Taking Fire (17 page)

31

Amir al-Attar stumbled out of the elevator and into the hotel lobby.

“Got eyes on,” Bobby whispered into his collar mike as he sat in a corner at the back of the bar, with Lauren from London snuggled up beside him like a proper date.

From his vantage point, Bobby could see Amir walk across the lobby toward the entrance doors. He moved too carefully to be sober as he tossed his keys to the valet.

“Target's at the front door; valet's getting his car.”

“Roger that.” Coop's voice sounded hollow through his earpiece. “Took his damn sweet time.”

Coop and Brown had taken first watch starting around two o'clock this morning. They were relieved by Jones and Green around two p.m., and now both pairs were double-teaming Amir. As Lauren had promised, the man was as regular as clockwork.

He'd shown up at the bar around nine; Bobby had made certain to be in place by seven. After what had been one of the longest days of his life waiting for Amir to show, he wouldn't risk losing him after all this trouble.

“Run, you rat bastard,” he muttered. “Run back to your sewer, and I'll bring you some rotten cheese. Better yet, a nice shiny bullet.”

He waited until the valet brought Amir's blue Golf around, then unwrapped himself from Lauren's arms. “Thanks, Lauren.” He handed her a bundle of rial notes.

“My pleasure, love. Easiest money this bird's ever made. 'Urt 'im once for Peg, would ya? Then 'urt 'im again for me.”

Bobby dropped a kiss on her forehead, then headed for the door and watched the Golf pull away. A few seconds later, Green and Jones pulled out of the parking lot in a newly rented white Honda and eased into traffic behind Amir. When Coop and Brown pulled up under the portico in a four-door silver Camry, Bobby jumped into the backseat. The two black Land Cruisers were parked tonight. Both would be too conspicuous, and they didn't want to give Amir an opportunity to make them as tails.

“Do not lose that car,” he said, sitting forward on the middle of the backseat with his head between Coop and Brown.

“Always with the backseat driving,” Coop sputtered, and fell in a block behind Green and Jones, who were three car lengths behind Amir.

For the next fifteen minutes, they took turns peeling on and off Amir's tail, sometimes even passing him so as not to raise any suspicion.

“Anyone up for a quick game of I Spy?” Coop wanted to know, and he looked at Bobby in the rearview mirror. “I'll start. I spy someone who needs a hug.”

“I'd be up for a game of Stuff a Sock in the Bald Guy's Mouth,” Bobby muttered.

Coop grinned at him. “Chill already, okay, bud? Sit back. Enjoy the ride. There's not a damn thing you can do that we aren't already doing.”

Okay, fine. Coop was attempting to dull the razor-sharp tension. And he was right. Alert, prepared, in control—all made for successful ops. But there was such a thing as being too pumped, too wired, too ready. Bobby had passed that point the second he'd seen Amir stagger out of the elevator.

On a deep breath, he sat back and slouched against the seat. And thought about Talia.

He'd finally fallen asleep sometime after five a.m. When he'd come around, she was up and had already brewed coffee.

“Thanks,” she'd said, pouring him a mug.

“For?”

“Last night. For not judging.”

Judging? Hell, he couldn't judge her for wanting her son back. Not for that. And he couldn't judge her for falling apart. He'd been damn close himself. So close he'd almost caved. Almost let himself crawl into bed with her again and respond to her soft hands and willing body. It would have been easy. So easy to lose himself again in her. To give them both escape.

I loved you . . . I still love you,

Her words lingered. Long after they should have. Maybe she did love him. Maybe she just thought she did. Either way. It didn't matter. He couldn't let it matter. Because he couldn't forget. Maybe that made him an ass. Probably, yeah, it did. But for six years, her betrayal had eaten at him like poison in his blood. The taste wasn't going away in a matter of hours. Dangerous, stressful, revelation-filled hours.

Maybe when this was over and they got Meir back—and they
would
get him back—maybe then he could look back and think about forgiving.

But not now. Not after he'd seen her face this morning, the moment it had registered in her eyes that everything was the same between them.

By the time Carlyle had picked them up and driven them back to Royal Brit, they'd both shaken it off, and Talia was back in operator mode. She'd not only recovered, but she'd been royally pissed when she'd found out he was leaving her with Nate, Steph, Carlyle, and Santos while he joined the hunt for Amir.

“I want to be in on this,” she'd said, her dark eyes flaring with fire.

“Not a chance,” he'd said.

Nate had been more diplomatic. “I'm sorry, Talia. We can't afford to have you anywhere near Amir until we're ready to breach the hideout. They might make you. And then it's all over.”

She'd settled down but still hadn't been happy.

“You know we can use you here,” Nate continued. “And I know it's been a drag because you've been at it all morning, but we need to keep digging for the blueprints on this warehouse our CIA asset pointed us toward.”

