The Taste of Fear (15 page)
“Thunder!”
He appeared through the hole blown in the wall of the gatehouse. He shook his head.
They’re all dead,
she thought, feeling sick again.
That’s what he means. The guards are all dead.
Through the open gate Scarlett saw a large crater dug into the ground in front of the Chancery building. Wreckage from the suicide vehicle was scattered over the green grass and among the flame trees. Aside from the broken windows and the black blast marks on the stone façade, the structure seemed largely undamaged. The American flag atop the twenty-five-meter flagpole flapped undaunted in the wind. Then the front doors to the main entrance flung open and four gunmen herded a group of men and women into one of the waiting vans.
Scarlett’s instincts told her to run, but her feet remained soldered to the ground. She watched what played out dreamily, as if it was all happening in slow motion.
A terrorist attack,
she thought, the reality of the situation clubbing her over the head with an almost physical force.
I’m witnessing a terrorist attack. Not on the news. Right here, right now.
Three more gunmen emerged through the doors, herding more hostages.
One of them was Sal.
Before she could think better of it, Scarlett shouted his name.
A terrorist pointed at her.
That slapped her out of her dazed stupor. Time slung-shot forward. Her vision returned to normal. Sound bubbled back: shouts in Arabic, cries in English. A burnt, chemical smell hung over everything.
The same terrorist leveled his gun. Red fire erupted from the muzzle.
Thunder snagged Scarlett’s hand and they fled back to the Rav 4, scrambling inside. Thunder threw the transmission into reverse. The tires squealed as the car shot backward. As they neared the gatehouse, he hit the brakes, tugging the wheel to the right. The front tires skated across the asphalt in the opposite direction, coming to rest pointed toward the street. He shoved the gearstick into first and stamped the gas again.
Before he switched to second, however, there was a jolting crash. They didn’t have their seatbelts on and Scarlett slammed forward against the dash while Thunder shot up, cracking his head on the roof. She swung around in her seat. One of the vans was right behind them.
“Go faster!” she shouted.
The van swerved to the left, pulling parallel to them, its engine roaring.
Metal screamed as the two vehicles traded paint.
Scarlett could see the driver only a few feet away. He stared at her, his eyes narrowed slits filled with black hatred. His scarf blew away in the wind, revealing a horribly burned face.
“Faster!” she urged in a voice she scarcely recognized as her own.
The van swung hard to the right, sideswiping the smaller and lighter Toyota, causing the steering wheel to spin wildly in Thunder’s hands. The car careened off the road and collided head-on with the trunk of a palm tree.
Scarlett saw a burst of white moments before the airbag exploded in her face.
A snowy darkness faded to black.
Chapter 16
Thursday, December 26, 7:33 p.m.
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Fitzgerald snapped off the television and remained seated on the bed for a long time, thinking. His job, it seemed, had just become a hell of a lot more difficult.
He wasn’t surprised the terrorists had attacked the American embassies on the tenth anniversary of the original Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings. He was well aware of how history, and warfare by extension, repeated itself. What did surprise him, however, was the man he’d been hired to kill had somehow gotten himself tangled up in the whole bloody mess.
Nevertheless, to keep things positive, Fitzgerald’s earlier foresight was now proving to be more important than ever. Back in the Serengeti, when he’d surveyed the safari camp from the kopje, he’d realized he wouldn’t get another chance at Brazza, not there anyhow. The camp had been too small. Too many potential witnesses for him to have pulled off something unnoticed. And taking them all out would have been suspicious. You could murder lowlifes with little thought to circumstance and consequence, but he didn’t take out lowlifes. The privilege of his clientele often extended to their deaths. So when Brazza and Cox and the stocky fellow had gone off in the balloon, and the cook had followed on the ground, Fitzgerald had slipped two tracking devices into Brazza’s belongings—one in his suitcase, another in his blazer. The reasoning was simple. If he couldn’t get Brazza in Africa, then he’d get him in Dubai or LA or wherever he went to next.
Which, as fate would have it, was now going to be some Al Qaeda stronghold.
Fitzgerald flipped open his MacBook, attached a white receiver about the size of an external hard drive to a USB port, and used his Wi-Fi enabled thumb drive to connect to the Internet. The two tracking transmitters sent signals to the twenty-four Department of Defense satellites orbiting the earth. The receiver could triangulate the transmitter’s location to within eight inches and one-quarter mph. He frowned at the screen now. There were two dots on the map. One was in Moshi, a town in the northeast of Tanzania. The other was on the B129, between Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, Tanzania’s capital.
