WHY are we just sitting here?” Joel Wilson said. “We should be following them in.”
Nassar watched the scene through the windshield of the SUV they’d hired. On the surface it wasn’t much different from Wilson’s breach of Mitch Rapp’s home, but beneath the surface the differences were considerable. The men working to open the gate on Claudia Dufort’s house weren’t a well-trained FBI SWAT team. They were a random collection of his own people, local police, and men supplied by Mullah Halabi.
It was a dangerously unpredictable mix, but it was Halabi’s people he was most concerned about. While they were reasonably disciplined by terrorist standards, the contrast between them and his General Intelligence Directorate operatives was still rather stark. It made sense to limit Wilson’s exposure to the ISIS men as much as possible.
He glanced over at the impatient American and felt his fears diminish. The man had eyes, but they were glassy with a fervor that Nassar normally equated with Islam. While those men saw only God and their duty to Him, Wilson saw only Rapp and the revenge that was so close at hand.
“The presence of the African police creates an unstable situation, Joel. And the chances of Mr. Rapp hiding at the home of a woman he’s known to be involved with is far-fetched in the extreme. This is a job for soldiers, not generals.”
As if to punctuate his words, two shots rang out. Wilson went for the door handle, but Nassar grabbed his shoulder and activated his headset. “Report.”
“Two guard dogs,” came the reply in his earpiece. “We’re clear.”
“Copy. The compound is secured, Joel. We can go in now.”
“What about those shots?”
“It was nothing.”
Nassar pulled through the gate, parking in a courtyard overflowing with palm trees and bougainvillea. Mullah Halabi’s men were near the front door in what seemed to be a wary détente with Nassar’s team. Wilson was blind to the obvious tension, instead focusing on irrelevant matters that so easily distracted Americans. In this case, it was the two dead guard dogs and the local policeman pinning a terrified African woman against a tree. When one of them slapped her, Wilson jumped out and ran in their direction.
“Stop!”
Nassar followed, keeping Halabi’s men in his peripheral vision as Wilson pushed the policeman aside.
“Who are you?” he said to the woman.
Her words came out in an unintelligible jumble, so the policeman spoke for her. “She says she works here. That she lives in the servants’ quarters at the back.”
“Is there any reason to believe that’s not true?”
The man shrugged.
“Calm down,” Wilson said. “We’re not here to hurt you and you’re not under arrest. Now tell me. Where is Claudia Dufort?”
“I . . . I don’t know. She hasn’t been here in many months. I care for the house.” She looked past him for a moment at the dead animals lying in the grass. “And the dogs.”
He pulled out a photo and held it up to her. “Do you know this man?”
She nodded. “Mitch. He’s an American.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“When he came to help get Claudia and Anna’s things.”
“So months ago.”
She nodded.
“How do you communicate with them? Do you have a phone number?”
“No. An email address.”
“Okay. Go back to your quarters and stay there until I tell you to come out.”
She rushed off and he turned to Nassar. “Her story matches what we already know—that Dufort and her daughter have been living with Rapp in the U.S.”
“Agreed. Questioning this woman would be a waste of time. Rapp wouldn’t reveal anything to a servant.”
He followed Wilson into the house and a brief search turned up an office at the back. It was only three meters square and contained little more than a desk, a computer, and a single chair. Wilson immediately sat and turned on the computer. Not surprisingly, it requested a password. He swore quietly and rebooted it from a thumb drive.
“Your computer experts still haven’t been able to access her tablet,” Nassar pointed out. “What makes you think you can get into this?”
“People are funny,” he said. “They feel safe in their homes. So while they secure the hell out of their phones and tablets, they tend to be lazy with their desktops. They want it to be easy, they want their kids to be able to get on, and they figure no one will ever have physical access to it.”
Nassar riffled through a stack of papers but found nothing more than notes from the girl’s school and receipts for inconsequential household products. Finally, he wandered back out into the main part of the house as his and Halabi’s men tore the space apart. Normally it wasn’t his practice to get personally involved in these kinds of operations, but there was little choice. His life depended on the American FBI agent finding Rapp. Every minute that passed without success increased the danger.
After about thirty minutes a shrill laugh filtered through the home, reaching him as he passed through Dufort’s wrecked kitchen. He jogged back to the office and found Wilson grinning like an idiot at the computer screen.
“I found her daughter’s birthday on the calendar and reversed it for the password,” he said. “I hope she’s one hell of a piece of tail, because she isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
“Is there anything of value on the hard drive?”
“I’m less interested in the drive than the email,” Wilson said. Nassar watched as he searched for all the correspondence with Rapp.
“Okay, let’s start on the date we know they left the U.S.,” Wilson said. “Yeah, there’s an increase in email frequency, so they may not be together. Or at least they haven’t been for the entire time.”
“I doubt Mitch Rapp would discuss something as sensitive as his location on a commercial account,” Nassar said.
“No,” Wilson replied, opening and closing successive individual emails. “But he might not have to. Don’t give this asshole too much credit, Aali. He’s not an intel guy. He’s just a killer.” The FBI man suddenly jabbed a finger into the screen. “Right there!”
“What?”
“It’s a bunch of bullshit about Anna, but then look what he says. ‘It hit ninety three degrees today but the sun finally went down a half an hour ago.’ ”
Wilson dialed his phone and put in an earpiece. “Yeah, it’s me. September twenty-seven. Where in the world did the temp top out around ninety-three and the sun set around three forty-five GMT. Uh-huh. Yeah, I can wait.”
He continued scrolling through emails, closing most within a few seconds, but occasionally minimizing one instead.
“Central Africa? You’re sure? Are you going to narrow it down? Okay, I’ve got something else for you. On October fifth, there was audible shelling in the morning. Yeah, it uses the word ‘shelling’ specifically, so some kind of active war zone. Right . . .”
Nassar left the man to his work and exited the house, crossing the lawn to a stand of trees near the rear wall. He glanced around him to make certain no one was within earshot and then dialed his sat phone.