“Why would these guys want to block out light here in the middle of nowhere?”

“Maybe they were trying to hide something.”

“Or hide from something.”

Billings didn’t care what the blankets were for. “Tear them all down, “He ordered, “and let’s get some light in here.”

Stokes and Cooper stepped over to the windows and began pulling the blankets down. Light flooded the room. As it did, Schlesinger glanced up, and his voice caught in his throat. “Holy shit.”

In unison, the rest of the team looked up and saw what Schlesinger was looking at. Suspended from the ceiling were at least fifteen decomposing corpses.

Cooper, the biggest and until this point one of the bravest members of the squad, recoiled in horror. Stokes made the sign of the cross while Rodriguez and Schlesinger instinctively raised their rifles and swept them back and forth along the length of the ceiling, ready to fire. “What the fuck is going on here, Lieutenant?” implored Schlesinger, the fear evident in his voice.

Billings had no idea what the hell they were looking at. The bodies had been tied flush against the ceiling, and the heavy timber braces had completely hidden them from view when the team had first entered the room. Billings was about to say something, when a voice crackled over his radio. It was Russo.

“Alpha One. This is Bravo One. Do you copy? Over.”

Billings, his eyes still fixed on the gruesome scene above him, toggled his transmit button and said, “This is Alpha One. I read you, Jimmy. What have you got?”

“We’ve found somebody, Lieutenant. He appears to be one of the village elders. It looks like he hasn’t eaten in a week, but he’s alive.”

“Where’d you find him?”

“He was hiding behind one of the houses we were checking. My guys think he was foraging for food.”

“Does he know what happened to the rest of the villagers?”

“He says all the survivors are hiding in the mosque. That’s where we’re headed now.”

“Wait a second. Survivors?” repeated Billings. “Survivors of what? And what do you mean they’re hiding in the mosque? What are they hiding from?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out. The old guy keeps repeating some word in Arabic I don’t understand.”

Billings motioned to Rodriguez and then said into his radio, “What’s the word? I’ll see if Rodriguez knows it.”

There was a pause as Russo asked the old man to speak directly into his microphone. Then it came-an intense, raspy voice that sounded like a set of hinges in serious need of oiling, “Algul! Algul! Algul!”

“Did you get that?” asked Russo as the old man backed away from his radio.

Billings looked at Rodriguez and noticed that the soldier’s already ashen face had lost what little color was left. The bodies strapped to the ceiling had gotten to all of the men, but they had to hold it together.

“You ever play Xbox, Lieutenant?” muttered Rodriguez, his eyes still glued to the grotesque forms hovering above them.

“No,” said Billings, who failed to comprehend any connection between a video game and their current situation.

“Algul was the first Arabic word I ever learned. I learned it playing a game on Xbox called Phantom Force.”

Anxious for answers, the lieutenant demanded, “What the fuck does it mean?”

“Loosely translated, it’s a horseleech or a bloodsucking genie, but usually it’s used to describe a female demon who lives in the cemetery and feasts on dead babies. When there are no babies left, it moves on to whoever is left in the village and keeps feeding until no one is left alive. I’ve also heard it’s a derivative of an Arabic word which means living dead and devourer of women and children. However you slice it, Algul is Arabic for vampire.”

Billings was about to tell Mike Rodriguez he was full of shit, when one of the bodies strapped to the ceiling above them opened its mouth and covered the soldiers with a fine mist of bloody froth.

FOUR

OUTSKIRTS OF BAGHDAD

TWO WEEKS LATER

At first, Scot Harvath couldn’t tell if he had been shot or not. After the blinding white flash, his vision was blurred, and all he could hear was the thunderous pulse of blood as it rushed in and out of his eardrums. He had never expected Khalid Alomari to be carrying a third pistol under his robes-a knife, a razor, maybe even a grenade, but not a subcompact. It just proved yet again how desperate the man was.

From somewhere beyond the pounding in his ears, Harvath could hear the voice of his boss, Gary Lawlor, telling him to wait, telling him not to go in without backup, but Harvath had come too far to lose Alomari again.

Dubai, amman, Damascus…the terrorist had always been one, if not two steps ahead. For the past two months, Harvath had been trying to close the gap and capture the man Western intelligence had dubbed the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden. Some of the more flippant analysts and operatives at CIA headquarters in Langley, as well as some in Harvath’s own Office of International Investigative Assistance (OIIA) at the Department of Homeland Security, had taken to calling Alomari “Osama Junior,” or “OJ” for short.

Normally the first one to find the humor in any situation, Harvath didn’t care for the nickname they’d given Alomari. It downplayed the devastation the killer had wreaked in his short but very impressive career. Not only that, but Harvath took this assignment quite personally. In Cairo, the terrorist had come within a hair’s breadth of killing him. The chase had been a nonstop game of cat and mouse, and even with the resources he had at his disposal, Harvath had not actually laid eyes on his quarry until two minutes ago. If the president had simply charged him with killing Alomari instead of apprehending him for intensive interrogation, this soul-sapping assignment would have been over a long time ago, but it was precisely because Alomari was so elusive and so good at what he did that the United States government wanted him taken alive.

Hailing from Abha, the same remote mountain city in the southern Saudi Arabian province of Asir that four of the fifteen 9/11 hijackers had come from, Alomari had been born into a wealthy Saudi family, with a Saudi father, a French mother, and excellent connections to the Saudi Royal Family. Though he was highly educated, had traveled extensively abroad, and never wanted for money or creature comforts, Khalid Alomari had grown up feeling something was missing in his life. He carried a hole inside him that no amount of sailing the Greek islands, sunning himself on the French Riviera, or looking out over New York’s Central Park while indulging himself in champagne and women in the Plaza Hotel’s decadent Astor Suite could fill. Like another infamous Saudi trust-fund brat, Alomari eventually found what he was looking for-militant Islam.

In 1999, Khalid Alomari was only twenty-one years old when he was first introduced to Osama bin Laden. The two men hit it off instantly. Their backgrounds were very similar and they had much in common. When bin Laden mentioned that several men from Alomari’s hometown of Abha were destined for greatness in the eyes of Allah, Alomari had begged to be allowed to be included, but bin Laden had other plans for the young man who had become almost like another son to him. Alomari was destined for greatness as well, but not by flying an airplane into a skyscraper. He possessed talents far and away more impressive than any of the brothers of 9/11.

Alomari had something that no other young jihadi who had come to bin Laden ever had before. The boy not only possessed exceptional taste, style, and intelligence, but thanks to his French mother, he had a wonderfully European set of facial features that allowed him to pass for almost any nationality.

No, Khalid Alomari would not be flying airplanes into buildings. He was much too precious for that. He would become bin Laden’s greatest weapon-a new power that the Western world would be forced to reckon with.