Her hand reached inside her basket.
They were just about to surround her, their guns drawn and pointed at her.
Her back was against a brick wall. One of the police reached out to grab her arm. Once they saw the padding, it would all be over. They would shoot her right on the spot.
The loud voice reached to the alley.
The police stopped, turned.
The voice yelled out again and again. In Arabic it said, “We have the shooter! We have the shooter!”
The police turned and ran back down the alley toward the voice.
The crowd closed in on Reel. Sobbing people bent down to the dead bodies.
Reel pushed backward, away from the crowd, and managed to ease into a sliver of a side alley.
She walked quickly down it and reached another street, a busy thoroughfare. A taxi pulled up to the curb and she climbed in.
“Where to?” the bearded driver asked in Arabic.
“I think you know,” she said in English.
Robie hit the gas and the cab sped off.
He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Close?”
“Close enough,” she said.
She pulled the remote from her basket and held it up. “This came in handy. Once they find the source of the ‘We have the shooter’ voice they won’t be happy.”
“A little boom box in the street never hurts,” said Robie.
As they rounded a turn she tossed the remote out the window.
He looked in the rearview mirror again and saw the crowds spilling into the streets behind them. “They’ll know the shooter got away. So we’re not free and clear yet.”
“Face it, Robie, we’ll never be free and clear again.”
“They found the sniper’s nest. Even though you didn’t fire from it.”
“Big surprise. But at least it validates what your guy told us about the double cross.”
“I wonder how they felt back in the ops room watching?”
“One of my greatest regrets in life will be missing the looks on their faces. Especially Tucker’s.”
He turned right and then left and sped up again. Traffic was lighter now. But Robie could envision roadblocks being set up right this minute.
Damascus to Israel was a short trip, but that would be the exit the Syrians would be expecting. And also the one designed by the CIA. So that option was out.
The trip to Amman, Jordan, was a little over a hundred miles. But the border between the two countries had been strengthened, with limited crossing points. So that was also out.
Iraq was to the east. It was a long border with many ways across. But neither Robie nor Reel saw much advantage in sneaking across the northern border of Iraq. They would most likely die there.
That left one option. Turkey, to the north. It was also a long border, hundreds of miles. The closest major Turkish city was Mersin, about 250 miles distant. There was a shorter route they could take through a narrow section of Turkey that poked like a misshapen finger into Syria a little north of Al Haffah. But Mersin, though farther away, would have more options for their onward travel, and a large city was easier to hide in. Besides, Robie wanted to put greater distance between them and the Syrians than the finger of Turkish land provided.
But they had to get there first.
And though the border had many holes in it, Syria and Turkey were also informally skirmishing with each other. Bombs dropped from planes and guns fired by roving packs of soldiers were becoming the standard of the day around the border. Plus there was a lot of illegal activity involving the trafficking of drugs, immigrants, guns, and other contraband through the region. And the criminals typically had one response to pesky witnesses.
They killed them.
“On to Turkey,” said Robie.
“On to Turkey,” she parroted back.
She didn’t take off her disguise. Not yet. She had papers, in case they were stopped. She had to hope they would be good enough.
As Robie looked up ahead, he knew they were about to be tested.
He had shaved his head, grown a trim beard, and stained his entire body darker. His blue eyes were hidden by tinted contacts. He could speak Arabic fluently, with none of the accent of a westerner. Reel, he knew, could as well.
The checkpoint had been set up quickly, faster than Robie had thought possible. He wondered if the double cross had anything to do with that.
Security checkpoints were far more frenetic in the Middle East than in other parts of the world, barely controlled chaos where guns were pulled at the slightest misstatement or an ill-timed glance.
Robie slowed his taxi to a stop. There were three cars and a truck in front of his. The guards were searching vehicles, and Robie saw one of them with a glossy piece of paper in his hand.
“They have our photo,” he said.
“Of course they do. Fortunately, we don’t look like that anymore.”
The guards reached the taxi. One of them yelled at Robie. He produced his papers and the man carefully examined them. Another guard poked his head in the back window and yelled at Reel. She kept her eyes down, showed her papers, and spoke deferentially. He looked in her basket and found a chunk of bread, a bag of nuts, a jar of honey, and a bottle of spices.
The car was searched and nothing out of the ordinary was found.
The first guard gave Robie a searching look and even tugged on Robie’s short beard. It remained firmly attached to his face. Robie cried out in pain and the man laughed and then yelled at him to continue through the checkpoint.
Robie put the car in gear and drove on.
They cleared Damascus and Robie pointed them north.
Nearly two hundred miles later they arrived on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city by population. It was dark now and they managed to slip into Aleppo without incident.
They had arranged for a safe house there. They changed, ate, and rested up for the second leg of their journey.
The next morning they climbed aboard bikes and started off with a touring group that would cycle through northern Syria to the Turkish border fifty miles away. The trip would normally take three days, a leisurely affair through ancient ruins and beautiful countryside.
They reached the Church of Saint Simeon Stylites, where the biking group planned to bed down for the night.
Robie and Reel didn’t choose that option. They left the group and biked on, past Midanki, made several exhausting climbs over poor roads, and then entered a downhill sprint to Azaz.
They continued on to Turkey, making their border crossing in the middle of the night. They watched military aircraft soaring overhead and dropping bombs, which destroyed targets on the ground. Gunfire also sounded during the night, but they ignored it, pushing ahead.
Two days later they biked into the outskirts of Mersin.
A day later they ferried across the Mediterranean to Greece, and from there they flew west. They landed in the United States a week after Ahmadi’s bloodied body hit the pavement in Damascus.
As soon as they reached America, Robie made a phone call. “We’re coming in,” he said. “Get the champagne ready.” And then he clicked off.
Evan Tucker slowly put down the phone.
CHAPTER
85
ALMOST ALL AWARDS CEREMONIES CONDUCTED by the CIA were held in secret. That was the nature of the beast. This one was particularly so.
It involved the Special Activities Division of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. Within that division was the SOG, or Special Operations Group. They were the best of the best, running around the world doing the bidding of the United States either with a gun or by inserting themselves in the riskiest settings for purposes of intelligence gathering. They were the most clandestine special ops force in America, if not the world. Most of the members came from the military elite.