The cell leader was about to ask another question when one of the cell members appeared in the doorway and asked if the trio would be joining the others for Asr prayers.
“Do you feel up to it?” Karami asked.
“The key of Paradise is prayer,” replied Chase, quoting Mohammed. Apparently the men who had been watching him at the garage had told Karami of his inability to complete the Salah.
The men stood and Chase was directed to a bathroom where he could perform his ritual ablutions. After washing his hands and feet, he joined the others in the apartment’s dining room. There was no furniture, only prayer rugs spaced evenly along the floor.
Once all of the men were present, prayers were begun. Chase had been given an extra rug to use and he went through the motions perfectly. No one would have known that he wasn’t Muslim.
As he prayed, he was able to take a head count of how many men there were in the apartment. He’d also been able to at least glance into all of the rooms. From what he could tell, there were no booby-traps. He didn’t see any explosives or weapons, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t hidden away somewhere. What it did mean, though, was that there weren’t any right at hand. When Harvath and the assault team hit, they would have surprise on their side and therefore the upper hand. That was, if they hit.
Chase had still not had a chance to get to one of the windows to look outside for the car with the book on its dash. He had decided he might only get one chance to get near a window and that if he did, he should kill two birds with one stone. If he did get the opportunity, he’d look for the car while positioning the window treatments so that the team outside would have a rough idea of what was waiting for them when they took down the apartment.
Both while moving through the apartment and while at prayer, Chase kept his eyes peeled for objects he could use as weapons. If Harvath and the assaulters didn’t succeed in locating the safe house, Chase was going to have to either sneak out or fight his way out. With nine men present, Karami probably ran an around-the-clock guard. Chase slowly began preparing himself for what fighting his way out might look like. Once again he reflected on the lessons of Hagakure.
But try as he might, he couldn’t quite focus. Something was bothering him. It took him several minutes to figure it out. There was something missing in the apartment. It wasn’t just weapons that were absent. It was computers. There wasn’t a single one to be seen. If a raid did take place, they might be able to get to hidden weapons quickly, but computers? Not a chance. Not unless there was a rack of them in one of the closets, all powered up and ready for their hard drives to be wiped clean or blown to kingdom come with the touch of a button.
There weren’t many places they could be hidden. He planned on finding out if there were any here or not.
After prayers, he expected Karami to pick back up with his questioning, but the cell leader apparently had other pressing business and disappeared into one of the rooms along with Sabah and two other men and closed the door. This left Chase free to converse with the remaining cell members. It also left him somewhat free to move about the apartment.
CHAPTER 21
In the first room, Chase found multiple mattresses, only one of which was covered by a sheet. There was a milk crate for a nightstand and atop it a table lamp with an exposed bulb and no shade. A small TV, DVD player, and cushions scattered across the floor completed the makeshift dormitory cum rec room. In the corner he noticed a couple of old hookah pipes.
Sitting on cushions in front of the TV were four cannon-fodder cell members-all mouth breathers, as Chase liked to call the IQ-impaired. They were watching footage of American military vehicles being taken out by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The men found the carnage extremely amusing and were laughing out loud at every explosion.
That’s okay, thought Chase. Yours is coming soon enough. Keep laughing.
Only one of the men looked up and acknowledged that Chase had walked into the room. The cell members seemed to know that he was related to someone important, which meant he was treated with a certain amount of deference. But he was still a newcomer, so despite that deference, they kept him at arm’s length. None of the men invited him to sit.
That was fine by Chase. He had other things on his mind. Pretending to be interested in what they were watching, he made his way across the room. The closet was partially open and he stole a quick glance inside. Nothing. Only shirts, trousers, and a row of cheap shoes.
Stepping near the windows, he stopped and leaned against the wall. The view outside would be perfect-right out over the street.
Minutes passed. The explosions on the TV continued, and the four men guffawed right along with them. The joy they took in the killing and maiming of American soldiers spoke to how incredibly sick they were.
As not one of them had given him as much as a second glance, he decided to risk a look through the blinds, which had been drawn tightly shut.
It took him a moment and at first his heart sank as he thought the car wasn’t there, but then he saw it-book and all. It was like a shot of caffeine being pumped into his bloodstream. Immediately, his heart raced and he could feel a rush sweep through him. Harvath and the rest of the team knew where he was. This jihadist rats’ nest was going to get the shit kicked out of it.
Withdrawing his hand from the aluminum blinds, he forced himself to take a deep breath. Be cool, he told himself just as he had back at the garage. Everything’s cool.
He ran through his head exactly how he needed to construct his signal in order to let Harvath know what was going on inside. He debated whether he should check out the other rooms first. Waiting was a gamble. What if Karami sent for him or Sabah decided he needed to be watched more closely? It definitely was a crapshoot.
Chase decided on the bird in the hand. He’d send the signal now. He could convey the number of men and that he had not seen any booby-traps, weapons, or explosives. The assaulters would still hit the safe house just as hard, expecting all of those things to be there. So, without wasting any more time, Chase got to work.
“What are you doing?” one of the men asked when he heard Chase monkeying around with the blinds.
“I’m opening the window,” he replied in Arabic. “It stinks in here.”
It did in fact smell, quite badly, but the man either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. “We were told not to go near the windows.”
“I have to get some fresh air,” said Chase.
“It is forbidden.”
Chase signaled to the man not to worry. “It is my decision, brother. I will take the responsibility. Enjoy the television.”
Used to his place at the bottom of the cell’s hierarchy, the man gave up admonishing the newcomer and he and his associates went back to watching war porn.
Chase didn’t waste any time. He lifted two sets of blinds to the same height, about a quarter of the way up. He then adjusted the angle on one set, opened each of the windows differing amounts, and let the string for the blinds hang out the window on the left. With his Bat signal blazing, he grabbed a cushion and sat down with the jihadists to watch TV.
By his estimate, the windows had been open for a little more than ten minutes when Sabah entered the room. “Who touched the windows?” he bellowed in Arabic.
No one answered.
As he repeated his question, he looked directly at Chase. “Who did this?”
“I think the dates don’t agree with my stomach,” said Chase, fanning the air with his hand.
“What’s going on?” said Karami, who suddenly appeared in the doorway.
Sabah gestured toward the windows. “Our guest has been busy creating problems.”
“I wasn’t creating problems,” Chase insisted. “I just opened the window. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal,” said Karami as he walked over to the windows, “is that we have certain rules. One of them is that the windows and blinds must remain closed.”