Earlier this morning, the guys had been able to make brief contact with the undercover CIA agent. He was aware that a Hamas cell had recently arrived in the city. Had gathered that they were holed up somewhere in the warehouse district, but other than that, he didn't have anything concrete.

Still, the team had run with it. Because the warehouse district was so huge, they'd worked all day doing title searches and locating the names of owners who might have ties to the al-Attars or Hamas.

Just before Bobby had left for the hotel to help with surveillance on Amir, Stephanie had hit pay dirt.

“I've got something.” Her fingers had flown across the keyboard. “Look at this. I've found a company—Mideast Blades—that provides site security for various petroleum companies in the Mideast. One of those companies is Ultramar PLC. And Ultramar happens to own a warehouse-slash-office complex here in Muscat. Guess who owns Mideast Blades?”

“Hakeem would be too easy,” Jones had said.

“Yeah, it would. But Hakeem has a cousin who's married to a guy named Qasim Nagi. Nagi owns Mideast Blades. He also happens to be on a terrorist watch list. His specialty? Money laundering for Hamas.”

“So most likely, Mideast Blades is actually a shell company?” Black had concluded.

“I'd bet on it. Bet real big that Nagi's company allows him to move people and money around in ways that can't be traced by international security analysts, and that's why he hasn't been picked up or charged yet. I've uncovered patterns of money transfers that make it obvious to me that Ultramar is paying protection money so they'll leave the company and its people alone.

“Like they always say,” Stephanie had added, “follow the money. And in this case, the money points to payoffs funneled directly into Hamas bank accounts.”

“Of more immediate importance, following the money may have found Meir.” Black had smiled. “It's a damn big coincidence that Hakeem has a cousin who provides security for Ultramar. I say we look at this warehouse really hard. Nice work, Steph.”

“NSA's going to love me when I get back and play show-and-tell with them. They've been after this guy for a long time.”

“Wish I could tell you your work was done,” Black had added. “But now I need you to see what you can do about finding the blueprints for this warehouse and whether it's currently operating as an active business. If it turns out to be our Hamas hideout, we're going to need that info ASAP to plan the rescue. And Talia, we can use you to help us set up our driving route and action plan. If Ultramar turns out to be our target, we'll be one step ahead of those bastards.”

They all knew that time was running out. Anything they could do to speed up the prep process went in the win column for Meir.

“And if it doesn't?” Talia had asked. “If Ultramar turns out to be a near miss?”

“Then we keep looking.”

At that point, Bobby had to get out of there. He'd felt Talia's frustration as keenly as if it was his own. And if he'd hung around much longer, he might have caved and tried to talk Nate into letting her come along on surveillance duty.

“Hold on, ladies and gents.”

The veiled excitement in Coop's voice snapped Bobby back to the moment. He sat forward in the backseat again. “What? What's happening?”

“Amir just turned into that lot up there.” Coop drove on by so as not to draw any attention.

Bobby craned his neck around as they passed the security gate. Spotted the sign identifying the company on the tall chain-link fence that surrounded a warehouse roughly the size of a football field.

Sonofabitch. We got him!

His hand was unsteady when he reached into his pocket for his phone. “We've found them, Talia.” He wished he could be there to see her face. “Amir led us to the hideout. It's Ultramar.”

He barely heard her whispered, “Thank God.”

“It's almost over,” he promised. “We're getting him back. Make no mistake, we are bringing him back to you.”

32

As much as Taggart wanted to follow Amir straight into that warehouse, put a bullet in his head, and fight his way to Meir, he knew he had to keep himself reeled in. If there had been any chance that he could have taken on the terrorists by himself, he wouldn't have needed the team.

Wired and impatient, he sank into the backseat, prepared for another wait, as Coop headed back to Royal Brit. Jones and Green stayed behind and set up surveillance on the Ultramar warehouse. Finding the hideout was only the first phase. It would take the entire team and careful planning to pull off Meir's rescue—and even then, it was going to be dicey.

Complex snatch-and-grab ops were generally preceded by days, sometimes weeks, of precision training drills. Hours and hours of running and rerunning the infiltration and extraction plan until each operative had their individual and their team members' tasks embedded in their psyches. Until muscle memory took over and they could run the routes in their sleep.

They didn't have weeks or months. He checked the time on his phone. Felt a double tap from his heart. One forty-five a.m. They had mere hours. Two hours and fifteen minutes exactly if Hakeem stayed true to form and called at four a.m. to give Talia the time and place where she was to give herself up to them in exchange for Meir. Only everyone knew there would be no exchange.

Meir's life wasn't the only one on the line in this op. They were all gearing up to stop bullets if they had to, to save the boy.

Another rolling rush of emotions swamped him. The boy who was his son. Every time the reality of it hit him, he felt a rush.

He clenched his jaw so tightly his teeth ached. He could not, he
would
not, let his son die.

