A Carl Gustav round could slam through steel-reinforced concrete as if through cheese, and the overpressure from the explosion tended to screw up most of a building’s interior. From their roof position across the street, Perry and Gibb were not able to see what happened to the front of the house, but the entire structure quaked and swayed and deformed, and two exterior shutters on the back windows blew off, clanging across the concrete yard, as spikes of window glass bounced and splintered on the pavement.
At most twenty seconds after the building was slammed, the back door flew open, and two men staggered out, disoriented and no doubt half deaf. The night-soil manager drew the pistol from his drop-leg holster, and the new guy carried a fully automatic carbine with an extended magazine, maybe an Uzi. Gibb needed one shot to take out the would-be Scarface, a second to ensure the kill, and Perry dropped the other terrorist, sparing him from further latrine duty.
Following the second round from the Gustav, the house resembled a set from a Transformers movie after a robot had stomped through it. Pax was prepared to use the remaining two rounds, and Danny loaded one. But the building swayed as though constructed of pudding and crashed in upon itself, clouds of dust billowing into the street.
They tore off their ear protection, snatched up the MK12s, ventured outside as the air slowly cleared. Approaching the target house, they were cautious, though the chance of anyone within having survived seemed nil. Perry and Gibb came in from the street to the east, which was when Pax learned that two had been sniped, leaving five under the rubble.
Time now to call in the carrier-based helo to extract the team, though the task remaining would not be easy. The point was to prove you could not kill 317 Americans and live long enough to brag about it to your grandchildren. They needed to find al-Ghazali, photograph his face or what remained of it, and take a tissue sample for DNA. Otherwise, some anonymous Internet-savvy bonehead would fake proof that he was al-Ghazali, and 31 percent of Americans would believe him.
Pax started to call for the helo when Bibi’s face bloomed so vividly in his mind’s eye that the ruins of the ghost town ceased to exist for a moment. If previously he’d suspected she was in trouble, he knew it now. This was battleground intuition on steroids—and more than intuition. He had to wrap the op, ditch this cesspool country, and call Bibi as soon as the blackout rule no longer applied, when they were at sea, aboard the aircraft carrier.
Calida Butterfly was a whirlpool, a vortex of dark energy that could not be resisted, so that Bibi was caught up in the woman’s fear, felt it swirling through her. So convincing was the diviner’s anxiety, so distraught the series of expressions that tortured her face, it proved impossible quite to believe that she could be a fraud with criminal intent. And there had been too many bizarre occurrences to dismiss her as a delusional paranoid. Something extraordinary was happening, about to happen, approaching fast, and the prudent course seemed to be to get out of its way before it arrived.
In the bedroom closet, as Bibi opened the shoebox and retrieved the holster with the Sig Sauer P226, Calida said, “I’ll leave my massage table. It’ll slow me down. I’ll get it later, next week, whenever. Can you hurry, kid? Come on, come on!”
Bibi shrugged into the shoulder rig, adjusted it, pulled a blazer off a hanger, and slipped into it. The pistol already held a full magazine. She glanced at herself in the closet-door mirror. The gun didn’t show under the coat. Her reflection did not quite resemble the one to which she was accustomed: hair kind of wild, windblown on a night without wind; strangeness swimming in the dark pools of her eyes; hard edges in her face that she hadn’t seen before. She thought she looked like a desperado. Or a perfect idiot.
In the living room, as Calida snatched up her suitcase, Bibi grabbed her purse and laptop. “Damn it, why did Mom and Dad sic you on me?”
“Not their fault. They couldn’t know. Nothing like this ever happened when I did them.”
“Nothing like what?”
“The disgusting rotten smell, the cold from nowhere, the weird candle crap, the clocks. The wrong people coming.”
Following the woman to the front door, Bibi said, “I figured stuff like that always happened.”
“Never happened to me before.”
“Never?” Bibi pulled shut the door. She fumbled with the key to engage the deadbolt. “But you’re the diviner, the big kahuna.”
Hastening along the balcony toward the stairs, Calida said, “It happened to my mother sometimes. She warned me about it, but maybe I didn’t take her seriously enough.”
“Wait up.” Bibi hurried after the blonde. “Didn’t take her seriously? Really? I mean, really? Your mother, who was tortured and dismembered?”
“No need for the snarky tone, kid. Sometimes you can be pretty damn insensitive.”