Chapter 14

Wajideeb, Somalia

“I was told you were the man to speak to,” Gehdi said into the phone, while looking at Taylor and the two men flanking him on either side.

Taylor opened his mouth to make a last attempt at buying off Gehdi, when the warlord jerked the phone away from his head in surprise.

He looked at one of his lieutenants before putting the phone back to his ear and saying, “Hello? Hello?”

The lieutenant said something in Somali and Gehdi replied, sounding more surprised than anything else. They had a brief back and forth, Gehdi pointing at the now disconnected phone.

“Problems?” Taylor asked.

Gehdi said something to the guards, who started dragging Taylor out again.

“Wait. If they’re not going to be ready to pay you, I am,” Taylor shouted.

He half thought Gehdi would wave him off again, but instead, the man said, “This was for more than just your life, and was a lot of money.”

“I’m looking to pay you for more than just my life, too. I came here to try and convince you and your men to help me and I was willing to pay. I still am. If they’re having issues on their end, then let me prove to you that I’m serious.”

“How?”

“One phone call. That’s all I need.”

Gehdi stared at him, thinking it through, before holding out the phone.

“One phone call,” he said, but pulled the phone back as Taylor went to reach for it. “If you don’t convince me though, I might just kill you for free.”

“Fine,” Taylor said, taking the phone which Gehdi extended out again.

Taylor didn’t have the satellite phone with its secure line and hoped Wheeler wasn’t one of these guys that would rather follow things by the book regardless of the situation. He didn’t strike him as the type, but CIA guys could be squirrely when it came to operational security.

“On station,” a different voice than the one last time said.

“It’s Taylor, I need to talk to Wheeler. It’s urgent.”

“This isn’t a secure line.”

“No, it’s a cell phone owned by the leader of the Feedh Ilaah, so tell him to get his ass on the phone while he still has a chance to talk to me.”

The phone clicked and the line went silent, the same as it had the last time he’d been put on hold. Why spooks had to make everything so dramatic, Taylor would never know. Thankfully, Wheeler did answer.

“You’re on whose cell phone?”

“Tahiil Gehdi, who is at the moment staring at me, waiting to find out why he shouldn’t put a bullet in my head and try to collect on it.”

“Yeah, I’d heard about the bounty.”

“Thanks for the warning. You’re going to help me arrange a payment for him.”

“Why would I pay off a bounty on your head? You’re a great guy and all, but you’re an independent contractor, my friend. Besides, I heard you were some kind of badass who could get out of this on his own.”

“It’s not about that money. I’ve looked over the village and there’s no way I’m going to get the hostages back on my own. I need some local assistance and that assistance is going to want to be paid well for their help.”

Taylor hoped Wheeler read between the lines and understood hostages to mean targeting system, since the last thing Taylor wanted to do was to point out there was something even more valuable available for the taking.

“Do you think they can do it?”

“I just need a big enough distraction and I should be able to get in. Well, a distraction and a Javelin.”

“Do you have any idea how much those things cost?”

“Do you care?”

“Not really. How much money were you talking about?”

“A hundred and fifty.”

“That’s going to take some time to get a hold of.”

“Time is the thing we don’t have. I need it, and I need it by tomorrow. Unless you have another plan for taking care of this.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, but Taylor knew Wheeler was just thinking it over. Had there been another option for getting the tracking system back, they would have gone with that from the beginning instead of sending Taylor. The only reason they’d gone with him was because he already had an in and Wheeler saw an opportunity.

Taylor had worked with enough station chiefs to have some idea of what their limits were, which is how he’d come up with the number. From the look on Gehdi’s face, it was probably a lot less than the warlord had wanted, but Taylor thought they could get around that.

“Fine. I’ll make it happen. Anything else while you’re filling out your Christmas list?”

“One more thing. Mr. Gehdi is skeptical that I can come through with this and is entertaining other offers. I’d like for you to explain to him why he should believe this is a very real offer.”

Wheeler let out a sigh, more of an annoyance than anything else, and said, “Put him on the phone.”

Taylor handed the phone out to Gehdi, who took it and after saying ‘yes’ listened intently, occasionally saying ‘hmm.’ Taylor wasn’t worried about Wheeler doing an end-run on him, since there was no way he would tell the warlord about the targeting system and he’d have to if he wanted to ensure it was recovered or destroyed. Taylor may be an outsider from the intelligence community, but he was still several levels more desirable for someone like Wheeler than almost any local capable of getting the job done.

“That will be fine,” Gehdi said before handing the phone out to Taylor.

“Yeah?” Taylor said, taking it.

“You should be good. Do you still have your sat phone?”

“Yeah,” Taylor said, not elaborating.

“Smart. You’re planning on waiting until night for your strike, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Go get your sat phone and signal me your position. We’ll have a drop in five hours and we’ll signal when the plane is in country. This is your one thing. After this, I can’t help you again until after you’ve taken care of the targeting system.”

“Understood. We’ll be waiting.”

He clicked off the phone and handed it back to Gehdi’s minion.

“I thought you said you were not with the CIA,” Gehdi said.

“I’m not. I was here to rescue hostages. I just knew they had some interest in the area and when the rescue attempt failed I leveraged that for a little help. At best, I’m an independent contractor.”

“Isn’t everyone who works for you Americans in this part of the world?”

“Probably. Right now, what I want and what they want align, which works out for you, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I will lose men and material on this. At best, I break out even. And don’t pretend like this will earn me some kind of favor with your intelligence services. We both know that means very little.”

“I won’t, and you only break even if you think of it on a one-to-one basis. You haven’t accounted for Barsane’s actively working on finding someone willing to pay for his captured Americans, and if it gets public, the company might not have any choice but to go along. How would you fare if he got his hands on that kind of money? He’s already come into your territory once and he’s been edging you out a little at a time for a while.”

