Edge of Courage (Edge Security Series Book 5) (12 page)

F
rom the alley
, Sarah watched the two sentries disappear around the corner. She and Dylan had to wait until they’d walked the length of the back of the building before they could move again. And while they waited, they stood in the open on the side while the second set of guards crossed the front of the building, getting closer to their position.

She checked her watch again. It should take the guards about a minute to cross the length of the building.

Dylan didn’t say a word behind her, but kept his eyes behind them, letting her focus on moving forward. She’d only gone inside twice before, but had spent many nights watching the sentries from the rooftops and seeing who worked where. She just hoped they hadn’t changed any schedules since she’d last surveyed them.

At the corner, she put her back to the stone wall and counted five breaths, steadying her nerves. She checked her watch. Twenty seconds gone.

Dylan waited patiently beside her, watching the alley entrance and not questioning her.

Another twenty seconds gone.

Footsteps and low voices sounded from the opposite end of their alley. The other guards approached. Blood rushed too loud in her ears.

Wait.

Just before the minute mark, she peeked around the corner. The two guards strode out of sight. She slipped around the corner with a sigh, Dylan on her tail.

She ran to the back door. It was a single metal door, set in a slight alcove. The kitchen and supply entrance. She reached for the handle and tugged.

It didn’t budge.

Someone had locked it.

“Fuck,” she muttered. “It hasn’t been locked before.” But they’d obviously tightened security since Dylan’s team had rescued the CIA agent.

She pulled a small zip-pouch out of her cargo pants pocket and dropped to her knees.

“Can you do this?” Dylan asked, his voice calm and controlled. He brought his rifle up while his gaze scanned the surroundings.

“I’ve got it.” She pulled two picks from the pouch and inserted them into the deadbolt. “We’ve got less than a minute before the other sentries get here. Give me a countdown.”

“Twenty seconds gone,” he said.

She heard whispers of Dylan’s movement as he swung his rifle from one area to another. The tumblers inside stuck. She reinserted the picks and twisted again.

“Thirty seconds.”

She appreciated how his voice remained so calm. Her heart thudded like an elephant stampede in her chest.

“Forty seconds. We’ll have to move in ten and try again later.”

“Almost got it.” She pushed on one lock pick.

Male laughter echoed from the alley.

“We’ve got to move, Ghost. Now.”

Almost there. She wiggled the second pick and twisted both. A click sounded.

Dylan hauled her upright even as she yanked her tools from the door while opening it. Dylan shoved them both inside and shut the door behind them.

They stood in a lit hallway with a flickering fluorescent light overhead. Three large bags of garbage waited by the door and the slight smell of rotting food tainted the air. Sarah didn’t move, didn’t breathe. That had been too close.

Male voices speaking Arabic drew closer outside.

Please let them not choose now for a coffee break.

Dylan motioned with his hand for her to continue. She nodded and took the lead. The guards, if they followed their previous schedules, weren’t due to change until just before the pre-dawn morning call to prayer. They now had time to do what she needed.

She led Dylan down a back hall, past an open doorway, into the dark kitchen. The smell of burnt coffee wafted out.

The far end of the hall ended in an intersection. Sarah nudged open a door just before it. Cigarette smoke scented the air.

“I thought it was forbidden to smoke,” Dylan whispered.

“It is for the masses. The rules are different for those in power.”

“Typical.”

They ran up three flights. Sarah stopped on the third-floor landing. “My contact’s office is in the middle of the hall. The hall should be deserted, but his office won’t be.”

“How can you be so sure?”

She went to answer and then shook her head. “You’ll see.”

He scowled. “How many?”

“Usually just my contact and another man.”

She opened the door a crack and listened. No sound came to them. Dylan nodded at her and she stepped into the hall. Deserted, just as she’d predicted.

This hall had carpet, unlike on the first floor. And there were clean spots on the wall where pictures used to hang. She strode down the hall to the door she wanted. She paused outside it.

A man cried out.

Dylan stiffened beside her.

Voices murmured together in Arabic. She pressed her lips together. It sounded like they were done now. She pulled her weapon out and held up three fingers.

