None of the others had made it this far, but al-Tikriti was still going strong.
“That is the only answer you will get from me,” the prisoner said finally.
“Have it your way, by all means.” Braden freed the pliers from his coat pocket, clamped them on the Iraqi’s smashed nose, twisted. “Maybe I didn’t tell you, but I understand Arabic, Kharballah,” he growled in the prisoner’s native tongue, as al-Tikriti howled and fresh blood burst from the pulped beak.
“Let’s try this again,” the American said, switching to English, releasing the pincers and stepping back as blood spattered on plastic. Braden began his slow shark circle around the prisoner. “What I’m looking for, Kharballah, is the golden tip that will lead me to the Holy Grail—the rest of what you and the others were smuggling into Turkey when you were picked up. How about it? Where’s the rest of it?”
“What you took was all I know of.”
Braden snapped the pliers. The lie he read in al-Tikriti’s eyes was swept away by fear. “That’s not what your fellow holy warriors told me. Yeah, Kharballah, they talked.”
“Then what do you need me for?” the prisoner responded.
“Before I get into all that, let me explain the facts of life as I know them. I am in personal possession of satellite imagery that details a lot of truck traffic. Hell, for a while there we tracked whole convoys of eighteen-wheelers all over the map. We’ve got Damascus, through Kirkuk, Tikrit to Damascus, they’re coming from Tehran even, all these eighteen-wheelers, SUVs, transport trucks heading straight for the Turk border. I’m thinking maybe we Americans ought to just build a few superfreeways while we’re putting your country back on its feet.” It was an exaggeration, but al-Tikriti didn’t know what Braden knew.
“Trouble is, satellites have a tough time seeing things through the clouds. We know you had contacts in the Kurd-controlled far east of Turkey, but we doubt you were doing business with a people the former regime wanted to gas to extinction. So, I’m thinking you found a spot to stash all or a large chunk of it, but you had help from militant Turks. How do I know they’re Turks, you ask? I can’t be positive, but you people often forget we have ways to intercept conversations over what you believe are secured lines. Then there’s e-mail, faxes, Internet chat rooms. We get hold of your computers. You think you’ve deleted your files, but we have guys who can bring up these things called ghosts on the hard drive.”
“I know what you can do.”
Braden smiled. “The wonders of technology. Maybe you see where I’m headed with this.”
“How can I tell you what I do not know? I was simply what you might call a foot soldier.”
Braden put an edge to his voice. “That’s not the way Abdullah and Dajul told it.”
“Then they lied to you.”
“I cut them a deal, Kharballah, the same one you can have. Hell, you put me on the scent, I might even give you back some of that five hundred thousand I relieved you of. Now, I need to know whatever rendezvous points you had in Turkey. I need to know the approximate numbers—a rough guess will do—and specifically what the ordnance is. And I need to know where it’s all squirreled away. Real simple equation here. Names, numbers and how to get hold of who you were off-loading the ordnance to. Talk and you walk to fight another day.”
“I know nothing,” al-Tikriti said.
Braden lit another smoke off his dying butt and bobbed his head at the detainee. Time to hit him in the pride, he decided. “Doesn’t it bother you, Kharballah?”
“Does what bother me?”
“How you gave up without a fight, left the dying to your brothers in jihad.” Braden saw he’d scored, figured the prisoner was still steaming at the memory of hacking on tear gas, stumbling around in the smoke, hurling his weapon away, hands up.
“We had you figured for a lion sure to go out with a roar. Instead you whimpered, not one shot fired. Hell, I thought you were going to start crying like some old hag, the way I recall it. Threw away your AK so fast—”
“You surprised me. You gassed us.”
“That’s what separates the men from the boys and the bullies in a fight, Kharballah. Being able to adjust, take a few on the chin, but dig in and charge back, swinging. That’s the way of the warrior, Kharballah. He fights, even when the odds are stacked against him. He goes all the way, even if he’s looking at Goliath.” Braden smothered the scowl with a smoke cloud.
“That’s right, honey, I’m calling you a coward. You scumbags run around, trying to make everybody think you’re mean as the day is long, that you’re willing to die for your twisted holy war. But the first sign somebody’s ready to fight back and wax your ass you cut and run. A few car bombs, killing unarmed women and children, sweetheart, hardly proves you have the biggest pair on the block.” Braden paused to let al-Tikriti eat his shame.
“I want to know about Khirbul, and don’t tell me it’s a Kurd stronghold the Iranians run heroin through. Well, sweetheart, I’m waiting.”
“And so you shall keep waiting. You can leave me here for a week, a month like this, I will tell you nothing.”
Braden’s gut told him that was the only truth he would get out of al-Tikriti. He tossed the pliers, dropped the cigarette and ground it out on the plastic, then unzipped his jacket, displaying the shouldered Beretta. There were still other warm bodies to work with. “That your final answer?”
The Iraqi chuckled. “What? You beat me, now you’re going to shoot me?”
“You don’t believe I will?”
“You’re an American. I am a prisoner of war. There’s such a thing, I believe, called the rights of prisoners as established by the Geneva Convention,” al-Tikriti stated.
Braden unleathered the Beretta, drew a bead between al-Tikriti’s widening eyes and showed him just what he thought about the Geneva Convention.
2
John Brolinsky was worried about his job and reputation, wondering if he was being set up for public scandal and ridicule. Stranger—and worse—duplicity had happened over the years at the NSA. Those sharks on the man-eating end of the food chain were always looking for fresh guilty meat. If a man wasn’t as clean as a newborn, the conventional wisdom held he was ripe for blackmail—a definite liability when it came to guarding secrets or protecting national security.
Without question, a gentleman’s club—the gentleman part the grossest of misnomers from where he sat—was the most unlikely and unprofessional of places to rendezvous with one of the most powerful men in the White House. But here he was, nursing a club soda that was dropped off without his ordering the drink. He claimed the deep back booth the man had told him would be empty. Just wait, the man had told him, relax, enjoy the ambience.
As if I could, even if I was so inclined, the NSA man thought.
Given what he’d learned and suspected was at stake, he decided he had no choice but to ride out this tawdry scenario, take his chances and hope the walls of his own world wouldn’t crash down.
There had
