“The rest of you have taken hostages for years and have profited greatly while the rockets of retaliation rained down on my people and I did not complain to you. Now all I am asking is that I be allowed to share in the spoils of war. You have not allowed me to partner on any of your other business ventures, so I must take what is rightfully mine.” With a look of sadness he added, “I have given nothing but loyalty and this his how you treat me.”

Mughniyah threw his arms up in frustration. He looked at Badredeen and Jalil. “Talk some sense into him before I shoot him.”

Sayyed didn’t let it show, but he was enjoying every minute of this.

Badredeen sighed heavily and said, “This is only temporary. Hand the man over to Sayyed. He is without question the best man to do the job. When he is done, if the man is in fact a businessman, he will turn him back over to you and you can then negotiate a ransom. That is fair.”

Radih shifted nervously in his chair. He did not want to give up the man, but he could not defy these four. Any one of them could have him killed before the sun rose again. He could see what Sayyed was up to. The hostage could be worth as much as several million dollars if he did in fact work for the telecommunications company, and once the man was out of his hands, he would be lucky to get half of the ransom. Still, half was better than being dead. With great reluctance he said, “Fine,” and then glancing sideways at Sayyed, he added, “you can interrogate him at my camp.”

Sayyed laughed. “Nice try.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so. I do not need to explain such things to you.”

“He is being unreasonable,” Radih said to the other three.

Before they could answer, Sayyed said, “I need to inform Damascus of this situation, and I need to continue my discussion with the American agent. I expect Radih to have his prisoner here by ten o’clock tonight so I can get to the bottom of this, and I suggest you all leave as quickly as possible.” He glanced at the ceiling. “The four of us,” he said, intentionally leaving Radih out, “are far too tempting a target, and with the American in the basement who knows what they are up to these days. They may have other spies in the area.” Moving toward the door he said with absolute finality, “I will have more answers for you tomorrow.”

PART II

CHAPTER 20

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

OF all the changes Rapp had to make over the six months of his training, adjusting to the solitude had been the most challenging. As he became increasingly immersed in his new trade, he drifted further and further away from his friends. The big change was not that he did not see them as much. It was a mental detachment. With each new level of training they had less in common. His new life was far from social.

Rapp’s childhood had been fairly normal. He’d grown up in a nice upper-middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., and pretty much stayed out of trouble. He did well in school, although some subjects, like French, were far easier than math and science. He excelled at every sport, which guaranteed a certain level of acceptance among his peers. There had been just one setback, and it was a pretty big one.

When Rapp was thirteen, his father dropped dead of a massive heart attack. It was a heavy blow, but Rapp didn’t go into a complete free fall, nor did he retreat into a shell. The truth was his dad wasn’t around much. He was a workaholic who golfed on the weekends. He was in no way a bad father. He was fair and honest with his two boys, and as far as Rapp could tell he had been faithful to his mother and treated her with the respect she deserved. It was neither bad or good, it just was.

Rapp had a tight group of friends in the neighborhood, and his father had been wise enough to take out the right amount of life insurance, so very little on the home front changed. The awkward moments came at the sports banquets where he was the only one without a father, and the holidays when the memories of his father inevitably bubbled to the surface, but through it all he was more concerned about his little brother and mother.

There was one area where it definitely changed him. He wanted stability in his personal relationships. His friends became more important than ever. Not that they hadn’t been before, it was just that he had never had to think about it. All he had to do was walk out his front door, get on his bike, and within a block or two he couldn’t help but stumble onto a basketball or stickball game. More than anything, though, his father’s death taught him that the clock was ticking. Everyone was going to die. Some a lot sooner than others, but in the end there was no avoiding it, and since he wasn’t a Hindu, he pretty much figured he’d better make the best of his one shot. This drove him with amazing intensity and focus on fields and courts of his youth.

And then there was Mary. Rapp met her when he was sixteen. He was playing baseball and she was running track. He didn’t know if it was love at first sight, because he hadn’t a clue what love was, but it was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It was like every great emotion he’d ever felt all rolled into one euphoric wave and it scared the crap out of him, because he instantly knew he was not in control. Fortunately, she was, and she had the sense and stability to not jerk him around too much. Her father was a captain in the navy and a huge lacrosse fan. With three daughters of his own, he enthusiastically attended Rapp’s lacrosse matches. Rapp and Mary dated all through high school and then headed off to Syracuse together, where Mary ran track and eventually landed in the Newhouse School of Public Communications. Her ambitious plan was to become a sports announcer. On a chilly December night in 1988 Mary was returning home from a semester abroad when her plane was blown out of the sky, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 more innocent souls on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. The terrorist attack that became known as Pam Am Lockerbie hit Rapp like a hammer blow.

They had planned their entire life together. They’d discussed kids, ambitions, and fears, but never once did they think that one of them would be taken. If he’d made it through the death of his father relatively intact, the opposite was true this time. He crumbled. He was already home for Christmas break and planning on picking Mary up at Dulles after she’d connected through JFK. Strangely enough, when he received the news he never questioned it, never challenged it, never asked for proof. The downing of the plane was all over the news and there was no doubt that she was on it. She’d called him from Heathrow right before she’d boarded.

He was a wreck for the first week. He refused to see a soul, including Mary’s parents, and then on the morning of her funeral he emerged from the basement shaved and wearing a suit and tie. His mother and his brother, Steven, accompanied him to the funeral, where he sat stone-faced in a state of bewildered shock. Midway through the service, though, something happened. The shock, the pain, the agonizing self-pity over the fact that he would never see her again, never hold her, never smell her, the list went on, and on, and on like some pounding surf that threatened to drown him.

Sitting in that pew that morning, listening to all of the crying, witnessing all of the pain and loss, made him want to make a break for it. He did not want to share his heartache with these people. None of them knew her the way he did. It was his dreams that had been dashed. His life that had been turned upside down and wrecked. Self-pity was something he had never experienced before, and it sickened him.

Rapp took his pathetic self-absorbed emotion and shoved it as far down in his gut as it would go, and he plugged it with the first and only thing he had available—anger. That anger slowly metastasized into a suit of armor. For the first time since the news had hit him, he saw a way out. A faint light at the far end of the cavern. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew he had to head toward it. It was the only thing that offered him hope. The rest of these people could sit around and feel sorry for themselves and each other, but not him. He wanted to hurt someone. He wanted to make someone pay. He didn’t know for certain that he would achieve his goal, but he knew with absolute certainty that he wanted to kill the men who were responsible for bringing down that plane. Rapp didn’t know if it was right or wrong, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that the anger kept the pain at bay.