“Krugerrands,” Botha said, dropping the cash back to the ground.
A second steel box had two four-hundred-gram “good delivery” bricks of gold.
Mike keyed his radio. “Ritter, this isn’t it.”
He saw Ritter standing at the open trunk of the enclosed technical, shaking his head.
Another dry hole.
He heard the sound of running footsteps and saw Botha sprinting for his plane, his arms full of cash, errant bills flying over his shoulder. Mike fired a burst from his hip. The bullets kicked up dirt in front of the Afrikaner, who came to an immediate stop.
Ritter ran over, did a double take at the contents of the case as he passed it, and stopped next to Mike.
“We need to get out of here. Whoever was waiting for this money is going to come looking for it pretty damn quick,” Ritter said.
“Botha! What did I tell you about working for Arabs?” Moshe stormed past them both and grabbed Botha by the scruff of the neck.
“Moshe, hey, buddy. If knew you’d be here, you think I would have taken this job?” Botha said.
“I thought the terms of me letting you live were pretty clear after I caught you delivering rockets to Hamas in the Sinai,” Moshe said, punctuating his words with a slap across Botha’s face.
“I got expenses, man. Those Arabs weren’t Hamas, and they were paying cash.” Botha held up a bundle of euros, which got slapped out of his hand.
“Think I was kidding?” Moshe pulled a pistol from its holster.
Botha fell to his knees and begged in Afrikaans as Moshe aimed at the man’s forehead.
“Moshe,” Mike said, “we need a ride out of here.”
Rising dust from more vehicles rose in the distant sky.
Moshe lowered his weapon, put his fingers to the mike on his throat, and spoke in Hebrew.
“Get the money on board. We’ll split it up later,” Moshe said. Israelis tossed thermite grenades into the trucks and ran for the Cessna.
“Hey, you let me live, and no charge, ja?” Botha said.
The Somali woman sat outside a mud house, her sons clutching at her. She wailed over the body of the shirtless Somali man.
“What about them?” Moshe asked.
“Leave them alone,” Ritter said. A father was dead. Dead for minding a strip of dirt in the middle of nowhere. More collateral damage in a war waged from the shadows that the public could not fathom.
It’s worth it, he thought. Please God let this be worth it.
Chapter 6
Shannon uncapped a black marker and drew an X on the map of Somalia where Ritter and Mossad had interdicted the payoff.
“The alpha fell through. Where are we on the beta?” Shannon asked her team.
Irene traded a glance with Tony.
“Ma’am, if we go through with the beta, the second- and third-order effects are… are severe,” Irene said.
“We’ve spent years on the network. A little longer, and we might get an actionable lead on the senior leadership in Pakistan,” Tony said.
“Noted. Where are we on beta?”
Tony hit a button on a keyboard, and the target packet popped up on the screen: it was the passport photo of a man in his early sixties, a thin gray-and-white beard over a bulbous face with bloodshot eyes. Natalie thought he looked like a lecherous Santa Claus.
“Suleiman Al Nuami, head of the Abu Sayf financial network. Given his personality assessment, history, and proclivity for micromanagement, he will know where the Somalis sent the nuke for pickup,” Irene said. “The last call from the leader of the Somali team at the last dry hole satellite phone was to Suleiman’s personal cell phone. We don’t know the contents of the call, but… ” She shrugged.
“It’s more than enough,” Shannon said.
The screen flipped to a satellite view of a metropolitan area. A pin on a large building.
“Our source in his entourage says he’s at the Cèdre Hotel in Beirut on other business,” Irene said.
“Excuse me?” Natalie said. “I’m sorry — I’m new here. But if this guy is the linchpin for financing terrorist attacks and we know where he is, why is he still breathing?”
“Because he’s an idiot, Ms. Davis,” Shannon said “and an invaluable idiot at that. Suleiman is sloppy, predictable, and too much of a narcissist to ever change how he does things. As such, we’ve followed his trail of stupid to terrorist cells, arms shipments, and bank accounts across the Middle East and the Muslim world.
“You’re new, which is why you need to learn this lesson: Use the dummies to lead you to the ones too smart to get caught. Given the situation, Suleiman has reached the limits of his usefulness,” Shannon said.
A moment of silence passed as Shannon waited for any objection from Natalie.
“Is he keeping to his other pattern?” Shannon asked.
Irene blushed and waved at Tony.
“Yes, he’s scheduled a visit through a local provider later tonight,” Tony said.
Shannon looked at Natalie, her lips pressed into a thin line.
“Natalie, this is going to fall on you,” Shannon said. “You’re going to Beirut, and you’re going to get Suleiman to tell us where the nuke is.”
“Wait. Can we back up real quick?” Natalie asked.
“Suleiman likes prostitutes, and you can pass for one of the Russian working girls in Beirut,” Shannon said. “The Russian mob flooded the market after they lost South Korea to the Filipino gangs,” Tony said.
“Time out. Flag on the play. All stop.” Natalie slammed a fist against the table. She felt her face flush with a simmering rage. There were lines she wasn’t going to cross, and there was no way in hell anyone would tell her to do something like this with a nonchalance of asking her to pick up bagels for the morning meeting.
“Why the hell do you know that?” Natalie asked Tony. “No, more importantly,” she said, changing her attention to Shannon, “do you expect me to sleep with him and think that will magically make him tell me where the nuclear bomb is?” Natalie said.
“No, Natalie. You’re not going to sleep with him. Here’s what you’re going to do.”
Natalie had seen women wearing the full-length black niqab in Iraq but had never thought she’d wear one. Being covered from head to toe in black cloth — to “protect one’s modesty,” as it was explained to her — struck her as social nihilism. Don’t look at me. Don’t think of me. Don’t talk to me. Wearing a niqab was to be nothing; a woman became someone only when she was at her home.
She stopped to look in a mirror and adjusted her veil. Her eyes were visible and dolled up with an embarrassing amount of mascara and eyeliner. She had a thin strip of visible skin to close the deal; might as well doll it up.
She’d questioned wearing the niqab in socially liberal Lebanon, but if a visiting Saudi was going to have a visit from his “wife,” then that visitor should look like she was from a country so conservative that she couldn’t even drive a car. The “service provider”—the Lebanese pimps were too good to refer to themselves as such — specialized in such visits.
“The things I do for my country,” she muttered as she moved down the hallway, her black robes hissing against each other as she went. She took some comfort in knowing the robes would mask her face from the hotel’s surveillance.
She knocked on her target’s door and waited. Heavy footfalls approached, and the door opened to the length of the security chain. Suleiman was shirtless, a pseudo sweater of black-trending-to-gray body hair covered his shoulders and chest. A short beard covered a red and puffy face. His eyes were dilated and quivered in their sockets.