“What kind of event?”
Voland sniffed, cleared his throat. “She’s dead. Bianca is dead. They are all dead.”
A pause. “Tarek? Rima?”
“As I said. They are dead.”
“Dammit! How?”
“I tried to help them. Rima and Tarek. But they wouldn’t listen.”
“Was it Drexler?”
“Bien s?r it was fucking Drexler, along with Malik, a Syrian government assassin, and his team. Guns, night vision, communications jammers. They burned the house down to embers. They slaughtered everyone!”
Another pause on the line, but not for long. The American said, “Well . . . they didn’t slaughter everyone, did they, Voland?” Vincent Voland had expected to hear just exactly what he heard next. “I cannot fucking wait to hear the explanation of why you didn’t die in that fire with the rest of them.”
“I . . . I swear to you. I tried. I fought with them to understand we were outnumbered. I told them it was futile to—”
“Stop right there. You ran out on them, didn’t you?”
“Did you hear what I said? Azzam’s men were here! GIS. Mukhabarat paramilitaries. We didn’t know GIS would be involved.”
Slowly, the Gray Man said, “Did you, or did . . . you . . . not . . . surrender to Drexler and the Syrians?”
“I did!” Voland shouted defiantly, his voice echoing off the trees around him. A fire truck raced past on his left. “It was exactly the right move! The move Rima and Tarek should have taken for themselves.”
For the next twenty seconds, all Voland could hear was breathing over the phone. Then the American said, “You and I will talk about this again when I get to Jordan.”
To this Vincent Voland made no reply. Fire trucks continued rolling past, and he walked deeper into the cover of the trees.
“Hello? The pickup at the border? Remember? I need you to focus and give me my coordinates for—”
“Monsieur . . . I realize how this will sound, and I’m truly sorry. If it were just me I would get you and the child out of there . . . but, with the mother gone . . . it’s not me making the decisions, you understand.”
Court’s voice lowered an octave. “Be very careful about what you say next.”
“What can I say? The child was a bargaining chip, nothing more! The extraction of the baby was only to earn the compliance of Bianca Medina. But Medina is dead, so there is no way to exploit everything she knew about Azzam.”
“He’s leverage.”
“How? He’s an infant! Azzam will disavow that baby the moment he knows Bianca is dead. He won’t bring a bastard child into his palace without a mother, and Shakira surely won’t accept him. Maybe Azzam will find another mistress, make another heir, but Jamal Medina is worthless to him now. That means he is worthless to those trying to stop Azzam.”
The next response from the American was delivered in a matter-of-fact tone that made it all the more frightening to the Frenchman. “I’m going to kill you, Vincent. You know that, right?”
“Listen to me carefully. If you give me time, I will find a way to get you out. I owe you that for your heroism over the past week. But the Syrian resistance group based in Jordan won’t help now, so it won’t happen tonight. And even when I do find an exfiltration route for you, it will just be for you. The girl and the baby. That operation is played out. They can’t come.”
“We had a deal, you son of a bitch! I was to bring the child to—”
“What deal did you have with me? If you will remember, I was firmly against you traveling to Syria! I wanted you up here, where you could protect the Halabys from Drexler.”
“You promised me you had that end of the operation covered. I was wrong to believe in you.”
It was silent for several seconds, until Voland said, “I will find a way to get you out.”
“Yasmin and the baby, too. If I come out, they come out.”
“Then you have put yourself in a hopeless condition, haven’t you?”
The American did not reply.
* * *
? ? ?
Court sat on a pile of rubble in the half-destroyed underground parking garage of a completely destroyed office building. He held the phone to his left ear, and with his other hand he picked out what he hoped was the last shard of protective windshield glass from where several pieces had been lodged under a flap of skin right above his ear. The wound bled freely still, but it was superficial, and hardly his biggest concern of the moment.
The NDF vehicle he had stolen sat parked twenty feet away in the deepest shadows of the large empty space. He looked over at Yasmin and Jamal, whom he could just barely see through a shaft of moonlight that came through a crack in the concrete roof. She held the baby in her arms and sat with her back against the wall of the garage looking up at Court. She didn’t speak a word of English, this was obvious, because she showed no reaction to the fact that her fate was being discussed in front of her, and things weren’t looking good for her right now.
But she could clearly see there was a problem. She watched Court intently, certainly wondering why he was yelling at the people that he’d promised were waiting right over the Jordanian border with open arms.
Court turned away from the young girl and blew out a long sigh. “What would it take for you to agree to extract the child and the girl?”
The Frenchman on the other end of the line said, “What do you mean, ‘what would it take’? This is not a negotiation. I have to find people in Jordan or Syria or Lebanon or Turkey who will risk their lives to get you out. I can find someone, probably, but only to get out an able-bodied man of incredible skill. No one would be foolish enough to take on the added danger of an untrained civilian and an infant. There is nothing that would—”
Court said, “What if I helped you eliminate Ahmed Azzam . . . would that do it?”
“Eliminate?”
“Assassinate. I won’t do it myself, that’s impossible. But it might be possible for me to acquire intel that helps the FSA or the SDF or someone out there to kill him. Intel better than anything you could have gotten from Bianca Medina.”
Voland sniffed out a surprised laugh. “Ha! Well, yes, of course, in that case I could find someone who would help me bring out an entire nursery school.” The Frenchman clearly thought Court was joking.
But Court just sat there with the phone to his ear.
Voland slowly realized the American was serious. “What are you talking about?”
Court said, “I know where Azzam is going. Exactly where he is going. And I can get there myself. Close, anyway.”
“How do you know this?”
“Bianca told me he was going to make an appearance at a Russian military base outside Damascus.”
“There are a half dozen that I know of, and I assume there are others I don’t know about. You can’t—”
Court cut him off. “And then, tonight, a regime-backing militia officer told me the SAA was creating an unprecedented security cordon around a new Russian special forces base outside Palmyra, possibly for a high-profile visitor.”
“That’s it?”
“No, that’s not it. Yasmin tells me Ahmed told her he’ll return to Damascus on Tuesday. I think he’ll be at a Russian base in or near Palmyra on Tuesday morning.”
“That’s not enough intelligence to get the FSA to attack a Russian base.”
“Of course it’s not.” He said, “But here’s my offer. You talk to your people in the French government. You know, the ones you aren’t working with right now.”
“Go on.”
“Find a way to get the kid and the girl out of here, and I’ll stay in Syria. I’ll go north, I’ll try to get more intel on Azzam’s exact location and the time of his visit. I’ll push any intel I get to you, and you push it to the FSA. If they have any assets in the area at all, I’ll give them a target.”
“How on earth can you possibly get close enough to provide intelligence?”
“That’s my problem, not yours. Do we have a deal?”
Voland took a long time before replying. “What is wrong with you?”
“Meaning?”