Congressman Ellis heard nothing from the aide until he returned to the hotel. The man entered his room with a smile, saying, “Not your constituents. No worries.”
“Were there any Americans?”
“Yes. Four on the tour, one dead, one in a hospital and expected to die.”
“Then wipe that fucking smile off of your face.”
The aide’s glee disappeared.
“How sure are you of the information?”
Now all business, the aide said, “One hundred percent. The embassy had the manifest of everyone who paid for the tour, and has already confirmed the information about the Americans.”
He handed a sheet of paper to the congressman. “The deceased have a line through their name. The wounded have an asterisk. The Americans are fourth from the bottom.”
Ellis looked at the list and felt his bile rise. There were annotations next to every name but two. Nephilim was one of them.
This early in the morning, the Kentucky Fried Chicken was closed, forcing Rafik to hide in an alley with a view of the coffee shop. He had originally planned on giving the details of his operation to the Muslim Brotherhood contact no earlier than the day the aircraft arrived, but with Noordin dead, he would need to go to Cairo himself, forcing him to give out the information early. There was a risk the man would leak the information, but Rafik couldn’t see a way around it.
At precisely nine, he watched the contact go through his ritual of signals, this time correctly. He approached and took a seat. The first words out of the contact’s mouth brought him up short.
“The plane’s on the way. It will be here tomorrow night.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes. They called and asked for more than three hours. They’ll be on the ground for the night, but will leave before dawn.”
“Did you get the uniforms?”
“Yes. Five like you asked. And the side gate is my post. That’s where you’ll enter. Nobody else will be there.”
“I’ll also need a vehicle to get to the plane.”
The contact looked alarmed. “You never said that. Nobody is allowed to approach the plane. It’s going to land and stay out on the runway. It’s not coming into the terminal.”
“I never said it because I didn’t want to give you any aspect of my plan. You’ve already shown me your accident-prone skills. Can you do it?”
The man nervously glanced left and right, refusing to meet Rafik’s eyes. “I’m just letting you in. I don’t want to be a part of your plan.”
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted. I asked if you could do it. You are
The man said nothing. Rafik leaned forward, forcing the contact to meet his eyes. “Can you do it?”
The contact hesitated, then nodded. Rafik smiled. “Can you remember my instructions without writing them down?”
The contact nodded again. Rafik gave him the bare minimum of information he would need to accomplish the mission.
Getting back to his hotel, he accessed his Skype account and called the one man on earth he trusted. When his face appeared on the screen, Rafik felt a calm settle over him. Kamil had bled with him in Algeria and was the touchstone he needed to keep going.
Rafik said, “Peace be upon the prophet. It’s time.”
“Thanks be to Allah,” Kamil replied. “The men are ready.”
“Did you get the weapons?”
“Yes. You were right. Al-Fayoum was the perfect place to wait. We had no trouble finding weapons.”
An old oasis a couple hours southwest of Cairo, al-Fayoum had some of the strictest security restrictions in all of Egypt. In 1997 a group of terrorists had massacred more than sixty foreign tourists at the Luxor archeological site. Most of the terrorists had come from al-Fayoum, and the town itself suffered the repercussions. It was a counterintuitive choice to place his trusted friend and the team in the heavily patrolled area, but Rafik didn’t worry about the security. Instead, he had leveraged the reason the security was there in the first place; the town was ripe with sympathizers.
Rafik said, “There’s been a complication, old friend. I’m afraid I must put more on your shoulders than I wanted. In addition to your requirements in Europe.”
23
Knuckles looked like a caricature of someone injured. He was covered in bandages from his head to his waist, with irregular red polka dots splotching through where the wounds were still seeping, like oil spots trying to join together. In the twenty-four hours he had been in the hospital, he hadn’t gotten appreciably better. But he hadn’t gotten any worse, either. The doctors kept marveling that he was alive at all, which was something I didn’t need to hear.
The hospital in Alexandria turned out to be pretty damn good, as far as foreign hospitals go. It was very clean and modern, and handled the trauma of the terrorist attack efficiently. We had been given the presidential suite because they’d run out of room, which was small compensation. It gave Knuckles an anteroom he wouldn’t use with a TV he couldn’t watch.
I had been conducting a vigil since we’d arrived, not for any emotional reasons, but because I was petrified the staff here would miss something if an alarm went off on one of the plethora of machines hooked to him. So far, we’d been okay.
Jennifer had stayed as well. I could tell she wasn’t sure what to do, and was probably traumatized by the carnage she had witnessed. I knew I was being an asshole by letting her flounder, but I didn’t have the energy to help her cope. It was all I could do to deal with my own emotions. Seeing Knuckles’ torn body was eating into me like acid. I felt a darkness coming back.
After the murder of my family, I had lived in an abyss, full of rage and hatred. The senselessness of their deaths had consumed me, bringing on a blackness that wanted to take over my soul. Those days were now a distant memory. I had tricked myself into believing they weren’t even that, but just a bad dream that had no substance. The terrorist strike that had ripped my friends apart had also awakened something, a small sliver on the edge of my consciousness asking to grow. Reminding me that my past was all too real.
Had my friends been killed or injured on an operation, in combat, I would have been able to handle it differently. I had had many friends die that way, and it was something I inherently understood as the price of my job. This was different. This was just as senseless as my family’s death. A random killing of people I cared deeply about, and I could feel the beast wanting back out. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hold it back.
“Pike,” Jennifer said, “you should eat. You haven’t taken a break since we got here. Let’s go take a walk.”
I thought about it and decided she was right. I needed to get out of here.
“Yeah. Okay. I want to stop by the nurses’ station, though, let ’em know we’re leaving.”
We exited the hospital onto a tight, busy street, the buildings crammed together without any space and the sunlight blinding me. Looking around, all I saw was a small industrial area with metal workers shaping fenders on cars, and lathes shooting out sparks into the alleys.