Three.

Two.

One.

She threw open the door and sighted her weapon on the man leaning against the desk. The man kneeling between his naked legs she left to Dylan.

“Hello, Zahir,” she said in Arabic.

Zahir was of average height, with a potbelly and black body hair that crawled over his shoulders. His long beard had a gray streak in it.

“Fuck off,” he snarled in English, grabbing for his
dishdasha
.

The man who’d been kneeling before him crab walked backward, babbling pleas to not hurt him, to not tell anyone. Dylan didn’t let him get too far before stopping him.

“Stop your whining!” Zahir yelled in Arabic at the other man, before turning to Sarah and speaking in English. “What do you want this time?”

“I want to know where Mahmoud al-Baghdadi will be lodging two nights from now,” she said.

He held his robe over his privates. “Have you no shame? You should let me dress.”

She gave a dramatic sigh and holstered her weapon. Zahir straightened, perhaps thinking he’d won the round. She pulled the knife from her leg sheath and let the light glint off it. The man on the floor whimpered. She kept her gaze on Zahir, letting the cold rage that had built up over the months she’d been here show in her eyes.

“You will answer my question or I will cut little bits of your body off until you do.” She moved closer. “A fingertip. The tip of your tongue. Your eyelid. But first.” She smiled. “I’ll start with your dick.”

He flinched when she stepped toward him. “They will kill me if they find out I told.”

“I will send the photos I have of you to Mahmoud. You’ll be crucified, tortured and then thrown to your death. If you don’t die from that, the gathered crowd will stone you to death. Your family will be ostracized.”

He shook his head. “You bitch.”

She shrugged. “You’re the one who allowed fanatical terrorists to run your city.”

He straightened. “We didn’t have a choice. The army left us to them!”

Sarah kept her face impassive as she glanced around the office. A bottle of Scotch sat on the desk with two glasses. “It looks like you’ve profited.”

“Fucking whore,” he said.

“Call her that again, asshole,” Dylan said, his voice cold, “and you won’t have to worry about your friends finding out about you. I’ll throw you off the roof myself.”

Sarah wanted to scowl at Dylan. She could handle this herself. She didn’t need him defending her from name-calling. She pressed her lips together. “Tell me where he’ll be.”

“First you must do something for me,” Zahir said.

“You’re in no position to negotiate,” she said.

“I want you to get my daughter out.”

Sarah didn’t say anything, more from shock than anything else. Zahir had a ten-year-old girl and a thirteen-year-old boy. She’d assumed since he’d been caught up in the ISIS leadership that he felt the same as the rest of the men running the city.

“I have a sister in Erbil,” he continued. “She’ll look after her and see that she’s educated. Just promise to get her out of the city.”

Sarah’s thoughts raced with whether she could get the girl out or whether it was even wise to do so. But she kept her voice cold as she spoke. “Tell me Mahmoud’s location.”

“Will you promise?”

She stepped back so she could see the other man, who still cowered on the floor. “Can you guarantee his silence?”

He quirked an eyebrow. “How do you think I get him here each week? What is that saying you’re so fond of? Pictures speak a thousand words.”

“You’re blackmailing him.”

He nodded. “He deserves it. You see, no one will admit to liking men anymore, so I’m must stoop to someone like him. He doesn’t even like men.”

She didn’t want to know why Zahir thought the man deserved to be blackmailed into sex. “Can he understand English?”

“If he did, he’d be screaming at me right now. He likes this regime.” His lips twisted cynically. “But only because he’s been given a young boy as a
sabaya
.”

Sarah’s gut twisted with that information. Dylan scowled down at the man he guarded.

Still, no matter what Zahir said, she didn’t trust him. She couldn’t trust him with her smuggling network. “I can’t get your daughter out—”

“Then we have no deal.”

“This
isn’t
a negotiation.” Sarah studied the man in front of her. “We can’t get your daughter out, but you can. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll tell you how.”

Silence filled the room as they waited for Zahir’s decision. He rubbed the middle of his forehead with his eyes closed. She didn’t want to start cutting into him, but she would. She needed that info. If the coalition could cut the head off the viper here in Mosul, then she would spill blood to give them that chance.

