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  He could see in Ahmad’s eyes that the man caught his meaning.

  “Father O’Melton and I will find a place to sit down around here,” Bolan told him. “Someplace where we’ll look like ordinary tourists. Walk back down this street when you’re done. We’ll be somewhere where you can see us.” He lifted a big fist and scratched his chin. “If you think you’re being followed, ignore us and we’ll ignore you. Just walk on past, and we’ll meet outside the Omayyad Mosque in four hours. That should give you more than enough time to shake a tail without it looking like that’s what you’re doing.”

  Ahmad glanced down at the ground as if he might be saying goodbye forever. Then he nodded once more, turned and headed down the street.

  The three men had passed a café a block earlier that had wrought-iron tables and chairs out front, beneath very European-looking umbrellas. Bolan turned that way and O’Melton followed. As they walked, Bolan pulled a tiny receiver out of his pocket and inserted it into his left ear. A second, identical earbud he handed to the priest.

  The earpieces looked little different from those worn by many of the younger, Western-dressed Arabs who were listening to music on their iPods as they hurried along the crowded street.

  “You suppose everyone’ll think we’re listening to Arabic rap?” Father O’Melton asked in a jovial tone as he inserted his receiver, then pulled out one of the wrought-iron chairs and sat down.

  Bolan’s answer was a simple smile as he dropped down across from the priest. A waiter appeared at their table, took the order for two cups of strong Arabic espresso, and disappeared again.

  “Can you hear anything yet?” O’Melton asked.

  “Just street noises,” Bolan answered. “Our man hasn’t reached the café.” He stopped talking suddenly, then said, “Wait. He’s there. Can you hear him?”

  “Yeah,” O’Melton said. “He’s speaking to someone. Someone who’s surprised to see him. It sounds like some of the other men there know him.”

  Bolan waited as he listened to half a dozen “Allahu Akbars” and similar greetings from the Hezbollah men. “I think he’s sitting down now. If they’re passing the hookah around they’re probably on those big pillows.”

  “The Koran warns against the use of tobacco,” O’Melton said.

  “Not everyone practices what they preach,” Bolan murmured.

  “Amen to that.” Father Melton frowned and stared down at the table in front of him. “Exactly what I was afraid of is happening. Ahmad’s speaking fairly slowly. But the rest are talking so fast I’m missing some of it.”

  “This isn’t going to work, then,” Bolan said. “But I’ve got a backup plan. It wouldn’t hurt to tune in a live feed to my base, where I have fluent Arabic-speakers. We can’t afford any confusion or misinterpretation.” Pulling his satellite phone from his pants pocket, he tapped in the number to Stony Man Farm. The waiter arrived with their coffee as the call connected, and Bolan heard Price say, “Yes, Striker?”

  “Hold on a minute,” he told her as the waiter set their cups and saucers on the wrought-iron table. When the man had left again, he said in a low voice, “Barb, I’m going to connect you directly into the bug I’ve got on our man inside a café. Father O’Melton is with me and speaks reasonably good Arabic. But they’re talking fast, and there’s always a chance of slang words or regional colloquialisms he might miss.” Bolan paused to take in a deep breath. “So please tell me you’ve got someone there who speaks Arabic.”

  “Phoenix Force just got back from South America,” the Stony Man mission controller said. “They’ve been three days straight without sleep and are upstairs in the bedrooms. But I can buzz Hawk.”

  “I’ll hook the live feed in while you do that,” Bolan said.

  He connected the receiver to the satellite phone with a suction-cupped wire. A moment later, the chatter in Arabic was streaming straight from one satellite to the next and ending up at Stony Man Farm in the United States. Bolan had left the line open so he and Thomas Jackson Hawkins, the youngest member of the counterterrorist squad known as Phoenix Force, could converse back and forth.

  A second later, the familiar Southern drawl came on the line. “I knew somebody’d make sure I didn’t get any sleep,” Hawkins said in a hoarse voice.

  “You can sleep all you want when you’re dead,” Bolan said.

