stared at my kit, wondering if I was making a huge mistake. Knuckles was good. He was ready. I had been training him to take over after this tour anyway. I truly believed he could do it, but I also knew that the transition was six months early, and while he had the raw talent, he hadn’t been a team leader inside the Taskforce. An Omega operation wasn’t the time for him to figure out what that meant. The risks were too great. On top of that, the team — any team — develops its own personality, driven by the team leader. The members weren’t plug and play. We were clicking because of my leadership style. I’m not saying it was perfect, or even the best, but that was irrelevant. They were used to me, and now wasn’t the time to switch horses. It was one more birthday, but after this, I would be at them all.
9
I heard my earpiece crackle, then the words I was waiting for: “Pike, Hedgehog is on the move. Should be passing you in about one minute.”
I was sitting on a patio just off Rustaveli Street in downtown Tbilisi, sipping my coffee like the seven other patrons around me. I had to physically fight to suppress a smile. I absolutely loved this work and would have done it for free. I looked at my watch, realizing with a pang of guilt that today was Angie’s birthday. I consoled myself that I had made the right call. Kurt had been wrong. Azzam was going down tonight or not at all. If I had stayed behind, the team would have been forced to either conduct the operation without its full complement of people, including their team leader, or miss the opportunity altogether. Given the stakes, they might have attempted it, but odds were they would have decided to pass, wasting a year’s worth of work.
“Roger. Break — break. Knuckles, this is Pike. Hedgehog’s headed home. You have execute authority.”
“Roger all. About time.”
Muslim names are always long, drawn-out, impossible-to-say things. Being the Ugly Americans, we usually gave a nickname to whoever we were tracking just to clean things up. Sometimes it’s simply his initials, as in UBL for Usama bin Laden, or AMZ for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Other times, it’s because the guy reminds us of someone. We had taken to calling Azzam the “Hedgehog” due to his remarkable resemblance to the porn star Ron Jeremy.
Azzam was currently conducting a complicated Internet dance of challenge and counterchallenge with the Chechen who was providing the radiological material to ensure that each was who he said he was, and that neither was the enemy. The Chechen himself had entered Georgia through the contested Pankisi Gorge, with onward travel into Tbilisi. Intelligence indicators showed they were planning on conducting the transaction no earlier than a week from now, which ordinarily would have given me plenty of time to plan a detailed operation.
Unfortunately, the Georgian interior police, with the help of a few choice pieces of intelligence from the United States, were set to arrest the Chechen tonight. This forced us to take down Azzam as well, as he would flee once he got word that the Chechen had been captured. You’d think we could just tell the Georgians to hold off, but the truth was that, while Georgia was a staunch ally of the United States, my team was inside the country without their knowledge. The Georgians had no idea about Azzam, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. Let them have the Chechen. Azzam would lead to much bigger fish.
The patio I was on sat at an intersection, giving me a commanding view down three of the four streets in front of it. Azzam should be walking toward my cafe, moving straight at me. It was still fairly early in the night, but the streets were already starting to pick up with partygoers hitting the bars and nightlife.
A rowdy group exited the Irish pub down the block, obviously already drunk. As soon as they cleared the sidewalk and crossed the street, I saw Azzam. I looked away. Call me superstitious, but from past experience, I’m positive that staring at someone somehow causes them to know you’re there.
“Knuckles. I’ve got him. He’s on schedule. No deviation.”
“Roger.”
Over the past four days we had developed a pattern of life on Azzam, and determined that the best time to snatch him was after his dinner meal, before he got back to his hotel. Each night, Azzam had eaten in the same restaurant, then walked the half mile back to the small, local inn he had found. He stayed on main thoroughfares through most of his route but took one shortcut down a narrow, one-lane road in order to avoid walking the extra four hundred meters the main road would have forced on him. This was where we intended to take him down.
I continued to sip my coffee like all the folks around me, without staring at the pedestrians to my front. I caught a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. Looking back to Rustaveli Street, the main four-lane thoroughfare that ran through Tbilisi, I saw a police car pull up on the opposite side, lights flashing.
10
It had been two days since the phone call with the robotic-sounding man telling Heather that Pike would be unavailable to come home this weekend. He had been unfailingly polite, but it had done nothing to blunt the hurt she felt. She hadn’t had the courage to tell Angie her father wouldn’t be here for her birthday. But then Angie had yet to ask. In truth, she would probably take it better than Heather herself.
It was already past one, and she still hadn’t picked up Angie’s birthday cake at the supermarket. Before she did, though, she needed to go to Tim’s to pick up the pinata. She had asked him to help with the birthday party when she found out Pike wouldn’t be home, and he’d readily agreed. She had an ulterior motive for the favor: She intended to convince Tim to put some pressure on Pike to retire. Or at least find a less dangerous job. She wasn’t even sure what it was that Pike did, but it had to be worse than the SMU, and that was bad enough. While not best friends, Pike and Tim got along well, and Tim was the only one with any experiences like Pike’s. The only one Pike would listen to. In her heart, she secretly hoped Tim would offer him a job at his consulting company.
She hadn’t told Angie about the pinata, but like children everywhere, Angie had picked up that there were secrets afoot and was sitting expectantly in the backseat. She rounded the corner to Tim’s house and parked on the street. She recognized Tim’s Blazer in the driveway, but not the two unfamiliar sedans behind it.
Angie asked, “Whose cars are those?”
Heather had no idea, and hoped she wasn’t interrupting a meeting Tim had scheduled.
“I don’t know. Probably salespeople.”
Before Heather could stop her, Angie jumped out, racing to the back door, shouting, “Maybe it’s Daddy!’
“Angie! Wait!”
Heather felt a pang of guilt. In keeping the pinata secret she had hoped to lesson the blow of her father’s absence. Now it appeared she had only exacerbated it, as Angie had surmised her father was the surprise. Rehearsing what she would say as she walked up the driveway, she saw that the back door was open, with shards of glass on the ground. She heard Angie shriek and felt adrenaline fire into her body.
Heather’s eyes dilated and her muscles became engorged with blood in a fight-or-flight response. She chose to fight, running into the kitchen through the back door. She saw a large man holding Angie by the hair twenty feet away.
Without conscious thought, Heather snatched a paring knife from a block on the counter and charged the man with a primal scream. She registered him flinging Angie away like a rag doll as he prepared to defend himself. Before she reached him she was knocked to the ground from behind, disarmed, and jerked to her feet. She noticed blood all over the room. Great washes of it, as if someone had slopped a bucket haphazardly about. Looking for the source, she saw Tim lying on the floor, wicked gashes all over his body, his intestines slopping out from a hole in his stomach. She felt faint, unable to assimilate the slaughter.
The man holding her said, “What the fuck are we going to do now?”
“Well, we can’t take them with us.”