Zahir straightened and rattled off an address. “He’s scheduled to stay there for the rest of the week.”

She lowered her weapon. “I will check out your info. If you’ve misled me, I’ll send the pictures I have to Mahmoud and his cronies.”

He shook his head. “I haven’t misled you. I promise.”

“Let’s go,” she said to Dylan.

At the door, Zahir called out, “But what about my daughter?”

Sarah paused. What could she say that wouldn’t utterly compromise the mission? “In two nights’ time, have your daughter ready to leave. The city will be in chaos and it should be easy for someone to slip out past the checkpoints on the secondary roads.”

“The whole city? Two nights?” His face paled as he realized what she was telling him: it wasn’t a surgical strike team coming for Mahmoud, but something that would hit different parts of the city at once. He was smart enough to realize it would be a bombing mission.

“If you tell anyone else, I will kill you and them,” she said. “Just be ready to get your family out.”

“I will,” he whispered and slumped back against his desk, suddenly looking nothing more than a naked and beaten middle-aged man.

She left the room, following Dylan to the stairs. They cracked the door and heard no sounds, but the acrid scent of cigarette smoke let them know that someone had been there recently. Dylan took the lead down the stairs and she focused on her surroundings while a part of her brain went over the interaction she’d had in the office.

Having dealt with Zahir before, she knew he wouldn’t call the guards. He’d have to explain his boy toy. Zahir wasn’t evil; he just wasn’t that good either. His morals were swayed by greed and lust, but he had a line he didn’t cross, and for that Sarah left him alive.

He didn’t hurt children. But the man he blackmailed did, if what she saw in Zahir’s face was correct. That was something they were going to fix tonight.

Men’s voices came from the kitchen, so they retreated to an empty office to wait. They stood silently in the dark for fifteen minutes while they listened to the men bitch about pulling the patrol night shift while they drank coffee.

They heard the metal door to the back parking lot open. The guards were leaving. They waited another minute before heading to the door themselves.

The door was thick but they would be able to hear a conversation if the men were still there. She stared at the door, her heart pounding. Should they wait a moment more before opening it?

“You’re thinking too hard, Ghost,” Dylan said.

She gritted her teeth. “Wait thirty seconds and then we should be clear to open the door.”

“Whatever you say.” An edge crept into his voice.

“What’s wrong?”

“Are you actually asking my opinion?”

She stared at him. “What the hell?”

“We can discuss this later.”

“Or maybe never.” She pushed open the door.

Dylan gave a muffled curse and Sarah froze for the briefest moment as her eyes connected with those of an ISIS soldier on the other side.

I
n the split
second after she pushed the door open, Sarah registered the guard’s black pants, his Adidas T-shirt, his black turban, and the AK-47 slung across his body. The scruff of his beard hid the lower half of his face. He opened his mouth.

Sarah pulled a knife from under her shirtsleeve and threw it without thinking.

The man fell back a step when the knife lodged in his throat; his shout became a gurgle as he choked on his own blood, his eyes wide. That was when Sarah noticed the scruff of his beard barely covered his cheeks.

Her heartbeat slowed and her breath caught. Was he even sixteen?

He fell to his knees as Sarah watched in silence, unable to process what she’d done. He was hardly more than a boy.

Dylan pushed past her and grabbed him under the arms, hauling him inside and down the hall to the kitchen. He did it so fast that only a small trail of blood indicated where he’d gone.

Dylan frowned at it. “Nothing to do about that now. Did you check the door?”

She looked at him. What did he say? Numbness crept through her limbs. Her thoughts kept circling back to the boy’s wide eyes.

“Ghost?” He pinched her ear. Hard.

“Ow!”

“Stay with me,” he ordered. “We need to evac now.”

Her brain clicked in and her world focused. She shoved the feelings quickly into a box and pushed it aside.

“I’m with you. Let’s move.”

“Copy that.” Dylan cracked the door to the alley and listened a moment. “Come on, we’re good.” He ran toward the road away from the corner the sentries would come around. She followed, her steps silent and her legs pushing hard.