The security chief’s blue-flecked steel-gray eyes were to him as scalpels to a surgeon. Direct and sharp and intent on cutting through all deception, his gaze seemed to flense her with exquisite delicacy, peeling away the layers of her image in a search for the most artful chicanery, some subtle telltale, that would put the lie to everything he’d been told.
“These days,” he said in a dead-flat voice from which he took care to bleed all inflection, “I may be just a glorified mall cop, in a somewhat more respectable environment, but I was once the real thing, and I still have good gumshoe instincts.”
Regarding him with growing amazement and uneasiness, Bibi asked, “What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything, Miss Blair.”
“That I’m some kind of suspect?”
He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes in an unconvincing pretense of surprise, as if she had misinterpreted what he’d said and had leaped to a conclusion about his intentions that astonished him.
“What am I supposed to have done?” she asked, not with offense or anger, but with a kind of amused bafflement. “Faked the remission of my cancer? Tricked the MRI machine? Deceived all my doctors? Does any of that make sense?”
If the irrepressible joy she felt as a result of her recovery had not been still so fresh in Bibi’s heart, the security chief’s smug smile would have ticked her off.
“That old cop intuition, Miss Blair, it’s like poison ivy. It just itches and itches, you can’t ignore it, so you have to scratch it real good to get relief.”
With those words, which Bibi took to be a promise or even a threat, Chubb Coy headed for the door.
She said, “Try some calamine lotion. It has a funny smell and it’s lady-pink, but it relieves the itching.”
Without glancing back, Coy left the room.
The soft laugh that escaped Bibi had only a slight nervous edge. She said, “Looney-Toon.”
Throughout the morning and the afternoon of their first day on the roof of the three-story building, the four members of the SEAL team used periscopic cameras with nonreflective zoom lenses to scan the dead village without much risk that sunlight, flaring off the glass, would betray their presence. The images transmitted to the display screens were crisp, clear, and tedious. When the sun moved west but not directly behind Paxton and his men, they were bold enough to poke just their heads above the parapet to study the townscape: a drab gray-and-sand-brown hodgepodge of characterless structures, bullet-pocked stucco, cracked and crumbling concrete, and iron security gates hanging useless from broken hinges, strewn through with rubble.
Their target, the Ghost, whose name was Abdullah al-Ghazali, was holed up somewhere in these grim ruins, and he had with him six acolytes, all true believers, two of them possibly women. He had chosen to hide in this town, whose population he had slaughtered seventeen months earlier, perhaps because he thought it was the last place anyone would look for him, but perhaps because the atmosphere of an abattoir appealed to the bastard, surrounded as he was with memories of vicious cruelties and abhorrent violence, which he found delectable. Paxton had studied the culture that produced such men, but a lifetime of study would not help him understand why they became death-loving haters of everything the rest of humanity held dear.
An equal-opportunity terrorist who murdered not only Jews and Christians and Hindus and those who had no faith, Abdullah al-Ghazali also butchered Arab tribes other than his own, Muslims he considered less than pure. He claimed to have taken—or ordered taken—the lives of ten thousand people, and most experts thought he had undercounted.
He usually moved with impunity through countries impressed by his barbarism, but not since the past October. In spite of Homeland Security and no-fly lists and surveillance of every transportation system coast to coast, he had gotten into the States, activated ten sleeper cells, planned two attacks—led one—on shopping malls, and murdered 317 people. Most of his associates had been killed or arrested, but he had escaped the United States, only to find that he was now too hot to be welcomed in those kingdoms and fake democracies that had once provided him with rent-free villas when he needed them.
Pax, Danny, Gibb, and Perry had been sent to provide justice, which in this case did not require a judge and jury. Now that they were in town, they were eager to do the job and go home, impatient with the need to conceal their presence until the targets revealed themselves, instead of boldly going on the search.