He watched and waited. The one in Moshi remained immobile while the one on the B129 moved west. He reviewed the archives and discovered from the time he’d activated the transmitters in the Serengeti, both had stayed together until Arusha, when, on the highway near Mt. Kilimanjaro Airport, they’d diverged. Had Brazza and Cox split up then? That couldn’t be right. They’d both been at the Dar embassy. Since that was the case, he ignored the tracker in Moshi and focused on the one that had gone through Dar and was now heading west. He spent another minute watching more of the same, then went to the window and lit a Kent.
He inhaled deeply, exhaled through his nose, and stared absently at the traffic far below him. By the time the tobacco had burned to the filter, he had come to the conclusion this new twist of events might actually be to his advantage. Because now he wouldn’t have to bother with making the kill appear accidental. Who would suspect an assassin’s bullet when Salvador Brazza was in the hands of Al Qaeda fundamentalists?
Fitzgerald snubbed out the fag on the window ledge, returned to the bed, and looked to the part of the laptop screen where the program monitored the battery life remaining in the transmitters.
He had exactly two days, eleven hours before he lost the signal.
Chapter 17
Friday, December 27, 12:01 a.m.
Macau, China
“Manyak,”
Danny Zamir swore under his breath in Hebrew as he skipped through the television channels. He exchanged the remote for his cell phone and dialed Sal’s cell number. He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one.
He paced the hotel suite.
The last time he’d spoken to Sal had been approximately twenty-four hours ago. He’d told him that Don Xi was dead and gave an update on what he’d learned about the Irishman named Redstone, which, as it had turned out, hadn’t been much. Even Danny’s shadiest contacts had heard only rumors about the man. One was that his alias, Redstone, was chosen after the first man he’d killed, a Malcolm Ruby. Another was that he was the son of a late London crime lord. Another still was that he’d single-handedly taken out an entire Russian mob.
According to that last rumor, after the Irishman had put a half-inch-wide bullet from a Barrett M107 through the heart of a high-ranking member of a Moscow-based mob, the mob’s boss, Alexander Noukhaev, tracked the Irishman down to a small house on the coast of Northern Ireland.
The Irishman wasn’t home, but his wife and daughter were. They were found by police dismembered, their limbs pinned to the living room wall like some kind of macabre art exhibit. Less than a month later, however, revenge was served when the severed heads of Noukhaev’s three sons were discovered in a garbage bag in the center of Cathedral Court, in the heart of the Kremlin. Over the next two years the rest of the mob was systematically picked off one by one—big daddies, little sixes, thirty-three men in total—until only Alexander Noukaev remained. Then one day he simply disappeared.
Regardless of whether that tale was true, Sal had not been cheered to hear any of it. The initial plan Danny had devised had called for Sal to skip the Prince Tower’s opening and return to the U.S., pronto, avoiding all public events, while Danny stalked the stalker. Now, it seemed, those concerns had become secondary.
Kidnapped in Africa,
he thought.
Christ, capo.
He punched another number into his cell. “Yeah, I saw it. Why do you think I’m calling? Round up six of our guys and meet me at the hangar at first light.” He paused. “And bring some sunscreen. Africa’s going to get hot.”
Chapter 18
Thump, thump, thump.
Scarlett opened her eyes. Blackness. The thumping continued, loud and hollow, from somewhere above her. She heard the hum of tires, felt the sense of speed. “Hello?” she said.
“Scarlett?”
“Sal?”
Suddenly hands cradled her head, fingers brushing her hair back from her face. She smelled the spicy-rose scent of Sal’s cologne. She struggled into a sitting position and hugged her husband fiercely. “How?” she mumbled into his shoulder.
“You’re all right,” he said.
“That noise, the banging?”
“It was me. I was kicking the damn door.”
“Where are we?”
“In a van. They took us.”
She recalled the explosion, the dead Marines, the car crash. Scarlett’s gut knotted with reawakened fear. “Thunder?” she said. “Where’s Thunder?” She looked around but couldn’t see anything in the dark.
“Big fellow? He’s here. They brought you in together.”
