this area?”
“Quite well,” she replied. There was no bravado there, just a simple statement of fact.
Thomas raised the satphone again. “I’ll let you speak to my guide. She was raised in these mountains.”
“She?” Hamid asked, laughter in his voice “How do you always manage it, Thomas? Put her on.”
He extended the TACSAT to her and she took it, listening as Hamid laid out his plan of action. Thomas watched her as they talked, steadying the impatient stallion between his knees. At length, she closed the cover of the phone and handed it back to Thomas, shooting another anxious glance skyward.
Even in the intervening moments, clouds had begun to move in, darkness drifting across the face of the sun as the mercurial nature of mountain weather asserted itself.
“We need to ride southwest to meet with your military. There is a place-south of the Qandil. I know it well. It is about forty kilometers from here.”
“It looks like your storm may be upon us soon.”
“I know,” she replied, looking up at the clouds. “There is a mountain stream, about twenty-nine kilometers ahead of us. We need to reach the ford before the rain swells the stream.”
“Can’t we go around?”
She shook her head. “A detour of nearly seventy kilometers. It is the nature of these mountains, Thomas. It is what has kept my people alive.”
“Then let’s ride.”
Harry raised his eyes from the dossier in front of him, staring through the one-way glass at the civilian in the interrogation room on the other side-Dr. Moshe Tal. In the previous two hours, he had gone through every scrap of information the Israelis were willing to give him on Tal. Unmarried, devoted to his work-and his country. Growing up on a kibbutz in the shadow of the Golan, Tal had early learned what it meant to defend his land.
And yet this reticence. Harry motioned to the guard, who had stood silently by the door the entire time. “I’m ready.”
Tal’s eyes flickered up at his entrance, then back down, a furtive, almost hunted look. Harry had seen it before, the look of a man broken beyond his endurance. For a brief moment, he wondered how far Mossad might have gone in trying to wrest his secret from him. Then he dismissed it without another thought. It was irrelevant to the task at hand.
He drew up a chair and sat down wordlessly, across from the archaeologist. Another long, interminable moment passed before Harry spoke.
“The Iranians are planning something, aren’t they?”
Tal raised his head, a strange light coming into his eyes. It was such a contrast to his previous browbeaten demeanor that Harry wondered for a moment if he was facing the same man. “Yes,” he replied. “They are.”
“What?”
The archaeologist shook his head. “I’ll never tell you. You left my people behind. You left them to die.”
It was as though Harry’s first question had given him a feeling of control, a sense of being in charge. Harry grimaced inwardly. Time to take that away. With a careful motion, he opened his sports jacket, withdrawing his diplomatic passport and identification, placing them on the table beside them.
“I’m from the U.S. State Department. I didn’t leave anyone behind.”
Tal took the passport and ID, scrutinizing them carefully. “You’re no diplomat,” he announced, looking back up.
Harry smiled. “Let’s call it a polite fiction.”
“Who are you?”
“Joseph Isaac,” Harry replied, tapping the ID before tucking it back in his wallet. “You can call me Joe. I’m your salvation.”
The archaeologist settled back in his chair, an expression of disbelief on his face.
“You see, there were Americans among your crew. President Hancock authorized a CIA strike team to rescue them. Our people arrived in the dark of night, just hours after Mossad brought you back here. And we were able to extract some of your team.”
Tal leaned forward, an almost painful eagerness on his face. “Some?”
Harry nodded. “Unfortunately, not all. The Iranians were on alert. We lost some people as well.”
“How can I believe you?”
Reaching once more into his jacket, Harry laid a cellphone on the table between them. A wire stretched from it to an earbud microphone, which Harry promptly inserted.
“We’re going to place a call to one of your colleagues. I believe you know Grant Peterson?”
“Yes, yes.”
“I will give you the number to dial,” he continued, fixing the archaeologist in a cold gaze. “And you will speak directly to Grant. This is a token of good faith. Don’t abuse it.”
Tal nodded his assent and Harry gave him the number to dial.
“You said he would call, Roberto,” Grant Peterson said, looking up into the eyes of the man he had been staying with for the past week.
“He will,” the man called “Roberto” replied, in one of his longer speeches. Whether he had a last name or not, Grant had no idea. Whatever his skills, conversation was not among them.
Almost at that moment, the man’s hand went to his pocket, withdrawing a vibrating cellphone. He cast a quick glance at the screen before handing it over to Peterson.
“Answer it.”
“Hello, this is Grant.”
“Grant!” It was Dr. Tal, nervous excitement in his voice. “Thank God you’re alive. Where are you?”
“Here in the US,” Grant replied, looking over at Roberto as though to ask if he should be more specific. Something in the man’s face told him he should not. “Are you okay, doctor?”
Tal seemed not to hear him, rushing on as if the question was irrelevant. “The rest of the team, Grant. Are the others all right?”
Grant opened his mouth to speak, but in that instant, the line went dead.
“Wrong move,” Harry stated calmly, replacing the phone on the table. “I told you not to abuse it.”
Tal stared at him, his eyes wide with sudden fear. “You’re sick.”
A shrug was the only reply Harry gave to the accusation. “You and I have business to discuss. You give me what I want, I’ll tell you who lived and who died. Not until.”
“How can I trust you?”
“You can’t. But you’re running out of options. You know Grant is alive and safe. Let’s work from that basis.”
“What do you want?”
“I think you know.”
The archaeologist looked away, towards the blank wall of the interrogation room. “All right,” he said at last, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll talk.”
