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Slim To None
Taylor Smith


Security specialist Hannah Nicks has one goal: earn enough money to regain custody of her son. The fastest way to accomplish that is to take on a covert, privately funded mission in the Middle East. But when the mission ends badly, she realizes the price of her risks: the loss of a young ally, the reward money and her reputation. Two years later Hannah is back in Los Angeles.When a chance encounter leads to the man who ruined her mission, Hannah plans to even the score. But she doesn't expect to unravel a tangled web of lies and treachery that could drag America to its knees. Her only ally is a cop who has burned a few too many bridges himself and understands that the odds are always better when you have nothing left to lose.









slim to none

Taylor Smith








This book is dedicated with love

to Cathy (Couturier) Towle,

who reminds us always why family

is so wonderful.




CONTENTS


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE: THE RENT-AN-ARMY WAR

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

PART TWO: THE END OF CIVIL TWILIGHT

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


My deepest thanks to Sheriff Lee Baca for free and open access to the resources of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Special thanks also to Homicide Detective Paul Delhauer and Deputy William Moulder for their patient and excellent guidance. Retired Homicide Detective Melinda Hearne was also great about answering my dumb questions. Deepest appreciation also to Linda McFadden (the plot queen), and Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Gary Bale. And where would novelists be without fabulous investigative reporters whose work fuels the background research? I’m particularly indebted to Miles Corwin, P. W. Singer, Anne Garrels and William Langewiesche. Finally, I can’t fail to mention Kayla Williams, whose wonderful memoir Love My Rifle More Than You taught me so much about being a Western woman in Iraq and in the macho culture of the U.S. Army.

Finally, thanks to my agent, Philip Spitzer, Miranda Stecyk, my editor (aka “Tijuana Mama”) and all the great people at MIRA—a joy to work with, one and all. And last but never least, Richard, Kate and Anna, the home team—without you, none of it means a darn thing.




PART ONE

The Rent-an-Army War


“You cannot have trade without war, nor war without trade.”

—Jan Coen, Governor General

Dutch East Indies Company (c. 1619)

“Hiring outsiders to fight your battles is as old as war itself.”

—P. W. Singer: Corporate Warriors:

The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (2003)




CHAPTER

1


Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Hamra Hotel: Baghdad, Iraq

The tinny jangle of the ancient black telephone next to the bed startled Hannah. Jumping to her feet from her crouched position by her duffel bag on the floor, she leapt over her desert camo jacket and bulletproof Kevlar vest and caught the phone on the second bleat.

“Hannah Nicks,” she said, wincing at the sharp pinch at her earlobe. It was caught between the receiver and one of the small gold earrings she’d forgotten to take off. Hooking the phone into the crook of her shoulder, she withdrew first the left, then the right stud and dropped them into the toiletry bag on the night table. The hotel room was furnished with battered blond Scandinavian furniture, an oddly modern contrast to the flood-lit palm trees and onion-domed mosque outside her window.

It was after 11:00 p.m. but the temperature inside and out was still hot enough to soften the unlit candles scattered on every available surface of her room. She’d left matches strategically placed next to each one in anticipation of the next inevitable power outage. For now, the electricity was functioning, for all the good it did. The air conditioner was on the fritz and the light situation wasn’t much better. Two of the lamps in her room were missing bulbs, while that in the third couldn’t be higher than forty watts. Rummaging through her duffel bag, hunting for her good luck charm, Hannah had finally resorted to her high-powered Maglite to see where she’d stashed the tiny velvet drawstring bag that held Gabe’s first baby tooth.

She’d already showered—with tepid and slightly brackish water, but she wasn’t complaining. The water supply, too, was intermittent, and she’d been lucky to get a chance to clean up at all after the long flight from the States. After the shower, she’d plaited her dark hair into a thick rope that reached almost to her shoulder blades, then dressed in desert camouflage pants, khaki T-shirt and sturdy tan hiking boots.

Losing the little gold earrings was the last vestige of her femininity set aside. In the rent-an-army business that employed her these days, dressing for success took on a whole new meaning. She might enjoy being a girl, as the old song went, but right now, she needed to be in professional mode.

“Ladwell here,” the voice on the phone said.

Sean Ladwell was a Brit, ex-Special Air Services, that nation’s equivalent of the Green Berets. Pushing forty—a decade older than Hannah and looking twice that, with his ruddy, wind-weathered skin—Ladwell was rumored to have seen private army action in Sudan, Angola, the Congo and Afghanistan since the end of his stint with the SAS. This was apparently Ladwell’s third sortie into Iraq on a short-term private security gig.

Currently, he was team leader of a small commando unit assembled by Brandywine International, a private military corporation headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. The assignment this time out: to extract two family members of a London-based Iraqi intellectual. Washington was courting the exiled academic to help form the new, post-Saddam regime. Rescuing his relatives, who’d become trapped in the war-torn Sunni Triangle, might go a long way to cementing the man’s cooperation.

“We head out at midnight,” Ladwell said. “Meet up in the armory downstairs at twenty-three hundred hours to collect your ordnance and go over the plan once more.”

“Roger,” Hannah said. “I’m good to go.”

It had taken only twenty-one days for Baghdad and the thugocracy of Saddam Hussein to crumble before the American-led coalition, the latest in a long line of invaders to this region. Once called Mesopotamia, the world’s first great civilization, the country had been conquered repeatedly over the centuries—by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks and the British. Saddam’s repressive rule was, in the end, nothing but an ugly flash in the historic pan, but building a lasting peace in this country would be a tricky, maybe impossible, venture. This was not an easy region to rule.

Brandywine had several contracts on the go in-country and maintained its own private airline, called Chardonair, to support its operations here and elsewhere. Brandywine’s employees were among an estimated twenty thousand private contractors who’d streamed into Iraq over the past few months, looking to reap a share of the riches in this latest corporate El Dorado. The company was running so many protective and assault teams in-country that it had taken over and fortified a large storeroom in the basement of the Hamra Hotel to warehouse a cache of rifles, handguns, fragmentation grenades, rocket launchers, flash-bangs and the other weaponry and supplies needed to keep its resupply lines open. Official U.S. military personnel might be short on bulletproof vests and armor to reinforce their vehicles, but the private contractors lacked for nothing.

“There’s a helipad a few blocks from here in the Green Zone,” Ladwell said. “That’s where we’ll rendezvous with the chopper.”

“Got it,” Hannah said. “I’m just going to take a run up to the roof to use the sat phone, but otherwise I’m ready.”

“A satellite call now? Is that necessary?”

“It’s just a quick one to my son back in the States,” Hannah replied, not that it was any of his business. It was superstition on her part, just like the good luck charm she always carried on these missions. If she died, she wanted one of the last voices she heard to be her eight-year-old son’s, and she wanted Gabriel to know she’d been thinking of him at the end. Making that potentially final call was part of her pre-op ritual. If you anticipated disaster, it wouldn’t happen—that’s what she told herself. In the past, it had been the unexpected nightmares, like losing custody of her child, that had blindsided her. Now, she never doubted the worst was possible, but if she visualized it, maybe she could dodge it.

“You can’t mention where you are,” Ladwell warned her.

Well, du-uh…

“I know that. This isn’t my first time to the prom, you know.”

“So they tell me.” The team leader’s voice betrayed the same skepticism he’d shown from the moment the team was first assembled five days earlier, despite the fact that at twenty-eight, Hannah was neither its youngest nor its least experienced member.

It wasn’t personal, she knew. Ladwell, like most of the ex-special forces grunts she worked with, couldn’t seem to shake the military mindset that women didn’t belong on the front lines of battle. This team and its mission had no official status, however, so the usual rules didn’t apply. The whole point of hiring private contractors was to allow governments to distance themselves from unpalatable tasks. The real battle, as far as the Washington political spin doctors were concerned, was the public relations battle. Passing messy jobs to off-the-radar civilian contractors made for handy deniability later if things turned sticky.

Despite Ladwell’s doubts, Hannah was no hothouse flower. She might have dark-eyed, exotic looks and a lithe, athletic figure on which even a T-shirt and cargo pants hung well enough to attract leering glances, but she’d spent six years as a patrol and undercover cop on the mean streets of Los Angeles, and then the last year and a half doing freelance security work. She didn’t need coddling and she was more than capable of taking care of herself when things got hairy.

She also knew her way around the Middle East, having spent nearly every summer of her youth in Beirut, Dubai and Amman with her paternal grandparents and other overseas Greek relatives who ran various family businesses in the region, some of which dated back to the turn of the last century.

“We are descendants of Ulysses,” Grandpa Demetrious liked to say on those evenings when Hannah would sit with him and her grandmother on their terrace overlooking Beirut’s Corniche, a warm Mediterranean breeze stirring the papery red bougainvillea and fragrant white jasmine that draped the balcony trellises. “Our family has always wandered the sea in search of its fortune. Sometimes the wind blows us good luck, sometimes not so good, but we sail on nevertheless.”

Hannah’s personal wind of fortune had blown her back to the Middle East once more when Brandywine management had overruled Ladwell’s objections to having a woman on the team. Hannah had done work for them before, she’d handled herself well, and with so much security business opening up these days, resources were stretched thin. And then, there was the clincher: she was the only Arabic speaker in their freelancer database who was available when the call came. Since the contract specs called for at least one member who spoke the language, either she was in or they didn’t get the job. End of story.

“I’ll be downstairs in twenty minutes,” she told Ladwell.

“Don’t be late.”

Hannah scowled. Yeah, right. Like she’d be sitting back, eating bonbons and watching her nail polish dry while the rest of the team got its kit together and headed out.

Dropping the receiver back in the cradle, she grabbed her GlobalSat phone and headed out into the hallway and up the stairs to the hotel’s rooftop to make her call to Gabriel.




CHAPTER

2


Boston, Massachusetts

Beantown was in the grip of a stifling summer heat wave that crackled with the electric charge of an imminent thunderstorm. Sweaty, lethargic pedestrians dragged themselves through the streets, ignoring blue-black clouds that had shown up like violent bruises on the heavy-laden sky. It was too hot to hurry for shelter, too humid to care about the approaching afternoon tempest.

Patrick Burton Fitzgerald stood high overhead at the windows of his fifty-third-floor offices in the John Hancock Tower, gazing down on Trinity Church, the Charles River and the gracious shops and tree-lined avenues of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. The Hancock office complex was entirely encased in glass, so that the windows on which he rested his clenched fists ran floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall.

Fitzgerald had never considered himself a violent man. At the moment, however, he trembled with the kind of rage that could spark murder. If he got his hands on the bastard who had ordered his daughter’s kidnapping, he would cut his throat without hesitation or regret. How dare these people use Amy as a pawn in their power games?

Fitzgerald wasn’t naïve. He knew that Americans were less than universally loved in some parts of the world, and he could sometimes even understand why that might be. He wasn’t some ugly American who thought that U.S. citizenship gave an automatic right to megalomania. He recognized that other people might interpret facts differently than his compatriots, and that other countries’ national interests might not always dovetail with those of the United States. Some conflicts were inevitable.

Unlike many of his business peers, he had grave doubts about the current campaign in Iraq. Although he hadn’t joined street marches to protest the war, he had made phone calls to members of Congress and other friends in the administration to express his concern that the legitimate hunt for Osama bin Laden and others responsible for acts of terror against America was being hijacked by an obsessive preoccupation with Saddam Hussein who, for all his brutality, hardly posed the threat to this country that other bad actors out there did.

Fitzgerald was a moderate Republican, economically conservative but not without a sense of noblesse oblige. He considered himself cosmopolitan, politically astute and culturally sensitive. In addition to numerous domestic charities, he donated significant sums to international refugee assistance, Third World education and health care for the planet’s poorest wretches. Fitzgerald and his wife Katherine had also raised their five children to understand their responsibility to give back to a world that had been uncommonly generous to the Fitzgeralds. In light of the disaster that had befallen them now, however, he found himself rethinking the wisdom of that approach. Had they somehow gone overboard with Amy, their youngest?

A brutal rage seized him once more. If he weren’t so wretched with fear, he might be appalled at having been reduced to the same level of animal passion as the terrorists who’d taken his daughter. To hell with civility, however. He wanted them all dead.

Most of all, he wanted Amy home safe.

She was a medical doctor. After completing her studies at Johns Hopkins, Amy had done her residency at a tough inner-city Baltimore E.R. After that, Fitzgerald and his wife had been hoping she’d move on to something a little less risky. Instead, when the International Red Cross put out a call for medical personnel to help rebuild the battered health care system in post-Saddam Iraq, Amy was quick to volunteer her services, signing up before her parents could express their misgivings.

Fitzgerald could almost hear her laughing voice. “Come on, Dad! You know what you’ve always said—to whom much is given, much is expected. And I’ve been given a lot, starting with great parents.” Her mischievous eyes sparkled, making it impossible for him to remain upset with her for long. “I’ll be fine. You worry too much.”

