Page 105 of End of Days

He said, “Look for Dora.”

I looked up from my iPhone and said, “You’re shitting me.”

He smiled for the first time and said, “I have a daughter. She named my phone.”

I laughed and said, “I have my own daughter, adopted from Syria. I get it. It’s on the way,” and we finally bonded. He relaxed in the chair, retrieved the message, and said, “I will take this to my command. I can’t promise anything.”

I said, “That’s all I ask. Just do what we both want here. Nobody wants a war. Well, almost nobody.” I looked at Samir and said, “Which is why I need that number for the smuggler.”

Muhammed said, “You don’t need to worry about that number. We’ve talked to him, and he’s okay. We’ll be taking care of him.”

“No offense, but I don’t think he will be. He’s in danger, if he’s not already dead. Do you know where he is here in Lebanon? Can you get to him?”

Muhammed glanced at Samir, and Samir nodded, encouraging him to talk. He came back to me and said, “He’s not in Lebanon. He’s in Syria.”

“Syria? What the hell for? How did he get there?”

“He’s helping us with some things.”

I said, “Muhammed, give me the number. He may have thought he was helping, but he’s with the men who are trying to get us into a fight. They want us at each other’s throats. Give me the number, and if he’s fine, he’s fine. If not, I’ll handle the problem.”

“We can deal with this.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “Okay, thendoit. In the meantime, give me the number. It’s just a sat phone. It’s not like I can use it to break apart your security systems here in Lebanon. Just give it to me.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Stop a damn war.”

Chapter 65

The Rock Star bird took off, circled the coast of Lebanon, and then began crossing back into the country, the city of Beirut lit up in the nighttime sky. We’d left so quickly I hadn’t had time to tell anyone what was going on, just instructing Knuckles and Brett to show back up at the aircraft for immediate exfiltration. They’d turned in our rental vehicles and had met us planeside. Jennifer and I had run up the stairs behind them, closing the door with me still on the phone. Five minutes later, we were airborne.

After we broke the ten-thousand-foot mark, Shoshana came forward and asked, “What are we doing? Why are we leaving?”

Still on the phone with George Wolffe, I held up my hand, waving her off. Truthfully, I was glad I had an excuse not to answer, because I wasn’t really sure what the hell we were going to do, but I knew that staying in Lebanon wasn’t the answer. Muhammed had finally given me the number, and I’d had Jennifer inject it into our system through the Taskforce after leaving the meeting. It was a long process, because Project Prometheus requests had to be washed of fingerprints before entering the intelligence community, but it was what I had to deal with. The NSA could find that phone if it had contacted a satellite, and because of the way sat phones worked, it would have a geolocation assigned to it. The problem was that the tail of getting that information back to me could take hours.

We’d left the café in one piece, with Samir satisfied that I hadn’t done anything to put him in danger. Honestly, I would have liked tospend a few days on the coast with him and his niece, just drinking beer, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Muhammed had actually become almost human. I knew he was a Hezbollah killer, but we were working for the same solution on this problem set, so I would respect his position. Someday I might be hunting his ass, but not today.

In the rush to get the number in the system and the team into the aircraft, I hadn’t had the time to tell anyone what we were doing, spending it all talking to George Wolffe on my secure phone. I’d kept arguing with Wolffe all the way through takeoff, the sticking point being that we were now going into Syria. Lebanon was okay, and Israel was even better, given we had Aaron and Shoshana, but Syria was an entirely different basket of shit.

He didn’t want to do anything there without consulting the Oversight Council, but I told him we didn’t have the time for a debate, using his own words against him about the original Omega authority. We’d thought it would be in Lebanon, but that didn’t alter the facts of the matter: terrorists don’t care about state boundaries, and that’s why we existed. Syria was no different than Lebanon as far as the Taskforce charter was concerned.

Well, except that it was a hell of a lot more dangerous.

I hung up the phone, Shoshana started to say something else, and I held up a hand, saying, “Jennifer, any geolocation?”

“Not yet.”

I said, “Brett and Knuckles, we need to talk.”

They came forward and I said, “Remember when I said I was going to target you against the so-called Turtles in Lebanon?”

Wary, Knuckles said, “Yeah?”

“Well, I’m still going to target you against them, but it’s going to be in Syria.”

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