The Black Bullet

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The Phoenicia restaurant was crowded for a Thursday evening. Mohammed Sharif liked it that way. Easier to blend in with the people-his people, he felt. The scent of garlic chicken, braised lamb, baklawa, and Turkish coffee drifted over the tables. Sharif and Rashid Aamed sat in a back corner of the restaurant, watched a belly dancer, and spoke Arabic in hushed tones. They ate grape leaves with rice and lamb, hummus, and tabouli, and drank a Chateau Musar white wine grown in the Bekaa Valley.

Sharif said, “The Russian, Yuri Volkow, he already has images of the material on the Internet, offered to select dealers who have been vetted for their lists of private buyers. Our dealer has invited us to bid. The bidding is to begin at ten million U.S. dollars. However, they boast more is expected. The person who offers the highest bid for these two will have an even more exclusive first-bid option for the other canisters.”

“It confirms what the old German told us. But the Russians have yet to produce the rest of the canisters,” Aamed said.

“How would they know where more material is anymore than we might? They must know something. It would be information they could only have received from one of the three men who discovered the submarine.”

“The one who was kidnapped, the younger one. No doubt that Volkow extracted information from him.”

“Perhaps,” said Aamed, biting into a stuffed grape leaf. “So if the younger man knows the possible location of the remaining canisters, then the two other men, the one named Cronus-the Greek guy, and the American, Sean O’Brien, would know the location as well.”

“Indeed. O’Brien, we learned, owns the boat.”

“Your thoughts, Mohammed?”

“Allah will guide us, hamdulillah. I feel we must find O’Brien.”

“If we find the material before the Russians, how shall we deal with them and recover the canisters they have?”

“We become the highest bidders. Upon retrieving the material, Waahid will become a martyr, inshallad, God willing. As the smoke clears, we leave with the material.”

Aamed’s jaw noticeably popped from controlled tension. He smiled just as the reflection of the belly dancer’s supple body moved across his dark eyes, and said, “It would seem the time is approaching to kidnap the girl as well.”

“Not yet, not until we have the material. After that, take her. We have takfir-complete authority. Then her father will come without a sound.”