Now, she was a prisoner—or worse, Fitzgerald thought, a knot tightening in his gut. There’d been no word from her captors since she’d been taken from a Red Crescent clinic north of Baghdad five days earlier. No ransom demand, none of the usual ranting, cliché-ridden communiqués ordering the withdrawal of American forces. Nor had there been any credible response to the million-dollar reward for her safe return that Fitzgerald had posted two days ago. Of course, the crazies and fraud artists had crawled out of the slime pool in quick enough time, forcing him and his advisors to sift through reams of deceitful, bizarre and mean-spirited messages, looking for the one that might provide a genuine lead or ray of hope. From Amy’s captors, however, there’d been nothing but total, bloody silence.

What kind of political cause justified attacking a medical clinic and kidnapping a young doctor whose only reason for being in their country in the first place was to help rebuild it after the long, dark nightmare of Saddam’s reign? Amy didn’t have to be there. She’d gone in to help the sick, the wounded and the poor. How did that make her a target for terrorists?

Fitzgerald gazed down on the cruciform shape of Trinity Church. If the glass that held him back were suddenly to vanish, he would plummet down and be impaled like an insect on the spire that topped the cathedral’s central tower. It couldn’t possibly be worse than the agony he was going through now—sheer, gut-wrenching terror. Never in his entire sixty years had he felt so helpless.

He exhaled a shuddering sigh and turned back to his massive, burled walnut desk, willing the phone to ring. It was nearly an hour since he’d put in the latest call to a highly placed source in the administration in Washington. Why hadn’t it been returned? They were certainly quick enough off the mark when campaign fund-raising time rolled around.

The law offices of Fitzgerald-Revere occupied the entire fifty-third floor of the John Hancock Tower. Softly lit and trimmed out in warm woods and buffed marble, the suite smelled of leather and lemon oil. The deep-carpeted corridors and rich furnishings fairly hummed with the subtle but unmistakable message that behind these heavy doors and silk-papered walls, powerful people carried out important business, defining law and business practices that would guide the nation for decades to come.

To facilitate its extensive commercial and government work, Fitzgerald-Revere had branch offices in New York and Washington, but the firm’s headquarters had always been in Boston, since it was here that the founders’ family roots had first been set down. Clients could be forgiven for assuming that those roots went back to the American Revolution, if not the Mayflower itself, given the name “Revere” on the firm’s letterhead. Nor did the partners go out of their way to disabuse anyone of the notion that the “Fitzgeralds” in Fitzgerald-Revere were the same ones whose family tree intertwined with that of the Kennedys.

In fact, however, the founding Revere had originally been a Reinhardt who had legally changed his too-German-sounding name about the time that Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops began mowing down young American manhood in the trenches of World War I. And if old Ernest Fitzgerald, the other co-founder of the now-venerable firm, had no DNA in common with the man who was later to become President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, neither did he have to answer for the kind of Prohibition-era rum-running shenanigans that underpinned the wealth of that other prominent Boston family. Instead, Ernest Fitzgerald had been an Irish potato famine descendant who’d made his fortune by dint of hard work, a brilliant, precedent-setting legal mind and astute deal-making.

There was no longer a Revere (much less a Reinhardt) in the firm of Fitzgerald-Revere, but Ernest’s son, Patrick, was the current senior partner of the firm which had opted to keep its original name, with that convenient if misleading cachet.

Sick of waiting, incapable of turning his attention to anything else, Fitzgerald picked up the phone and punched in his secretary’s extension.

She answered immediately. “Yes, sir?”

“Still nothing from Myers?”

Evan Myers, White House deputy chief of staff, had been a junior associate at Fitzgerald-Revere when Patrick Fitzgerald had introduced him to the former governor of Texas, then given him leave of absence with full pay while he ran the northeastern office of the governor’s first presidential campaign. Since then, and in short order, Myers had risen to stratospheric heights of power. Up to now, his former boss had never called in the marker. Fitzgerald rarely did, preferring to exercise influence subtly through ongoing access and dialogue rather than the tit-for-tat trading of favors. Now, however, the time for subtlety was over. It was payback time.

“I tried calling Mr. Myers again about ten minutes ago,” his secretary said, “but apparently he’s still in a meeting.”

“Damn.”

“His office did promise that he’d get right back to you as soon as it wrapped. Also…” she added, her voice hesitant.

“What?”

“Mrs. Fitzgerald called a while ago.”

“Why didn’t you put her through?”

“She didn’t want to bother you. She just wondered if you’d heard anything.”

Fitzgerald sank down in his leather chair and leaned forward on his desk, resting his forehead in his free hand. “I told her I’d be calling Evan this morning.”

“Yes, sir, that’s what she said. She just wanted to know if you’d spoken to him and if there was any news.”

Poor Katherine, Fitzgerald thought. This was even harder on her than it was on him. He at least had the office, where he could go and pretend to be busy.

He didn’t bother telling her about the frustrating calls they’d been getting from crackpots and fortune hunters looking to claim that million-dollar reward. Since there was nothing to report from his calls to Washington either, Fitzgerald could do nothing but tippy-toe around his wife, terrified of saying or doing something that would set off the howls of rage and grief they both felt—terrified they might lash out at each other simply because there was no one else to pummel or scream at in their impotent fury.

Katherine would have been sitting at home all morning, unable, like him, to do anything or step away from the phone for fear of missing that one critical call that would bring news about Amy. Reluctant, as well, to ask what else Patrick had done today for fear of sounding critical, as if he didn’t care enough to pull out all the stops to bring their daughter home. Fitzgerald himself was afraid to say anything that might get his wife’s hopes up, or of saying too little and plunging her even deeper into despair. In the end, he said little or nothing, skulking around with what must seem like stoic reserve at best and, at worst, like cruel indifference.

Behind him, a searing flash of lightning suddenly ripped open the sky and a sharp crack of thunder rattled the windows. Bullet-sized raindrops splattered against the glass.

This wasn’t how he’d seen himself spending his golden years, Fitzgerald thought. Now, if anything happened to Amy, there would be no golden years. Only grief and rage to his last pained breath.




CHAPTER

3


Baghdad, Iraq

Hannah was in a hurry to make her call and get down to the weapons locker before the team leader started making any cracks about the hazards of working with women, but she opened the hotel’s rooftop door cautiously, one hand resting on the gun holstered at her waist. It was her personal weapon, a Beretta nine millimeter semi-automatic, just like the one she’d been trained to use when she became a cop. No matter what equipment her employer made available, she never went out on a job without her own gun, the one she kept cleaned and oiled, the one she knew would never fail in a pinch.

That kind of security was especially critical here. Only a fool walked around Baghdad unarmed. Insurgents and snipers had a habit of popping up at the most inconvenient times. No point in getting shot stupidly.

The graveled rooftop was in darkness, lit only by the ambient light of the surrounding city. She stepped cautiously over the threshold, keeping the door propped open behind her in case she needed to beat a quick retreat, pausing to let her eyes adjust to the dark.

A low murmur sounded from different directions around her, the words indistinguishable but overlapping, the voices clearly engaged in separate conversations. She squinted until she made out four figures scattered around the rooftop, all of them up there for the same reason she was—to get a clear shot at one of the orbiting communications satellites that would bounce their telephone calls to far-flung home bases.

Suddenly, the night air shook with the boom of a mortar round landing somewhere nearby. Conversations paused, then went on as if nothing has happened. Hannah smiled grimly. They were a gutsy bunch, these people who chose to work in the world’s hot spots.

The figure closest to her she recognized, their path shaving crossed in previous strife-tornlocales. The woman worked for National Public Radio, and by the sound of it, she was calling in a story. Spotting Hannah, the reporter gave her a wave.

Hannah nodded back and closed the door to the stairwell, heading for her own isolated patch to place her call. She found an empty corner and set her satellite phone case down on the low wall that ran the perimeter of the rooftop. Then, she paused again as the scents of the city rose to meet her.

There was a particular smell to the Middle East, one as familiar and comforting as her grandmother’s cooking. Even now, years since those summer visits, the smell of lemons and oranges, garlic and ginger, or olive groves and the sea instantly sent her back in her mind to a safe, warm place where loving arms had always opened to welcome her.

Here in landlocked Baghdad, however, there were no salty sea breezes to temper the desert heat or damp down the powder-fine, pervasive yellow sand that insinuated itself into ears and noses and every other bodily crevice. And if the smell of spices and cooking fires drifted on the night air as they did in so many other cities of Hannah’s memory, here the scent was tinged with the acrid sting of weapons fire and explosives recently detonated.

Hannah ducked low behind the parapet as she flicked on the sat phone, directing the antenna southwest toward the Indian Ocean regional satellite. Leaning back against the wall, she scanned nearby rooftops for possible snipers as she dialed the Los Angeles number of her ex-husband.

Normally, in the Middle East’s hot summers, parents and children gravitated to rooftops and balconies in the evening, dragging out mattresses to make their nighttime beds, eager to catch the slightest breeze. These days, however, sleeping outdoors in Baghdad could prove suicidal. Four months after the capital had fallen to coalition forces and major hostilities had been declared over, the streets were still deserted and dangerous at night. No one ventured out after curfew except military patrols and the insurgents trying to kill them. Even peeking out a taped-up window could invite a bullet or rocket-propelled grenade.

Hannah glanced at her watch. It was late afternoon back in L.A. Gabe had been attending a summer day camp in the Santa Monica mountains, but it had finished a week earlier. Now he was supposed to be enjoying a few lazy days before heading off to third grade at Dahlby Hall, the exclusive private school he attended, where classes were due to resume the Tuesday after Labor Day. As always, Hannah’s presence at his first day of school was neither required nor encouraged.

She closed her eyes as a wave of guilt and anger passed over her. It wasn’t right that another woman got to see her child over these milestones. For two years now, Cal’s wife had been taking Gabe to his dentist appointments, his soccer games, his play dates and his friends’ birthday parties. Christie had been the one to read him the Harry Potter stories before tucking him into bed. It was Christie his teachers had called when Gabe had broken his arm in a fall from a schoolyard jungle gym.

When she was back in L.A., Hannah had her son on weekends, for two weeks in the summer and for alternate holidays, but how much longer would even that unsatisfying schedule last? Already she felt pressured to relinquish her visitation days on those occasions when Gabe was pulled between her and a chance at doing something special with his friends. It was no use making him feel guilty about it. That way lay only resentment. What was going to happen when he hit his teens and had a girlfriend or played team sports? How eager then would he be to pack up his bag and move for the weekend to his mother’s little condo across the city?

On the other side of the world, she heard the phone ring in Cal and Christie’s Mulholland Drive mansion. It picked up on the third ring and a Spanish-accented voice said, “Hello, Nicks residence.”

The satellite connection was as clear as if Hannah were calling from next door. She pictured Cal and Christie’s housekeeper standing by the phone in their massive granite and travertine kitchen. It overlooked a sprawling hillside garden with an infinity swimming pool that seemed to drop off the edge of the earth.

“Hello, Maria. This is Hannah, Gabe’s mother. Is he there?”

“Oh, hello, Miss Hannah. No, he’s not, I’m sorry,” the housekeeper said. “He just left with Mrs. Nicks to get some new shoes and his school uniforms.”

Even now, three years after Cal’s remarriage, it still grated to hear someone else besides his mother called “Mrs. Nicks.” It wasn’t that Hannah had an emotional attachment to her ex-husband’s name. She’d seriously considered going back to Demetrious after the divorce, but in the end, had decided against it. It wasn’t just the paperwork hassle. Sharing a name with her son seemed more important than severing that link to the man who’d cheated on her and then dumped her. God knew, she shared little enough with Gabe, the way things had worked out.

“They should be back in a couple of hours,” the housekeeper said. “Would you like Gabriel to call you when he gets in?”

Damn, damn, damn.

“No, I’m out of town on business and I’m going to be out of touch for a while. I’ll have to call back. Could you tell him I called and said I love him?”

“Yes, of course. I am sorry you missed him,” the housekeeper said.

“How’s he doing?”

“Oh, very good. He had some friends here for a sleepover last night. They put up the tent in the backyard and slept out there.” Maria laughed. “Mookie wanted to sleep with them, but the boys put her out. She had gone into the pool with them earlier and she was getting their sleeping bags all wet. And she smelled, Gabriel said.”

“Ah, yes, the ripe odor of wet border collie,” Hannah said, smiling. The puppy had been Cal and Christie’s gift on Gabe’s sixth birthday two years ago—a bribe, maybe, or a consolation prize. Lose your mom, gain a dog. A fair trade, right?

Whatever it was—the dog, the fabulous house, the new school and many friends—the strategy had obviously worked. Although Gabe had originally been unhappy with the changed custody arrangements, crying to move back with his mother, he clearly considered the Mulholland Drive mansion his home now and no longer even mentioned going back to living full-time with Hannah. Though he assured her he understood why the change had been necessary, she couldn’t help feeling she’d let him down—and that once more Cal, damn him, had ended up looking like the hero.



Hannah had met Calvin Nicks during her freshman year at UCLA. Barely eighteen years old when she arrived in Los Angeles from her parents’ home outside Chicago, she’d been swept off her feet by the handsome pre-law senior who lived down the hall from her dorm room. Being young and on her own for the first time was no excuse for her incredible stupidity about practical matters like birth control when she’d fallen in love with Cal. She might have come from a sheltered background in an immigrant family, but she’d grown up in the freewheeling 1980s, for crying out loud, not ancient Greece. What a dope.

