After sleeping through the morning, Bianca had asked to call Yasmin, but Malik reminded her that the president himself was waiting to hear from her. She did her best to sound innocent, to reveal nothing about the Halabys, the American killer, the French spy. But she did not think Ahmed believed her.

She did not believe him for a moment that Yasmin and Jamal had been moved to somewhere secure. No . . . the American had taken them, and that was why Ahmed was suspicious of her. Ahmed had determined the truth: that she had told her captors everything.

If she returned to Syria, she would be killed; this she knew without a shadow of a doubt. But she saw no opportunity to get away from the men who held her now.

She did not believe she would ever see her son again, and she did not believe she was safe in Europe, or safe at home.

She returned to her cot amid the hanging bed sheets, and she sat down, and there she could hold it no longer.

She started to cry.

* * *

? ? ?

Malik and Drexler watched the woman cry alone for a moment, and then they turned away and stepped into an office in the warehouse building to talk. Drexler knew all about the kidnapping of Bianca’s son, from Shakira, but Malik knew nothing about the child, even of his existence. All he knew were his orders—to get Drexler and Bianca back to Syria—and he knew that this plan had hit a stumbling block.

Drexler said, “You told me we’d go to the airport at noon. It’s five till.”

Malik said, “I had one of my men go to Toussus-le-Noble. He says French military troops have arrived and are searching it top to bottom. They are setting up tents off the tarmac, preparing for a longer stay. We won’t be flying out of there.”

Drexler rubbed his face in frustration.

Malik said, “You shouldn’t have left Voland alive. This is his doing.”

Drexler shook his head. “No, it’s not. I wanted a peaceful resolution so we could exfiltrate France quietly. Voland did his best to give that to us. But the massacre and the fire that could be seen from a jumbo jet . . . that is what brought the authorities out en masse.”

Malik turned away. “I have my men acquiring some vans. We will drive east. Not to Serbia; I don’t feel confident in the private flight to Russia any longer.”

“Why not?”

Malik shrugged. “Again, you left Voland alive. I think he will be involved in the search for us. He could have distributed photos of Bianca everywhere, even to a small airport in Serbia.”

“So . . . where are we going?”

“We will go to Athens, and then—”

“Athens, Greece? That’s a twenty-four-hour drive!” Drexler shouted.

Malik kept his voice calm. “We will drive for twenty-four hours. When we arrive in Athens, we will wait for a ship to pick us up. You, Bianca, and I will travel to the Syrian coast.”

“What is this ship?”

“It’s been used in smuggling operations for years, but right now it is off the coast of Lebanon. A dozen of my Mukhabarat colleagues working in Beirut will board today, and it will make the two-day crossing to Athens, where it will meet us.”

Drexler thought this over. He wasn’t getting on board that ship, obviously, but he saw how this change of plans might work to his advantage.

“When do we go?” Drexler asked.

“We will leave here within the hour.” Malik looked over at Sauvage, sitting and smoking at the front loading dock of the warehouse. “What about the cop?”

“He will come with us, he might be useful,” Drexler said. “I’ll see that he earns all the money that I have promised him, even if he never lives to see a cent of it.”

CHAPTER 59

At the refinery in central Syria, Van Wyk finally announced the “all clear” to his KWA mercenaries, after twenty minutes searching the control building. In all that time, the two KWA teams found a grand total of three armed enemy: the one Van Wyk sighted in the first room, and a sniper-spotter team on the roof that was killed by the men from the other BMP.

While this was going on, there had been a lot of shooting taking place all over the refinery as an entire company of Desert Hawks Brigade militia, some two hundred men, took outbuildings, pumping stations, storage facilities, and other structures, but Court couldn’t tell much from the cadence of fire. It could have been that the Desert Hawks were involved in multiple skirmishes with the enemy in different parts of the massive property, or it could have been that they were simply executing civilians they found hiding in the ruins.

As soon as the control building was clear, the battalion command of the Desert Hawks Brigade began pulling up in trucks, armored personnel carriers, and other vehicles. As the building had been used as an HQ by the Syrian Arab Army when they owned the refinery, there was already space for them to move their equipment into. Three large command center rooms on the second floor were used to bring in communications equipment, maps, headquarters staff, and senior officers, while a platoon of security was positioned on the roof and in the large building’s windows.

The twelve-man KWA strike force climbed back in their BMPs to catch up with the main element of Desert Hawks Brigade, but when they didn’t move out after twenty minutes, Van Wyk got on the radio with company command and found out that Ali Company had been ordered to halt here at the refinery to await further instructions. The mercenaries filed out of the vehicles again, went back into the command building, and found a shattered, ruined office with blasted-out windows on the top floor in which to wait.

The body of a man well into his fifties, perhaps even his sixties, lay in the center of the room. Blood splatter on the floor told the story. He’d been engaged from the doorway; the blood was fresh, so Court knew it was someone on the KWA team that shot him. The body wore a simple white button-down and brown slacks, he wasn’t geared up in any way as a fighter, and there was no weapon nearby.

Court couldn’t say for certain this man had been a noncombatant, and for all he knew the dead man had charged right at the men who came through the door, but Court seriously doubted it. From what he’d seen and heard of KWA, he assumed this man had just been squatting here in the building and was shot dead while unarmed by the mercenaries who encountered him.

When the team moved into the office, Saunders and Broz picked up the body in the middle of the room, dragged it over to the blasted-out window, and swung it out, letting it drop down onto the concrete below.

Court just looked away.

Van Wyk had been with the Desert Hawks leadership in the command post to find out the reasons for the delay, and now he leaned his head into the room. “Bashar and Chadli Companies are heavily engaged to the northeast. They think it’s FSA, company strength at most, but well dug into the hills. Nothing for us to do; it’s long-range engagement, snipers and mortars and RPGs. Definitely not the CQB stuff they use us for. The militia is calling the Syrian air force for assets to disrupt the enemy in the hills, but so far nothing’s available.

“We’re to wait here at battalion HQ for orders, but I don’t expect it will be long before the Hawks need us. I’ll be downstairs in the CP.”

The rest of the twelve-man team found places to sit or lie down around this ruined office. Court took off his rifle and his backpack and leaned against the wall. He was still fuming about the murder of the noncombatants, but he knew the sooner he focused his attention on his real mission here, the sooner he’d be done with these KWA assholes.

And he was well aware that being positioned here near the Hawks Brigade command post had presented him with an opportunity. Court knew he needed to find a way downstairs into the CP. There would be maps, plans, men discussing the tactical needs of this security operation, and, somewhere in all that intelligence, Court was hopeful he’d find some information about Ahmed Azzam’s rumored trip to Palmyra.

Sure, Court was embedded with one militia unit that, from what he had been told, had been positioned at the outer edge of the security ring around Palmyra. It was too much to hope for that that tactical operations center for the Desert Hawks Brigade was going to have all the plans for the entire operation laid out for him to see, but he didn’t necessarily need to know everything.

He was looking for a definite time and an exact place, and he would love to know as much as he could about the security setup for the president during his visit.

He had no illusions that he’d learn everything he needed to know. Still, he’d take whatever he could get and he’d make the most of it, but first he needed a way to get into the TOC.

Court had been thinking this over for several minutes, lost in his thoughts, when he looked up and saw Broz leaning back on his backpack, sitting on the floor by the wall and staring at him from across the room.

Court looked away, but the Croatian mercenary said, “What’s your problem, Kilo Nine?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Court answered.