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“It was a mistake!” Shirani insisted.
“Get out of my sight.”
Maslick skirted the wall as the general hurried past him.
“Give me a sitrep,” Rapp said when his man was within earshot.
“We’re solid. Everyone working in this place is regular army but their security procedures are shit. They’ve got four armed guys patrolling the fence line but everyone else is working under their cover as factory workers. Their weapons are all secured in an armory under the building. I’ve spread Chutani’s men around the facility and on the perimeter. Sidearms only but that’ll be plenty to take the place. If it has to go down, it’ll probably take less than two minutes and we could conceivably get out of it with no casualties.”
“Good,” Rapp said and then pointed through the partially open door. “Now there’s someone I think we need to meet.”
They went inside and Maslick shut the door behind them before taking a position behind a lone man shackled to a chair.
“Looks like you’ve had better days,” Rapp said.
The man raised his head, revealing a pulverized face partially hidden by a beard similar to the one Rapp wore.
“You’re . . . You’re American?” he said, saliva and blood rolling from his swollen lips as he spoke.
“Yeah.”
“Are you from the embassy?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’re here to take me home?”
“I don’t know. Who are you?”
He didn’t answer, but Rapp had a pretty good idea. The accent was middle-America but he had black hair and a dark complexion. A second-generation immigrant from somewhere in the Middle East.
Rapp would never understand how foreign parents—largely grateful for everything America had given them—could raise children like the man sitting in front of him. How someone brought up in a good neighborhood by moderate Muslims turned to radicalism. What was it about living in a free, prosperous, safe society that chapped their asses so bad?
“Look, you sound like you want to go home, but I don’t know where that is. American accents are easy to fake. I’m not sure you’re really my problem.”
He stared at Rapp through blackened eyes for a good thirty seconds, but finally spoke. “I’m from Durango. In Colorado.”
“You got a name?”
“Eric Jesem. You can look it up. Now take me home.”
“Home? You joined ISIS. This is your home.”
“I’m an American citizen!” he shouted, but the effort caused him to cough uncontrollably. His evident agony suggested he had a few broken ribs to go with the bruises on his face. “I . . . I have rights!”
“What about the rights of the women and children you and your friends have raped and killed?”
“They live in the new caliphate. Under God’s law.”
“But you don’t,” Rapp said. “Is that what you’re telling me? They live under God’s law but you get yours from Thomas Jefferson?”
“Take me back to the States! I know my rights. I get my day in court.”
“Why don’t we try it this way. You tell me everything you know and if it’s useful, we’ll get you to an American hospital.”
“Bullshit. I don’t have to talk to you. I don’t have to incriminate myself. It’s in our fucking Christian constitution.”
“Look around you, Eric. Where do you think you are? Does this look like a Colorado police station?”