When she’d discovered she was pregnant, Cal had been no more eager than she to consider the possibility of a termination. Whatever happened later, he had loved her then, she was pretty sure. To marry her and provide for their child, he’d been ready to give up his dream of law school and becoming a criminal prosecutor, but Hannah couldn’t let him do that. Instead, she’d dropped out and taken a job as a dispatcher with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, working right up to her delivery date, then going back to night shifts three months later while Cal stayed home to study and take care of Gabriel.

Maybe the drift had started then, with the two of them coming and going from their little apartment on completely opposite schedules. Or maybe it was when she decided to take up an offer to enter the police academy. Thanks to her cosmopolitan family, she spoke three languages in addition to English—Greek, Arabic and passable high-school Spanish. That made her too valuable an asset to waste on the dispatch desk, the sheriff’s department personnel management decided.

Had she loved police work too much and Cal not enough? Did he resent the excitement of a career that put her on the street and then into undercover work in record time? Despite the claims he made later during the custody hearing, she’d been conscientious about being there for Gabe and juggling her schedule as much as possible to meet his needs. At the end of the day, though, maybe too many of her husband’s needs had gone unmet. Maybe she had to take some of the blame when he drifted into a series of affairs, first with a fellow student, then some miscellaneous women he met in his first job at the district attorney’s office, and finally with Christie Day, the local television news anchor who became his second wife. But even if Hannah accepted some of the blame for the end of the marriage, that didn’t mean that Cal had had the right to jump at the first opportunity to steal her son.

If only the courts had agreed.

It was an undercover job, a major drug, arms and money laundering sting carried out in cooperation with the FBI, DEA and ATF, that had done her in, putting the final nail in the coffin. She and Cal had been divorced for nearly two years by then, and he’d left his job at the district attorney’s office and gone over to the dark side, working for a high-end defense firm with a stable of bad-boy clients. She’d been working long and irregular hours. With no family around to provide backup care and less than flexible babysitting arrangements, she hadn’t been in a position to turn down Cal and Christie’s offer to keep Gabe full-time for the few summer weeks the sting operation was expected to last. Christie had even rearranged her schedule at the TV station, taking the crack-of-dawn news shift in order to be home by 9:00 a.m. to care for Gabe while Cal was at work. In retrospect, Hannah realized, it had all been part of Cal’s master plan, but at the time, she’d been absurdly grateful.

It didn’t help that a few weeks had turned into four months as the sting operation dragged on and on. By the time it ended and the case went to trial, Gabe had already been enrolled at Dahlby Hall, made friends and begun to settle into a new routine with no need for the kind of outside caretakers that Hannah had to rely on. Yet even then, Hannah thought, with Cal determined to petition the court to reverse their original custody arrangements and having the money and the legal connections to press the matter until he got his way, she might have kept her son.

The bomb had ended her hopes. Planted by one of the defendants in the sting, who’d somehow discovered the identity of the undercover cop set to testify against him, the explosive had blown up more than her little house in Los Feliz. It had also destroyed any chance of convincing the courts she was the better parent to provide a secure and stable environment for a child. Even Hannah, shaken to the core by the assassin’s near-miss of her and Gabe, had conceded that, barring a lottery win, there was no way she could afford the kind of advantages Cal and Christie could offer her son.

Most people thought it was the events of September 11, 2001 that had pushed Hannah out of the sheriff’s department and into the freelance security game, but the truth was, it was sheer financial need. She made nearly five times her police salary doing the kind of work she was doing now. She was on track with a plan that would allow her, if she were very careful, to take several years off and devote herself full-time to her son’s needs without having to worry about where the grocery money would come from. She had a real shot at petitioning for a review of her case, she thought—if only she could survive long enough to see her game plan to fruition….




CHAPTER

4


Washington, D.C.

Evan Myers felt his cell phone vibrate inside the breast pocket of his subtly pinstriped, two-thousand-dollar navy-blue suit. He silently cursed both the interruption and the twitch of anxiety it set off in his gut.

He was perched on one of Richard Stern’s low, armless visitors’ chairs, forced—by design, he was certain—to gaze up at the older man who occupied the massive leather chair on the business side of a broad oak desk. As Myers pulled out his phone and flipped it open, he couldn’t fail to notice the irritation that flickered across Stern’s lined face. Myers hoped his own expression didn’t reveal how that made him feel—like a misbehaving schoolboy caught passing notes.

Not even his Armani suit could quite overcome the youthful impression cast by Myers’s slight, five-foot-eight stature, his thick mop of red hair and his rosy, puckish face. He’d just passed his thirty-sixth birthday, had graduated summa cum laude from Yale Law School, and had fast-tracked with the prestigious Boston firm of Fitzgerald-Revere. Now, as White House deputy chief of staff, his carrot-topped head could often be spotted in close proximity to the president during press scrums and state visits. Yet in spite of all that, Myers still found himself being carded by clueless bouncers at trendy Washington watering holes. It was unbelievably irritating.

As for Richard Stern, the man on the other side of the desk, his demeanor was as humorless as his name. With a shock of steel-gray hair and flint-colored eyes behind rimless glasses, the assistant national security advisor had a reputation for ruthlessness and a background as sketchy as his current mandate seemed to be. Stern was portly in girth and close to sixty years of age, yet there was nothing avuncular about him. Having spent most of his adult life swimming in the murky back channels of covert operations, he had a sharklike slipperiness and a corresponding cold disdain for any poor sap whose blood he scented.

Stern and his small gang of handpicked associates occupied a suite of first-floor offices at the northeast corner of the Old Executive Office Building at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, adjacent to the White House. A five-story, white, Empire-style monstrosity that Mark Twain had deemed the ugliest building in America, the OEOB had been the site of numerous watershed events in U.S. history, as well as some notable scandals—cursed, perhaps, by the ghost of its architect, who committed suicide over his much-maligned creation. Built in the late 1800s and originally called the State, War and Navy Building, the OEOB’s ornate rooms had been at the center of all of the country’s early international dealings. Here, in 1898, America declared war on Spain and then, two months later, signed a treaty of peace. More than a thousand other international treaties had been signed on behalf of America in its ornate halls, including the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and the 1942 United Nations Declaration.

In recent decades, with White House office space at a premium and much in demand by politicos hovering at the hub of power like flies at a sugar bowl, the neighboring building had been housing administration overflow as well as a few power brokers who deliberately sought to maintain a lower profile. In the late 1980s, Colonel Oliver North had secretly orchestrated the Iran-Contra affair out of Room 392 of the OEOB. In a failed bid to keep her boss from going to jail over his criminal dealings, Colonel North’s secretary had shredded incriminating documents in a basement cubbyhole of the same building—documents detailing illegal sales of U.S. arms to Iran and the equally illegal diversion of those proceeds to President Ronald Reagan’s favorite “freedom fighters,” the anti-government Contras of Nicaragua.

With so much tradition, both grandiose and disreputable, behind it, it was little wonder that a figure such as Richard Stern would have chosen to establish his lair in the OEOB.

The entire White House office complex was surrounded by blastproof concrete barriers, high wrought-iron fences, armed guard posts and countless security scanners and cameras. In spite of that already elevated level of vigilance, entering Dick Stern’s personal domain took things one step further, requiring even an official as highly placed as Evan Myers to pass through yet another security barrage and—the ultimate insult—to be accompanied at all times by an authorized escort. Myers had never fully grasped the precise nature of Stern’s mandate, nor understood the reason for these obsessive security arrangements. Although he chafed at having been summoned like some junior flunky to this meeting on Stern’s turf, however, he was damned if he was going to let the man intimidate him as he did most everyone else.

When his phone vibrated again, Myers flipped it open and glanced at the text message on the screen.

“Again, Evan?” Stern asked peevishly.

“Nature of the beast, Dick,” Myers said, reading the third communication his assistant had sent in the past forty minutes. “We’re at the president’s beck and call over there.”

This latest message, however, did not concern demands of the Oval Office. Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald had called yet again. Myers had never seen his former boss and mentor so rattled, but considering the kidnapping of Fitzgerald’s daughter, it wasn’t surprising.

“Anyway,” Myers added, tucking the phone away, “that’s why I wanted to meet in my office.”

Stern grunted. “Not possible.” He almost never entered the White House. Myers wondered whether the president even knew the man, much less what he was up to over here.

Hundreds of characters circled around any administration, drawing power and authority from it. Much as they needed and wanted that presidential imprimatur, however, some of those people made a point of flying beneath the radar of Congress, the media and the public, their activities largely invisible even within the administration’s inner circle. Dick Stern was a case in point. The man seemed to answer to no one, yet when problems of a certain sensitive nature arose, he was inevitably tagged as the go-to guy.

“Patrick Fitzgerald has called again,” Myers said. “We can’t keep putting him off. God knows, the State Department isn’t giving him any joy. If I don’t get back to him with an update on his daughter, the next call he’ll make will be to the Oval Office. And you know he’ll get through, too, Dick. Fitzgerald is too big a fish to ignore if the party has any hope of making inroads in New England next year. And when he does make that call, the president’s going to be calling us both in for a sit rep.”

“You can’t let that happen.”

“Explain to me why not. A young American woman’s been kidnapped from under the noses of our own forces in Iraq. The press is saying she’s being held by some fundamentalist warlord. The State Department, like I said, is clueless. Meantime, both the CIA and the Pentagon claim to have no idea where she is or what this Salahuddin character wants. For the life of me, I can’t figure why we haven’t already launched a rescue mission. Are we in control or not over there?”

“It’s not that simple. That part of the county is still influx.”

“Are we at least talking to this Sheikh Salahuddin who’s supposed to have taken her? I mean, is somebody who speaks for us talking to him, since Langley’s spooks and the military don’t seem to be in the loop?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.”

“Because if we are in negotiations over Amy Fitzgerald’s release, Langley claims to know nothing about it. The director was asked about it point-blank at this morning’s security briefing. Are you saying the DCI lied to the president’s face?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Myers made a forward rolling motion with his hand. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying you need to get back to Fitzgerald and tell him to sit tight. We’re doing everything we can.”

“Are we?”

“Of course, but we need to move cautiously. There’s more at stake than a girl stumbling into a place she had no business being.”

Myers threw up his hands. “For God’s sake, Dick! It’s not like she was some stoner blithely hitchhiking her way through Katmandu or Goa! She’s a doctor who was working in a frigging Red Crescent medical clinic, taking care of Iraqi women and children. Some of whom, may I remind you, are injured because they got caught in our own crossfire. I’d say that kind of dedication goes some way to winning hearts and minds, wouldn’t you?”

“As I recall,” Stern countered, “the International Committee of the Red Cross was warned that we couldn’t guarantee the safety of their personnel if they went into the Sunni Triangle before it was fully secured.”

“Small comfort to Patrick and Katherine Fitzgerald. And not really good enough when it comes to the media, either. She’s still one of ours. This makes us look really ineffectual.”

“Screw the media.”

“And the Fitzgeralds?”

“I feel their pain.”

Somehow, Myers doubted it. The man had ice water in his veins and no family that Myers knew of—thank God. Scary characters like this shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. “So? What can I tell the Fitzgeralds?”

“The situation is very sensitive.”

“And…?”

Stern exhaled heavily. “Tell them we’re making inquiries. Look, Evan, you’re a big enough boy to realize that there are much bigger issues at play here. Issues of major strategic consequence.”

“Such as?”

“America’s role in the region and in the world. Our ability to continue to be the only global power worth a damn. The last superpower.”

“And what’s that got to do with Amy Fitzgerald’s kidnapping?”

Stern drummed his stubby fingers on the desk, scrutinizing the younger man across from him. Once again, perched on his low armless chair, elbows akimbo, Myers felt like the not-very-bright truant in the principal’s office. He decided to demonstrate that he wasn’t as clueless as he apparently seemed.

“You’re afraid of alienating fundamentalists like this sheikh for fear we’ll lose access to Iraqi oil,” he said.

“It’s a little more complicated than that, but yes. As long as soccer moms and NASCAR dads want to exercise their God-given right to drive gas-guzzling SUVs, that is one consideration.” Stern shook his head. “Look, the Saudi regime is getting ready to implode. The House of Saud is being pressured to distance itself from us. U.S. oil companies have been losing contracts left and right in that country, and guess who they’re losing them to? None other than Lukoil.”

“Lukoil?”

“The Russian state oil company.”

“The Russians? A threat to us? Get real. They’re no superpower, not anymore—if they ever were. And Muslim fundamentalists hate the Russians, too. Look at what happened in Afghanistan.”

“Old news, young Evan. Conservative Saudis had no use for godless communists, it’s true, but these days, Moscow’s run by a conservative Orthodox Catholic. The Camel and the Bear are getting pretty damn cozy, thank you very much. The Saudis say Lukoil’s lower cost structure is the reason they’re getting all the contracts to develop new fields over there, but it’s never been about the money. Even if it were, the Russians are keeping their offers ridiculously low just to ingratiate themselves with the Saudis.”

“To undermine us?”

“Partly. The Russians want to pull the rug out from under Chechen rebels giving them so much grief. Those Chechens are being financed by Saudi fundamentalists.”

