I’d halted our operations, going back to the Taskforce and asking for a modification of the course of action. Asking to interdict the leader of the Nigerians after the meeting instead of my original plan. Simply removing all five would have been easiest, but we would lose valuable intelligence against the Islamic State. We might get information from the Saudis after they interrogated Panda, but it wasn’t a given, and even if we did, the information would always be suspect.

The last time we’d wholeheartedly trusted our Arab counterparts had been in late 2009, when Jordan had fed us an asset from inside al Qaida, who supposedly had a location to Osama bin Laden. The CIA had met him at a forward operating base in Afghanistan to debrief, eager to learn what he knew and never questioning his motivations for turning against his AQ masters. They completely relied on his vetting from Jordanian intelligence.

He had other plans.

He turned out to be a triple agent on a suicide mission. He exited his vehicle inside the perimeter of the base and detonated his vest, causing the largest single loss of CIA personnel in history.

I preferred a little ground truth to secondhand KSA intelligence, and had convinced the Taskforce to let me give it a try after this meeting. Panda might be a bigwig Saudi, preventing us from putting the screws to him, but the Nigerian was a nobody, and interrogating him could provide quality information. The problem was that only Retro remained clean. Everyone else on the team had been involved with the extraction of Jennifer.

We’d mulled over options, and Jennifer had convinced me that she was good to go also, since she’d had on a wig and fancy clothes when they’d met, and Panda had spent most of the time in the toilet. Today, she was back to being a dirty blonde, with her hair let down and covering her face, and had dressed blandly, with a set of glasses to further alter her appearance.

Retro’s call was letting me know they weren’t close to being burned. I clicked over to the command net, calling Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander, currently staged in a warehouse four miles away with the support team.

“Showboat, this is Pike. Conditions are set. Do we have execute authority?”

It wasn’t his official callsign, but the only time Blaine ever showed up for an operation was to control the endgame, so I liked poking him in the eye. In effect, he got all the glory without slogging through the work, something I always kidded him about.

“Pike, Showboat. Standby for Omega.”

The Taskforce called every stage of an operation a different Greek letter, starting with Alpha for the introduction of forces. Omega—the last letter—meant we were at an endgame. Ordinarily, we received Omega from the Oversight Council prior to an operation and that was it. We executed how we saw fit, then told them the results. In this case, I had Omega for my plan of removing the five, but given the size of the target, the fact that we’d just executed a separate Omega operation against Panda on Kenyan soil, and the curveball I’d thrown about taking the leader for interrogation, the Council had grown skittish. For the first time, they held execute authority in DC with Kurt. Which was cutting things a little close, to say the least.

Brett called. “Trigger. The men are headed to dinner. The leader’s on the move.”

We’d watched the group for three days, and they were extremely clannish. Everything they did, they did together, which had been the genesis of my plan. Right up until we’d gotten the intercept about a meeting.

On the team net I said, “Leader’s broken from the group?”

“Yep. He’s headed north. They’re headed east.”

North was to the Adams Arcade shopping area on Ngong Road, and to the coffee shop where Panda was sitting. Phase one’s a go.

I said, “Fall back. Meet us at the linkup. Dan Aykroyd here’s got the package ready.”

I put the van in gear, seeing Knuckles grimace. I called Blaine and said, “Do we have Omega for the leader? He’s on the move, and Panda is set.”

“Pike, they want to wait until after the meeting before giving you Omega on him. You report the situation, and then they’ll decide.”

“Damn it, Blaine, you know we can’t run an operation like that. I need execute authority before, so I can deal with any contingencies.”

“Then you don’t have it. Execute the original plan and let him go.”

Shit.

I said, “Okay, okay. I’ll send a SITREP when I have it.”

We continued south, and the area began to get seedy as we approached the infamous Kibera slums. Thankfully, the Nigerians were staying in a decrepit building on the outskirts and not in the shantytowns of the slum proper. If they had been, there was no way we could execute my plan. Kibera was a no-man’s-land of gangs, glue-sniffing youth, and splintered lives wreaking desperation.

Comprised of a rat-warren maze of houses built out of plastic, scrounged wood, and tin cans, Kibera was one of the largest slums in the world, jam-packed with an incredibly dense population that had nothing better to do than sit around and stare at whoever was around. Probing it would have been a nonstarter. Luckily, the Nigerians’ safe house was in a courtyard of broken concrete structures just north. It prevented us from driving right up, but at least we could infiltrate it on foot.

I saw a penlight flash and pulled over. Knuckles slid open the door, and Brett entered the van. He saw Knuckles and laughed, shaking his head. “You sure you don’t want me to do this on my own? I’ve done it plenty of times in the past.”

Brett was an old-school ground branch operative from the CIA, and had conducted some seriously hairy singleton operations in his career, but there was no reason to do that here. I wanted one Operator pulling security while another penetrated the house.

I said, “He’s going.”

“Okay, but he’s also carrying the dope. We get held up, and I’m leaving him behind, dumbass disguise and all.”

Knuckles scowled, not liking the mission at all. He held up a bag of what looked like balloons filled with brown sand, about thirty of them, each a half inch across. He said, “That’s not the plan. You carry the dope. I break inside.”

And that was the operation, in a nutshell. We were going to plant black tar heroin, ready for distribution, inside the shack the Nigerians were using, then alert the police. They’d be locked up indefinitely after the arrest, and no longer available to help the Islamic State. It seemed like a pretty simple plan to me, but man alive, trying to sell that to the Oversight Council was damn near impossible. I mean, it wasn’t like we weren’t walking outside the law anyway. You’d have thought I’d demanded to start selling heroin on the streets of DC to fund our own activities.

Eventually, since there weren’t a lot of options and it solved the problem neatly, Kurt had convinced the Council, and Blaine had flown over, illegally smuggling in heroin so that we could illegally plant it then illegally frame the Nigerians. Neat. At least, I thought it was. Blaine, on the other hand, was decidedly piqued when I’d met him in the storage facility.

He’d said, “You know how hard it was to get this? And how much trouble you’ve caused?”

I said, “Don’t blame me. Blame the Islamic State.”

14

Knuckles held out the bag and Brett said, “Why me?”

“Because you can run like a cheetah. I get caught, and I’m doing some serious explaining as it is with this paint on me. You get caught, and it’s because you wanted to.”

He was right in that assessment. Brett was somewhat of a freak of nature on foot, running faster than anyone I’d ever met. I said, “Look at it this way, if you did this as a singleton, you’d be carrying it anyway.”