borders six hours ago? Someone with influence in the Kingdom must have expected people to start getting hot at about that time. If we go with that pattern, Kalil came in first, followed about twenty-four hours later by Hamid. That would put Zafir arriving sometime today.”
“Makes sense,” Quinn said. “I got a call from one of my OSI buddies in Iraq a couple of hours ago. My informant, Sadiq, has gone missing. He says there was quite a bit of blood on the floor of the kid’s apartment so no one’s holding out too much hope of finding him alive.”
“I suppose they were all in the john,” Thibodaux snorted. “And didn’t see a thing.”
“A neighbor remembers a guy with a deformed hand walking up the stairs sometime on the eleventh. That would have been shortly after Sadiq called me.” Quinn scribbled in his black Moleskine notebook as he spoke. “DOD finally came up with a name to go with the third martyr photograph we gave them. Zafir Mamoud al Jawad. He was arrested with a bunch of other insurgents outside Baquba sometime in oh-seven. The report said they had American hostages. Should have gone to trial, but he escaped his Iraqi police detail along with some other prisoners and got away in the desert. He’s a Bedouin, real tough guy, missing three fingers and part of his left hand, apparently from some sword fight.”
“Now we’re gettin’ somewhere, beb.” Thibodaux bobbed his big head. “So we figure Zafir was still in Iraq on the eleventh. Let’s say he left on the twelfth, how long would we have from right now until he was contagious?”
“If the virus in him reacts like it does in the macaques,” Mahoney said, “and supposing he infected himself as soon as he left the Middle East, maybe a day.” She walked to a poster-size calendar Palmer had on his wall above a mahogany credenza that matched his desk. The September scene was a photograph of two sailboats racing in cobalt water of Cabo San Lucas.
Taking a red marker from a mug on the credenza, she drew a big circle around September 16. In the center of the circle, she wrote 10 a. m EDT.
She looked at her watch. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but before ten tomorrow morning, we need to find Zafir Jawad and kill him.”
“Eighteen hours,” Thibodaux moaned, leaning back in a huge, yawning stretch. “I guess I can sleep after I’m dead.”
CHAPTER 39
Zafir removed his shirt to kill the leader of the three cocaine smugglers. He used a short knife with a silver eagle head on the hilt he’d bought from a street vendor in Nuevo Progresso-across the Rio Grande in Mexico. The night was inky dark, but he couldn’t risk getting caught. Not now, not when he was so close. U.S. Border Patrol agents were everywhere and the dying drug smugglers provided them with a job to take their minds off chasing illegal aliens-especially those from the Middle East.
The knife was an inexpensive weapon, nothing like the fine steel Zafir was used to in his homeland, where such a blade was often used to take a life. The eagle-head blade was easily sharpened, as cheap knives often were, but easily dulled-much like most of the people Zafir knew. By the time he’d removed the head of the first cocaine smuggler, he had to stop and use a flat piece of sandstone from the river to bring back the edge. The other two smugglers looked on, trussed like goats as he tended to his gruesome work. Their eyes sparkled with that strange sort of glowing shock Zafir had come to appreciate. Lying on the their bellies, hands and feet behind their backs, neither moved, paralyzed by the sheer terror of watching their companion lose his head to a person who was an obvious expert at such things. Their mouths were taped, but Zafir guessed they wouldn’t have made a sound if he’d done nothing but tie them.
These were young, cocky men from the nearby city of Reynosa, who had made the mistake of many in the lower echelons of criminal organizations, believing that since their boss commanded respect, such respect automatically trickled down to their level. Zafir had never heard of the Ochoa cartel, and when they’d thrown the name out as something that should certainly strike fear in his heart, he’d only laughed and stabbed the apparent leader in the belly. He’d knocked the other two senseless with a rock.
His grizzly task completed, Zafir leaned the dead smuggler’s body against the base of a thorny acacia tree. The head, eyes locked wide as if still wondering how such an awful thing had happened, he placed in the lap of its previous owner along with the backpack of cocaine. When Zafir reached for the second smuggler, the young man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he began to writhe against his bonds, wracked with sobs. The high-pitched buzz of his screams purred against the duct tape stretched across his mouth. Zafir paid no attention and dragged the boy to the tree beside his headless friend, where he dropped him like a sack of garbage. The last smuggler was quieter, whimpering softly as Zafir dragged him to the tree by his belt and dropped him on the opposite side of his dead compatriot.
This done, he retrieved his shirt from where he’d left it on a willow shrub by the Rio Grande and knelt beside the quivering men. Up to this point, he hadn’t said a word.
Turning the knife slowly in his good hand, he let the blade glitter in the scant light from a sky of endless stars. He held the freshly honed point to the eyeball of the writhing one, causing him to freeze in the middle of his gyrations.
“When I remove the tape from your mouth, I need you to scream as if you’d just lost an eye,” Zafir whispered in fluent Spanish. “Here,” he said pressing the point home with a satisfying pop. “Let me help raise the volume…”
Frenzied howls from the terrified drug smugglers drew nearby Border Patrol agents to the riverbank. The responding agents’ radio reports quickly brought every agent in the sector, hungry to witness the brutality of such a bloody scene. Zafir was able to slip past what were normally heavily manned observation posts completely unmolested.
He estimated he’d walked almost seven miles before he saw the yellow flicker of a tiny campfire in the woods. He moved in slowly, picking his way through the clumps of prickly pear cactus and thick thorn brush. The night was hot and choked with dust. But for the tangle of so many bushes, it reminded Zafir of his home. Through the darkness, he heard lilting laughter. As he inched closer, he saw two Mexicans, a man and a woman, sitting on a white limestone boulder beside the dying embers of a fire. The woman’s belly was stretched tight under a black shirt as if she carried a huge ball. She was pregnant and very near to giving birth.
Zafir was about to move by, fearing contact with anyone that would slow him down. Then he heard the young husband mention in a soothing voice that his cousin would be arriving soon with a truck to take them to the hospital in McAllen.
He listened to the giggling couple while he knelt in the shadows of dry grass. They dreamed together about the birth of their son, how he would be born in America and experience all the fruits of such citizenship. Zafir smiled at the thought. Very soon America would experience some very bitter fruit indeed, but this young couple would never see it. Their cousin’s car would get him to the Harlingen Airport, where he could fly to Fort Worth. Farooq’s contacts in Los Angeles had provided him with a California driver’s license under the name of Jorge Ramirez. The sheikh’s influence was everywhere.
Quietly drawing the pistol he’d taken from one of the drug smugglers, the Bedouin looked at his watch. It was a U.S. Navy Seals dive model, given to him as an ironic gift from the sheikh. Tritium numbers glowed an eerie green in darkness. It was almost midnight. He began to move toward the sound of laughter.
Time was short and he had business with an old friend from Baquba.
CHAPTER 40
Fort Worth
Carrie Navarro hardly had enough energy to hit the button on the blender for Christian’s banana milkshake.
