“Ask him if the others were killed in the drone strike,” said Gabriel.
“You’re pushing it,” said Keller.
“Send the message, damn it.”
Natalie did. The reply was instant.
“Many of the brothers were killed,” she read.
“Ask him how many brothers are with him.”
Natalie typed out the message and sent it.
“Two,” she said a moment later.
“Are they hurt?”
Another exchange of messages.
“No.”
“Does he need a doctor?”
“Easy,” cautioned Keller.
“Send it,” snapped Gabriel.
The wait for a response was nearly two minutes.
“Yes,” said Natalie. “He needs one.”
There was another silence on the line.
“We need to know where he’s going,” Gabriel said at last.
“Track the phone,” replied Keller.
“If he turns it off, we’ll lose him. You have to ask him.”
Natalie typed out the message and sent it. The reply was vague.
al riad. The house.
“We need more than that,” said Gabriel.
“You can’t ask him which house.”
“Tell him you’re sending Nazir to look after him until the doctor arrives.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Keller.
“Send it.”
Natalie did. Then she composed a second message and sent it to Nazir Bensa?d’s number. They had to wait five long minutes for their answer.
“We’ve got him!” said Natalie. “He’s on his way.”
Keller brought the satphone to his ear. “You still want us to go to Agadir?”
“Not all of you,” answered Gabriel.
“Too bad about those guns.”
“Any chance you can find them?”
“Yeah,” said Keller. “I think I know where to look.”
The next call to arrive at the Casablanca command post was from Adrian Carter.
“We had his phone for three or four minutes, but he went off the air again.”
“Yes, I know.”
“How?”
“He was talking to us.”
“What?”
Gabriel explained.
“Any idea where the house is?”
“I didn’t think it was a good idea to ask him. Besides, we have Nazir Bensa?d to show us the way.”
“He’s already on the move,” said Carter.
“Where is he?”
“Leaving Fez and heading back to the Middle Atlas.”
“Where he will tend to a wounded Saladin,” said Gabriel, “until a doctor arrives.”
“Are you thinking about making a house call?”
“Office style.”
“I’m afraid you’ll be on your own.”
“Any chance we can borrow one of those drones for surveillance?”
“None whatsoever.”
“When’s your next satellite pass?”
Carter shouted the question to the officers gathered in the Black Hole. The answer came back a moment later.
“We’ll have a bird over eastern Morocco at four a.m.”
“Enjoy the show,” said Gabriel.
“You’re not thinking about going up there, are you?”
“I’m not leaving here without him, Adrian.”
“It’s the first part of that sentence that concerns me.”
Gabriel rang off without another word and looked at Yaakov.
“We need to clean this place up and get moving.”
Yaakov stood stock-still.
“You disagree with my decision?”
“No. It’s just—”
“You’re not worried about the damn jinns, are you?”
“We’re not supposed to make noise at night.”
Gabriel closed his laptop. “So we’ll leave quietly. It’s better that way.”
Five minutes later the Moroccan armed forces and security services went on their highest state of alert. Nevertheless, in the confusion, they failed to take note of two small but significant movements of personnel and equipment. The first occurred on the outskirts of the village of Rissani, where a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan Pathfinder paused briefly in the night at the intersection of two desert highways. There ensued a one-for-one exchange of passengers, a small bookish man for a tall lanky one. Then the vehicles went their separate ways. The Jeep Cherokee headed west toward the sea; the Nissan, north toward the base of the Atlas Mountains. The passengers of the Cherokee knew what awaited them, but those riding in the Nissan were headed toward a more uncertain fate. They had in their possession two Beretta pistols, two Kalashnikov assault rifles, passports, credit cards, cash, cellular phones, and a satellite phone. More important, they had a phone that had been used briefly by Morocco’s most prominent hashish producer. A phone, they hoped, that would lead them to Saladin.
The second movement took place some four hundred miles to the northwest in Casablanca, where two men slipped from a faded old villa, quietly, so as not to awaken the demons within, and loaded their bags into a rented Peugeot sedan. They drove along the empty boulevards of the old colonial section, past the tattered Art Nouveau buildings, and the modern apartment blocks of the newly rich, and the Bidonvilles of the wretchedly poor, until finally they reached the motorway. The younger of the two men handled the driving; the older passed the time by loading and reloading his Beretta pistol. He had no business being there, it was true. He was the chief now, and a chief had to know his place. Still, there was a first for everything.
He slipped the loaded gun into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back, and checked his mobile phone. Then he stared out his window at the endless lights of Casablanca.
“What are you thinking?” asked the younger man.
“I’m thinking that you need to drive faster.”
“I’ve never driven a chief before.”
The older man smiled.
“Is that all you were thinking?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because it looked to me as though you were pulling a trigger.”
“Which hand?”
“Left,” said the younger man. “It was definitely the left.”
The older man looked out the window. “How many times?”
63
The Middle Atlas Mountains, Morocco
The phone moved steadily south, across the lowlands around Fez, toward the slopes of the Middle Atlas. They could not be sure it was actually in the possession of Nazir Bensa?d. Now that the drones were gone, they had no eyes on the target, and neither the NSA nor Unit 8200 had been able to activate the phone’s microphone or camera. For all they knew, the device was on the back of a flatbed truck, and Nazir Bensa?d was somewhere in the labyrinth of Fez’s ancient medina.