Chapter 23
Lydia had Clint on speaker.
His voice came through clearly despite the distance.
“Okay,” Clint said. “I've got him.”
Nobody moved.
“His name is Ibrahim Sula. Right now he's in Los Angeles.”
Mason felt the air in the room change.
“How certain are you?” Rylie asked.
“Certain enough. I've been running all three names against every Midnight Delta op that touched the Boko Haram in the last twelve years.
Two of them don't hold up under scrutiny.
Sula does. Twelve years ago we were pulling a Boko Haram operative out of a compound in northeastern Nigeria.
The man's name was Kofi Sula. It was supposed to be an extraction. He ended up dead.” A pause. “He was Ibrahim's brother.”
Sophia gripped the table.
“How old was Ibrahim when this happened?” Mason asked.
“Twenty-three. Kofi was the only one left in his family. He was his baby brother.”
The room sat with that for a moment.
“So, he's been planning this since he was twenty-three years old,” Angie said.
“That's what the timeline says.”
“Who is he now?” Rylie asked. “What does he look like on paper?”
“That's the part you're not going to love,” Clint said.
“He's rich. Legitimately, spectacularly rich.
Got into cell phone distribution in Nigeria right around 2004, 2005, when the telecom market was exploding.
Built a retail network across the north, then expanded into infrastructure contracting.
By 2012 he's worth somewhere north of four hundred million dollars.”
Angie let out a low breath.
“Let me guess, his government loves him,” Mason grimaced.
“Yep. He funds schools, clinics, and road projects in the north. On paper he's exactly what Nigeria needs more of, a self-made success story who reinvests in his community.” Another pause. “The fact that some of that community is Boko Haram doesn't show up anywhere official.”
“What about his diplomatic status?” Lydia asked.
“Honorary consul. It's not uncommon. Wealthy private citizens, especially ones who fund the right things and know the right people, they give it away like candy. That gives him access, gives him protection and gives him a reason to travel.”
“And it gives him immunity,” Mason said flatly.
“Yeah.” Clint's voice was careful. “It does.”
Mason looked at the whiteboard. He looked at Lydia's map. He looked at the corridor marked in red and thought about a man worth four hundred million dollars sitting in a hotel in Los Angeles right now, untouchable by every legal mechanism Mason had ever operated within.
“The aid worker,” Sophia said. “The one that sent you all to West Africa. That was his doing?”
“Had to be. He's got enough government access in Nigeria to have known about the kidnapping before it happened, but my guess is he engineered it.
And he's got enough credibility with US contacts to have flagged it as a priority extraction and specifically requested Midnight Delta.” A beat.
“Getting bad intelligence to the CIA to keep you pinned down after the extraction, for a man with his connections, that's just another Tuesday for him.”
“He wanted us out of the country,” Mason said.
“He wanted you out of the country,” Clint corrected.
“Mason, everything about this operation points at you specifically.
The text Sophia received. The timing. The way it was structured.
Sula doesn't care about the team. We might have all been on the op, but you were the leader. All of his focus is on you.”
The room went quiet.
“What about the helicopter specs?” Angie asked. “Was that ever real?”
“Real enough to use as cover,” Clint said. “My guess is he'd have taken them if he could get them. Four hundred million dollars doesn't mean you stop wanting more money. But it was never the point. It was something to keep everyone looking left while he moved right.”
“And Lydia figured that out,” Rylie said quietly.
“She usually does,” Clint said, and even through the speaker Mason could hear the pride in it.
Lydia didn't look up from her screen. But he saw a small smile form for just a quick moment.
“So he's in LA,” Mason said. “How long has he been in the country?”
“This trip? Three weeks. But he's been in and out for months. He was here when the Mary operation was being built.” Clint paused. “For Bree. For Kayla. He wants to be up close and personal.”
“So what makes you think he’s in LA?”
“Well, that’s where he’s registered. Beverly Hills Hilton.”
“Can we prove any of this?” Rylie asked.
“Not in a way that gets him arrested,” Clint said. “Not yet. Diplomatic immunity makes him untouchable through normal channels, and everything that ties him to Boko Haram is buried under twelve years of very clean money.”
“So, what do we do?” Sophia asked. She looked at Mason when she said it.
Everyone did.
Mason looked at the map. At Los Angeles. At the corridor marked in red on the Fifteen, running north out of San Diego.
“We find Kayla first,” he said. “Then we deal with Sula.”
The news came from Rylie first.
She didn't build to it. That wasn't Rylie. She just looked up from her laptop and said, “They found the van. It was empty.”