“As I understand it,” Myers said, “our oil companies started backing away from Saudi projects anyway in the wake of 9/11. I’m not surprised the Saudis are looking to deal with anyone but Americans at this point.”

“Yeah, they’re in a major snit, all right—which plays right into the hands of the Russians.”

“I still don’t see what this has to do with Amy Fitzgerald’s kidnapping in Iraq.”

Stern sighed heavily, as if it should be self-evident to anyone but a moron. “The Russians have domestic oil reserves nearly equal to the Saudis’. About the only other country with that much oil still in the ground is Iraq.”

“There’s Iran, too.”

“Yes, but the Iranians haven’t learned how to play nicely with others, have they? Until they do, they’re a total write-off.”

“Okay, so you’ve got Russia, Iraq and the Saudis…”

“Right. The Russians and Saudis were already moving closer to Baghdad before we went in and toppled Saddam. Think of it—the three largest oil patches in the world, strategically linked and controlled by people who certainly haven’t got us in their bedtime prayers. If Moscow and Riyadh controlled Baghdad, they’d have us by the short and curlies, now, wouldn’t they?”

“And you think that’s their game plan.”

“There you go. We put it on hold when we invaded Iraq, but the question is, can we keep it together?” Stern kicked back in his chair and folded his hands over his ample sternum. “Think about it, Evan. Who has a bigger interest in promoting instability over there? If the anti-American forces in Iraq build up enough steam and we buckle and walk away, who’s left to come in and bring that country’s oil industry back online? Why, none other than the Russians, of course.”

Myers sat back in his own chair and stared at the older man. “Are you serious?”

“Dead serious.”

“But—well, forgive me, Dick, but that sounds like old-school paranoia. You don’t think maybe you’re just a little jaded by your Cold War past? Seeing commies in the woods again?”

Stern scowled. “Need I remind you that the president of Russia was a senior KGB officer, raised on the sour milk of anti-Americanism? If you don’t think this is a big problem, then you’re in the wrong business, son.”

Myers shook his head. “In the meantime, what am I supposed to tell the Fitzgeralds about their daughter?”

“Tell them we’re doing our best. But do not,” Stern added, “do not, young Evan, promise them anything.” He drummed his blunt-tipped fingers on the brown leather desk pad once more. “And while you’re at it, encourage Patrick Fitzgerald to keep his own counsel, for God’s sake.”

“In other words, don’t go to the media.”

Stern’s hands rose, palm up, as if it should be self-evident. “Although it’s rather a case of shutting the barn door after the horses have already escaped.”

“What do you mean?”

“That damn reward. The jungle drums are already beating out the news of that bit of folly.”

“Well, can you blame them? It’s what I’d do if my daughter were kidnapped and I had the money.”

Stern shook his steel-gray head irritably. Shards of light flickered off his rimless glasses. “If Fitzgerald think she’s made things easier by offering a million-dollar reward, he’s sadly mistaken. He needs to lie low. Tell him that, for God’s sake.”

“And if he does? What are the odds of them getting their daughter back safe and sound?”

Stern shrugged. “One hopes for the best and prepares for the worst. Wars have casualties. You know that. I know that. Amy Fitzgerald should have known that before she blundered into the Sunni Triangle.” Before Myers could protest, Stern added, “Stay on top of the Pentagon and Langley. Meantime, I’ll see if I can find out anything on my end. That’s the best we can do.”



A few minutes later, once Myers had been escorted out of his office and out of the building, Stern wheeled in his chair and reached for a phone on the credenza behind his desk. He punched a series of numbers on the base, then listened while the system bounced the call across several international satellite links. The line picked up quickly at the other end, but the voice sounded groggy. It wasn’t just the scrambler encoding their communication, Stern realized, glancing at his watch. It was after midnight over there.

He didn’t bother to identify himself. “Kenner, look sharp!”

“I’m here. What’s up?”

Stern’s trained ear picked up the faint hint of an almost untraceable accent, although he knew that not one in a million other listeners would hear it. The man he called Kenner had American pronunciation and syntax down perfectly, and he used American colloquialisms with ease. It was only one of the reasons Stern found the man so useful.

“The Fitzgerald problem is looking to get out of hand,” he said.

“How so?”

“Patrick Fitzgerald has posted a million-dollar reward for his daughter’s safe return. He’s also calling in markers to pressure the administration to take action. What were you thinking of, standing by while they kidnapped the American woman?”

“They needed a doctor and the local clinic had just gone through a personnel shift.”

“And nobody knew it was an American there? A girl, for chrissake?”

“What can I say? The intelligence was faulty.”

“Nonexistent, is more like it. Enough is enough. It’s time to get this situation back under control. Got it?”

Stern barely waited to hear the assent from the other end before hanging up. He didn’t need to. Orders were meant to be followed. He had no doubt that his would be.




CHAPTER

5


Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Iraq, the heart of the Sunni Triangle

The Brandywine team came out of the hills just after 1:00 a.m. There were four commandos with the forward unit that set out from the landing zone. They’d left the pilot and a base guard on backup at the LZ with the understanding that the chopper would pull back to a safer distance if there was any sign of enemy activity in the area. They had no desire to draw undue attention to their effort to extract the two Iraqi civilians from the insurgent-held town of Al Zawra.

Hannah was the lone woman in the advance group that headed down into the valley. Sean Ladwell, the team leader, was on point. Hannah and Marcus Wilcox were in the two and three positions, while OzNuñez was on rear guard. Nuñez, a former marine sniper, carried an M40A1 rifle, while the others had M-16s. In addition, each team member carried a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with sixteen rounds, half a dozen spare clips, plus a personalized assortment of backup guns, knives, fragmentation grenades and smoke bombs. Wilcox, a former NFL linebacker who’d quit pro ball on September 12, 2001, also had an M203 grenade launcher slung around his Kevlar’d torso. They were armed for bear but hoped to need none of it, slipping back to the LZ before sunup with their rescue targets in tow.

Four pairs of tan leather boots negotiated barren, rock-strewn terrain as they crept stealthily toward the target: the small market town of Al Zawra, population eight thousand, some fifty miles north of Baghdad. Four heads took constant, 360-degree readings of the terrain as they crept forward. Four pairs of eyes were fixed on the green-tinted shadows in their night-vision goggles, searching for any movement that would betray opposition forces. Hunting, too, for seemingly innocuous bumps in the terrain that could conceal improvised explosive devices.

The air, hot and arid, was laden with powder-fine grit. It was all Hannah could do not to sneeze inside the itching balaclava pulled over her head, nose and mouth, but she dared not make a sound that might announce their approach.

The caution was well warranted. They were coming in from the back side of the town that pressed up against the hills rather than via the main road off the Baghdad-to-Tikrit highway. Advance intel suggested that this flank was the most lightly guarded. The half-mile stretch of open ground between the foothills and their objective had also been aerial-surveyed with ground penetrating radar looking for land mines. Still, it paid to be ready for surprises. It could mean the difference between success and failure, life and death—or worse, capture. The gruesome images of recent hostage beheadings, flashed round the world via the Internet, were graphic reminders of the fate that could await them if they screwed up.

Hannah held her M-16 rifle clutched close to her body. Upon arrival at the first mission briefing at Brandywine International headquarters in Virginia a week earlier, she’d been greeted by wolf whistles and a few dubious propositions. Even though she’d been careful to show up wearing an old police academy sweatshirt, faded jeans and scuffed boots, her dark hair knotted behind her head and her makeup nonexistent, it had taken only a nanosecond for these clowns to jump to the conclusion that she was there to offer coffee, maps and maybe a hot-blooded romp to brave boys willing to risk their necks for a cause deemed worthy enough for a lucrative payday.

The kibitzing had faded fast, replaced by raised eyebrows and skeptical muttering when she was introduced and her role in the mission outlined. The grumbling hadn’t altogether died down since. They’d be happy to bed her, the grunts made clear, they just didn’t want to babysit her out here when their lives would be on the line.

Hannah informed them she didn’t need babysitting from anyone, thanks all the same. In any case, there was nothing they could do about her inclusion. It was a management call, and management had decided: she was in. She liked to think it wasn’t just because she spoke Arabic, but realistically, with even the team leader reluctant to have her along, she knew it probably was the tipping point. This mission—any mission in Iraq, these days—was risky enough. Without someone who spoke the local language, it could be impossible to pull off and maybe suicidal to boot.

Now, as they crept out of the hills, there was no distinguishing Hannah from the men, rigged out as she was in full paramilitary camouflage gear. She was on the tall side for a woman, five-eight in her bare feet, an inch more in her hiking boots. At least one of the men in the group was shorter, although Oz Nuñez was built like a Humvee, low, wide and solid. Hannah’s Kevlar body armor concealed a slender frame under her dark outerwear, while the balaclava and night-vision goggles obscured her long hair and deceptively delicate features.

Hannah’s fingerless leather gloves clutched the barrel and stock of her rifle. The gun was set to burst pattern, ready for any threat, but she projected outward calm as they crept toward their target. Only she knew that her heart was pounding against the khaki cotton T-shirt under her body armor, beating out the universal anthem of fatalists everywhere: When you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.

That about summed it up, she thought, as an itchy bead of sweat ran the rim of her goggles, then soaked into the lower part of the balaclava covering her nose and mouth. It was way too hot to be wearing complete covering, but they were going for anonymity and the intimidation factor here. Nothing said wet-your-pants scary like the Ninja warrior look.

The market town they were about to enter was under the thumb of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin, a militant anti-western Sunni warlord who’d managed to survive Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign of terror through sheer, Machiavellian bloody-mindedness, plus a close alliance with the dictator’s sadistic monster sons. Uday and Qusay Hussein had been killed in a shoot-out with U.S. forces the previous month. Saddam himself was on the run and his former soldiers had thrown away their uniforms, but all that meant was that there was no telling the players without a scorecard—and the scorecard kept getting rewritten. No matter how many times the administration back in Washington crowed “mission accomplished,” Iraq was descending into anarchy, with allegiances shifting daily.

Meantime, the ruthless Sheikh Salahuddin clung to control of his personal fiefdom. He was a force that would have to be reckoned with or eliminated, sooner or later, Hannah imagined, but as much trouble as the warlord was proving to be to coalition forces, the Brandy wine team hadn’t been sent to bring him down. Rather, its mission was to extract an old woman and her granddaughter living at the western edge of the town. It seemed like a lot of firepower for some granny and a kid, Hannah thought, but who was she to question orders?

Dawn was still a few hours off, but a searing wind stirred the fine sand that seemed to blanket the landscape. Hannah’s clenched jaws scraped grit over tooth enamel, while underneath the balaclava, the sweat on her cheeks and brow congealed into a gluey, sandpapery mud pack. Great. A dermabrasion facial, the repressed girlie-girl in her thought ruefully.

The group moved ahead stealthily, pausing now and again when Ladwell raised his hand. They pivoted, taking in every nuance of their surroundings. Even with night-vision goggles, it was a tough call to distinguish anything. The boulder-strewn, scrub-covered terrain was an abstract painter’s canvas of green, splotchy shadows. Whirlwinds of dust obscured the stars and the crescent moon overhead. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. The lack of light and definition, combined with their dusky camos and matte black weapons, would also render the team virtually invisible to any adversary. In theory, anyway.

If captured, they were hosed. No rescue would be mounted to save their sorry hides. Officially, they weren’t even here. They would not be counted among the dead, wounded and captured in this dirty little war where the enemy could be anyone from a Saddam fedayeen to an adolescent holy-martyr-wannabe body-wrapped in Semtex.

Despite the high risk, Hannah hadn’t hesitated to sign on for the mission. After all, if she bought it here, who would mourn? What family she had didn’t need her. Gabe would be the beneficiary of the hefty insurance policy that came with these contract jobs, so that if one day he wanted to escape the clutches of his father and the woman who was now his mom in all but name, he’d have the means to do it. As for Hannah’s police career, that had self-destructed, too, along with the rest of her once reasonably happy life.

Behind her were nothing but burned bridges. And when you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.




CHAPTER

6


Al Zawra, Central Iraq

Zaynab Um Ahmed awoke with a start, the ripe smell of leather filling her nostrils. A gloved hand was clamped onto her mouth. She struggled and tried to cry out, but her captor was relentless. Another hand bore down on her collarbones, exerting more than enough force on those frail bones to keep her pinned to the mattress.

Her first thought was for Yasmin, her twelve-year-old granddaughter, who’d been sleeping in the twin bed next to hers, but she could neither move nor see if the child was safe. No sound came from the other bed. Zaynab struggled and moaned, but the man holding her down was unyielding.

She turned her attention to the ghostly, nearly featureless head looming over her. The room should have been pitch-black, and yet was not. In a dim, reddish glow, she made out a pair of dark eyes, intently fixed on her. When Zaynab whimpered, the head gave a sharp, warning shake, and a whispered command sounded from that awful lipless face. “Shhh, grandmother! Be still.”

