Page 32 of The Devil's Ransom

The team member at the computer said, “What?”

“Do it!”

He returned to the phone and said, “Sir, we knew that, and we have people on the consulate, but we can’t snatch him there. We’re working on it.”

Haqqani said, “I don’t like excuses. Get me that treasure. And bring me Jahn.”

The phone disconnected and Shakor turned to the team member sitting in front of the computer. Looking chagrined, knowing the answer he gave would reflect on him as much as Shakor, the man said, “Ahmad turned himself in to the consulate. They’re working his visa to get him to the States. He’s all over the news as a great story for the US evacuation, because that’s going so poorly. They’re trumpeting his escape. He’s going to be on a press conference today at four.”

Shakor looked at his watch and said, “That’s in two hours. Get the team here. Now.”

“All of them? You want to pull off the airport completely?”

He paced for a minute, unsure, then said, “Leave one person watching the plane. Everyone else comes here.”

Forty-five minutes later he had a four-man team surrounding a computer, a Google map displaying the location of the United States consulate. All of them were dressed in European clothing, with short hair and no beards. All of them spoke English, with two fluent in German and two in French. They could blend into any European country, and Shakor would use that now.

He said, “Ahmad Khan made it into the U.S. consulate. He’s being presented today at a press conference where the United States will blather about protecting the allies they pretend to hold dear. The mission is simple: We wait for it to be over, and then follow him to wherever he’s being kept. When we find that, we take him. Understand?”

The men in the room nodded, waiting on their specific assignments. Using Google Street View, Shakor pulled up detailed pictures of the consulate, showing a nondescript five-story office complex with a parking garage underneath, the building itself about four blocks east of Lake Zurich.

He said, “The consulate is on the third floor, and we obviously aren’t going to be invited to watch the press conference, but sooner or later, they’ll have to leave the building. When that happens, the mission is to simply find out where they take him.”

He then dictated positions, saying, “I’ll be the control. Each position will have two people, as I have no idea how long it will take for him to leave the building. He could stay there for hours getting debriefed, but sooner or later, he’s going to leave. Use the Vespa scooters and relieve each other as necessary. Sooner or later,they’ll leave the parking garage and go to wherever they’ve paid to put him up.”

One of the men asked, “What about security? We can’t attack them without causing a reaction.”

Shakor said, “He’s not going to spend the night in the consulate, and the U.S. will feel no threat here in Switzerland. I’m sure there will be security when he leaves, but that’s going to just be show. When he gets to the bed-down site, he’ll be left alone. That’s where we’ll take him. Questions?”

Ghulam, one of the more violent members of the crew, said, “When he leaves, why not just take him off the street? Before he gets to the safehouse? Put a bullet in his head?”

Shakor actually had to take a minute to process what the man said. When he did, he fought to control his voice. “This isn’t a kill mission. We’re here to find the treasure. Anyone who thinks that killing Ahmad is the mission is sorely wrong. He is a link to the treasure. That’s all. Donotkill him.”

The men nodded and, as he’d done on multiple operations with the Badr 313 Battalion, Shakor said one final time, “Any more questions? If there are, ask them now.”

Unlike the usual Taliban attack forces, the Badr Battalion had learned from their very enemy, the United States Special Forces, and they’d become better because of it. They had studied. Had learned that each member of the team had something to offer. And after twenty years of war, they were now the equal of the men they were against, if only because their enemy held them in disdain.

Nobody around the computer said anything else. Shakor said, “Okay, remember, this isn’t about Ahmad. It’s about the treasure. We need him alive. When we find the treasure, then, and only then, can we kill him.”

Chapter19

Dylan Hobbes pulled into the checkpoint for the West Wing and showed his driver’s license. The man took it, scrolling through a list on a computer, and Hobbes used the opportunity to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Having always had hyperhidrosis, he was used to the moisture under his arms and his hands, but it increased exponentially when he was stressed.

Which he was now.

The 911 call the night before had worked out as best as he could hope, with the police and EMT response deciding it was an accident—a tragic fall down the stairs. The coroner would have the final say, and one man appeared to question the wound on the forehead, saying it was much too deep and precise to be from a random fall, but Hobbes had been told at the scene that it looked pretty cut-and-dried. No foul play.

It was still nerve-racking, and because of it, he couldn’t turn off his body’s reaction, the beads rolling down him like he was the character in the sweating scene from the comedy movieAirplane!

It wasn’t just the killing making him sweat, though. It was what he was about to do. He couldn’t allow the Serbians to continue the attack he’d planned. The risk was too great that he’d be found out as the source of the code for the attack, and in so doing be branded as a traitor, when that was the absolute opposite of what he was. He was a patriot. The problem was he couldn’t simply turn them off. He wasn’t in control of their operations—the Russian, Andrei, was.

While he had given them the code with the promise that they use it on a specific target of his choosing, he couldn’t stop them from doing whatever else they wanted before that time. He’d had no fear of discovery when he believed they’d simply attack some European airline, but they’d hit something else entirely—and he was sure they had no idea of the trouble they’d caused.

Why did they choose this place to attack? Why?

He’d scrabbled for a solution all night long like a rat gnawing on a piece of gristle, tossing and turning, his bedsheets damp with the sweat rolling off his body. One answer was to simply “admit” failure, telling the secret people at the White House that he couldn’t crack the code and had given up. But that would invite questions. Who gives up after two days? These sorts of things took much longer than that, but there was no way he could let anyone else from his team look at the code. They’d recognize it just as Kirk had, and he most certainly couldn’t start killing everyone in his company, and so he’d have to engineer another reason he couldn’t continue.

But that brought up a second problem. If he quit, the United States government wouldn’t. They’d find someone else, and that company would be outside of his control. Eventually they might make the same connection Kirk had, exposing him to the same problem. The Vault 7 leaks from WikiLeaks taught him that. The world was a much smaller place than it used to be. The only way to be clean was to keep the problem set to himself.

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