She crawled blindly forward and discovered an inert body lying in the center of the van’s cargo body. Thunder. She traced her fingertips up his shoulder to his face and felt something sticky on his forehead. Blood. She probed gently, finding a gash just above the left eye. She pressed the pads of her index finger and middle finger in the hollow between his windpipe and the large muscle of his neck. Relief swamped her. His pulse was strong, the rhythm regular. She settled down beside him, resting his head on her lap.
“Who is he?” Sal asked. She heard him shift, as if he was settling down as well.
“The man whose car you wouldn’t get into.”
“Him? He drove you all the way to the embassy? What were you thinking anyway? I had no idea where you went—”
“Not now, Sal. Please.” It still sounded like she was hearing everything through cotton. “How long have I been out?”
“Only a few minutes,” a woman said.
Scarlett jumped. “Who are you?” She spun her head. “How many people are in here?”
“My name is Joanna Mills.” Her voice came from where the cargo body met the cab. “I’m the vice consul at the embassy.”
“I’m Miranda Sanders,” a soft, barely-there voice said. “I’m a clerk in the passport office.”
“They were in the atrium with me when the blast occurred,” Sal explained. “We were thrown to the floor. Then the gunmen came in and took us outside. That’s when I saw you at the gate. What were you doing just standing there?”
“Thunder and I had just arrived. We saw a bunch of men in scarves shoot the Marine at the gatehouse. Thunder went to see if any of them were alive, and I followed.” She swallowed. “Who were they anyway? Al Qaeda?”
“I’m afraid so,” Joanna said.
“How do you know?” Miranda asked. She sounded young—young and scared.
“Who else blows up American embassies?” Sal quipped.
“Watch how you speak to her,” Joanna said sharply.
“I’m in no mood for imbecilic questions right now.”
“1965,” Joanna said authoritatively. “The Viet Cong detonated a car bomb outside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two American hostages for 444 days. 1983, two truck bombs, this time Hezbollah, against the American barracks in Beirut—”
“And in 1998,” Sal cut in, “Al Qaeda terrorists blew up the embassies in Nairobi and, guess what, this same city. Last I checked it was 2008. That makes it exactly ten years after the original bombings. Anniversaries, as you should know, are big for these guys. So unless you’re telling me this is all some grand coincidence, and in fact some Viet Cong who’s just woken up from a coma—”
“Shut up.”
“—and still thinks Johnson is president has decided out of all places to bomb why not—”
“I said shut up!”
“I just want to make clear that, yes, it was a very imbecilic question.”
“Enough!” Scarlett shouted. “Enough. Everyone’s stressed. Okay. But we need to think this through. Figure out what’s going to happen next.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” Sal said, still using his boardroom tone, authoritative and in control. Scarlett half expected him to start talking about quarterly forecasts. “They take us somewhere, call up the most important politician they have the number for, and start ransom negotiations.”
“That’s if they want money,” Joanna said.
“What else would they want?”
“You said so yourself, Mr. Brazza. This is Al Qaeda. Not some South African syndicate going after children and businessmen. Nor Somali and Sudanese tribal clans snatching up journalists and foreign aid workers.”
“It’s not political,” Sal stated flatly.
“How can you say that? They bombed an embassy.”
“Bombings, assassinations—that’s political, sure. Kidnapping is all about money.”
“How can you know that? How can you possibly, categorically know that?” Joanna sounded half flustered, half incredulous. Like Sal had just told her Mars was pleasant to visit in the spring. “Maybe they want to put us on the Internet and—” She bit back the words.
“Cut off our heads?”
“God, you’re a horror! Don’t you know Miranda is just a girl?”
“She better grow up fast.”
“Stop it!” Scarlett shouted again. “Would you two please stop? We’re on the same side here.”
Silence fell. Scarlett found it almost as bad as the infighting. She could taste despair in the coffin blackness.
The van lurched around a corner, throwing her onto her side. She pushed herself back upright, repositioning Thunder’s head on her lap. The engine made a dirty, revving sound, as though the driver had left his foot on the clutch for too long. She prayed the bastard would get a speeding ticket, or the van would blow a tire and flip—or swerve to avoid a pothole and shoot through a cable-and-post guardrail. Ironically, she would have welcomed such a fate right now. God, how quickly one’s fortune could change. It didn’t matter who you were, Fate didn’t tug you back out of the way of an oncoming bus—or politely suggest today might not be the best time to visit the embassy because, haven’t you heard, terrorists are bombing it.