The old woman went limp, her terrified gaze darting left and right in that red spectral glow. There’d been no electricity in town for weeks now, ever since Salahuddin’s men had seized control of the area, taking advantage of the power vacuum left after the American invasion. No one knew whether Salahuddin had cut the power lines and telephone communications or whether the foreign forces had done it. All anyone knew was that the country was sliding into anarchy. This was what some people had feared would follow if Saddam were ever overthrown. No one loved the dictator, but in a nation rife with ugly ethnic divisions, the devil one knew was perhaps preferable to whatever supposed savior might follow—for some, anyway. Zaynab had known too much grief in her sixty-two years to believe in anyone anymore.

People said Salahuddin was the spiritual “younger brother” of Osama bin Laden, but Zaynab had her own take on the opportunist who was now terrorizing her town. After all, she’d known the little monster all his life. He was about the same age as her own children, but unlike Mumtaz and Ahmed, Salahuddin had dropped out of school at sixteen, becoming a drunk and a thug who was suspected of several sexual assaults. He had wormed his way into the inner circle of Qusay Hussein, but inevitably fell afoul of the dictator’s family and landed in jail. Some people said it was during his time in prison that he adopted the jihadist cause. Whatever the case, after he was released, Salahuddin disappeared—to Afghanistan, some said, to fight the Soviet invaders of that country.

He’d shown up back in Al Zawra only a few months earlier, calling himself “Sheikh” Salahuddin. Whether or not he was a follower of bin Laden, Zaynab thought, he certainly didn’t need the blessings of Al Qaeda to launch a so-called holy war. He had always had delusions of grandeur and been given to spouting the worst kind of hateful nonsense. Since he’d taken over the town, nothing had been working.

Zaynab tried to make out where this dim red glow in the room was coming from. Out of frugality and fear of fire, she was always careful to extinguish candles and oil lamps before she and Yasmin went to bed. Even on bright, moonlit nights, she kept the curtains drawn close against the dangers that lurked outside. But now, the room was a patchwork of black shadow and crimson light. The armed invaders—from her pinioned position on the bed, she could make out at least two others dressed in full military camouflage—were carrying shielded torches.

As Zaynab turned her gaze back to the soldier holding her down, a sense of weary inevitability and terrible sadness overcame her resistance. Of course these men had been sent to kill her and her granddaughter. Why not? Everything else had already been taken from her. Now, why not her precious granddaughter and her own useless life?

The soldier took away the hand on her shoulder, lifting one finger in warning. Zaynab felt too beaten down to move as he reached up, yanking off the balaclava that had obscured all features but those dark eyes.

Zaynab squinted, then blinked through her tears. This was not one of Salahuddin’s hooligans. In fact, it was no man at all. It was a young woman with the dark eyes of the forty-two virgins who were said to welcome devout men into paradise. Was she dead, then? And did the houris come to faithful women, too? How was it possible that the angels of paradise were dressed like soldiers, in camouflage shirts and trousers? Had things gotten so bad that even heaven was beleaguered by battling forces?

The dark-eyed soldier-angel leaned close and whispered urgently in the old woman’s ear. “Shhh, grandmother! Don’t be afraid. Mumtaz has sent me.”

Mumtaz? Zaynab puzzled. But…how? She is far off in London.

It had been ten long years since Zaynab had last seen her daughter. Mumtaz’s husband had been a professor of mathematics at the University of Baghdad. Zamir was not a political creature, never had been. He might never have fled the country had Saddam not turned his murderous gaze in the direction of Iraq’s intellectuals. Mathematics, Zamir always said, did not concern itself with the shifting winds of human ambition, but with the unassailable logic of formulas that could be tested and proven. But then, as one after another of his colleagues fled or was imprisoned or killed for daring to express any opinion at all that distinguished him from a dumb rock, Zamir, too, found himself challenged. Perhaps he had some warning or premonition of danger. Whatever the case, Zamir defected while attending a mathematicians’ conference in Paris, taking Mumtaz with him.

When they didn’t return, Saddam’s soldiers came to Al Zawra, questioning Zaynab and her son for days about what they knew. In the end, the soldiers must have been convinced by their protestations of innocence, for they’d finally gone away and left the family alone. Mumtaz and Zamir had ended up in London, Zaynab had heard through intermediaries. Now, apparently, there were two young grandsons she had never laid eyes on. It broke her heart to think of them growing up among strangers, far from the land of their people, but at least they were safe there. Perhaps they were the lucky ones.

Was it possible Mumtaz had now sent a message through this dark-eyed warrior houri who spoke strangely accented Arabic?

As if reading her mind, the woman-in-man’s-clothing nodded. “Yes, Mumtaz, your daughter,” she murmured.

She was not an Iraqi, certainly, nor was her Arabic the Cairo dialect heard in movies and on imported television programs.

“Mumtaz heard about what happened to her brother,” the warrior-woman said. “To your son, Ahmed, and his wife, Fatima.”

Zaynab’s son and daughter-in-law had been killed two months ago in a shoot-out at their café near the central marketplace. A newly appointed official named by the American civil administrator had arrived from Baghdad and began taking afternoon coffee breaks at the café, talking to merchants and other local people, listening to their concerns about the uneasy security situation. He’d seemed like a good enough man, but Salahuddin, sensing a challenge to his authority, had issued a fatwa against what he called the “agent of the infidels.” In addition to the official and his bodyguard, Salahuddin’s men had gunned down six civilians in the café that day, including Zaynab’s son and daughter-in-law—Yasmin’s parents. Then, they had burned the café to the ground.

With her son dead, Zaynab had needed to find a way to support herself and Yasmin. Their family had once been prosperous, but it had fallen on hard times in recent years. During the time of international sanctions when goods grew increasingly scarce, they had sold off jewelry and anything else of value in order to purchase goods on the black market. By the time the café was destroyed, drying up even that modest source of income, there was nothing of value left to trade away and no one with money left to buy it in any case. In the end, Zaynab had taken to selling tea from a trolley in the marketplace.

And still, she worried. Hiding behind a scrim of false piety to justify his ambition, greed and brutality, Salahuddin had been issuing one restrictive command after another, and his bearded enforcers beat or arrested anyone who did not obey. If the rumors were true and he decided to forbid women to go out in public at all unless accompanied by a male relative, she and her poor granddaughter would starve to death. They no longer had any living male relative except her son-in-law in far-off London.

The old woman glanced over at the next bed. Yasmin was sitting up but she was restrained by a stocky, dark-haired soldier. The child’s eyes were huge and frightened. The soldier held her firmly but his expression seemed apologetic. Zaynab spotted two other burly, camouflage-clad soldiers in the room, guarding the door and peering around the edges of paisley window curtains that had grown tattered and thin. Their fingers were poised on the triggers of terrible-looking rifles. None of them looked like Iraqis. They were too well-fed.

How could they have entered so silently? Of course, Zaynab’s ears were getting old and feeble, but surely Yasmin would have heard something? Or the chickens they kept in the courtyard? How had these soldiers gotten by without the hens raising a squawk? Not to mention Salahuddin’s men, who were said to patrol the town all night long? Ostensibly there to guard against infidel invaders, as often as not Salahuddin’s men, most of whom were not even from Al Zawra, just strutted around, lording it over everyone, stealing whatever they pleased, and harassing farmers and shopkeepers who were up to nothing more nefarious than trying to provide for their families.

Even in the time of Saddam, may his name be cursed forever, the town had not lost so many innocents to senseless, ugly violence. These foreigners had good reason to be nervous, Zaynab thought. If Salahuddin’s men found them, they would be dead before sunup.

She studied the strange warrior-woman and her comrades, and they in turn studied her, all of them weighing their risks. Finally, Zaynab nodded. Only then did she realize that the warrior-woman had been holding her breath. She exhaled heavily now and released her grip on Zaynab’s shoulder, allowing her to sit up. The soldier holding Yasmin released her, too, and as soon as he did, the girl leapt across the space between the two beds. Grandmother and granddaughter wrapped themselves in each others’ arms, then looked back at the warrior-woman, who seemed to be the speaker for the others.

“My name is Hannah,” she said. She had a rifle slung over her chest, but she shrugged out of it, set it aside, then settled herself at the foot of Zaynab’s mattress. Her hair was very dark, most of it caught up in a plait except for wisps that clung to the damp skin of her forehead, cheeks and neck.

“Are you American soldiers?” Zaynab asked.

“My commander here is British,” the woman named Hannah said, nodding at the wiry man guarding the door. “The rest of us are American. We’re not soldiers, though.”

“You look like soldiers.”

“Think of us as protectors.”

“Protectors of whom?”

“At the moment, you and Yasmin.”

“I don’t understand. How can that be?”

“I told you, it was your daughter Mumtaz who asked that we come here.”

The warrior-woman unbuttoned a pocket on the leg of her pants and withdrew a folded piece of paper, then unclipped a small flashlight from her belt and turned it on. Like the men’s, it had a red shield around the lens, narrowing its beam. “This is from your daughter,” she said.

Being careful to keep the light aimed low and away from the window, she handed the paper to the old woman, holding the light on it. Zaynab took the paper.

“Is it really from Auntie Mumtaz?” Yasmin asked.

Hands trembling, Zaynab unfolded the note. She peered at the writing, and gasped. “Yes! I recognize her handwriting!”

“Shhh,” Hannah murmured, touching her arm. “Whisper. Tell your granddaughter what it says.”

Zaynab read:

Mama,

Please, you must do what these people say. They are friends and will keep you safe. Go with them. We have arranged visas for you and Yasmin to come and live in London with Zamir and me and the boys. Yasmin, you will go to school here and we will love you as our own daughter. Neither of you need ever be afraid again. It is for the best, I promise you. Come away from that terrible place.

We send you love and a thousand kisses.

Mumtaz

The old woman’s eyes misted as she clutched the note to her broken heart. Then, she looked up at the soldier-woman and nodded. “Tell us what we are to do.”




CHAPTER

7


Al Zawra: Compound of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin

The man known as George Kenner had gone by many names in his lifetime, taking on and casting off identities as easily as most people switched hats. At the moment, as far as the sheikh and his followers knew, Kenner was a Canadian-born ex-paratrooper-turned-private-military-contractor who had converted to Islam twenty years earlier while helping Afghan freedom fighters expel Russian invaders from their country.

It did no good for Kenner to try to pass as an Arab, not with his startling, pale blue eyes, fair skin and white-blond hair. Brown contact lenses and a dye job might have camouflaged his eye and hair color temporarily, but those solutions were unsuited to the kind of open-ended operation on which he was currently engaged.

In any case, the language would have given him away as soon as he opened his mouth. There were myriad accents and dialects throughout the Arabic-speaking world, but none of these came naturally to Kenner. As gifted a linguist as he was, having been trained from youth to blend like a native into certain foreign milieus, he would never speak better than kitchen Arabic. He’d come too recently to the language. Better to adopt the identity of a sympathetic former infidel from a country deemed relatively benign and then get on with the job of infiltrating Salahuddin’s inner circle.

Kenner had come to Salahuddin on the recommendation of a mujaheddin chief in Kabul, who’d praised his foreign-born brother for his piety, his ruthless devotion to the cause and his superior tactical skills. Inside the jihadist movement, the Kabul contact reported to Salahuddin, Kenner was called “Juma Kamal,” but his brethren accepted that his Muslim identity should remain secret to all but a select few. Kenner was of more use to them traveling incognito under his infidel name and that useful Canadian passport, which rarely received more than a cursory glance from border guards.

That Kenner’s Canadian background was fiction, his religious conversion a farce and his Kabul sponsor long since turned by U.S. intelligence remained a secret to all but a tiny handful of individuals back in the American capital. Washington had a miserable track record for running humint—human intelligence—sources, inside the nearly impenetrable fundamentalist Islamic warrior movement. The only reason Kenner’s cover had remained intact thus far was that the existence of the double agent was known to so few.

Here in the so-called Sunni Triangle, the self-styled Sheikh Salahuddin had seized on the opportunity offered by the current confusion to return to his hometown, wrest control of it and then extend that control over the region. If his campaign went as planned, he would be a major force to be reckoned with, playing a key role in the formation of the new national government.

Salahuddin claimed to hate the traitor Saddam Hussein, a fellow Sunni who paid lip service to Islam when it suited his aims but who, together with his corrupt sons, lived like the worst of infidels. If Salahuddin had once enjoyed a decadent life himself, his time in prison had allegedly convinced him there was more glory to be found in being a holy war leader. Now that Saddam had been overthrown, he had no wish to see the Americans’ tame Shia lapdogs take over the country, divvying it up between themselves and Kurdish riffraff. While a power vacuum existed, Salahuddin told his followers, the time was ripe to exert the moral authority of the Prophet’s true way—and there was no shortage of potential followers among the country’s Sunni minority, which was terrified at the prospect of rule by Shias and Kurds, gunning for bear after Saddam’s long, dark reign.

Kenner had been infiltrated into Salahuddin’s camp ostensibly to help organize and train the sheikh’s warriors, but really to keep track of his plans and try to turn them in a direction favorable to Washington’s interests in the oil-rich region. Either that, or, if Salahuddin couldn’t be co-opted, eliminate the threat. If the sheikh had known where the mercenary’s true loyalties lay, he would have been far more careful about welcoming him into his proverbial tent.



Sitting on the edge of his cot, Kenner frowned at the sound of dead air in his cell phone. His caller had hung up on him. Typical.

