make sure Erin and Natasha were ready. Then he turned on his headlamp and eased toward the edge of the cave.
Bennett could that tell his wife wasn’t enthusiastic about his doing this without her, but there was no other way. Erin had barely recovered, and Bennett didn’t feel right about sending Natasha in by herself, no matter how experienced she was.
“All set?” he asked as he donned gloves and took hold of the nylon rope.
“Ready when you are,” Natasha replied.
“Just be more careful than me in there,” Erin said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I will.” He gave Erin such a long kiss that Natasha had to turn away in embarrassment.
“I love you,” Erin whispered into his ear.
“I love you, too.”
“All right, you two,” Natasha groaned, “move it along.”
Erin apologized and Bennett wondered if Natasha could see him blush in the dark. He didn’t wait to find out. A moment later, he was rappelling into the cave. As best they could tell, the descent was rougly sixty-five or seventy feet down into the mountain. Where it went from there, he had no idea.
Bennett took his time, lowering himself a few yards, checking his equipment, letting Erin and Natasha adjust to his weight, then dropping another few yards. At the bottom, he finally remembered to turn on his radio.
“Testing, one, two, three — can you guys hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” said Erin. “What can you see?”
“Not much. But, man, it stinks down here. What in the world is—?”
Suddenly there was a high-pitched screeching sound and a rush of wind. Before he knew it hundreds of bats were swarming all around him. He dropped to the ground and covered his head and face, but he could feel them everywhere — on his back and legs and hands and flapping around his ears. From the deepest recesses of the cave they just kept coming. After what seemed like an eternity, the horrifying cacophony tapered off, and all was quiet again.
Only then did he realize that what he was lying in wasn’t mud but a huge pool of bat guano. He radioed to the top that he was fine, but he could feel his heart pounding and the humidity rising, and he was beginning to perspire in all his gear.
No one tells a billionaire he snores.
So Abdullah Farouk had no idea. None of his wives or concubines back in Riyadh had ever told him. Nor had any of his lovers around the globe. And unbeknownst to him, both of his bodyguards used earplugs at night so they wouldn’t have to suffer his horrible racket.
Tonight, they would suffer far worse.
The guard by the back door was the first to die. He was shot in the chest with a silencer, then dragged out of the house and loaded into a stolen bakery truck. The guard by the front door got a steel pipe over the head and a knife across his throat.
Before Farouk realized what was happening, four men were upon him. Two held him down while a third stuffed a rag down his throat. The fourth jammed a needle into his wrist, injecting a lethal but traceless toxin. Farouk twisted and writhed in pain, but a minute later, both the snoring and the muffled screams had ceased. The four men stripped his body, carried him into the bathroom, and set him in the tub. Then they drew a nice, hot bath, waited for the tub to fill, and slit Farouk’s wrists, leaving the razor blade on the bloody tiled floor.
Sixty seconds later, a baker’s truck rolled through the streets of Amman, attracting no attention at all.
58
Nearly three hours had passed.
Bennett had found nothing yet. He wanted to make sure he would be able to find his way back through the labyrinthine series of tunnels and small corridors branching off the main passageway, so he dropped glow sticks every twenty yards or so. He pressed onward.
At the beginning, the tunnel had been about four feet from one side to another. Now, as he continued his descent, the walls narrowed steadily. At the same time, the tunnel began to shrink from six or seven feet high near the entrance to a point where it was less than three feet high, forcing him to crawl on his hands and knees through more bat droppings and who knew what else.
Bennett noticed that the stench didn’t seem as bad. Or perhaps he’d just gotten used to it. He also noticed that his radio was no longer working. He quickly changed batteries, but it didn’t help. He had gone too deep to get any reception. But he couldn’t stop now, so he dropped another glow stick and continued his journey into the subterranean maze.
Back on the surface, Erin was panicking.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” said Natasha. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“How do you know?” Erin shot back, more aggressively than she’d meant. “You barely know him.”
“I know more than you think,” Natasha replied. “Uncle Eli used to go on and on about you guys until I thought I was going to be sick.”
“Really?” said Erin. “He never mentioned you at all.” She suddenly realized how cold that sounded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”