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“Yes, sir. But on a much more disruptive scale.”
“What do we do, Irene? Have you created some kind of action plan?”
“Mitch is working on tracking the material.”
“Working on it how?”
“He’s posing as an American ISIS recruit.”
“Has he found anything?”
“We aren’t certain.”
“What do you mean, you’re not certain?”
“We don’t actually know where he is at this moment. We assume in ISIS-controlled Iraq, but we haven’t been able to verify that.”
“Are you certain he’s even alive?”
She picked up the tea mug and let the ceramic warm her hands. “Certain? No, sir. But we have every reason to believe he is.”
“Why?”
“Because he always has been before.”
CHAPTER 37
AL-SHIRQAT
IRAQ
RAPP tried to curl into a more comfortable position on the worn mattress, but finally had to admit that there was no hope. Between the burns on his back and the damage Maslick had done, he’d probably be better off trying to sleep standing up.
Not that it was just the pain keeping him awake. It was also thoughts of Pakistan and his failure there. That fissile material was in the wild because he’d allowed himself to lose focus and be lured to South Africa. The question now was what he was going to do about it.
Options were limited. The most obvious was to convince the Iraqi general to put him back on his team. U
nfortunately, that was easier said than done. Rapp would have to prove his physical abilities in front of witnesses, and the only way he could think to do that was to find the biggest, meanest son of a bitch in town and pick a fight with him.
As plans went, though, it was complete crap. For all he knew, Eric Jesem couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Winning could easily blow his cover and end with him enjoying a starring role in the next ISIS execution video. A lot of risk for not much hope of reward.
His second option was to figure out a way to contact Kennedy. Maybe she had some intel that could help him. Hell, maybe he could just bring down a wrath-of-God bombing raid on the city and flatten everything taller than a curb. The problems with that plan were even worse. With the U.S. military jamming, there was no way to get a line out and he had no way of knowing if the fissile material was even within a thousand miles of Al-Shirqat.
In the other room, Laleh murmured something in her sleep. He’d left her on the floor near the kitchen with a wool blanket and a full stomach. She’d answered a few of his questions but turned out to be the master of the reluctant one-word response.
Building trust between them could turn out to be harder than securing the missing fissile material. Just because she hated ISIS didn’t necessarily mean that she had any love for Uncle Sam. It was entirely possible that she despised the idea of America even more than the reality of the men tearing her world apart. He’d seen it a hundred times before.
A nearly inaudible click sounded in the front room and Rapp raised his head from Jesem’s filthy pillow. The rhythm of the girl’s breathing continued, just loud enough to be heard over the howl of the wind outside. He was starting to settle back in when the creak of ancient wood reached him.
Rapp rolled out of bed and padded silently to the bedroom’s empty doorway. A sliver of desert moonlight gleamed around the old towel hanging over the window, making it possible to see the hazy outline of Laleh on the floor but not much else.
The next sound was hard to mistake—the dull scrape of the front door sliding against an uneven floor. He moved quickly across the room, keeping to the edges where the floorboards had the most support, finally halting next to the apartment’s only entrance.
The door moved slowly inward, finally stopping when the gap was large enough for a person to squeeze through. Rapp remained motionless as a man with an AK-47 entered. A moment later, a second man appeared and carefully pushed the door closed. Now that they were inside, Rapp expected them to spread out—one going for the bedroom while the other cleared the kitchen and bathroom. That didn’t happen.
He watched with momentary confusion as the two men just stood there, crouched and frozen. After a couple seconds, he figured it out. They’d used too much light getting up the stairs and were now waiting for their vision to adjust.
That brought Rapp to an obvious question: What were a couple of amateurs doing creeping around Eric Jesem’s living room at three in the morning?