“You're right,” he said.

Coop shifted his gaze to the rearview mirror, and Brown turned around in his seat.

“Meir is my son.”

“We'd figured that out,” Brown said softly. “We're going to get him back, Boom. No doubts.”

His eyes burned with emotion, and he swallowed it back, too overcome to speak.

*   *   *

Except for the constant grinding of the Bunn making yet another pot of coffee, the conference room in the basement of Royal Brit was church-quiet. All eyes were on Stephanie, who stood at the front of the conference table, entering key strokes on her Toughbook while a tense Nate Black watched over her shoulder.

The tension in the room was familiar to Talia. Her years with Mossad had been filled with similar briefings. Everyone wanted success. Everyone wanted to come back alive. And everyone knew the odds were stacked against them.

Not this time
, she repeated over and over in her mind. This time, her son's life was on the line. He was an innocent. He didn't deserve to be part of Hamas's bloody games.

And neither did the people at the table with her.

When this was over, she would find a way to repay them. She only hoped they would all be alive for her to thank.

“Okay!” Stephanie said, sounding excited. “We've got eyes in the sky on the Ultramar warehouse. Thank you, technology gods!”

Everyone expelled a breath of relief, and Coop let go of a “Hoo-ah!”

Five minutes ago, Stephanie and Black had returned from carrying the dismantled ultralight surveillance drone up to the roof, reassembling it, and hand-launching it. Since the launch, Stephanie had been remotely guiding the drone using software loaded on her Toughbook.

“You can call Green and Jones in now,” Stephanie told Black, who immediately picked up his phone and dialed. “I've got the coordinates for Ultramar locked in, and the Puma will circle the building at around five hundred feet until I change the command or until it runs out of battery power, whichever is first. If anyone leaves or arrives at that warehouse, I'll know within seconds.”

The Israeli military and Mossad had been the first to employ drones to locate targets as far back as the 1970s, so Talia was very familiar with the technology. The Puma was an excellent choice. It had a two- to three-hour loiter time and was equipped with on-board sensors, a thermal-imaging camera, and nearly silent electric motors so it wouldn't be heard from the ground.

“What's the resolution on that?” she asked, wanting to know just how good the thermal-imaging camera was.

“We swapped out the basic sensor package for top-of-the-line,” Stephanie told her, “so we should even be able to see if they have a mouse problem. We'll know pretty soon.”

“Okay,” Black said after hanging up. “It'll take Green and Jones what? Around twenty minutes to get here?”

Coop nodded. “This time of night, traffic's light. Twenty minutes should do it.”

“While we're waiting for them, bring the drone in closer, Steph. See if you can pick up some heat signatures inside the building.”

This was the part they'd all been waiting for. The test to see if the drone and the thermal-imaging equipment could lock onto the heat signatures each human body created and tell them how many people were inside the Ultramar warehouse and where they were. More specifically, where Meir was.

The room grew silent as Stephanie shifted the images the drone sent from the Toughbook screen to the wall screen so they could all see them.

All eyes strained to see the details in the photos that arrived, one after another after another. For several long frames and multiple shots, they saw nothing but dark, nothing but gray. Nothing that indicated there was a single sign of life in the building. Finally, when the drone reached the east side of the warehouse, there they were. Fuzzy red horizontal blobs.

“Got 'em,” Brown said. “Way to go, Steph.”

A few heat signatures indicated people at ground level. Others were at a higher level and others even higher than that.

Stephanie said, “Inside this warehouse, there's a four-story building that houses administrative offices and more. As you can see by the various heights, our terrorists are spread out from the first to the fourth floors, sleeping.”

Suddenly, the images were blank again.

“Give it a few minutes,” Stephanie said. “The drone moved out of range. It'll circle back, and we'll have another look.”

Talia made herself breathe as she waited for the drone to fly back into thermal-image range. She couldn't be sure, but she thought she'd seen a smaller image among the other red lumps, another larger one close beside it.

“Here we go again,” Stephanie said. “Sharp eyes, everyone, so we can pin this down.”

Talia watched closely, then made a quick diagram with pencil and paper. “I think I've got them.”

When the drone went out of range again, they all compared notes.

“So we're in agreement?” Black asked after they'd conferred. “Meir and . . .” He trailed off and glanced at Talia. “What was his name, the one Meir told you looked out for him?”

“Rami,” she supplied quickly.

“Right. Meir and Rami appear to be sleeping side-by-side in a room in the middle of the fourth floor. Then we've got eight other signatures which we're tagging as tangos. Two on the ground floor guarding the entrance door, two on the second floor, two on the third, and two outside the room we've designated as Meir's and this Rami guy inside with him.”

Everyone nodded.

The conference-room door opened, and Green and Jones walked in.

“Gentlemen,” Black said. “Good timing. Let me bring you up to speed.”