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He finally met her gaze. “Of course it is.”
“Does anyone know you’re here?”
“What? Why?”
“Answer the question.”
She could see the wheels of his mind turning. He was wondering if she was involved with Rapp and desperate to hide that involvement. More to the point, he was wondering if answering in the negative would end with him buried in Langley’s basement.
Finally his body sagged. “No one knows. I came here first. I haven’t talked to anyone.”
She pressed a button on a phone sitting next to her and her assistant reappeared.
“Jamie, I need to make sure that there’s no record of Agent Wilson leaving Juba or arriving in the U.S. Also, call General Jayyusi in South Sudan. Ask him if he’s spoken with Aali Nassar. If so, ask him if it’s not too late to have him confirm Agent Wilson’s death and to destroy the bodies that were left behind.”
Wilson didn’t even react to what she was saying. Apparently he’d decided that he deserved whatever fate she had planned for him.
“That’s not going to be cheap,” Jamie said. “Is there any limit to what I can pay him?”
“No. But I want you to be clear that we’re buying an exclusive. If I hear that he’s sold any of this information again, I’ll be . . .” Her voice faded for a moment as she chose her next words. “Inconsolably disappointed.”
“I think he’ll understand your meaning. Anything else?”
“That’ll do for now.”
She disappeared and Wilson watched the door close as though he were in a gas chamber.
“What about Mitch?” she said. “Do you know where he is?”
Wilson shook his head. “He left me a long way outside of Juba. Last time I saw him, he was driving back toward the city.”
It seemed clear that Rapp had seen the same thing in Joel Wilson that she did. He could have killed the man with little fear of repercussion. Instead, he’d left him with a phone full of intelligence and the freedom to use it as he pleased.
“What are you going to do with me?” Wilson said, becoming uncomfortable with the silence drawing out between them.
“For now, I think it’s in our best interest to let the world think you’re dead. Of course, we’ll call Director Miller and tell him that’s not the case. If it’s acceptable to you, I’d also like to ask him to let me use you to lead the effort to identify the men on your phone and their connection to Aali Nassar. I have good intelligence analysts, but what we need here is an investigator.”
He just stared at her, stunned.
“You were expecting something else?”
“Yes . . . no. I mean, I’d love to be involved in getting Nassar.”
“Then why don’t you have one of my assistants send for some clothes for you and show you where the showers are. In the meantime I’ll assemble your team.”
CHAPTER 54
Riyadh
Saudi Arabia
THE basement had been lined with cubicles, and the overhead fixtures were dimmed, causing each workstation to glow with the light of its computer monitor. Ironically the secret to effective intelligence analysis was the sharing of ideas, but in this case that kind of an exchange was impossible. Aali Nassar’s goal was neither truth nor accuracy. What he needed now was to conjure an alternate reality so convincing that it persuaded even the analysts who had created it.
As he walked across the room, the people who noticed him stood, some even attempting an awkward salute. He ignored them. They weren’t soldiers or the disciplined operatives he’d surrounded himself with since graduating from university. They were the young technology experts who now reigned supreme in the intelligence-gathering field.
Nassar was wary of them, not only because he lacked any real understanding of how they did what they did, but because their talent was always inversely proportional to their faith. For these men, God, country, and authority were meaningless when compared to what they saw in those screens.
The most gifted—and thus least devoted—of the analysts assigned to this detail had been placed along the back wall. He swiveled in his chair when Nassar stopped in the open door of his cubicle but didn’t stand as the others had.
