“You think they could be keeping Kurland here? Seems almost too quiet.”
Wells understood what Gaffan meant. The neighborhood was poor but not chaotic. Wells guessed most of these houses were filled with the migrant laborers who did the menial jobs the Saudis wouldn’t. In times of crisis, they would buckle down and hope to be ignored. Armed men would stand out. Apparently, the police were making a similar calculation and focusing their attention on neighborhoods where jihadis had a stronger presence.
Six blocks on, Aziz Street dead-ended at an electrical substation. Wells made a U-turn, pulled over beside a house better lit than its neighbors, knocked heavily on the front gate. A man stepped out. He was too dark to be Saudi. Indian, probably.
“I’m looking for number thirty-eight Aziz.”
“This is number eighty-one. Thirty-eight is that way”—the man pointed toward downtown. “And on the other side. Near the mosque.”
The location made sense. The mosque would draw traffic, helping to hide the jihadis’ coming and going. “Is the mosque number forty-two?”
“No, maybe thirty-two, thirty-four.”
“Do you go there?”
The man was no longer interested in the conversation. He backed away with slow, careful steps. “Good luck, mister.”
WELLS ROLLED TOWARD THE mosque’s narrow minaret. Four buildings down from the mosque, a twentysomething man sat on the flat roof of a two-story house, his legs dangling over the front. He could have been trying to cool off. But he didn’t seem relaxed. He shifted his attention up and down, from the helicopters to the Jeep and back. To the northwest, the center of the city, a shot clipped the night, a big high-caliber round. Then another. The kid popped up, looked toward the downtown office buildings.
Wells drove without slowing, past the house, the mosque, and the storefronts. Three blocks on, the street hooked right, then merged into a grimy avenue. “You think it’s the one with the guy on the roof?” Gaffan said.
“I think we need to find out.” Wells swung onto the avenue, past a long, low warehouse, and then turned right and right again, circling the warehouse. Aziz Street was three blocks down.
A police helicopter picked them up again. Wells slowed. It slowed, too. It was barely two hundred feet up, its rotor wash rattling the Jeep’s windshield. Wells didn’t see how they could get close to the house with the helicopter on them.
Then he had an idea. He drove past the mosque, didn’t turn onto Aziz. Halfway down the next block, he pulled over. The chopper stayed on them.
“I’m getting out. I’ll walk to the next corner, go left. You loop past the warehouse again, come back, park a block past the house on Aziz. Don’t rush it. Let the chopper stay with you. If he follows me instead, I’ll keep walking this way. In that case, make the loop, come back, pick me up a couple blocks down.”
“You want to use the copter to distract the kid?”
“I’ll go in the back of the house. He’ll be focusing it. Give me a couple minutes, let the chopper get bored and peel off, then come in the front.”
“What if it doesn’t get bored?”
“Come in the front anyway. Worst case, we’ll go out the back, ditch the Jeep.”
“Worst case, they close off the neighborhood and trap us.”
“They’re spread thin. They’re running roadblocks all over the city and they have no reason to focus on us in particular.”
Gaffan shrugged, conceding the point. “You gonna take your rifle?” They’d stowed their vests and M-16s in the spare tire compartment but kept their Glocks under their seats.
“No.” Wells reached under his seat for his pistol and silencer, slipped them in a white plastic bag imprinted with a cartoon chicken and the logo of Al Baik, a chain of popular fast-food restaurants in Jeddah. “Nobody ever thinks the guy holding a bag of chicken is a threat.”
Wells stepped onto the street. The spotlight fell on him with almost physical force. Gaffan shifted into the driver’s seat, and the Jeep rolled off. Wells shuffled along the curb, as if he had nowhere to be—
As the helicopter’s noise faded, Wells heard another half-dozen shots echoing from downtown. The police were busy tonight. No doubt the roadblocks had snared more than one unlucky criminal. Wells turned left on the nameless street just past Aziz. The chopper circled away, following Gaffan. Wells had a partial view of 42 Aziz, enough to see that the sentry on the roof was watching the helicopter. He walked past an alley that dead-ended at the back-right corner of the house. Two blocks up, he turned, paced back, timing his steps against the slow rotation of the spotlight tracing Gaffan. His window was narrow at best. In a few minutes, the police in the helicopter would either call in cars to stop the Jeep or find another target.
Then the spotlight twisted away, toward downtown. A problem. Either the helicopter had broken off contact or Gaffan had gotten lost somehow. Either way, Wells had to go in now, while the sentry was still distracted.
He jogged into the alley, the gown bunching around his legs. A step before the wall, he jumped up. In one motion, he laid the Al Baik bag atop the wall and wrapped his hands around the rough concrete. He dug in, pulled himself higher, all those push-ups paying off, and crawled on top of the wall. A dog barked from somewhere across the street, but the rest of the neighborhood stayed quiet.
The house had a small concrete yard littered with plastic water bottles. A Honda motorcycle was parked in the corner, hidden from the street. Heavy shades covered the windows, allowing only faint light into the yard. A television inside played what sounded like an Arabic news channel. Wells pulled the Glock from the bag and jumped down. He landed on a plastic bottle and pitched forward, his fingertips grazing the concrete before he pulled himself up as nimbly as a running back keeping his knee off the turf. The bottle skittered behind him. The television muted. A man inside the house said, “What was that? Go check.” Then yelled, “Usman? Did you see anything back there?” From the roof, a voice yelled, “No, Hassan!”
“Check again. Make sure.”
Wells had a problem now. Killing these men wouldn’t be difficult. But he still didn’t know if they were the right targets. He had no proof that 42 Aziz Street was connected to the kidnappers — or even that this house was actually 42 Aziz.
Narrow alleys ran along the sides of the house. Wells picked his way to the back-right corner and flattened himself against the rough concrete. The house was twenty feet high, and the guy on the roof, Usman, would have to lean almost straight over the corner to see him. Wells unscrewed the silencer and slipped it into the front-right pocket of his gown. He shifted the Glock to his left hand, holding it by the barrel now, high across his chest. The footsteps on the roof creaked closer. The back door snapped open and scraped against concrete. Wells pulled back his head and listened as the man in the house stepped into the yard. On the roof, Usman paced.
“I don’t see anything,” the man in the yard said.
“Me either,” Usman said.
The man in the yard walked toward the corner where Wells was hiding. Wells waited, waited, then spun left, popping out from the alley. He swung the Glock with his left arm, a downward clubbing backhand, quicker than a looping right hook and nearly as powerful. The man’s eyes opened wide, and he tried to raise his own pistol—
But Wells drove the corner of the Glock into the left side of the man’s temple, the soft spot just above the eye. The man grunted and sagged sideways. Wells stepped up and swung his right fist into the man’s belly. The man grunted again, his breath rushing out of him, giving Wells a whiff of the curried chicken he’d eaten that day. He dropped his pistol and toppled forward. Wells got under him and held him and hit him once more with the butt of the Glock to be sure he was out. He was skinny, maybe one hundred fifty pounds. Wells lowered him easily and laid him on the ground. In a couple hours, he’d wake up feeling like a car had run him over. But he would wake up.
The guy on the roof, Usman, yelled, “Is everything okay?” Wells shifted the pistol to his right hand, ran inside, found himself in the kitchen, a small, tidy room that also smelled like curried chicken. “What’s going on?” someone at the front of the house said. Hassan, the third jihadi. Wells ducked toward the refrigerator. Hassan lumbered through the house and stepped into the kitchen holding a big black pistol in a two-handed grip.
Wells grabbed Hassan’s hands and forced up the pistol. Hassan pulled the trigger, and the gun fired uselessly
