“You know about that, huh?”
“Was she in on it?”
“Won’t be able to answer that until we find her.”
“Which means she may be in trouble too.”
“Affirmative. Anyone else you want to ask about?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about Alegria? Any idea what she’s been up to the last few days?”
Mantis didn’t like where Gunner was going with this. “Do you have something to tell me?”
“Seems you weren’t the only K19 team member goin’ rogue. She and her daddy negotiated a ten-million-dollar payout if Ghafor delivered both you and Dutch.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Can’t say I am.”
“Where’d the money come from? The agency?”
“Hell no. She pulled this stunt all on her own.”
Ten million dollars? Where did she get that kind of money? How had she been able to contact Ghafor to offer the deal in the first place?
“I’m not following. So what happened, Ghafor gave you my twenty?”
“Are you serious? No, Ghafor didn’t give us your twenty. Jesus.” Gunner glared at him. “I’ll ask again, who the fuck do you think you’re dealin’ with here? We found you all on our own before little Miss Ten Mil and her daddy could make things worse.”
“And Dutch?”
“You think Ghafor knew wher
e he was being held? Negative on that one too.”
Mantis rubbed the back of his neck. “So where’s Ghafor?”
“God knows, but we’re on our way to get Alegria and her daddy now.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re in Islamabad. I told Doc I don’t understand why we had to escort them home; seems like they got here all on their own.”
Alegria and her father were in Islamabad? Mantis would ask Gunner if he was sure, but he didn’t want to sound like he didn’t trust the man or their team’s abilities for the third time.
And what about the money? If K19 had intercepted him and picked up Dutch, did that mean Ghafor walked away with Alegria’s ten million? Something was telling him it wasn’t going to go down quite that easily.
—:—
Alegria watched her father check his phone. There was still no word from Ghafor about where and when the exchange, Mantis for Dutch, was taking place.
The way she’d left things with Doc, he’d agreed to have two teams on standby, one for each man, and the minute she alerted him, they’d move in, while she and her father went back to Bagram Air Base.
It was her father’s connection to the Armée de l’Air Française that allowed them to land there, not Alegria’s Air Force or CIA background. He hadn’t been willing to share how or why the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure was able to give him such quick and easy access to a man who ultimately, many believed, would come to be as universally hated as Osama bin Laden had been—perhaps even worse.
When Mantis recounted what had happened on his final Afghani mission, he’d told her that he’d made a deal with Abdul Ghafor in order to gain access to the Taliban and Bagish Safi. He didn’t outline the specifics of that deal, but Alegria’s guess was that there had been a great deal of money involved, just like there was now. That, along with Bagish Safi’s head on a platter.