  “And that could come any second,” the man known as Hawk replied. “What have you got for me, Striker?”

  “You have the phone to your ear?” Bolan asked.

  “That’s affirmative.”

  “Then listen to the Arabic in the background and see if you can interpret the important parts as we go. We’re taping the conversation on this end, and Barb will be taping the whole thing there at Stony Man Farm, too. Later, you can go over it in more detail.”

  “Rumor here at the Farm has it you’ve got an Arabic-speaking priest with you,” Hawk said.

  “I do,” Bolan said. “But he’ll be the first to admit that while he can get along just fine in that language, there are nuances he very well might miss. Besides, two heads are better than one.”

  Both men fell silent as they listened to the stream of Arabic coming from the café. Then Hawkins said, “It sounds like several men can’t quite figure out why one person isn’t dead.”

  “That makes sense,” Bolan said. “The man they’re questioning is ours. The others are some of his former Hezbollah buddies. Does it seem like they’re buying his story?”

  “It’s hard to say at this point,” Hawkins replied. “There’s a slight tone of skepticism. At this point, I’d say it’s like betting on red or black at a roulette table. Maybe fifty-fifty.”

  “Don’t forget the green 0 and 00,” Bolan said.

  “Yeah, well, he’s feeding them a story about being in a Catholic chapel. Says he got out with the help of a priest when he pretended to convert to Christianity. They’re all starting to laugh now.”

  “I can hear that on my own,” Bolan said.

  “They’re making fun of the priest, and how gullible Christians in general are. ‘They always believe what they want to believe’ is almost a direct quote.”

  “What’s your overall take, Hawk?” Bolan asked. “Is our man really our man or is he playing triple agent?”

  “He’s sounding like a Muslim,” Hawkins said. “But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Hey, wait. Hold on a minute....”

  Bolan and Hawkins quit talking, and the Executioner noted that the men speaking Arabic had lowered their voices. They were almost whispering.

  The low, throaty sounds went on for perhaps a full minute. Then the voices returned to their normal tone.

  “What was that all about?” Bolan asked.

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” the Phoenix Force operative said. “They were kind of talking in circles. The way men do when they’re plotting something that needs to be kept secret.”

  “Anything more direct you can give me?”

  “Well, your man—I’ve gotten to know his voice—seems to have gained their confidence. I guess they finally bought his story. Wait—” Thomas Jackson Hawkins’s voice suddenly cut off as all three men tried to hear what was being said.

  “I think I just heard the word sarin,” Hawk said in almost a whisper.

  Bolan looked across the table to O’Melton.

  The priest nodded.

  “Keep listening,” Bolan said quickly.

  A few minutes later, he himself recognized the “Allahu Akbars” and other expressions of goodbye, and then the sounds of the street outside the café.

  Hawkins took a deep breath. “It looks like your man isn’t burned. In fact, they’ve included him in an op they have planned for tomorrow night.”

  “You catch the details?” Bolan asked.

  “Most of w
hat you’ll need, I think,” Hawkins said. “We lucked out, because your snitch was a new face and had to have a lot of details explained that the other men would already know.”

  “So let’s have them,” Bolan said.

  “Your guy is supposed to meet them back at the café tomorrow night around 2300 hours. They’ve got something cooking. Something big. Bigger than Saint Michael’s, anyway. What was Saint Michael’s, by the way? We’ve been in Argentina.”

  “Nothing you need to concern yourself about,” Bolan said. “You’ve done a great job. Now, give me the rest.”

  “They’ve got sarin gas,” Hawkins said. “And the name Saddam came up more than once.”

  “Saddam Hussein?” Bolan asked.

  “That’s what I took from the context,” Hawkins agreed.

  “But he’s dead,” Bolan said.

  “I got the definite impression they—Hezbollah—have had the chemical weapons for a number of years. Or at least the Syrian government has.”

  “Then Saddam shipped the sarin out to Syria before the U.S. invaded,” Bolan said. “And Syria is giving it to Hezbollah. If whatever strike they’re planning comes off, Hezbollah takes the blame and the Syrian government pretends to know nothing about it.”

