“If you wanna keep that arm,” said Harvath, “you’d better lower it.”

“No admittance, Harvath. Boss’s orders,” replied the powerful looking operative.

Before Scot could respond, Avigliano piped in. “Jerry, it’s okay. Rick and Tom should be expecting him.”

“Do I care? My orders are no one gets in while the debrief is going on.”

“Stop being such a prick, Jerry, and just knock on the goddamn door, would ya?”

Harvath was impressed. The kid might have potential after all. In fact, Harvath worried that Avigliano was actually starting to grow on him.

The burly operative relented, and after a couple quick raps, the door opened a crack and Rick Morrell peered out. “What is it?”

That was the only opportunity Harvath needed. He slipped past the sentry and shouldered the door open. Morrell caught it with his head.

“For fuck’s sake, Harvath,” he grunted as he rubbed his forehead. “You’re like a bull in a china shop. Shit, that hurt.”

“Maybe it’ll keep you honest,” said Harvath. “Now, I want to know what’s going on here.”

“We going to have a problem with this guy?” asked the sentry, his muscular body filling the doorframe.

“You might if you don’t turn around and close that door-” began Harvath, who was immediately interrupted by Tom Ellis.

“No, Jerry. Everything’s okay. Why don’t you and Mr. Avigliano wait outside.”

When the door was closed, Tom Ellis turned to Harvath and offered his hand. “I’m Tom Ellis, director of consular affairs-”

Now it was Harvath’s turn to interrupt. “And I’m the tooth fairy. Pleased to meet you,” he said as he shook the man’s hand.

Rick Morrell shook his head in disgust.

Upon hearing laughter, Morrell and Ellis turned, revealing Meg Cassidy, who was sitting upright in her hospital bed, attached to an IV.

“You’re looking much better,” said Harvath. “Funny how some fluids will do that for a person.”

“I want to thank you, Agent Harvath,” she said, “for saving our lives.”

“First of all, you can call me Scot. And secondly, from what I hear, Ms. Cassidy, the people on that plane owe their lives to you.”

“I guess I didn’t have much choice.”

“What you did took a lot of courage. People are alive because of you. I was just saying to someone not too long ago,” said Harvath as he threw a disapproving glance at Rick Morrell, “that this whole thing could have been a lot worse.”

“Well, I want to put it behind me. All of it.”

“No one can blame you for that.”

Ellis interrupted again. “Ahem,” he said as he cleared his throat. “Agent Harvath, could we have a word with you in private please?”

“The tooth fairy’s work is never done. Will you excuse me, Ms. Cassidy?”

“Only if you’ll stop calling me Ms. Cassidy and call me Meg,” she said with a smile that warmed him all over.

“Fair enough. Meg, it is,” said Harvath as he smiled at her in return.

Harvath followed Tom Ellis and Rick Morrell down the hall and was shown into the same small conference room that had been used for the press conference earlier that morning. The piece of paper with Anglo-American Hospital printed on it was still taped to the podium. Morrell closed and locked the door behind them.

“Agent Harvath,” began Tom Ellis, “I know you’re not much for playing by the rules-”

“What I’m not much for, Tom, is bullshit,” replied Scot.

“Neither am I, so on that front we should get along fine. Now, in my capacity here in Cairo as-”

“CIA chief of station?”

“Yes, that is my capacity. I hope you understand that as Meg Cassidy is a civilian, presenting myself to her as chief Cairo station officer could be uncomfortable.”

“And having the U.S. Embassy send over their ‘chief consular affairs officer’ to debrief her on a hijacking is supposed to somehow put her more at ease? You guys crack me up. You live in your own little world, you know that? We have one sharp lady in there, and I bet she saw right through you.”

“Well, whatever the case may be, I’m sure any doubts she had about my capacity with the U.S. government were answered by your referring to yourself as the ‘tooth fairy,’ so we can set that one aside.”

“Fine with me,” said Harvath. “I just want to get to the bottom of this.”

“Good. To do that, though, we need to enlist the help of Ms. Cassidy. She’s the only one who can positively ID Hashim Nidal, so instead of encouraging her to put everything behind her, like you were doing back in her room, we need to encourage her to work with us. It’s the only way we’ll be able to nail him,” said Ellis.

“I don’t understand what the problem is here.”

Ellis was exhausted. He had been going full throttle since the hijacking had started and was desperately in need of sleep. He leaned wearily against the edge of the podium and said, “We lost him.”

“I figured as much. How?”

“Well, there’s no question that Meg Cassidy saw his face. He had taken her up into the bubble of the plane and was going to rape her and God knows what else. She put up a struggle and was apparently assisted by one of Mayor Fellinger’s bodyguards, who had been tied up in one of the upper-deck lavatories, but managed to get out. He was killed as he plowed into the guy with his hands still cuffed behind his back.

“Cassidy used the distraction to get away from Nidal and grab his weapon. He slashed at her with his knife, nicking her ankle, and she shot him in the head. She then capped a couple of the hijackers, gathered their weapons, and made her way downstairs, where she capped a few more and got up to the first-class section with Mayor Fellinger and Bob Lawrence. She told us that there had been explosions and gunfire, but it all happened so fast, she can’t put together a comprehensive timeline.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Harvath, a degree of awe creeping into his voice. “What amazes me is that she was able to pull the whole thing off by herself. But where does losing Nidal come into play here?”

“Like I said, she swears she shot him in the head.”

“Where in the head? Between the eyes?”

“No, higher up.”

“How does she know she hit him?”

“She says he went down. She thought she saw blood too.”

“A description such as that, does not a confirmed kill make,” replied Scot.

“Unfortunately, we agree, so we photographed all of the faces of the dead hijackers from the takedown. We also videotaped all of the passengers and crew who were being held in the containment area for the interviews.”

“And?” asked Harvath.

“And nothing. Not one of them rang a bell with her. She remembers Nidal, all right, says she could never forget his face. We worked with her via an encrypted laptop with a sketch artist back at Langley and came up with the composite we showed during the press conference.”

“By the way, what was that all about?”

“We’re convinced he escaped somehow with one of his lieutenants, who was probably assisting him.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Harvath.

“Cassidy has said, and other passengers have confirmed, that there were two hijackers dressed in black jumpsuits, who kept their faces covered the entire time-except for in the bubble when Cassidy saw Hashim’s face.”

“And who was this other masked hijacker?”

“We believe it was a very high ranking member of the organization. I only use the word lieutenant as a figure of speech. We don’t know who he was.”

“But why were they wearing masks and not the other hijackers?”

“I think they realized they had more to lose.”

“Yeah, but how do you get a bunch of other people to participate in a hijacking after you’ve told them ‘Hey, by the way, we’re going to be wearing masks to protect our identities, but none of you guys can’?”

“Who knows? Maybe the others were fanatics who were prepared to die. Maybe they were promised protection or new identities after the hijacking. There’s no way to tell. The one thing that’s for certain is that the nonmasked hijackers were spaced throughout the cabins as regular passengers and therefore had no choice.”