The answer came from the floor. The man had also regained enough of his senses to glare, teary-eyed, at them. “I think your American colloquialism is a shitload.” He stared at the assemblage in the room. “Who the bloody hell are you all?”
Gray holstered his weapon and offered out an arm to get him back on his feet. “Someone who needs your help.”
The man took Gray’s hand suspiciously, but he allowed himself to be pulled back to his feet. “This is a fine way to ask for it.”
Kowalski offered the only possible explanation. “We’re Americans. It’s how we do things.”
11:34 P.M.
An hour later, Gray had everyone gathered back at their suite at the Hotel Jubba. They sat in the common room. A call to Director Crowe, followed by a flurry of communiqués between the two countries’ intelligence agencies, facilitated some candid conversation.
“The kidnapped woman out of the Seychelles,” Captain Trevor Alden said, holding a steaming teacup in the palm of his hand. “She’s the president’s daughter?”
“That’s right,” Gray said. “Amanda Gant-Bennett.”
The two groups sat on opposite couches, Americans on one side, Brits on the other. A tea service tray rested on the table between them. Kane kept near his handler as Tucker balanced on the arm of the sofa, but his nose kept drifting toward a stack of tea biscuits.
Captain Alden’s eyes shifted to Seichan, seated next to Gray. “And she works for you chaps now.”
Gray simply nodded, not bothering to go into the complicated details of their professional relationship.
Alden leaned back. “Someone could’ve informed us all of this before you got here. Would’ve saved Major Patel a great deal of hardship.”
Kowalski paced behind the sofa, near the balcony doors, where the smoke from his cigar was less offensive. “Sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have sacked him so hard, but he got in my way.” He shrugged, showing little remorse. “But aren’t you guys supposed to wear special berets or something?”
“Not on a mission. We’re a covert team,” Alden explained. “Just the four of us—or three now, I guess.”
Patel had been shot up with morphine and was sleeping in the next room, awaiting evacuation due to his broken leg. On the sofa, the captain was flanked by his two other associates: the Indian woman—Major Bela Jain—and a black, wiry soldier, Major Stuart Butler.
Gray redirected the conversation to the problem at hand. “Captain Alden, any local intelligence you can supply us, to help figure out where the president’s daughter might have been taken, would be most appreciated.”
“No appreciation necessary. We’ve been ordered to offer our services.” Alden winced, then gently placed his teacup on the tray. “My apologies. That came out less sincerely than I intended. I have a young daughter of my own. If she’d been kidnapped …”
Alden leaned forward and offered his hand.
Gray took it and found the man’s grip firm and dry.
“You have our full cooperation,” Alden promised.
Gray found himself warming to the man. Once past the stiff British reserve, he seemed likable enough. And he had captured Seichan, not an easy thing to do.
However, from the way Seichan sat with her arms folded over her chest, fingering the tiny silver dragon pendant at her throat with her bandaged hand, she didn’t share Gray’s opinion of the SRR captain. Likewise, Major Jain barely said a word, her features hard and unreadable, her posture rigid. Gray imagined the woman’s head still ached from the effects of the flash-bang, not to mention being pistol-whipped by Tucker.
Not the most opportune way for allies to meet.
Still, they’d all have to find a way to work together.
“Do you have any clues at all to the whereabouts of the young woman?” Alden asked, getting down to business. “Where she made landfall? Who took her?”
“Not much.”
Gray had briefly related their encounter with Amur Mahdi and the attack by an assassination squad in the construction yard. The captain was unaware of any of it, so Gray got him up to speed.
Next, he reached to the table and unfolded a topographic map of the country. Alden leaned closer as Gray ran a finger along the mountain range to the west of the city. It cut clear across northern Somalia.
“All we know,” Gray said, “is that she was likely taken somewhere up in these mountains.”
“That’s a lot of rough territory. Jungles, chasms, caves. You could spend years searching up there and only scour a tenth of those peaks. Do you have any other intel?”
“We’re still waiting for an NRO satellite to search the coastline for the raiders’ ship.”
“Needle in a haystack,” Alden pronounced grimly with a shake of his head. “And they move those ships regularly. Even if you found it, that doesn’t mean that’s where the boat made landfall.”