He’d known Dick Stern over a decade now, since long before the ex-CIA deputy had arrived at his current exalted status in the White House inner sanctum as assistant national security advisor. He’d met Stern back in the days when he was running covert operations into Soviet-controlled Afghanistan. Since then, Kenner had carried out several deniable assignments at the CIA operative’s behest, including at least one assassination of a foreign opposition leader—a totally illegal operation that remained to this day unknown to anyone else in the American capital, least of all the dreaded Congressional intelligence oversight committees.

As far as Kenner was concerned, Stern had always been prone to pomposity—seldom in doubt, never wrong. He demanded absolute, unquestioning obedience from his agents and he got it, because to cross him was suicide, professionally and sometimes literally. On the other hand, the man did have a talent for landing on the winning side of domestic bureaucratic skirmishes, which made him a reliable source of lucrative contract dollars to a free agent like Kenner.

Kenner had been asleep when Stern called from Washington. His room in the sheikh’s compound was a private one, closet-sized but infinitely preferable to the overcrowded barracks that the bulk of Salahuddin’s fighters occupied. When his razor-thin cell phone had vibrated in an inner pocket of his shirt, he’d come instantly awake. Salahuddin was paranoid about cell phones, forbidding their use in the compound for fear of overhead satellites that fished through the ether, listening for suspect conversations and using the signal to zero in on enemy targets. Kenner was careful to keep his link to his handlers well hidden from view at all times, and was trusted enough at this point never to be subjected to a body search.

After the short conversation with Stern, Kenner tucked the phone away once more, then sat on the edge of the cot, thinking about the best way to deal with the problem of the American doctor. On the one hand, her capture had inflated Salahuddin’s reputation in this campaign where image was everything. The foreign press was already coming to name him as a power to be reckoned with, which helped attract followers to the sheikh’s camp.

From an American perspective, this kidnapping could be played a number of ways. In a worst-case scenario, if anything were to happen to the doctor, it would cement Salahuddin’s reputation as a power to be feared. If nothing else, it provided a convenient high-profile villain to shore up the American public’s support for the invasion of the country, now that it was becoming clear that the weapons of mass destruction play had been a bluff. On the other hand, if the public outcry over the doctor’s kidnapping became too clamorous, the American military might be tempted to launch a strike against Salahuddin. Kenner couldn’t let that happen. Salahuddin was too useful to him. He’d spent too long working this plan to stand back and see his protégé eliminated.

The rich tapestry of the prayer mat lying in one corner of the room, prearranged so that it was facing toward Mecca, caught his eye, and he scowled. Five times daily, when the muezzin called the pious to prayer, those who could get to the mosque did so in order to pray shoulder-to-shoulder as tradition demanded with their fellow believers. The sheikh accepted that Kenner’s responsibilities often prevented him from praying at the mosque, but he believed the convert made use of the prayer mat. Kenner, however, barely gave the rug a glance.

Reaching over the side of the cot, he grabbed his boots, pulled them on and laced them up, then got to his feet. Approaching his midforties, his short-cropped hair rapidly going from white-blond to pure white, Kenner’s body retained the lean, hungry appearance of an Arctic wolf, with cold blue eyes to match. He strapped on his gun belt and slipped the knife he always carried into the sheath at the small of his back. Then, he stepped outside onto the low veranda surrounding the compound’s open central courtyard.

A mosque stood at one end of the compound. Behind it, a series of rooms ran off a rectangular inner square, open to the sky above. In times of peace, the rooms were used for meetings and for Koranic instruction of the village children. These days, they held an armory and barracks, as well as the makeshift infirmary that Salahuddin had ordered set up after the last shoot-out with American soldiers, in which several of his followers had been wounded.

It wasn’t that Salahuddin spared all that much compassion for the injured, Kenner knew. If they couldn’t fight another day, they would have served the cause better by dying in battle. The sheikh had no problem sending young men out to blow themselves up on suicide bombing missions, especially the less talented among them. It was a win-win situation. They had the reward of paradise, with its forty-two houris, and Salahuddin had holy martyrs to bring in more recruits for the cause. But instead, these men wounded by the Americans were brought back to the compound moaning and groaning about their injuries, and that was just bad for morale. The sheikh had needed a doctor to take care of them and shut them up, and the American girl had turned out to be what he got.

Kenner moved around the edge of the veranda towards the sheikh’s quarters. A wide-branching fig tree stood in the center of the courtyard, silhouetted by the light of a small fire that burned in a brazier at the far end of the yard. The scent of smoke drifted on the warm night air. Except for the occasional spit and crackle of the flames, the compound was silent and dark. Kenner looked up. A twinkling swath of stars blanketed the pitch black sky.

As the sound of a low murmur reached his ears, Kenner turned back to the brazier and noted that two—no, three—of the men who were supposed to be on night guard were instead lolling around the fire on molded plastic chairs. They obviously hadn’t noticed him.

Stepping deeper into the shadows of the overhanging roof, Kenner crept ahead. Silently withdrawing his knife from the leather sheath at his back, he hugged the wall as he padded toward them, silent as a panther. The gleam of the fire danced on their glistening skin. One of the guards, sitting with his back to the veranda, was old enough to sport a thick, black beard and mustache, but the other two were barefaced youths. The younger men’s eyes glittered as they watched the dance of the fire in the brazier. All three were mesmerized by the flames—and blinded by them, Kenner thought contemptuously.

He stole up behind the bearded one, then sprang like a coiled snake, grabbing him by the hair and pulling the head back so that the blade of his matte black knife had clear access to the soft, vulnerable skin beneath the wiry beard. The man’s white plastic chair tipped back on two legs, and he stared up, terrified, into those pale Arctic eyes. The two youths sprang to their feet, tipping over their chairs as well as the Kalashnikov rifles that they’d carelessly propped against the armrests.

“You’re dead,” Kenner growled, as his knife etched a superficial but memorable line in the man’s neck.

Too surprised to remember to reach for their sidearms, the youths stared, open-mouthed, while their bearded comrade whimpered for his life.

“And the two of you,” Kenner added, glancing up at them, “would be just as dead if this were a real enemy infiltration. Did you see or hear me approach?”

“N-no.”

“Of course not, idiots. Your eyes were blinded by the light and your ears were filled with the sound of your own yammering. Why are you not patrolling the grounds?”

“We were,” one of them protested.

“We only just stopped for a moment to take a little tea.”

“And if this were the moment that the enemy chose to strike?” Kenner asked. “What good are you if you cannot see him coming? If you cannot kill him before he kills you? If you cannot at least sound a warning to your brethren asleep in the barracks? If we relied on your vigilance, we could all be dead now.”

“It was a mistake. We meant no harm,” the bearded one said breathlessly, petrified to move lest the knife at his throat cut any deeper.

Kenner gave him a disgusted look and yanked his head back another inch or two. Finally passing equilibrium, the chair tipped over backwards. As the man tumbled to the ground, Kenner released him. Bending down, he wiped his knife blade on the man’s grimy shirt, then slid it back into the sheath.

“Return to your posts now,” he warned, “and let this be a lesson. If I find you betraying the sheikh with your carelessness once more, my knife will show no pity.”

The bearded one scowled but got to his feet as the other two scrambled to retrieve their assault rifles. “Yes, sir. Thank you. May the Prophet bless you,” they said breathlessly as they scrambled off to their guard posts.

“And may he keep you alive in spite of yourselves, you morons,” Kenner muttered, heading away toward Salahuddin’s quarters.




CHAPTER

8


Al Zawra: Central Iraq

Hannah pressed the light fob on her black army surplus watch. Nearly 3:00 a.m. The dial went dark again as she released the button—no telltale fluorescent to give away her position in the dark.

Sean Ladwell stood at the window, peering around the edge of the curtain, his M-16 rifle gripped in both hands. Nuñez and Wilcox kept moving from room to room, checking for trouble from alternate vantage points.

Ladwell glanced back at her. “Tell the old woman they need to hurry.”

“She knows,” Hannah said, watching the grandmother fumble through a drawer, withdrawing underthings that she handed to her granddaughter.

The house fairly hummed with tension, and for good reason. The eastern sky would lighten soon. Roosters would crow in backyard coops. With the electricity down, neighbor women would rise early to start cooking fires to make breakfast for their families. Soon, the whole town would be stirring, including the warlord Salahuddin and his troops in their compound, which advance intel said was behind the mosque, near the town center. If the team was going to head back to the hills for their rendezvous with the chopper without being seen, then they were going to have to leave very soon.

“Why don’t you guys wait out in the front room?” Hannah told Ladwell. “These ladies won’t want to get dressed in front of men. I’ll stay and speed things along.”

The team leader glanced at the woman and girl, who were shyly folding clothing on one of the beds. Nuñez arrived in the doorway, back from his circuit of the house. The young ex-marine was short but solidly built. A high school wrestler, Hannah thought. Nuñez had to be at least twenty-one, because that was Brandywine International’s minimum age for its contract security forces, but in spite of his flak jacket and armaments, he still looked like a kid playing at soldiering.

“Wait out in the front room,” Ladwell told him. Then he turned back to Hannah. “They can’t bring much. Tell them that.”

“I think they get it that this is no luxury cruise we’re offering.”

“They should pack only what they can carry themselves. We’re going to be moving out at a brisk clip and there’s no such thing as chivalry here. No one’s going to carry their stuff. We’ll be busy enough trying to keep them alive till we get to the LZ.”

“I’ll make sure they understand.”

Ladwell grunted and headed out of the room.

Hannah turned to the woman and girl and switched back to Arabic. “The men will wait in the living room. You should hurry and get dressed now. We have a long walk ahead of us, and we don’t want to be running into anyone.”

“We are walking to London?” Yasmin said.

“No, just into the hills to the west of here. It’s about two kilometers. We’ll be picked up there and flown out. I’m sorry,” Hannah added to Zaynab. “I wish we didn’t have to make you walk, but it was too risky to drive in case of roadblocks.”

“No matter. I am strong,” the old woman said. “We both are. Come, Yasmin, hurry. Here are your things.”

An ornately carved wooden bureau stood between the two narrow beds. Hannah set her flashlight down on top of it, pointing it toward the large oval mirror hanging above to add a dim, red-tinged light for Zaynab and Yasmin to see by. The mirror was gilt-framed and, like the ornate bureau itself, said something about the comfortable and relatively privileged life that this family had once lived. At the same time, the mirror’s silver backing was crackled. This, like the peeling blue paint on the walls and the chipped and broken ceramic tiles on the floor, was mute testimony to years of declining family fortunes. In a country where the average annual income wouldn’t cover an American family’s cable TV service, these people had obviously been among the country’s small, educated elite, part of that group who should have helped this ancient and cultured nation move into the future. Such people, however, were just the type to attract the attention of a paranoid dictator.

Yasmin turned her back modestly as she lifted her faded nightdress over her head. Hannah caught a glimpse of birdlike shoulder blades and a pronounced rib cage, the bones jutting too sharply to indicate anything but malnutrition. This child had lived almost her entire lifetime under the sanctions mounted against Saddam’s regime after the Gulf War of the early nineties. The dictator and his cronies had kept themselves amply fed, clothed and entertained throughout that time, Hannah thought angrily, but Iraq’s children hadn’t been so well provided for. Things could only have gotten worse for poor Yasmin after the death of her parents, despite her grandmother’s best efforts.

“Here,” she murmured to the grandmother, who’d been pulling clothes from the bureau, “let me fold these while you get yourself ready. You won’t be able to take much, I’m afraid.”

“We have little enough.”

The old woman shut the drawer, then turned to a tall armoire. When she opened it, the scent of cedar wafted through the room. Hannah caught a glimpse of a man’s dark suit on a hanger—the dead son’s, no doubt—and of two black abayas, or burqas, draped on hooks at the side of the closet.

Zaynab caught her looking at the black shrouds, and she fingered the fabric. “My mother used to dress in full hijab, but in my lifetime, only peasants and uneducated women still did. I never used to wear one of those—my late husband never demanded it, thankfully. I dressed modestly, always wore a kerchief on my head, but I saw no reason to stumble around half-blind. After they killed my son and his wife, though,” she added bitterly, “it was the only way to go out safely into the streets. Even Saddam’s hooligans and this latest bunch, Salahuddin’s men, will not generally harass a woman in hijab. We are invisible. I made Yasmin cover up, too. Not even a child is safe these days.”

“I didn’t like it. It was hot,” Yasmin said.

“You won’t need it where you’re going,” Hannah told her.

Zaynab pushed the robes aside. “Good.” She withdrew a long gray skirt and flowered blouse from the armoire, then headed back to her bed to get ready.

Hannah busied herself folding the clothing on the bureau—a few pairs of thin socks and underthings, a child’s sweater and T-shirt. Yasmin came over and shyly added her folded nightgown to the pile. Hannah gave her a smile.

The girl had on a white cotton blouse and dark pleated skirt that had seen better days. The blouse was clean, but worn and patched, and a little small for her. The skirt had obviously been let down at least a couple of times, by the look of the fold lines at the hem. Even so, it ended an inch or two above her knee, shorter than girls in this part of the world normally wore. Hannah doubted it was a fashion statement. Yasmin’s outfit looked like a school uniform that had been worn long past its serviceable time, after being subjected to all the abuse that children everywhere put their clothes through.

