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“Thank you, Mitch. But it’s impossible. My brothers are good men, but they’re not like you. They’re not strong enough to protect me.”
“They’d want the chance to try.”
“Of course. But they would fail and I would be the cause of their deaths. For what? To delay my fate another week? No. Without me, they have a chance. With me, they’re dead men.”
Rapp was surprised when Laleh pulled back the blankets covering her. She was still wearing only the panties and bra he’d insisted on so as not to raise the suspicions of Mustafa and his men.
“Now come back to bed.”
• • •
The chime was barely audible, but still caused Rapp to jerk awake. It was the first electronic sound he could remember hearing in days. He would have assumed it was just a dream if it weren’t for the elated shouts filtering in from the street.
Rapp eased himself out of bed, careful not to wake Laleh, and walked naked into the outer room. The torn blackout shade was on the floor, so he skirted the wall and slipped up alongside the cracked glass. Below, he saw two men talking excitedly. They seemed consumed with something the one on the right had cupped in his hands.
Eric Jesem’s cell phone was still charging in the window and Rapp picked it up. The screen showed three bars and a weak data signal.
Irene Kennedy making it rain. He would love to have been a fly on the wall when she asked Jimmy Templeton to pull the plug on his beloved jamming program.
Rapp punched in the U.S. country code and dialed Kennedy’s private number. He didn’t really expect it to go through and was surprised when an echoing ring started.
“Hello?”
“Irene! Can you hear me?”
The delay was infuriating, but she finally responded. “Mitch. Thank God. Where are you?”
“Al-Shirqat.”
“Al— Suspected . . . region.”
“Irene! This connection sucks. We may not have much time. What have you been able to figure out?”
When she came back on, the signal had stabilized a bit. “Not much, Mitch. We’ve run scenarios for the potential use of the fissile material and I’ve prioritized them in order of probability. But we’re working more with hunches than data.”
“Okay, listen. Here’s what I can tell you. This thing’s being run from here by one of Saddam’s former Generals. Ali Mustafa. The six compromised warheads we know about are all they have. And when I said that the CIA thought ISIS was building nukes to smuggle into the U.S., Mustafa made it clear that wasn’t the plan.”
“What is the plan?”
“I don’t know, but it’s starting tonight and it sounds like it’s about Saudi Arabia.”
“Have you seen the fissile material? We could bring teams in.”
“No. And my gut says it isn’t here.”
“Mine, too. If it’s coming from Pakistan for use in Saudi Arabia, why move it into Iraq? More likely they’d transport it up the Gulf.”
“I’ve gotten myself in on the operation, Irene. I’m on the backup team and I leave sometime tonight.”
“Understood. Everything you’ve told me confirms my suspicions. I don’t think we’re looking at nuclear explosions, Mitch.”
Rapp nodded in silent agreement. If the goal was to take out Saudi Arabia, six nukes was overkill.
“The evidence that Maxim Krupin is involved keeps getting stronger,” she continued. “If we add the intelligence you’ve managed to gather, I think the most likely scenario is a dirty bomb attack.”
“So Riyadh, Jeddah, and Medina. Are you thinking they’d hit Mecca?”
“Not the cities, Mitch. The oil fields. It would destabilize Saudi Arabia to the point that they’d become vulnerable to ISIS. And after that—”