Gray couldn’t disagree. He closed his eyes and replayed the conversation between Amur and his men. The man’s group had been silenced for a reason. There had to be a clue there, something useful.
Then he remembered and straightened. One line of that conversation played out in his head.
A friend of my brother’s uncle, up near Eil, he says a white woman came through his village. He says they were moving her into the mountains.
Gray opened his eyes and stared at the map. “Do you know some town named Eil?”
Alden nodded, studying the coastline. “It’s a small place, a tough town, pirate run.” He finally tapped the map. “Right here, by this deepwater cove.”
“One of Amur’s men said they’d heard of a white woman, a hostage, who had been through that village. If we went to that town—”
Alden cut him off. “You’d be shot on sight. And even if you did somehow survive, they’d tell you nothing. Anyone squeals there, and it’s an instant death sentence.”
Gray pictured the last of Amur’s men being shot.
Still, Alden did not seem despondent. “If they went directly from Eil to the mountains, that could narrow your search.” He ran a finger inland. “I’d suggest you call your director and ask him to have the NRO give up the satellite search for the ship and concentrate on this section of the mountains.”
He marked off a box with his fingertip.
“That’s still hundreds of square miles,” Gray said.
“True.”
“What about an infrared sweep?” Tucker offered. “If the satellite can pick out heat signatures, narrow the search parameters …?”
“Maybe. But as hot as it gets here in summer, those rocky peaks retain plenty of heat throughout the night.” Alden leaned closer to the map. “But I may have a better idea.”
“What?”
Alden smiled and glanced at the closed bedroom door. “I think I just found a good use for our poor Major Patel.”
9
July 1, 4:55 P.M. EST
Washington, DC
Painter sat in his office, struggling with a puzzle that set his teeth to aching. Since this morning’s briefing with the president, he’d been ensconced in his windowless office at Sigma headquarters, buried several floors beneath the Smithsonian Castle, yet steps away from the halls of power and many of the country’s best scientific institutions and think tanks.
Earlier, he’d reviewed the video feed from Somalia, listened to the audio recordings. Without a doubt, Amur Mahdi had been executed in order to silence him. The CIA was already squawking about the murder of one of its local assets, even though Amur was clearly playing one side against the other. And in this case, the turncoat had gotten crushed between them.
Still, the assassination of Amur offered further support to the idea that there was more to the kidnapping of Amanda Gant-Bennett than simple piracy.
Painter was sure of it.
But what?
So far, no ransom demand had been made. There continued to be no chatter among the various regional terrorist groups, no one claiming responsibility. If they had the president’s daughter, they’d be crowing from the rooftops about it.
So what game were they playing out there?
Painter could not shake the feeling that Amanda’s kidnapping was somehow tied to the Guild. Perhaps she was being used as a pawn by a competing criminal organization to put pressure on the Gants—that is, if the Gants were indeed the true puppet masters behind the shadowy Guild.
He had a hard time balancing that with the raw fear he’d seen in the president’s eyes, the anguish and grief in the First Lady’s embrace of her husband in the hallway. Even Gant’s older brother, the secretary of state, had seemed openly sincere about finding Amanda.
But that didn’t mean other family members were not involved.
He returned his attention to the large LCD monitor on his desk. Using a mouse, he scrolled through the long list of names glowing on the screen, each of them connected by branching and crisscrossing lines marking family ties: marriages and births, even infidelities and children born out of wedlock. It mapped out the genealogy of the Gant family clan, stretching back two centuries. It was less a family tree than an interlacing matrix, so complicated it required being diagrammed out in three dimensions.
Clicking and dragging, he spun the matrix in a slow turn, a spiral galaxy of power and influence going back to before the founding of this country. And it was still incomplete. He had historians and genealogists from around the globe working piecemeal on the puzzle, to keep the project secret, building a picture of the true breadth and extent of this ancient clan. He doubted anyone had ever performed such a comprehensive analysis of the Gant clan.
He also noted lines that crossed into and out of the matrix, distant cousins marrying back into the family—not an unheard-of situation in such a powerful, aristocratic family. It seemed, generation after generation, no one wanted to drift too far from that wellspring of power and wealth.
And what a wellspring it was …
Painter had lost count of the number of inventors, scholars, statesmen, and leaders of industry that shone like stars amid the lineage. Not to mention rogues and several persons of ill repute.