  “That was my take on the subject,” Hawkins stated.

  “Okay, kid,” Bolan said. “You did a great job. “Now catch some Zs.”

  “One eye is already closed, Striker,” Hawkins said, and hung up.

  Down the street, Bolan saw Ahmad sauntering toward them, a grin on his face. He turned to O’Melton before the former Hezbollah man got within earshot. “Was that your take on things?” he asked the priest.

  O’Melton nodded.

  Bolan sat back in his chair and took a sip of his coffee. It had gone cold, but the caffeine would give him a jolt of energy. “Well, let’s see how our friend’s story stands up against what you and my man back home heard.”

  A moment later, Ahmad was at the table, saying, “Do you mind if we go inside? Who knows who might walk by and recognize me.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Bolan said. He glanced down the street, toward a small hotel they had passed earlier. Aladdin’s Lamp read the sign atop the three-story building. “You stay here for fifteen minutes,” he told Ahmad. “Then come meet us in that hotel. I’ll try to get a room on the top floor, facing the street. Don’t ask for us at the front desk—who knows who you might be dealing with there? Just go down the halls looking at doors. We’ll hang a jacket on the knob.”

  Ahmad nodded as he took a seat, glancing nervously around as if he suspected he might already have been seen.

  Without further words, Bolan and O’Melton took off toward the hotel.

  4

  If he had to describe Aladdin’s Lamp in one word, Father O’Melton would have said, “Dusty.”

  The former Army Ranger-turned-priest felt his sinuses swell and clog as he followed the man he knew as Matt Cooper up the ancient wooden staircase. Each step they took brought a creaking sound to the ancient wood. In the big man’s hand, O’Melton could see the large key fob and the numbers 307 imprinted into the metal. In his mind, he registered the fact that the key holder could be used as a weapon—much like a yawara stick.

  The thought caused the priest to laugh silently to himself. You could take a priest out of the Rangers, he concluded. But you couldn’t take the Ranger out of a priest.

  The room faced the street as they had requested, and O’Melton waited as the big man inserted the key into the door. The aged wood squealed as loudly as the stairs when the door swung open, and Cooper stepped to the side to let the priest in first. Then, with a quick glance up and down the hall to make sure no curious eyes were watching, he took off his sport coat and hung it on the knob before closing the door.

  The room held a mixture of old and new furniture. To O’Melton, it looked as if the proprietors waited until one piece wore out completely, then replaced it with a more modern item. The bed frames—there were two of them—looked to be old, and the mattresses and box springs didn’t fit. Both lapped over the sides of the wooden frames at least six inches, and sleeping—if they had time to sleep—would be a balancing act worthy of a circus high-wire performer.

  A rickety wooden table against the wall at the foot of the beds looked as if it had come into the room about the same time. But the chairs around it were of steel, with cheap plastic making up the seats and backs.

  Bolan moved to the end of the room, where a large dusty curtain covered the window. He pulled it back slightly, allowing a shaft of sunlight to drift in and highlight the dust motes that floated in the air and plugged O’Melton’s sinuses. “I see you only travel first class,” the priest said, breaking the silence that had fallen over them since they had checked into the hotel.

  “Only the best for you, Padre,” he said.

  The priest laughed out loud and took a seat on the edge of one of the beds. Before either man could speak again, there was a knock at the door.

  Bolan’s guns—a Beretta 93-R and .44 Magnum Desert Eagle—had been exposed ever since he’d taken off his jacket. O’Melton watched as Bolan drew the Beretta from under his left arm and walked to the door. He raised the barrel of the automatic, covering the peephole for a few seconds, before lowering it and replacing it with his eye.

  The movement was smooth and simple, but vitally important, O’Melton knew. It was a survival technique he’d been taught himself while in the Rangers. There was no better assurance of the enemy getting a head shot than seeing the inside of a peephole darken. A savvy assassin simply shot through the hole and into the eye. Much better to risk a little damage to a steel barrel first, to make sure whoever had knocked was one of the “good guys.”

