Takedown

He had taken less than two strides when Ali felled him with a single silenced round. The damage, though, was already done. The security agents came charging into the room with their weapons drawn and upon seeing the ambassador and his assistant sprawled on the floor, opened fire.

Thankfully, their shots went wide as Ali dove for cover behind the desk.

The security agents managed to get off several more rounds before Ali found his opportunity, rolled from behind the desk, and took out each of them with exceptionally clean head shots.

With the bodyguards down, Ali leapt from behind the desk. He had no idea if the shots had been heard by anyone else, but he didn’t want to wait around to find out. This would be his one and only chance to free Mohammed bin Mohammed, and either he would succeed or they would both die trying.

Ali quickly found the items he needed, and once he had retrieved his diplomatic passport, he wheeled his little surprise toward the freight elevator.

One of the few pieces of useful information he’d been able to squeeze out of the ambassador as the man blubbered for his life was that the Americans had welded their stairwell doors shut and that the only way to gain access to their floor was via the freight elevator. Though they were many things, stupid was not one of them. They had gone to considerable lengths to ensure their security. And who could blame them? The last thing they wanted was for someone like Abdul Ali to spoil their party.

After prepping the door upstairs with the remaining plastique he had hidden inside his specially made belt, Ali returned to the ambassador’s floor and using the man’s keycard, swiped it through the card reader and summoned the elevator.

When the elevator arrived, Ali looked up and saw that the hatch had been welded shut. He smiled. The Americans really had thought of everything. But he doubted they had a contingency plan for what was about to happen next.

Swiping the card again on a reader inside the elevator, Ali punched the button for the next floor, positioned his surprise aboard, and headed for the stairwell. Things were about to get very interesting.

Ninety-One

From the streaks of blood on both the floor and along the wall of the elevator, it looked as if the ambassador had stumbled inside after being shot and had managed to swipe his keycard and press the button for their floor before collapsing.

“Don’t touch him!” commanded Jaffe as the two Libyan intelligence agents rushed into the elevator. Until he knew what the hell was going on, he wanted everything taken very slowly.

That plan, though, fell to pieces when the agent they called Hassan leaned down close to the ambassador’s face and could hear the sound of breathing. “He’s alive!” he shouted.

Jaffe gave a rapid series of orders and after sending Harper for the medical kit and telling the two Libyans to back out of the elevator, he stepped inside to have a look for himself.

Shouldering his weapon, Jaffe carefully approached the ambassador to check on his condition. The man was in bad shape, and what Hassan had thought to be the sound of breathing was actually the sound of the ambassador choking on his own blood. If they didn’t do something and fast, the man was going to die.

Calling Rashid, Hassan, and his two other marines back into the elevator, Jaffe placed them along both sides of the ambassador and prepared them to carefully turn the man while he supported his head. On three, they began to roll him over, and that’s when Jaffe realized he hadn’t been cautious enough. The ambassador was indeed choking on his own blood, but he was also desperately trying to warn them not to move him. By the time Jaffe realized what was happening, it was too late.

The improvised device rigged to the ambassador exploded in an enormous fireball, ripping the roof off the car, shearing the cables, and sending it plummeting into the basement.

Ninety-Two

Upon hearing the explosion, Ali ran back up the stairs and detonated a second device, blowing the welded door right out of its frame.

He stepped into the freight area and saw the blackened elevator doors standing open, but nothing else. It was like an enormous gaping mouth with smoke billowing from its throat.

His weapon up and at the ready, Ali began his search for Mohammed. Moving quickly, he swept into the first three offices along the hall and finding them empty, moved on. In the fourth, he found a television set, a cooking area with a sink as well as a table, chairs, and some couches, but nothing more.

The next door was marked with both the English and Arabic words for washroom. He pushed the door open and quietly slipped inside. Having looked inside every stall and confident that they were all empty, he exited and continued his search. There were only about five offices remaining. The next was empty, as was the next after that. As Ali quickly moved toward the last three rooms, he found the next one he approached was locked. A handwritten sign identified its function as a sterile treatment room and listed a set of instructions to follow before entering. Abdul Ali kicked it open and inside found a surgical table, a medical recovery recliner, a wheelchair, various first aid supplies, and right in the center of it all a high-end Nova Medical Systems dialysis machine.

The next room was the nerve center of the interrogation operation. The walls were covered with dry-erase boards, maps of the Middle East and Africa, multiple photographs of the al-Qaeda hierarchy, as well as various organizational and relationship diagrams. Desks were laden with audio and video equipment as well as monitors tuned to cameras that must have been positioned all over the floor. Seeing the image on the largest monitor, Abdul Ali turned and fled.

Bursting into the room across the hall, he was ready to weep with joy. There, bound to a small, wooden chair was Mohammed bin Mohammed. Next to him, unconscious and severely beaten, was a man Ali had never met but most definitely knew of. The last he’d heard, the man had been in Canada. He had no idea Mohammed’s nephew, Sayed Jamal, had been taken prisoner.

As he rushed to Mohammed’s side, he saw that he was naked from the waist down, his penis red and swollen beyond belief. “What unspeakable acts have they done to you, my brother?” he asked as he removed a knife and begun cutting away the restraints.

At first, Mohammed didn’t want to believe his eyes. His body was so racked with pain and his mind was clouded by the horror of his torture. Surely it was some sort of trick. Then he saw Ali holster his weapon and remove a knife to help cut him free. It was Ali, wasn’t it? At this point, he didn’t know what to believe. “Is it you?” he asked, his voice hoarse from his screaming.

“Yes, Mohammed, it is I. I have come to take you home,” replied Ali.

Looking in the direction of his nephew, Mohammed asked, “And Sayed?”

Ali reached over and felt the man’s pulse. It was weak, too weak. “I’m sorry. There is nothing we can do for him. He is not going to make it.”

Mohammed hung his head. “At least his family is already waiting for him in paradise.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Americans took each one of his children and killed them. Then they took his wife. They made us both watch it on television, hoping it would force me to tell them what they wanted to know.”

“And what did you tell them?” asked Ali, concerned that everything he had been through, everything they had risked might now be for nothing.

Mohammed’s face was a block of implacable granite. “I told them nothing. Even while they killed Sayed’s family one by one, I told them nothing.”

Ali looked at Jamal once again. His trouser legs had been sheared away, and his knees were a mass of bloody pulp. “What did they do to him?”