He scanned a couple more reports, thinking about his conversation moments ago on deck. He called up a photograph of Libya’s Justice Minister, and cringed. He was an ugly man, with a bulbous, misshapen nose, narrow eyes, and a skin condition of some sort that made his face appear pebbled.
On top of that, he’d been injured. Half his lower jaw was missing, and the grafts to cover the hole were taut, shiny cicatrices. The official bio said the wound came from the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986, but a little further digging in a CIA database Cabrillo still had access to told him that the Minister had been beaten to within an inch of his life by a cuckolded husband.
Cabrillo smirked. He compared this information to his impression of the ousted Foreign Minister. Now, that guy was a class act, he thought. He had lost his job, been imprisoned and forced to do hard labor, and yet wouldn’t accuse Ghami of orchestrating the whole thing. He seemed more upset that Ghami was living in his house.
“Must be a hell of a place,” Juan muttered to himself.
It took him a few minutes searching the Internet to find an article about Ghami’s home that listed an address. He then found the GPS coordinates off a mapping site and keyed them into Google Earth. As the computer zoomed in on the precise location, pixels blurred for a moment. When they resolved, Cabrillo leapt from his chair so fast he startled the rest of the op center crew.
He mashed the intercom on his chair’s arm. “Max, get up here now. We’ve got trouble.”
Cabrillo looked again at the satellite image. The house sat alone in the desert, miles from any other building, and was ringed with a perimeter wall. The driveway ran up to the home before looping back on itself under a cantilevered porte cochere. There was a glass-enclosed solarium attached to one side, and the back lawns were a veritable maze of box hedges. On the roof was a satellite-uplink antenna.
He’d seen this exact layout for the first time as a mock-up less than forty-eight hours earlier.
He understood everything at that moment. The attack was planned for tonight. Al-Jama wanted to do it before the conference to show symbolically that peace never stood a chance. Knowing the terrorist mastermind’s sense of the dramatic and penchant for beheadings, he was pretty sure what would start the attack. He envisioned Fiona Katamora’s graceful neck bent and a man standing over her with a sword.
When he closed his eyes, the sword came down in a shining blur.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE EXECUTION EXAMINED THE ROOM CRITICALLY. HE was alone for now, but there was plenty of space for witnesses, though they had been forced to use a lottery system to choose the lucky ones. The black backdrop, a piece of thick cloth hung from a pipe, was in place. The camera sat on its tripod and had already been tested. The uplink worked perfectly. There was thick plastic sheeting on the floor to make cleanup afterward a bit easier.
He recalled the first time he’d used a sword to decapitate a man. His victim’s heart had been racing and his blood pressure dangerously high, so when the head came free it was like a fountain. So much blood erupted from the stump that they opted to abandon the safe house in Baghdad they had used rather than clean the mess.
Tonight would be his eleventh, and for him the most satisfying. He’d never killed a woman before—at least, not with a sword. Since taking up arms he’d killed dozens of women in bombings from Indonesia to Morocco. And in firefights with Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, stray rounds had certainly hit others.
He gave them little thought. Al-Jama had issued orders and he had carried them out. There was no more weight on his conscience than had he been told to shake his victims’ hands rather than blow them up.
Of course the irony, and open secret within the organization, was that he wasn’t a practicing Muslim. He’d been born into the faith, but his parents hadn’t been devout followers so he’d visited mosques only on holy days. He’d only come to Al-Jama after a hitch with the French Foreign Legion had given him a taste for combat that he had yet to slake. He fought and killed and maimed for himself, not for some insane religious conviction that slaughter was somehow Allah’s will.
He didn’t try to understand the motivations of those who fought with him so long as they followed orders. He did admit, however, that the fear of missing out on Paradise kept the fighters motivated to a degree only the best-trained armies could achieve. And the ability to talk people into blowing themselves up was a weapon unlike any other in the arsenals of the world. It went so against the West’s precepts for the preservation of life that the effects rippled from the blast’s epicenter to the very hearts of any who learned of it.
A subaltern knocked softly at the doorframe behind him. “Does everything meet your needs, Mansour?”
“Yes,” he said absently. “This will be fine.”
“When should we get the American whore?”
“Not until just before her execution. It’s been my experience that they are most terrified in those first moments when they realize their death is upon them.”
“As you wish. If you need anything further, I am just outside.”
The executioner didn’t bother to reply, and the man stepped out of view again.
He doubted there would be any pleas for mercy from the woman. He’d observed her only briefly but had a strong sense of her defiance. He actually preferred it that way. The men loved the crying and wailing, but he found it . . . bothersome. Yes, that was the word, bothersome. Better to accept fate, he believed, than to demean yourself in worthless begging. He wondered if they actually believed carrying on would stop their execution. By the time they met him, their death was an inevitability, and pleading was as useless as trying to stave off an avalanche by raising your arms protectively.
No, the woman would not beg.
“WATCH THE RIGHT FLANK,” Linda said, and fired a controlled burst over the Saqr’s rail. “They’re trying to get around us by crawling along the rubble wall.”
The muzzle flash drew counterfire from four different points.
Eric had been ready for it, crouched twenty feet farther along the deck. He raked the spot where one of the terrorists was hiding, but in the cavern’s absolute darkness he had no idea if he’d hit anything.
In the first furious seconds of the gunfight, both sides scrambled to organize themselves after the surprise encounter. Linda quickly ordered her people onto the Saqr, which offered the best cover on short notice, while the terrorist leader shouted at his men to conserve ammunition and prepare for an all-out assault.
They came swiftly, flicking their flashlights on and off like lightning bugs in order to see the terrain but not overly expose themselves. The Corporation team concentrated their fire on the men with the lights before realizing their mistake. The men carrying torches only turned them on when they were behind cover. The beams were meant for others scouting ahead.