“But we’re not going to surprise them, Yaakov. We’re expected.”
Yaakov guided the car onto the private road and started toward the compound.
“Switch on your high beams,” instructed Gabriel.
Yaakov did as he was told, illuminating the harsh, rocky landscape with white light. “They see us now.”
Gabriel raised a second phone to his ear, the one connected to Natalie, and told her to ring the doorbell.
Natalie had preloaded the text onto Mohammad Bakkar’s phone. Now, on Gabriel’s command, she thumbed it into the ether.
“Well?” he asked.
“He’s working on the reply.”
The message finally appeared.
“He says they’ll open the gate.”
“How nice of them. But tell them to hurry. The doctor is very anxious to see the brother.”
Natalie sent the message on Bakkar’s Samsung. Then she switched her own phone to speaker mode and waited for the sound of gunfire.
By then, Gabriel was already talking to Adrian Carter at Langley.
“Any change?”
“Two men getting ready to open the gate, one coming downstairs. Looks like he’s carrying a gun.”
“So much for Arab hospitality,” said Gabriel, and lowered the phone.
They were about fifty yards from the compound and closing at a moderate speed. The headlamps now shone directly on the gate. It was a two-leaf swing model, stainless steel. A cloud of dust settled around them like fog as Yaakov slowed to a stop. For several seconds, nothing happened.
Gabriel raised the Langley phone to his ear. “What’s going on?”
“Looks like they’re unlocking it.”
“Where’s the third man?”
“Waiting outside the entrance of the house.”
“And where’s the entrance relative to us?”
“Your two o’clock.”
Gabriel lowered the phone again as a crack appeared between the leaves of the gate. He relayed the satellite information to the other three men in the car and issued a terse set of instructions.
Keller frowned. “Mind saying that again in a language I can understand?”
Gabriel hadn’t realized he was speaking in Hebrew.
All at once the gate began to swing away, drawn by two pairs of hands. Yaakov balanced the Uzi Pro atop the steering wheel and aimed at the pair of hands to the right. Mikhail leveled a Kalashnikov at the hands on the left.
“Never mind,” said Keller. “No translation necessary.”
At last, the gate was sufficiently open to accommodate a car. Two men, each cradling an automatic rifle, stepped into the breach and waved Yaakov into the compound. Instead, he unleashed a torrent of fire through the windscreen toward the man on the right. Mikhail, in the front passenger seat, squeezed off several rounds with the Kalashnikov toward the man on the left. Neither guard managed to fire a shot in return, but as Yaakov accelerated through the open gate, a gun opened up from the entrance of the main building. Mikhail answered through the open front passenger window while Gabriel, directly behind him, fired off several rounds with the Jericho .45. Within seconds, the gun in the entranceway fell silent.
Yaakov braked hard and rammed the shift into park while Mikhail and Gabriel tumbled out of the car and started across the outer yard of the compound. Mikhail quickly drew away from Gabriel, and after a few paces Keller overtook him as well. The two elite soldiers paused briefly at the entrance, next to the body of the third gunman. Gabriel glanced down at the lifeless face. It was Nazir Bensa?d.
Beyond the entrance was an ornate Moorish courtyard, blue with moonlight, with cedar doors on all four sides. Keller and Mikhail pivoted through the doorway on the right and crossed a foyer to a stone flight of steps. Instantly, they were met with automatic weapons fire from above. The two operatives dived for cover, right and left, while Gabriel remained pinned down outside in the courtyard. When the gunfire ceased, he slipped into the foyer and sheltered next to Mikhail. Keller, directly opposite, wedged his Kalashnikov into the stairwell and blindly fired several shots into the darkness. Then Mikhail did the same.
When they paused to reload, there was only silence from above. Gabriel peered around the edge of the wall. The landing at the top of the steps appeared empty, but in the darkness he couldn’t be sure. Finally, Keller and Mikhail mounted the first step. At once, there was a piercing scream. A woman’s scream, thought Gabriel—two religiously significant Arabic words that left little doubt as to what would occur next. He grabbed the back of Mikhail’s shirt and pulled with every bit of strength he had left in his body while Keller hurled himself down the steps toward safety. A second too late, the bomb exploded. Saladin, it seemed, had lost his sense of timing.
Gabriel was carrying two mobile phones in the pocket of his jacket, one connected to Adrian Carter, the other to Natalie and Dina. Carter and the rest of the officers gathered in the Black Hole had the advantage of the satellite’s cameras and sensors, but Natalie and Dina had been privy only to the audio. The quality was muted. Even so, they had no trouble making out what was taking place inside the compound. A brief but intense firefight, a woman screaming “Allahu Akbar,” the unmistakable sound of a bomb exploding. After that, there was only silence. Dina quickly started the engine. A moment later they were racing along the main street of Zaida. The little town in the shadow of the Middle Atlas Mountains was now wide awake.
The steps were strewn with the tattered remnants of a woman—smallish, about twenty or twenty-five, pretty once. Here a leg, here a portion of a torso, here a hand, the right, still clutching a detonator switch. The head had rolled to the bottom of the steps and come to rest at Gabriel’s feet. He lifted the black veil from the face and saw a set of delicate features arranged in a mask of religious madness. The eyes were blue—the blue of a mountain lake. Was she a wife or concubine? Or a daughter perhaps? Or was she just another black widow, a lost girl to whom Saladin had strapped a bomb and an ideology of death?
Gabriel closed the blue eyes and covered the face, and followed Keller and Mikhail silently up the stairs. A Kalashnikov lay on the upper landing where it had fallen from the woman’s hands, along with a magazine’s worth of shell casings. To the right a hallway stretched into the darkness. At the end of it was a door—and behind the door, thought Gabriel, was a room at the southeast corner of the house. A room facing Mecca. A room where an injured man now lay alone with no one to protect him.