“Gotta test the ladder first,” McGinn said, answering a question that neither Hawk nor Alex had yet vocalized. “I think it’s good.”
“Hawk, you want to have the honors?” McGinn asked. “You secure the area down there. Then Alex, then me. I’ll cover our tracks in case they search the room.”
Within ten minutes, they were all safely in the underground passage. McGinn removed the ladder and led them to a secure room beneath the home of an elderly woman a quarter mile away from the compound.
“We can get in and out of this room through a small opening in a cellar we dug for her,” McGinn said.
“How did you arrange all this?” Hawk asked.
“We pay her a monthly stipend. Not enough to change her standard of living to the outside world, but let’s just say she eats very well.”
“So, now what?” Alex asked.
“We still need to secure the passageway in case any of those Al-Shabaab thugs figure out where we went and try to come after us,” McGinn said. “Hawk, I’ll need your help.”
“What about me?” Alex asked.
“Just stay here. We won’t be long.”
Hawk glanced at Alex, who cast a leery eye toward McGinn.
“Here, take a gun,” McGinn said, handing it to Alex. “You’ll be safe here, and if you need to get out, the opening to the cellar is in the bathroom.”
Hawk watched Alex, who appeared to be fine with McGinn’s solution.
“Let’s go,” McGinn said.
Hawk followed McGinn into the tunnel.
***
ALEX CHECKED THE CLIP and counted the bullets. She felt foolish for not doing this in McGinn’s presence as he could’ve easily handed her an empty gun or a clip with only a couple bullets. Not that she would need more than one shot to shoot him. No matter how cool and in charge McGinn tried to be, she didn’t trust him.
With nothing else to do, Alex decided to snoop around. If she had time, she would open up her computer and start snooping around on the Internet, breaking into classified servers and digging up information on McGinn. Instead, she decided to pry the old-fashioned way.
She went straight to McGinn’s desk in the corner of the room. Taking a moment to remember where everything was positioned, she then began to dig through the papers in the drawers. At first, it all seemed like boring administrative paperwork. But then she came across one file that arrested her attention. She started reading, and her mouth went slack-jawed.
Unlocking her phone, she took several pictures of the papers before returning everything to how it was when she first entered the room. She then read more of the documents by looking at the images on her phone.
Hawk is never going to believe this.
CHAPTER 9
Wednesday
HASSAN GARAAR STRUGGLED TO SHAKE the scene from his mind—the mother gasping for air as she watched her children die. It was not the side of the cause he wanted to witness again. Garaar desired to put his talents to use for jihad as best as possible. He was certain when he started that it never would’ve consisted of betraying the trust of a sick family and locking them in a room with vaporized sarin.
Anything for the cause, right?
The end justified the means, but it didn’t make Garaar feel like he could stake a claim on the high road of this conflict now. The American military may have killed his family and other friends, but he knew he could no longer look at himself in the mirror and claim to be better. No amount of nuance or mental gymnastics could help Garaar talk himself out of his new reality: He was a murderer.
If that realization wasn’t enough to sober up Garaar, paranoia set in on the chemist. Ever since he returned to his warehouse to prepare the sarin and vaporizer for sale, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. Garaar wasn’t one to dismiss the feeling without a thorough investigation. It’s why the night before he had covered the windows with sheets and reviewed every square meter of his office in order to make sure he could speak freely. While he found nothing, it didn’t stop him from installing a sound machine in his office to protect against any audio snooping. It also didn’t stop him from moving the sarin to his home and in a protected wall safe located in his bedroom closet.
Garaar used his phone to call his Al Hasib contact.
“Do you have someone down here already?” Garaar asked.
“Why would you even ask me that?”
Garaar looked around, peeling back the curtains to peek outside. “Just answer the question.”
“Absolutely not. We have limited resources as it stands, and we haven’t sent anyone to your location.”
“Are you sure?”
“Have you been drinking?”
Garaar slammed the phone down, irked at how evasive the responses were.
Five minutes later, Garaar’s home security system alerted him to intruders at his residence. He rushed home only to discover the aftermath of a whirlwind search. Couches were flipped over with cushions strewn about the room. Garaar also found every drawer had been dumped onto the floor and apparently sifted through in search of something. He suspected whoever initiated the search was looking for the sarin.
Garaar rushed to his closet and opened the wall safe. The sarin was still there. In an impulsive move, Garaar decided to return the sarin to the warehouse and hide it there. The security was sufficient enough, and the perimeter had never been penetrated, even though he’d previously felt more vulnerable there than at his home. His sense of security at his house was apparently overinflated, and nothing could reassure him now.
Surely they don’t know what I’m doing.
He glanced at the barrel in the corner that contained his personal stash of sarin. Despite being compensated for his services, Garaar figured he couldn’t live off the meager stipend supplied by Al-Shabaar. Not comfortably, anyway. He held back a small portion that he intended to sell privately to