  A moment later, Bolan opened the door and let Ahmad into the room.

  The dark-skinned man took a seat on one of the steel chairs at the table as Bolan dropped into one directly across from him. Then, slowly and methodically, the big man began to question him in detail about the meeting at the café. Ahmad knew O’Melton spoke some Arabic. But the smaller man wasn’t sure just how much, nor did he have any idea that they had hooked the transmitter feed to a satellite phone and streamed it all the way to America for another translation.

  Bolan’s questions were simple and friendly. But O’Melton knew he was testing the other man for any inconsistencies between what he said and what the man Cooper had called “Hawk” had translated earlier. Listening carefully, the priest noted that Ahmad’s story fell pretty much in line with what the translator had told them. There were a few minor differences, but nothing beyond what would be expected about the same incident from another point of view.

  If anything, the tiny inconsistencies confirmed the fact that Ahmad was telling the truth and that his “story” had not been rehearsed.

  Finally, Bolan said, “Okay, Zaid. Make sure I’ve got this right as I sum it up. Hezbollah has chemical weapons—sarin gas, to be exact—which they secretly obtained from the Syrian government and which originally came from Iraq right before the U.S. invaded. They plan on moving the chemicals tomorrow night. The ultimate goal is to get them into the U.S., where they can be set free in an act of terror which’ll make the World Trade Center look like a mere opening act. Am I right?”

  “You are correct,” Ahmad said.

  Bolan pulled the satellite phone from his jacket and tapped in a number. As the airwaves began to connect, he said, “Then we’ve got tonight—and only tonight—to get to the sarin gas first. Do you know the location?”

  O’Melton remembered the lowered voices during parts of the meeting they’d eavesdropped on. “Hawk” had been unable to pick it all up, and the priest suspected it was during this time that they’d spoken about specific details such as the location. It would have been human nature to do so.

  “Yes,�
�� Ahmad said. “They are in the port at Latakia. I can lead you straight to them. But there will be guards.”

  “I expect there will be,” the big man with the sat phone pressed to his ear said. The call must have connected at that moment because O’Melton saw their leader’s eyes drop from Ahmad to the table in front of them. He quit speaking for a moment, then murmured, “Barb, I need Hal just as fast as you can get him.” Then he became quiet again.

  O’Melton waited patiently. He had no doubt that this big American operative had already worked out a plan in his mind. He had never seen an agent quite like Cooper before—not in the Rangers, and not even with Delta Force. Cooper was bigger, stronger, faster and smarter than any warrior the priest had ever met—and O’Melton had been a Ranger long enough to meet thousands of the “best of the best.”

  He shifted slightly, adjusting the featherweight Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum “Military and Police” revolver he still carried in its shoulder holster. He had added a Colt Special Combat Government Model to his personal arsenal. It was a handgun that he vastly preferred to the newer GI-issue Beretta 92, and the bags had contained the weapon in both .38 Super and .45 caliber versions. The .38 had been tempting—the magazine contained one more round than the .45. But the likelihood of finding more ammunition for what was primarily an IPSC—International Practical Shooting Confederation—competition round was low. So he had chosen the .45, and it currently rode on his right hip in a Concealex holster. Other features—updated changes from the basic 1911 design that had served the U.S. for over a hundred years—were the rosewood-and-rubber composite grip slabs, white dot front Heinie dovetail and rear Bo-Mar sights. The skeletonized trigger was a nice touch, as well.

  The priest shifted the hard plastic holster beneath his jacket. Its presence was beginning to irritate the skin beneath it. The same thing was happening with the double 10-round magazine carrier, which he’d attached to his belt on the opposite side.

  While he readjusted the magazine caddie, Cooper began to speak. And the more O’Melton heard of the one-sided conversation, the more in awe he became not only of the man’s prowess in the field of covert operations, but also the connections and “pull” he had to have in order to get all the things he began to request.