Mason went still.
“Temecula. Park-and-ride off the Fifteen.” She paused. “It's been processed. There's blood inside. Not a lot, but some. Tracks with the head wound people noted at the scene.” Another pause, shorter. “And a cleat.”
The room went quiet.
Then Sophia made a sound that wasn't quite a word. Her hand came up and pressed flat against her sternum, and Mason crossed the room and put both hands on her shoulders from behind and held on. She reached up and gripped his forearms with both hands and didn't say anything. Neither did he.
A cleat.
He knew exactly which ones. Royal blue and Kelly green, the school colors. She'd had them since the beginning of the season and she'd complained twice that they were rubbing her left heel and he'd told her to break them in and she'd rolled her eyes at him.
He pressed his jaw tight.
One thing at a time.
“Caltrans cameras?” Lydia asked.
“That's the problem. The park-and-ride has one camera covering the entrance and it was angled wrong.
The FBI has the van on the Fifteen as far north as Murrieta, then they lose it when it exits.
They don't know what they switched to. They're going back through every frame of Caltrans footage in a fifteen-mile radius trying to pick up a thread, but without knowing what vehicle they're looking for—” Rylie shook her head. “They're drowning in it.”
“How many cars pass through those cameras in an hour?” Sophia asked.
“On the Fifteen at that time of day? Thousands. Tens of thousands.”
Sophia exhaled slowly. Her hands were still on his forearms. He could feel her steadying herself through the contact.
He was trying to do the same thing.
He was still holding onto that when Angie's phone rang.
She looked at the screen. Something shifted in her face. She held up one finger to the room and answered.
“Mrs. Kowalski.” Her voice went easy and warm, the PI voice, the one that made people feel like they were talking to a friend.
“Yes. When?” A pause. “Today. What time did she say?” Another pause, shorter.
“That’s wonderful. Thanks for keeping my secret.
I can’t wait to surprise her. I know she’s going to be tickled when I give her the bon voyage card that all of us signed from Bay Brew, and who doesn’t need a Target gift card, am I right? ”
“Oh, she might send someone for her cat instead? Well, that’s all right, maybe I can get them to drop off the card.”
She hung up and looked around the room.
“Mary doesn’t deserve a Target gift card,” Rylie growled.
“Hush up. That’s great work, Angie. I’ll go with you,” Lydia started to get up from her chair.
“Sit down, Lydia,” Mason said as he walked around the table. “I’m going with Angie.”
“Just so we’re clear, I’m driving.”
“I hope you drive better than you park.”
Mason watched as San Diego moved past the window. Angie had already told him about the apartment building, now he was just running through the logistics. He couldn’t believe that an operator was coming back for a cat. He shook his head again.
“Are you thinking about the cat?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a feral Tom that has half of one ear chewed off and is blind out of one eye. He’s ugly as sin. Mrs. Kowalski tried to introduce me, but he damn near bit her hand off.”
Mason shook his head again.
A cat.
How many times had an op succeeded or failed due to one little thing like a cat? He couldn’t count.
His phone rang.
Drake.
“Tell me something good,” Mason answered.
“We're wheels up in thirty minutes.” Drake's voice had the tone it got when an op was finally moving. “All of us.”
Relief immediately moved through Mason's chest. His men. Coming home.
“Thirty minutes,” he said.
“We'll be there before breakfast. An early breakfast.” A pause. “How are we doing, Mase?”
“We're working it.”
“Yeah.” Drake knew what that meant. “We'll be there.”
Mason ended the call. He looked out the window. He thought about six men on a transport crossing an ocean and felt like he could take a breath.
Angie parked half a block down from the building, facing the entrance, engine off. The kind of position you could hold for three hours without drawing attention.
She turned to Mason. “Now we wait.”
“What about Mrs. Kowalski, won’t she be waiting for you?”
“I go up there and Mary shows up, and Mrs. Kowalski is there, it’s a problem. So, Mary’s co-worker is going to be stuck in traffic for a long time.”
Mason grunted. “Guess she’s not getting that Target gift card.”
“Guess not.”
They didn't talk much while they waited.
Forty minutes passed. Then fifty.
His phone buzzed. He looked down at the screen. Not a call. A text from an unknown number.
There was a photograph.
Kayla was on a concrete floor. Her rain gear was gone and she was still in her lacrosse uniform. Her knees were pulled up slightly. Her eyes were barely open, half-lidded and glassy, looking like she was not quite present. She looked so small. So much younger than fourteen.
Then he read the text beneath it.
Trade. You for her.