Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(85)

“Flag of Saudi Arabia, minus the Muslim creed. Whatever’s going on out here, it’s a big deal. Saudi involvement would explain why this area was blurred out on the maps. It was probably done at their request.”

“Friend of mine who retired from State said that James Osborne kept company with the Saudis in Baghdad. Maybe he was wooing potential clients.” I lowered the glasses and palmed sweat from my forehead. “I heard on the news maybe a month ago that an unnamed US company employing ex-CIA officers is negotiating with the Saudis to help them create their own spy empire.”

Dougie moved the binoculars from his eyes. “It’s true. The organization will be modeled on the Special Activities Division of the CIA. But the fact that there are former CIA officers involved has some people in Washington questioning its legality.”

I didn’t ask him how he knew all this. I was sure he had connections. “You think the company is Valor?”

“Looking at this complex? I think it’s Valor and Vigilant. Vigilant trains the men and builds the organization. Valor supplies it with weapons. They have some damn powerful backers.”

This could explain the Alpha’s recent aggression in her efforts to hide Valor’s treasonous arrangement with Iran. A multibillion-dollar contract with Saudi Arabia would float the company for years. Even decades. And provide entrée to Saudi Arabia’s allies—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, and Kuwait.

The wealthiest countries in the Middle East.

A cash cow, there for the milking.

Unless someone could prove that Valor Industries also worked with the Saudis’ deadliest enemies—the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I lifted the binoculars.

Scattered around the rest of the complex were twenty construction trailers arranged in four clusters. A large P was stenciled on their sides, presumably for Phlage Construction. They all had a single central door flanked by two windows covered with aluminum blinds. Roughly ten feet by thirty-six, the trailers looked like matchsticks next to the rest of the complex.

Unless they’d moved him, Cohen had to be inside one of those matchsticks.

A road from the distant highway entered the complex from the southwest, a guard shack just visible. Another road ran between the compound and the runway.

Eight vehicles sat in a large paved lot a short distance from the brick building—seven black SUVs, their sides streaked with dust, and an incongruous red Mercedes sports car. Allowing four people per SUV and two in the sports car meant somewhere between eight and thirty potential threats inside the complex. More, if people were bunking down on-site.

But only two men were visible. One on patrol, walking the perimeter. And another on the far side of the compound, standing guard atop a twenty-foot-high wooden platform.

We timed their activity. The guard on the platform made a slow rotation of the area every ten minutes, watching the horizon through his binoculars. He seemed less concerned with anything that might be happening closer by—maybe that was the purview of the guard on the ground. Between his scans of the horizon, the man occupied himself with his phone, eyeballing something on the screen.

The second guard made a complete circuit of the area every fifteen minutes, walking just inside the chain-link fence that encircled the compound. The first time he walked the perimeter, he stopped and spoke with the guard on the tower. On his second circuit, he didn’t pause.

Dougie said, “Watch the trailers farthest away.”

I shifted the binoculars. A door to one trailer stood open. A man came down the stairs, talking on his phone. He crossed to one of the other trailers and disappeared inside.

“Five to ten men, probably,” Dougie said. “Or there could be an army inside that building. But no workers. Maybe because they’ve got Cohen here.”

We divided the area into sectors and assigned labels to each cluster of trailers from T1 to T4, and designated the large building as Country Club and the hangar as Zeta. This would allow us to communicate our whereabouts inside with a minimum of talk and no chance of being understood by eavesdroppers.

My phone vibrated. Sarge again.

I ducked out of the wind below the ridge line. Grasshoppers pogo-sticked around me.

“I’ve got the phone,” Sarge said.

My heart smacked against my chest. “You’re holding it?”

“Affirmative. It’s an old Nokia, just like I remember. Sealed in a manila mailer with all kinds of interesting postage.”

Relief swept through me. “It’s working?”

“Battery’s dead. We’ll have to find a charger. Want to know what else was in there?”

“First, are you back on the road?”

“Yeah, I’m driving. And I left behind about half a million dollars, all tightly packaged in bundles of hundred-dollar bills. TSA would throw my ass in jail if they caught me carrying that much money. But now you know I love you. I could be hanging out poolside in glorious Bullhead as we speak, getting drunk and enjoying some female companionship. A half-million fucking dollars.”

I processed the news, wondering if Laura Almasi was also looking for the cash. But five hundred grand didn’t seem like enough to interest her. Not against Saudi billions.

“Get on that plane,” I said. “I’ll text you the coordinates of our location. We’re going in.”

“I’ll call when I’m about to board. You don’t answer, I’ll try again when I land. If you still don’t answer, I’m calling the Feds.”