She thought of Gabriel, her son, and the many knees he had taken out of pants, crawling around with his cars when he was little, and later, tumbling off bikes. These days, it was his skateboard that put rips in his clothing and beat down the treads in his sneakers. But Gabe never had to wear pants that had been patched or rehemmed. At eight years old, in fact, his wardrobe cost more than Hannah’s, outfitted as he always was in trendy fashions from the upscale children’s boutiques of L.A.’s Westside and the Beverly Center. Gabe couldn’t care less about style, of course, but it was important to Cal that his son be as much a credit to him as his trophy wife, so Gabe’s stepmother kept him turned out in relentlessly preppy fashion.

“Can I take my pictures?” Yasmin asked, pulling a small, leather-bound album from the bureau’s top drawer. From the way she clutched it in her thin arms, Hannah could only guess at the memories it contained.

“Absolutely,” she said. The girl looked relieved.

Zaynab finished buttoning the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse. Then, she picked up a brush off the bureau and pulled it gently through her granddaughter’s wavy black hair. “We are lucky that Mumtaz sent for us,” she said quietly. “Yasmin hasn’t been able to go to school this past while.”

“You lost your teachers?”

“No, but when Salahuddin took charge, he banned school for girls.” She grimaced. “I’ve known him since he was a boy, you know. I knew his parents. His mother died in childbirth. The father was a brute, and Salahuddin turned out to be a lout just like the old man, drunk and stupid. Then he went to prison and found Allah, they say. Nonsense, I say. Holy warrior—feh! Then he comes back here, calls himself ‘sheikh’ and starts issuing fatwas. I’m surprised he didn’t close the school altogether, because even the littlest boys are smarter than he is.”

“Ouch, Grandmother!” Yasmin protested. “Too hard!”

“Oh, sorry, little one,” Zaynab said, setting aside the brush she’d been wielding like a rake. She kissed the top of the girl’s head. Then, she glanced back at Hannah. “Even before he outlawed school for girls, it wasn’t safe for Yasmin. People! It wasn’t enough that she’d lost her mother and father. At school, the children, even the teachers, some of them…” The old woman shook her head bitterly. “The things they said. The things they did. That’s what thirty years of Saddam has turned my countrymen into—cowering pack dogs who tremble before the leaders, then turn around and bare their fangs at the weak and defenseless. We have become a nation of cowards.”

“Are we ever coming back here?” Yasmin asked Hannah.

Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. That will depend, I guess. I think everyone hopes things will get better here one day.”

The grandmother looked around, as if the finality of what they were about to do had suddenly hit her. “This used to be a beautiful country, you know.”

“I know,” Hannah said.

“I don’t want to die in a foreign land. I want to be here, in my home. I want to be buried near my husband and my son.” She sat down on the edge of the mattress. She looked as though she might be changing her mind.

“The future is for the children,” Hannah said quietly. “For Yasmin here, and for those two grandsons in London you’ve never seen. All we can do is what’s best for them. What’s best for Yasmin now is to get her to a place where she’ll be safe, have enough to eat, go to school and become the young woman her parents would have wanted her to be. That’s the gift you can give her. And Mumtaz, too. Your daughter must be frantic to have you and Yasmin safe with her.”

The old woman’s eyes teared up, but she nodded.

“Do you have a small bag we can put your things in?” Hannah asked.

The old woman’s forehead creased in thought, and then she turned to her granddaughter. “Your old school satchel will hold everything, I think. It’s in the other bedroom. Run and fetch it. It’s under the bed, I think. Or…no, on top of the wardrobe.”

“I’ll help you get it down, Yasmin,” Hannah said, grabbing her rifle and flashlight.

“Ready?” Ladwell asked as they emerged from the bedroom.

“Yup,” Hannah said. “Just getting a bag to put their stuff in and then we can hit the road.”

She followed Yasmin into the bedroom on the other side of the sitting area and reached up to retrieve a blue nylon backpack that was sitting on top of the armoire. The wardrobe stood opposite a double bed covered in a pink chenille bedspread. A ruffled white lampshade topped a pink-striped ginger jar lamp, while a woven jute rug just next to the bed was designed to protect bare feet from the cool, decoratively tiled floor. As in the rest of the house, the impression here was of a middle-class family fallen on hard times. And yet oddly, Hannah thought, this room looked more decorated than the one Yasmin and her grandmother had been using.

By the odd, crumpled look on the child’s face, Hannah guessed that this must have been her parents’ room. She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “All set?”

Yasmin pressed her lips together and nodded, starting for the other room. Hannah was right behind her, but stopped short as the beam of her flashlight fell on something behind the door. “Hold up a second, Yasmin.”

On a chair hidden by the open door sat an expensive-looking hiker’s pack with a North Face embroidered patch on the flap. A bright blue Nalgene hiker’s water bottle hung from a carabiner hooked on one of the pack’s carrying loops, and a tan, multi-pocketed jacket hung on the back of the chair. When Hannah shone her flashlight on it, she spotted an L. L. Bean label inside the collar.

She frowned. “Where did these things come from?”

The girl’s shoulders gave a hesitant shrug. “They’re not ours. We’re just…I don’t know how it got there,” she said, suddenly fearful. “We should go now?”

“Hang on.” Hannah tucked the flashlight under her left arm and patted down the jacket pockets. Encountering resistance, she fumbled until she found a hidden inside pocket which she unzipped, withdrawing the object she’d felt through the fabric. It was a blue passport with a gold eagle and the words United States of America embossed on the cover. She opened it by the light of her flashlight. The young woman’s smiling face on the inside photograph seemed vaguely familiar. When Hannah read the name of the passport holder, she understood why.

“Holy smoke.”

She hung onto the jacket and passport as she bounded out of the room.

“What the hell…?” Ladwell muttered behind her as she flew across the sitting room and into the bedroom on the other side.

“Zaynab,” Hannah said, holding up her discoveries, “how did these get here? And that pack in the other room?”

“I don’t…” The old woman hesitated, as if trying to guess what the right answer might be. It was a common response among people who lived in countries where the wrong answer could mean torture or death.

Hannah amped down her excitement. “You know Amy Fitzgerald,” she said gently, telegraphing the message that there was no wrong answer here.

The old woman nodded. “She was renting the room of my son and his wife. I didn’t like to take money, because really, she is a guest and it was good that she had come here to help the people. But Amy insisted, and it allowed me to buy better food for Yasmin and other things she needed, so in the end, I let her pay me.”

“What the hell is going on?” Ladwell asked coming in behind Hannah. “We need to go, Nicks. This is no time for a bloody gabfest.”

“I found this in the other room,” Hannah said, switching to English. She held up the L.L. Bean jacket and the passport. “You’ll never guess who they belong to. Amy Fitzgerald.”

“And who’s that when she’s at home?”

“Daughter of Patrick Fitzgerald, whose family owns half of Boston or something? Amy Fitzgerald’s a doctor. She was working in-country for the Red Cross/Red Crescent when she was kidnapped a week or two ago. I read about it on the flight over here.”

“And that is significant to me why?”

“Because she’s a hostage, and we’re here, and there’s a million-dollar reward for her return.” Before Ladwell could reply, Hannah turned back to Zaynab and asked in Arabic, “Do you know who took her?”

“Salahuddin’s men. People said there were wounded men in his compound.”

“And they’re holding her at this compound?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Aha.” Hannah turned back to Ladwell and translated. “She says there’s a chance Amy’s at the compound of Sheikh Salahuddin, here in town.”

“I don’t give a toss if she is. It’s not my concern. We’re being paid to get this woman and her granddaughter out safely. Now, get them ready and let’s get the hell on the road.”

“We can’t just walk away and leave, now that we’ve discovered where she is.”

“Allegedly is. She could also be in Syria or upcountry or dead by now.” Ladwell passed a finger across his throat. “Beheaded like those other poor sods.”

Still, Hannah held back. “Sean, listen, this is worthwhile. Think about it. A million-dollar reward. We could radio the chopper to pick us up at the LZ tonight and take the day to check this out. One day, that’s all. I can dress up in one of these burqas in here, scout around and see if I can find out if they’re still holding her in the compound in town. If we could get her out…”

“Not a chance. That’s not what we were sent in to do. There will be no compromising this mission on my watch.”

“Just let’s—”

“No. We’ll report what we learned after we get these civilians safely out, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go. End of discussion. If you want to get paid for your part in this mission, Nicks, you’ll put your ass in gear right now, or I swear to God, I will leave you behind and you’ll get sweet bloody zip. Now, move it!”

Hannah hesitated, but she knew when she was beaten.




CHAPTER

9


Al Zawra, Iraq: Compound of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin

Kenner hung back in the shadows, watching the young American doctor through the window. He had spent most of his life living in the shadows. It was where he felt the most comfortable.

Soft light from a smoky kerosene lamp illuminated the infirmary like an old oil painting of some nineteenth-century battlefield hospital. The room was a classroom of the madrassah, the Koranic school behind the town’s mosque, used for teaching the young to read and understand the holy texts. Now, rows of straw-filled pallets lined one side of the room. The gray metal supply shelves on the opposite wall held bandages, medicines and other equipment removed from the Red Crescent clinic across town.

The half-dozen fedayeen wounded by U.S. forces a few days earlier occupied three of the straw-stuffed mattresses on the floor. Most of them lay still, evidently asleep. They had taken bullets in arms or legs, a relatively minor problem now that the doctor had removed the copper-clad hunks of shrapnel and brought the risk of infection under control with the stolen antibiotics. One of the men had bandaged ribs, cracked against the steering wheel when the Toyota truck he’d been driving had veered into a wall. Time alone would take care of his injuries, but morphine kept him quiet in the meantime.

The injuries of one of the last men were more serious. This man had taken several rounds from an M-16, and the bullets had shattered his right femur into jigsaw puzzle pieces, some of which had been extruding through the skin when his comrades finally managed to get him back to the compound, screaming in pain. That was when the doctor from the nearby Red Crescent clinic had been kidnapped and forced into service.

Amy Fitzgerald was bent over him now, her back to the open window. She had on the same green scrubs, considerably the worse for wear, that she’d been wearing when she was seized from the clinic. Now, however, she also had on a black shawl that covered most of her head and shoulders, concealing her curly blond hair. Salahuddin had been dismayed enough by the surprise of getting himself a female doctor to insist on this exercise in modesty—though not enough to rethink his strategy and release her. That he hadn’t known the newly arrived doctor at the local clinic was a woman didn’t say much for the so-called sheikh’s intelligence apparatus, Kenner thought contemptuously.

The wounded man groaned. Kenner heard the doctor’s low, soothing murmur as she prepared an injection. She held the syringe up to the light and watched as a tiny, shimmering stream shot from the tip. When she inserted the needle into the man’s arm, he stiffened briefly and then his entire body relaxed.

Dr. Fitzgerald capped the needle, then dropped back onto her heels with a sigh. As she did, the kerchief slipped off her hair and her fair curls caught the lamplight’s glow. Watching her patient as his ragged breathing fell into an easier rhythm, she made no attempt to put the head covering back in place.

Finally, she got to her feet with a clanking of the iron shackle and chain that Salahuddin’s men had clamped onto one ankle. Bolted to the floor in the center of the room, the chain was just long enough to allow her to move from patient to patient and to the medical supplies. She clumped awkwardly to the shelves, dragging the chain behind her. Her skin was pale with strain, and dark, puffy circles underscored her eyes. She’d lost some weight, but compared to most Iraqi women, Kenner thought, she was in ridiculously good health, with shining hair, flawless skin and the kind of gleaming white teeth that owed as much to expensive dental care as to nature.

Disposing of the needle in a small box, the doctor replaced the cap on a vial of what was probably liquid morphine and replaced the bottle on the shelf. Then, Dr. Fitzgerald walked over to what had been the teacher’s table, shoved against the wall underneath the blackboard at the front of the room. Leaning wearily back against the table, she covered her face with her hands. She made no sound, but Kenner thought she might be crying.

A better man than he might have been moved by the sight of a lovely young woman, kidnapped, frightened and alone, but for Kenner, she was merely a problem of logistics and politics—a target for domestic and international attention and a poster child for everything that could backfire in this campaign if things weren’t carefully handled. Salahuddin would have to be talked to.

He turned to go, but hesitated as the doctor’s hands dropped away from her face. She peered, frowning, in the direction of the window, almost as if she had sensed that she was being observed. Her shackles wouldn’t reach as far as the window and Kenner knew he couldn’t be seen from where she was, but he dropped back deeper into shadow anyway, backing off stealthily while she stared out into the night, waiting and watching for the next nasty surprise.

She was a very long way from home.



A soft light also shone in the window of Salahuddin’s quarters at the far end of the compound. Insomnia is the trademark of those who would rule the world, Kenner mused. How many plans to conquer were hatched in the dark hours before dawn while innocent souls lay in virtuous sleep?

