could feel nothing but could smell the stale odor of excrement soiling his legs as he lay helpless. He barely noticed the droning sound as it drifted on the breeze, but when he did he looked up and saw a faint glint of metal flashing in the sunlight against the stark blue sky above.
“Oh no,” he mumbled, “please no.”
The drone shuddered and a streak of white smoke accelerated toward him.
“Please, God, no,” he uttered, closing his eyes as something silvery flashed through the sky before him, and then everything vanished into a terrible inferno of flames and agony. Malik’s body was hurled through the air as the flesh was seared from his bones.
Rafael glanced over his shoulder as the apartment vanished within a roiling ball of flame, heard shouts of alarm from neighboring buildings, and saw thick coils of ugly black smoke spiraling upward from where once there had been a balcony.
A few of the IDF soldiers guarding the nearby cordon watched as the Valkyrie drone zoomed over their heads and disappeared. Rafael turned to survey the jumbled skyline of Jerusalem for a few moments before hurrying away down the street.
Ethan propelled Rachel in front of him as the sound of the exploding Hellfire missile silenced the sniper, and they dashed for the cover of the vehicles in the street outside.
“You sure they got him?” Ethan asked Lieutenant Ash as they ran.
Ethan looked up at the apartment building that was now billowing smoke as Lieutenant Ash spoke into his microphone. A man in traditional Bedouin clothes appeared on the street outside the apartment building and looked up at the billowing clouds of smoke.
“He’s dead,” Lieutenant Ash said to Ethan. “The UAV got him.”
“A good sniper would change positions,” Ethan pointed out, tucking his pistol into his belt.
“They saw him on camera before the missile hit,” Ash insisted grimly. “They got him.”
Ethan frowned and shook his head, one eye on the distant Bedouin.
“He fires his shots and then sits around to get blown to pieces?”
Ethan watched as the Bedouin turned toward a narrow alley. He glanced over his shoulder at the IDF cordon before looking briskly away, a red scarf concealing his features and black gloves on his hands. Ethan recalled the man in the tunnels beneath Gaza, wearing black gloves when he had stolen Ethan’s rucksack. For a brief moment, a spectral image of Joanna drifted into Ethan’s field of view. He gasped softly, losing his balance and trying to blink the hallucination away. She stood on the sidewalk, watching him intently, superimposed over the Bedouin man hurrying away from him and beckoning Ethan to follow.
“Get your men together,” he said impulsively to Lieutenant Ash as the bizarre vision faded away.
“What the hell for?”
“I doubt you’ve got the man you think you did,” Ethan shouted over his shoulder as he broke into a sprint, aiming for the Bedouin.
Ethan looked to where the man was vanishing into the side alley. As he did so, Ethan saw him peer sideways again in his direction from beneath the veil of his headdress, and in that moment he knew that the Bedouin was the man MACE would have tasked with abducting Joanna: Rafael, the assassin. Ethan shouted back at the lieutenant.
“Get some backup and meet me on the other side of the block!”
Ethan didn’t give the officer a chance to reply, concentrating on the alley into which the Bedouin man had disappeared. He plunged headlong into it, the shadows enveloping him as he ran, his footfalls echoing off the narrow walls. From somewhere in front of him he heard a dog howl in alarm.
Ethan burst out into a square enclosed on all four sides by featureless apartment buildings. A skeletally thin dog stood on scrawny legs near a long-dry fountain, having clearly just picked itself up off the dusty earth. Ethan felt the skin on the back of his neck tingling and staggered sideways as his balance failed him, his hands trembling freely now and his knees weak with fatigue.
Ethan guessed that the man he had seen would keep heading directly away from the scene of his crimes, so he hurried across the square to an alley that led off toward the east, running hard and splashing through puddles of dirty brown water.
An open area of wasteland appeared as he reached the end of the alley, while on his left was a main street filled with scattered pedestrians and cars parked outside cafés. To his right, a narrower street that seemed devoid of life