lately-asking the question, giving half the answer, and then moving on to the next thing before completing the thought. Doing so prevented him from having to face the truth. These shortened prayers were turning into bleak sessions. Almost as if he were jotting down notes with Allah and saying, when I get through the hardest part of this journey, you and I will sit down and sort our way through this mess.
Hakim still believed in Allah. That was not the problem. His lack of confidence had more to do with his followers-the men who claimed to know exactly what Allah wanted. As he slid under the covers, he tried to clear his mind. His faith, he realized, was not in crisis. It was his faith in his friend that was causing the problem. Hakim thought back to the day they had met, but quickly stopped himself. He had spent too much time wrestling with this of late. He was tired, and if he was ever going to sit down and discuss his concerns with Karim he would need to be rested. Using an old trick, he picked one of his best memories and began to replay it in his mind.
The sun was glistening off the familiar cool blue water of the Florida Keys. Hakim leaned back in the chair and then let himself come forward almost as if he were praying to Allah, but he wasn’t. His right hand went round and round in tiny circles on the reel, drawing in as much line as he could in the few seconds he had, and then he leaned all the way back. Despite the strain of wrestling with the great big marlin for the better part of an hour, he had a look of childlike elation on his face.
The trip to Cuba had been inspired by his reading The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. For Hakim, it had been the single greatest experience of his life. A day didn’t pass without that beautiful marlin jumping into his thoughts, and rarely did he fall asleep without a glimpse of it. He knew it was a coping mechanism. There had been a lot of death and dismemberment-bullets and bombs that did horrific things to friends, strangers, and enemies alike. He’d seen men literally shredded by the shrapnel of an artillery shell. So bloody and fleshy and cut to pieces that you’d swear there was no way on earth they would ever survive, but by God’s mercy some of them did, and if they’d had the medical facilities that the enemy had, even more would have lived. And then there were other times where you would find a comrade after an air strike and you would swear he was simply knocked unconscious, because he had not a blemish on his body. You would nudge him, even splash some water on his face, and there was no bringing him back. Hakim learned later it was the concussive blasts of the big two-thousand-pound American bombs. The shock wave from the explosions would cause blunt trauma to the internal organs of individuals without leaving any outward mark of death.
These were just some of the images Hakim tried to suppress every time he attempted to sleep. Like the six well-trained men assaulting the counterterrorism facility. Hakim did not like the casual way they convinced other followers to throw their lives away. That was why he clung to the memory of his trip to Cuba and the unforgettable day he spent chasing the marlin, fighting and eventually landing the huge fish. The chasm between the two worlds, however, created a paradox. He had either been halfheartedly trying to reconcile the issue, or trying very hard to avoid it. Whichever was the case, Hakim knew he couldn’t put it off much longer.
Now is not the time, he told himself. He quieted his mind by thinking of the warm sun on his face. He remembered the humid salt air and the soft breeze, the balletic dance of the big blue fish as it sailed through the air. Hakim began drifting off to sleep, hopeful that he would someday return to Cuba. That familiar voice in his head was calling him a fool.
He had no idea if he had been asleep for two minutes or two hours. He was still on his back, his eyes closed, when he heard the heavy footsteps of someone running in the house. The door to the bedroom burst open with a thud, and Hakim, startled, sat up in complete shock. His mind, numb from its deep state of REM, couldn’t quite place the face of the burly man standing in the open doorway.
“They are coming,” the man said with genuine fear in his voice.
Hakim realized it was Ahmed, the lethargic Moroccan.
“Hurry, they are here,” he said in heavily accented English. “Grab your gun and get to your post.”
“Who is here?” Hakim asked, suddenly very alert.
“Two men with orange… like they put on their vehicles.”
Hakim was used to trying to translate the mangled sentences that the men often concocted, but this was a new one. “What are you trying to say?”
“Get up,” the Moroccan said with genuine panic. “Karim wants you now! Hurry!”
CHAPTER 9
ADAMS couldn’t figure out where in the hell things had gone wrong. His plan had been perfect. He’d seen what happened to whistle-blowers. They ended up celebrated by one party and trashed by the other. Legal bills bankrupted the poor bastards while the slow workings of justice placed their life in a near-permanent state of limbo. No matter how just their accusations, they ended up pummeled. Politics in D.C. was a blood sport and whistle-blowers were cannon fodder. Adams had thought about it long and hard. It would have been like being the first guy off the very first landing barge at Omaha Beach on D-Day. They would have slaughtered him.
No, he was convinced he had plotted the right course. He knew with every fiber of his body that Rapp, and Nash and Kennedy and a bunch of others, were trampling all over the Constitution. He had been working feverishly behind the scenes to try to get the right people at Justice to stand up and take notice. Most of the deputy AGs wanted nothing to do with Rapp and Kennedy. There was a long list of people in Washington who had tried to tangle with them and so far they had proven themselves untouchable. More and more, people saw it as a career- ender. Adams thought he had finally found an ally in Senator Lonsdale. The senior senator from Missouri chaired the Judiciary Committee and shared Adams ’s dislike of the CIA and its cowboy ways.
Then the bombs had shattered the civility of the capital and the mood changed yet again. Adams had gone to see Lonsdale only a few days ago, and the meeting had been a disaster. After months of working with each other, and finally finding an aggressive attorney at Justice who was brave enough to go after the criminals at Langley, she had now lost her nerve. She suggested Adams drop the issue and focus his energy on tracking down the millions in unaccounted funds the CIA had squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan. He desperately tried to get her to see that now was not the time to quit. They were so close. All Adams needed was the political clout and subpoena power of the Judiciary Committee and they could finally put Rapp and the rest of them behind bars.
Adams could not do it by himself. Despite their overall lack of brainpower, Rapp and the others were survivors and had gone to great lengths to cover their tracks. With Lonsdale abandoning him, and the rest of the Senate and the House too morally bankrupt to lift a finger, Adams saw no hope in dragging them out of the shadows and into the bright light of court. With no support from Justice or the Hill, and the whistle-blower option deemed suicidal, Adams had to find a third way. His source of inspiration was none other than Mark Felt, the now deceased assistant deputy FBI director who had brought down President Richard Nixon by selectively feeding information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
While Felt was the template, Adams was not going to be so foolish as to allow some reporter to make millions off his bravery while he retired on his meager federal pension. He would publish a scathing expose of the CIA, its illegal programs, and the men who ran them. He had already picked out a title-A Quest for Justice. He would write it under the pen name Jefferson. No first name, just the last. Adams had told Kenny Urness that a CIA black ops agent had come to him and was asking for help. The fictional agent wanted to shop a tell-all manuscript that would expose the CIA and its myriad illegal programs. Urness would set up a blind trust to hold the millions the novel would make, and then when things finally settled down five or seven years from now, Adams would step forward as the brave man who had brought down the fascist wing of the American government.
There would be uproar for sure, but Adams knew how to hide his tracks. He’d already purchased, with cash, a used laptop that would be destroyed once the book was finished. He’d even found a software program that would allow him to change his prose to avoid identification by writing experts. Polygraphs would be administered far and wide, but he would pass them as he always did. The lie detectors were useless against someone with his IQ. He’d had it all figured out, but despite all of the careful planning, he’d missed something.
Adams fingered the empty glass sitting on the table and silently wished they would get him another drink. The vodka was starting to wear off and that was the last thing he needed right now. Staying calm was no easy thing when you knew a man like Mitch Rapp was loitering on the other side of a steel door, and you had no way of
