Jihad

CHAPTER 18

Asad’s driver had been placed in a room with three other patients on the third floor of the hospital, next to an emergency staircase and only a few yards from the elevators; snatching him would not be difficult. But that meant the men coming for him would have an easy time as well.

One of the patients in the room was suffering from the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Posing as an acquaintance of the man’s daughter — her name and address were in his file, easily accessed by the Art Room — Lia went up and surveyed the room. The driver lay in the second bed from the door, knocked out by the drugs they’d given him to ease the pain of his burns. Lia placed a video bug and an eavesdropping “fly” inside the room and in the hallway, making up for a gap in the hospital’s video security system that failed to completely cover the hallway down from the nurse’s station.

“Easiest thing to do is to take him down the stairs, slap him in a wheelchair and roll him out the front door,” she told Rockman as she descended in the elevator. “Can you kill the alarms on the staircase?”

“Not a problem. We have two CIA paras in a car outside.”

“Para” was short for paramilitary officers, CIA operatives specially trained for covert military mission.

“Describe their car.”

Lia left the hospital through a side exit and circled around the block, coming up on them from behind. Unlike some of the CIA people she’d worked with, these ops were smart enough to be out of the car, watching their backs. Still, they were ridiculously easy to spot, wearing mirrored sunglasses and identical black baseball caps, seemingly oblivious to the evening shoppers passing nearby. Lia pulled a guidebook from her pocket and strolled down the block; as she got close to them, she flipped open the book and turned to one of the men.

“Can you help me with directions?” she said in a loud voice. “I was looking for the tram line.”

“Lia?”

The voice took her by surprise. She looked into the CIA officer’s face, staring past the sunglasses. Never in a million years would she have expected to see the face behind them, and even as she stared at them she told herself it must be a mistake, must be some trick of her unconscious.

But the voice was definitely his.

“I believe you have to go up about three blocks,” said the man, shaking off his own surprise. “And I think it’s that way.”

He pointed to the left, down the street.

“Could you show me?” Lia asked, regaining her composure.

“Love to.”

“Lose the hat and glasses,” she said, starting down the block.

“You haven’t changed at all,” replied the CIA officer.