Path Of The Assassin

“So, you’re talking to me again?” said Harvath as he found a cup and poured himself some coffee. The kitchen window had a nice view of a small courtyard outside.

Meg paused before responding. “You could have told me what was going to happen. I kept waiting for the helicopter to reel us in because you made it seem like it was going to be like one of those Coast Guard rescues. You lied to me.”

“Let’s just say I didn’t paint the full picture.”

Meg tore off a small piece of croissant before responding. “I guess I owe you a thank-you.”

“I guess you do.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Well, you’re welcome,” said Harvath.

Meg knew the helicopter extraction had been their only means of escape, and she also knew that her being angry with Harvath was just a way of ignoring the anger she felt with herself. It was her fault that they had gotten captured and that the mission had been botched, but what was done was done. They could only move forward.

“How’d the debriefing go?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

Harvath stared absentmindedly over the top of his coffee cup at her. Even after everything they had been through, she was still incredibly beautiful. Here they were sharing coffee, croissants, and the morning paper at this little breakfast table as they skirted an argument and Meg tried to steer the conversation in another direction. The whole scene was almost too surreal for Harvath.

“Not good,” he replied as his mind slipped from fantasy back to reality.

“Not good how?”

“Morrell refuses to believe that a woman is running Abu Nidal’s organization.”

The indignation rose in Meg’s voice as she slammed her coffee cup down. “But we saw her. We talked to her! He has no idea. He wasn’t there.”

“And he doesn’t seem to care.”

“Why the hell couldn’t a woman be manning the operation?”

Harvath smiled at her choice of words. “It’s completely out of keeping with Islam and their male-dominated society. Muslim men, especially extremists, will not take orders from a woman.”

“But they don’t. They take them from the brother. He’s the puppet and she pulls the strings.”

“I told them all of that, and they wouldn’t listen.”

“What about the fact that you could connect her to all of those assassinations around the globe.”

“A woman as an assassin, that they could accept, but it still doesn’t make her their main focus. They see the brother as being in charge, and for the time being, that’s where all their resources are going to be placed.”

“So what’s next?”

“I’ve given them detailed descriptions of both Hashim and his sister. The CIA is gathering all the materials they can from Oxford, and you and I are going to review every last scrap of it to see if maybe she slipped up and allowed herself to be photographed at some point during her time there.”

“If she was ever there,” said Meg.

“She could have been lying, but I don’t think so.”

“Is Morrell going to send another team back into the camp to try and take them out?”

“From what we can tell, the camp has been abandoned.”

“Abandoned? Why?”

“I don’t think there’s a terrorist on this planet that isn’t familiar with what we did to the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Our satellites picked up a lot of vehicles leaving, followed by several very large explosions.”

“From Avigliano?”

“No. These were explosions Adara’s people set off afterward to cover their tracks. I’m guessing that whatever sensitive equipment or information they couldn’t move out of there right away, they destroyed.”

“So what happened to the two of them?”

“Now that we’re on to them, Gadhafi won’t be much help anymore. I’ve got to imagine we’re already ramping up to teach him a lesson for harboring them. Adara and Hashim Nidal are probably going to be hotfooting it out of Libya real soon. For all we know, they’re already gone. Which begs the question, where are they going?”

“With the list of places we know Adara has already been, the answer is anywhere.”

“I know, and that’s our biggest problem. I have a source that’s been watching an old friend of the Nidal family and thinks Adara might have made contact with him. Shortly thereafter his yacht was seen leaving port.”

“Which port?”

“Puerto Banus. It’s on the Costa del Sol.”

“Near Marbella, I know it. Where was it headed?”

“That’s where it starts to get like a needle in a giant haystack. According to my source, the yacht was headed for an island somewhere off the southern coast of Italy.”

“Italy? Maybe your haystack’s not as big as you think,” said Meg as she set down her coffee cup. She walked into the living room, retrieved an atlas from the bookshelf, and brought it back to the table.

Harvath watched her flip pages until she found the one she wanted and spun the book around so he could see it. “There,” she said.

Her finger was resting on a small island west of Naples named Capri. “Why do you think this is our island?” asked Harvath.

“It’s a hunch, but so many signs point to it, it’s got to mean something.”

“What signs?”