Jihad

CHAPTER 79

“You didn’t expect Saudi intelligence to apologize, did you?” Pinchon plopped down in the sofa of the borrowed embassy house and threw his head back on the cushion. “Being Arab means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Lia pursed her lips. She didn’t want the Saudis to apologize; she wanted them to turn back the clock and not have tried the raid in the first place.

“I don’t blame them,” continued Pinchon. “They figured their oil fields were threatened and they dealt with it.”

“Oh, yeah, like they had enough information to go on.” Lia stalked back and forth across the empty living room. She’d turned her communication system off so the Art Room wouldn’t hear her venting. An embassy driver was due to pick her up and take her to the airport at any minute.

The house they’d been watching had been leveled by the explosion, which had undoubtedly been rigged beforehand to prevent capture. Besides the al-Qaeda operatives, three women and two servants who’d been inside at the time, as well as two Saudi policemen, had been killed; another cop had been seriously wounded. The house was a charred mess of rubble and ash.

The Saudi intelligence officer in charge of the raid claimed that one of the suspects had sent a message to a worker at the state oil agency implying that there was a plan to detonate the doomsday device protecting Saudi oil fields from foreign attack. The device, a network of explosives rigged across the wellheads and pipeline systems, would have been a major terrorist prize.

The NSA had also intercepted the message. It was far from clear that the doomsday safeguard had been the target. If it was, there must be at least a dozen more al-Qaeda operatives in place to carry it out. It seemed unlikely now that they would be caught.

“The Saudis blew it,” said Lia. “They should have known the house would be rigged to explode. They went in there without even talking to us. Your boss—”

“My boss?”

“The station chief was supposed to get them to cooperate, not play cowboys. We could have gone in there ourselves.”

“Then we would have been the ones blown up,” said Pinchon. “And I don’t work for Riyadh, thank you very much.”

“Whatever.”

“You’re just mad because they didn’t ask us. Come on, Lia, what’d you expect them to do? Wait around until it’s too late to act? Besides, the world’s better off — two pests have been exterminated. Good riddance.”

Pinchon got up from the couch. “You’re pretty when you’re pissed off, you know that? But then again, you’re always pissed off.”

He put his hands on her hips. Lia tensed but didn’t push him away.

“Miss me?” he asked.

“No.”

He leaned to kiss her. She moved away.

“Hey, hey, I’m not going to bite,” he told her.

“What happened to you, Terry?”

“Come on, Lia. Obviously I can’t talk about it, right?”

“That’s bull.”

He smirked and held up his hands.

“I don’t mean just on the mission,” said Lia. “You changed.”

“Changed?”

“You couldn’t have let me know somehow that you were alive.”

Pinchon shrugged. That was all the explanation she was ever going to get. But it said it all, didn’t it?

No, the killer was that she had felt something for him, and that even now her heart was pounding — if he stopped smirking, if he came clean, if he said he loved her, what would she do?

Pinchon reached for her, but she backed away.

“This isn’t the place,” she told him.

“Where, then?”

“Nowhere.” Lia turned on her com system. “Where the hell’s that car to the airport?”