Salahuddin’s personal bodyguard sat on a chair outside his door, massive arms crossed over a barrel chest. A strapping Tikriti named Bashir, the man had once been part of the security entourage of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s capricious and sadistic older son. One day, in a fit of pique over some perceived slight, Uday had apparently tossed a pot of boiling water in Bashir’s face. Now, puckered and scarred from chin to hairline, the Tikriti’s face resembled nothing so much as ground meat. Still, the man had been lucky to escape alive. It had been a fact of life in Saddam’s Iraq that those who knew the secrets of his inner circle served without question. If they fell into disapproval, they’d better flee fast and far. If not, they died ugly deaths.

Bashir had fled to Afghanistan, where he had landed in the camp of Salahuddin. The self-styled sheikh, preparing to return to take advantage of the growing confusion in his home country, was glad to offer protection in exchange for intelligence on the ruling family’s foibles and security arrangements. At the time, Salahuddin had not yet come out in open opposition to Saddam, but the writing was on the wall. Once, someone that ambitious would have been shot the moment he crossed the border. As the threat of foreign invasion mounted, however, the beleaguered dictator had sought allies wherever he could find them. Salahuddin had returned to Al Zawra and bided his time, consolidating his control on the town as he waited to see which way the wind was blowing in Baghdad. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, he declared himself ruler of this region.

The bodyguard rose to his feet and nodded as Kenner approached. “Aasalaamu aleikum,” he grunted. His grotesque face was scarred through to the deepest dermal layers. Incapable of expression, it was all the more unsettling for being unreadable.

“Wa-aleikum aassalaam,” Kenner replied. “I need to talk to the sheikh.”

The bodyguard’s black eyes, like shards of jet set into quivering meat, glanced at the eastern horizon. The sky had not yet begun to lighten, but it wouldn’t be long before the first gray-blue glimmer would begin to rise above the nearby hills. “He will be getting ready to make wud’u. You should return after the fajr.”

The fajr was the first in the series of five daily prayer times, spaced out from predawn until bedtime. Through repeated prayers in the course of a day, the devout were constantly reminded of God and his blessings and were advised to use the opportunity to seek guidance and forgiveness. Wud’u was the ritual washing that preceded prayers—hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, head, ears and feet brought clean to Allah, cleanliness of the body symbolizing the striving for purity of the soul.

“It cannot wait,” Kenner said. “I have a matter of importance to discuss with him.”

Bashir seemed to scowl, the ripples of his skin creasing deeper as he contemplated this ice-eyed, ghost-haired infidel whom the sheikh had inexplicably admitted to his inner circle. The bodyguard wasn’t fooled by Kenner’s alleged conversion to Islam. Trust in anyone, let alone strangers, had no place in his experience. Suspicion and paranoia were all that had kept him alive thus far.

He raised one massive hand. “Wait here.”

He rapped lightly, then stepped into the sheikh’s quarters and shut the door behind him. After a brief rumble of voices, the door opened again and Bashir stepped out, giving Kenner a grudging flick of the wrist that signaled permission to enter.

Inside, Salahuddin sat cross-legged on thick carpets, wearing a long white robe and crocheted skullcap, a wooden lap desk propped across his knees. He was working by the light of a brass oil lamp that hung by a chain from a pole set into the mosaic tiled floor. He gestured for Kenner to settle opposite him.

Despite a long, wiry beard and bushy eyebrows, his face was deceptively benign, his eyes a gentle, doelike brown. Though he had no family outside of the men who followed him, he looked almost fatherly. On the occasions when Kenner had seen him issue an order condemning some poor sod to be flogged or shot, the sheikh’s expression left the impression that the ruling pained him more than the condemned man. Salahuddin was a political handler’s dream. A man with a face like that could be unstoppable, Kenner knew, having spent a lifetime supporting those whose ambitions meshed with the interests of his own masters.

He had first met Salahuddin in Afghanistan, introduced by none other than Dick Stern, who was at the time working undercover, running anti-Soviet operations with the mujaheddin resistance. Salahuddin had showed up in the country for the first time in early 1989, just a few weeks before the Russians finally pulled out of Afghanistan. A young man of twenty-one who’d bought into the jihadist movement during a stint in prison, Salahuddin seemed disappointed to have missed out on the fun. Unschooled and largely illiterate, then as now, but intensely ambitious nonetheless, he went on from there to training camps in Syria and Yemen. Like Osama bin Laden, he was a follower of the strict Wahhabi strain of Islam, but there was little evidence that bin Laden had ever accepted Salahuddin as an equal or even a protégé in the struggle against the Zionists and western infidels—which played nicely into Kenner’s grand scheme of things. Salahuddin was a man desperate to be taken seriously.

“Aasalaamu aleikum,” Salahuddin said, smiling benignly.

Kenner settled cross-legged on the carpet and inclined his head briefly. “Wa-aleikum aassalaam.”

“You cannot sleep?”

“My duties prevent it. And you?”

“Just so. I was just going to have some tea. Join me?”

“Thank you.”

Salahuddin took a brass pot from a tray at his side and poured out two cups of steaming tea that must have been brought in only moments before. Kenner winced as the sheikh dropped four lumps of sugar into each cup, turning the strong black stuff into syrup that Kenner found almost undrinkable. Many children in the town went without bread, but Salahuddin always had ample food and plenty of black market sugar for his sickly-sweet tea.

“What is it that troubles you, Sheikh?” Kenner asked, glancing at the document spread out on the lap desk. It was a map of central Iraq, he noted.

“The American and British forces are closing in,” Salahuddin said, passing a hand over the map. “Up until now, they have been concentrating on the major cities, but now that the larger centers are more or less secured, they are expanding their search for Saddam. I think the encounter with the American forces last week was only the first shot. I fear there will be others.”

“They will not attack if they are sure of your cooperation.”

“So you say. And yet, they shot my men.”

“They could not have known they were your men, Sheikh. And the situation is confused at the moment. The Americans are still trying to sort out who to trust. That’s why you should let me speak to them for you.”

“I think rather it is I who must decide if they can be trusted,” Salahuddin replied. “So far, I am not confident. And now, I hear, they have put a reward on my head because I brought the doctor in to care for the men they wounded.”

Kenner sat back, confused for a moment until he realized what reward Salahuddin meant. “No, Sheikh, not on your head. The reward is for the safe return of the woman. And it is her family, not the American government that has sponsored it. Her father is a powerful and wealthy man. It may have been a mistake to take her.”

“I did not know when I sent for a doctor that it would turn out to be an American woman. There had been an Iraqi doctor at the clinic before.”

“Yes, sir, but he was a cousin of Saddam, as you know. He fled after Uday and Qusay were killed, fearing that the Americans would kill every Hussein they could get their hands on. The American girl arrived only a few days before your men took her.”

“Nevertheless, I must have a doctor for my men and there is no other. Besides, if the Americans know that I hold a member of one of their wealthy families, they will think twice about sending their bombers and helicopter gun ships against me. And the jihadist forces, meanwhile, will know that Sheikh Salahuddin is a serious force to be reckoned with. They are scattered and disorganized. They need leadership. As more and more of them hear of our growing strength here, they will flock to our side.”

Kenner sipped his tea and made a show of appearing to ponder the other man’s words. “P. T. Barnum,” he murmured.

The sheikh frowned. “What?”

“Barnum. He was an American showman of the nineteenth century. He believed that all publicity was good publicity.”

Salahuddin raised his cup and nodded. “This Barnum was wise.”

“My concern, Sheikh, is that you may not be safe as long as you hold her here. As I say, her father is an influential man. As long as she is in your command compound, someone may come looking for her. She is not worth the trouble.”

Salahuddin sat silent for a bit, stroking his beard. “That may be,” he said finally, “but unless you can find another doctor for me, she must stay.”

Kenner planted his hands on his knees, frowning. “I understand your concern for your men. It is a credit to your humanity and your leadership. However, keeping the infirmary here makes your forces a target and puts you yourself at unacceptable risk.”

Salahuddin shrugged. “I will survive, inshallah. Or not. I do not fear martyrdom.”

“I know that. I might suggest, however, that you not seek it before your time. You are of more use to your people and to Allah alive than dead.” He sighed. “At least let me move the infirmary and the doctor away from the center of operations, to the farm we commandeered outside of town. In that way, if the Americans do come looking for her, you and your fedayeen are not at risk of getting caught in the crossfire.”

And, Kenner thought, the better I can control the situation, deciding whether and when it might suit my purposes to have Amy Fitzgerald show up dead rather than alive.

The sheikh stroked his beard. “Perhaps,” he said. “Let me think on it.” Then he glanced out the window. “And now, my son, it is time to make wud’u and offer up our prayers. Guidance will come to those who believe.”

Kenner bowed his head. “Inshallah.”




CHAPTER

10


In the hills west of Al Zawra, in the heart of Iraq’s Sunni Triangle

Hannah liked to think it wasn’t just the million-dollar reward that motivated her “damn stupidity,” as Sean Ladwell put it. After all, she and Amy Fitzgerald were contemporaries—could have been girlfriends, if Hannah weren’t the Chicago-raised child of working-class immigrants and Amy the private-school offspring of Boston money and power.

Yeah, right. Girlfriends. That could’ve happened….

Still, while examining the passport she’d found back at the house in Al Zawra, Hannah had noted that the doctor was twenty-seven, just a few months younger than herself. For all the privileges Amy must have had growing up, she could have turned out to be a ditzy, club-hopping clotheshorse. Instead, according to the profile Hannah had read in the newspapers, she’d studied hard, gotten a medical degree, worked in a tough inner-city E.R., and then made her way to Iraq to try to help out here.

Studying the smiling face and blond, curly hair of the young woman in the passport picture, Hannah had no doubt this woman held the same hopes for a long and happy future that she herself did. But just like Hannah’s, Amy’s dreams had been disrupted by malicious forces beyond her control. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. Hannah had spent enough time regretting the nasty surprises in her own life to feel sympathy at any time circumstances played cavalier games with someone’s life.

Before the Brandywine team left the house in Al Zawra to head back to the rendezvous with the chopper, Hannah zipped Amy’s passport into a pocket of her cargo pants. Even if Ladwell wouldn’t buy into a rescue mission, they could at least alert American authorities when they got back to Baghdad’s Green Zone that they’d picked up the kidnapped doctor’s trail and had a notion where she was being held. Of course, that was no guarantee that a rescue mission would be mounted anytime soon. With every day, the risk grew that Amy’s captors would move her—or worse. On the other hand, once they got back to Baghdad, Hannah thought, maybe she could convince someone of the wisdom of putting together a private rescue operation—one in which she herself could play a lead role.

Now, as the Brandywine team crouched in the rocks and scrub surrounding the LZ with Zaynab and her granddaughter, listening to the rotor thrum of the returning helicopter, Hannah felt the passport weighing on her and her frustration mounted. It wasn’t all about sisterhood, she had to admit. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that this was as doable right now as it was ever going to be. If Amy was still in Al Zawra, then it might just be possible to spring her, and she herself was the ideal candidate for the job. No one would expect a woman to try anything, so the element of surprise would be on her side. And there was even transport back at the house where they’d found Zaynab and her granddaughter. Looking through the window of a covered shed at the back of the house, Hannah had spotted an old Toyota pickup truck. It had been Yasmin’s father’s, Zaynab had said. Someone had driven it back to the house the day after he was killed. The keys, presumably, were still in the truck or somewhere in the house. Zaynab would be able to tell her where.

It was about fifty miles from Al Zawra to Baghdad and the comparative safety of the Green Zone, Hannah calculated. An hour’s drive. Hazardous, maybe, but she was trained in survival and evasion tactics. She knew the language and the culture. Maybe all her training and experience had been leading up to this very mission. She could do it. There might be no one else who was as uniquely suited as she was to pull it off.

A million bucks. She could do a lot with that kind of money.

In the first place, she could finally afford to hire a decent lawyer to help get her son back. Her ex-husband and his legal buddies had run circles around her bargain basement family law guy during the custody hearings when she’d lost Gabe to Cal and Christie. And if—no, when—Hannah went back to court to challenge their current arrangements, she had no doubt that Cal would try to steamroller right over her again. Unless, that is, she had legal guns to match his.

Here, as in many other areas of life, it was a classic case of those who have, get more, while the little guy just keeps falling into deeper and deeper holes. She knew for a fact that colleagues who worked high profile divorce and family law cases had provided their services mostly free of charge to her ex—just lawyer buddies, trading favors. In exchange, as a celebrity defense attorney with a rising profile and several professional sports figures and above-the-title movie stars in his client roster, Cal had Grammy and Academy Award ticket she could trade off, as well as impossible-to-get ringside, rink-side and courtside seats at sporting events. He also had an entrée to the hottest clubs and parties in L.A., all provided by his growing stable of rich clients and their handlers. Hannah would need big bucks to level that playing field.

And that wasn’t all. Even the best legal team wouldn’t do her much good if she couldn’t provide a stable home for Gabe, with opportunities at least somewhat comparable to what Cal and Christie could give him. That meant she had to have enough money to live on for the next five years at least—and ideally, until Gabe finished high school. Living in a tiny condo in Silver Lake, spending nothing on herself and banking most of her security work earnings, she’d started to build up a nice little nest egg. But even with the recent rise in overseas contract security work, the best she could hope to earn in a year was about $250,000, and that was taxable unless she spent at least two hundred days out of the country, which didn’t leave much time for being with Gabe.




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