“I suppose you have an equally good reason why I shouldn’t try and get my hands on those hostages and sell them myself.”

“I do. For one, the odds of them surviving the attempt are low and you’ll lose a lot more men doing it. If you are successful then you have to worry about someone like me out here again, trying to do the exact same thing, but against you. It’s why you never tried to recover them when they were actively on your territory, and that was when it was easier. This is your best play, with the highest possible reward for the least risk. I’m not asking you to break into the town or even get that locked in. I just need you to keep them busy for thirty minutes.”

“I assume you know about the tank?”

“Yes, I’ll take care of that for you.”

“Fine. Deliver the money and we’ll help you.”

“I left some stuff a mile or so away that I need to retrieve if I’m going to get the money drop.”

“Do you really think I’m letting you out of my sight before we’re paid?”

“I need you and your men for my plan to work. I came here on my own originally, remember? I still need your help. Running doesn’t get me anywhere. If it’ll make you feel better, send one of your men with me.”

“Fine,” he said, turning to his lieutenant. “Go with him and make sure he comes back.”

“One of the things I’m getting is my weapon. I’ll need it when we go after Barsane. I don’t want anyone getting jumpy when I get it.”

“Fine, but we’ll still be keeping an eye on you.”

“Fair enough. It’s a good walk, so let’s get going,” Taylor said to the lieutenant.

Washington D.C.

Kara had made it home around four in the morning, being very careful to move as quietly as she could, tracing back through the paths through the surveillance blind spots. The house was under video monitoring, but she’d figured out there were blind spots over the last year and tested those out before leaving the house that night.

On the way home, she’d pulled the magazine from the pistol and dumped both in the Potomac a block from where she’d shot Packer, before turning up and heading towards the center of DC, which took her through some sketchy areas before getting into the more touristy areas where she knew she could find a taxi even this late.

She’d dropped her gloves as she passed an underpass where a few homeless were sleeping, figuring they’d be in someone’s possession before the morning. She did the same to her hoodie at the next block, with the same goal.

Both the hoodie and gloves would have gun powder residue on them, so they needed to disappear. Although she liked that hoodie, it had been big enough to cover a good section of her pants and she’d kept her hair up in the hood, so they should be the only thing she’d been wearing to pick up gunpowder.

She did go to her range with Taylor occasionally, so she could have probably explained the traces away if anyone looked, but she figured it was better to be safe than sorry.

To give the police plausible reasoning for Packer’s death, she’d also taken his wallet and his phone. The Phone had gone into the river with the gun. She hadn’t had a chance to look it up, but she was pretty sure the magazine and phone would be light enough for the current to carry them further away, so at least they wouldn’t be near the weapon. She’d also pulled the bullets out of the magazine and thrown them in by themselves, just in case she’d left fingerprints on any of them and to make it harder for anyone dredging the river for evidence to find all of the pieces.

She’d thrown the wallet into a storm drain after pulling the cash. If the cops did find it, they’d think the thief wanted to get rid of evidence and threw it in the drain after stealing the money. Hopefully, it would disappear with other junk into the sewer and never be found, or at least not for a while, making it harder to backtrack her steps into DC.

She didn’t think the cops would put that kind of all-out effort into tracking down a mugging gone wrong, but the one thing she’d learned from listening to Whitaker’s stories about investigations was that you could never be too paranoid. Which is why she’d dumped the last of the evidence she was disposing of several blocks before she hailed a taxi, to put a little buffer between where they might find the evidence if everything went wrong and where they’d need to look to find a taxi that had picked up a girl in the middle of the night. It was the same reason she’d had the taxi drop her off almost half a mile from the house she lived in with Mary Jane.

None of the agents had noticed her window was cracked open and checked on her apparently, since everything was the same way as she’d left it. She changed into the large shirt and shorts she wore to bed and threw the rest of her clothes from the evening in with her dirty clothes, and crawled into bed, hoping to get just a little sleep.

Kara felt like she had just closed her eyes when a soft knock on her door woke her up.

“Kara, are you up?”

“Wha...?” Kara said, groggy from only having been asleep for an hour.

“There’s a man from the FBI downstairs that is asking to see you.”

Kara wasn’t surprised by the news and was positive she knew who was downstairs and what exactly he wanted to talk about.

“Yeah. I gotta get dressed. Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” her friend said, her footsteps receding down the hall.

Kara threw on sweats and a big t-shirt and sat down on the edge of the bed, running her fingers through her tangled red hair, breaking through some of the knotted curls. Closing her eyes and took a deep breath to steel herself before pushing off the bed and heading downstairs to face the music.

“Kara, I’m sorry to bother you so early. Can we talk for a moment,” Robles said as she walked down the stairs? He eyed Mary Jane and added, “Alone?”

Mary Jane looked at Kara, who nodded in confirmation, “Sure. Let’s go sit in the dining room.”

She led the way through the foyer and into a mid-sized room with a small rectangular table with a chair on each end. Walking past the chair by the door, gesturing for Robles to sit there, while Kara pulled out the chair at what was ostensibly the head of the table.

“What can I do for you Agent Robles,” she said, sitting down.

“About an hour ago I was notified that the body of Edward Packer was found not far from his home, shot once in the head at close range.”

Robles was looking at her closely as he said it, probably trying to recognize any sign of guilt or anything else that might give her away. Kara was sure that Robles was good at his job, but she’d spent nearly her entire life hiding her true thoughts and feelings away from men. For her, it was as easy as breathing. They both knew how she felt about Packer, which meant shocked or any strong emotion would have been too much, so she’d decided on nonplussed acceptance with a hint of satisfaction.