The Secret Soldier

BAKR WAS IN THE kitchen, making a pot of tea, when he heard the commotion, the unmistakable puff of a silenced pistol. Even before he asked the question, he knew. They’d gotten here somehow, the muk or the Americans. He didn’t understand how they had tracked him, but the answer no longer mattered. He still had time to kill Kurland. And then to escape with his video camera and lay out the evidence that proved the princes had supported him. “Come,” he said to Abdul. The camera and knife were on the kitchen counter. He grabbed them and ran.

WELLS HEARD THE JEEP outside the gate. He didn’t have time to open it. Gaffan would have to get in on his own. Wells ran for the front door and then changed his mind and angled toward the driveway in back. He ducked low as he passed two barred windows. At the back-right corner of the house, he stopped. The ambulance was parked across a short apron of asphalt, in front of a big windowless garage.

He stepped into the yard between the house and garage. Through a barred window, he saw the kitchen. A pot of tea steamed on the stove, but the room was empty. The back door into the house was open a few inches. Wells listened for footsteps but heard nothing. Had they gone upstairs? They wouldn’t keep Kurland on the first floor. But Arab houses rarely had basements.

Then Wells remembered the cell in Lebanon that Meshaal had described. He ran for the garage, fearing that he was already too late.

BAKR AND ABDUL CLIMBED into the cell. They wouldn’t have time to make a proper video, but they could still put the camera on the stepladder and record the moment when Bakr cut off Kurland’s head.

Kurland stirred as they reached him. His skin was gray, his eyes red and inflamed, as if his body had responded to the amputation by giving up its defenses against infection. He said something Bakr didn’t understand and stuck out his tongue. He smelled like an open sewer, his insides rotting. Bakr didn’t understand how Kurland had gotten so sick so quickly. But no matter. Bakr set up the camera on the stepladder, its top step now coated with dried blood. “Tell him the Americans haven’t met our demands and the time for his execution has come,” he said to Abdul.

“Do we have time?”

“Do it.”

Abdul spoke. Kurland responded with two words that needed no translation.

“Ask him if he wants to convert to Islam.”

This time the answer was three words.

“Fine, then. Tell him that by coming to the Arabian Peninsula, he’s broken Islamic law, and that he’s rejected the opportunity to save himself by converting. Tell him the penalty is death.”

THE GARAGE WAS A big concrete shed, three car-sized bays wide. Wells tried to lift the front doors, found them locked. He ran to the windowless door on the side of the garage, pressed on its steel handle. It, too, was locked. He wondered if the men inside were waiting, standing inside the door with their rifles poised. Forcing your way into a room without covering fire was an all-time no-no. But he needed to keep coming. So far, the sirens weren’t any closer. Help — if the Saudi police qualified as help — was a ways off.

Wells put the tip of the silencer to the edge of the door, just above the handle. He angled it diagonally down and squeezed the trigger twice. By his count, he’d fired seven rounds here, and three at the house in Jeddah. He still had nine rounds left. Which ought to be enough.

From somewhere inside the garage, a man shrieked.

KURLAND OPENED HIS EYES. They were back. They were talking. The big one talked in Arabic, and the little one translated. That was how it went. But whatever language they spoke, they were beasts. They’d taken his hand. His left hand, with his wedding ring. Too late, he’d realized his ring was gone. He wished they’d taken his right. If he was going to die in this little room, he wanted to die wearing his ring.

Now they were back for the rest of him. He knew even before they spoke. They didn’t offer him water or Coke or anything else. No fake courtesies. Not that he wanted any. They seemed rushed. They made their speeches, their psychotic justifications, and ignored his curses and came at him. The big one holding a knife that must have been a foot long, with a black handle and a gleaming serrated edge. Kurland was afraid now, more afraid than he’d ever been, but angry, too. He wanted to see Barbara again. His kids. And grandkids. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve to die. Though no one ever did.

Fine, then. He would die. But he didn’t plan to make it easy. Dignity didn’t matter to him anymore. His skin burned and his skull throbbed and his swollen tongue filled his mouth like a loaf of bread. They’d taken his dignity when they took his hand. So when they got close he shook his arm free of its sling and pushed the tip of the stump against the wall behind him—the pain—

He screamed. And dug his heels into the floor to rock the chair off its back legs, and leaned forward and toppled over, feeling a ridiculous surge of triumph as the floor rose toward him—

THE SHRIEK BROKE OFF. Then started again, this time resolving into a man’s voice, words in English: “No, you don’t, you bastards—” Wells pushed open the door and came into the garage in three big sideways steps, holding the Glock in a two-hand grip, keeping his shoulders forward and down to make himself a smaller target. All useless if someone was waiting inside, but he had to try. He looked side to side—

A Toyota Camry, a shovel, a pick, a humming electrical generator, empty water bottles, an orange first-aid kit that looked like the twin of the one he’d found in Jeddah. No jihadis. He ran around the Camry and saw two flat metal plates, big, the ones that utility workers used to cover the holes they made when they dug up streets. A crude hinged hatch had been cut into the front plate. The hatch, two feet square, was unlocked. And open.

The hole was about twelve feet deep. Wells peeked down, saw metal rods embedded in the wall that seemed to serve as a crude ladder. But the hatch was too narrow and the cell too deep to allow him to glimpse the entire space below. Unless he squatted down and put his face to the hatch, he couldn’t see Kurland or the kidnappers.

BAKR COULDN’T BELIEVE THAT Kurland had knocked over his chair. Crazy American. He and Abdul flipped it up, ignoring Kurland, who was yelling and waving his stump, blood leaking from the gauze. Bakr reached for his knife, but Kurland thrashed his head sideways so he couldn’t get a clean stroke. Bakr tried to grab his chin, but Kurland snapped his jaw like a wild dog. “Get the morphine,” Bakr said to Abdul. The syringes were in the first-aid kit, in the garage.

“We don’t have time—”

“I want the video to be clean, not this screaming—”

“The video, the video, you’re insane—”

“Do it!”

WELLS HEARD THEM YELLING and backed away from the hatch and dropped onto his hands and knees. They didn’t know he was here. For the first time, he thought he might succeed. He was far enough from the hatch that the jihadi climbing out wouldn’t see him, close enough to be able to kill the guy cleanly. “This is stupid,” the man below said. His feet pounded on the metal rungs, rising step by step—

The man’s hands emerged and the top of his head, thick black hair. He rose through the hatch as if he were materializing from empty space, a magic trick. He swung his head around, defenseless. His eyes widened and his eyebrows rose as he saw Wells, and Wells leaned forward and put the tip of the silencer to his forehead and pulled the trigger and blew off the top of his head with a 9-millimeter kiss—

And gravity had its way with his corpse and sucked him back into the cell. Wells stood up, knowing he had only one chance. He stepped toward the hatch, and without hesitating put his hands at his sides and stepped through the hole like a kid jumping off the high dive—

He fell through. Halfway down he caught his shoulder on one of the rungs embedded in the wall. He twisted sideways and wrenched a knee as he landed. He stumbled forward over the legs of the man he’d killed. He braced himself against the wall, without a shot—