“Joanna Defoe,” he gasped above the supreme effort of keeping the killer on the ground. “Disappeared from Gaza, thirty-one, a journalist.”
Rafael smirked over his pain.
“Go to hell.”
Ethan felt a surge of anger course through his veins. He jerked away from the blade and shoved down hard on the pole. An agonized rattle escaped from Rafael’s mouth amid a spray of spittle. He looked up at Ethan through the pain.
“Release me, and I’ll tell you.”
“Not a chance.”
“Your loss.”
The assassin whipped the knife across Ethan’s exposed flank, causing him to jerk farther away from the bright pain. Instantly, Rafael’s right leg hooked up and curled around Ethan’s neck, arching his back and slamming him down onto the rocky earth. Before Ethan could respond, the Arab was upon him, the knife pressing against his throat.
He squinted up into the bright blue sky above and saw Rafael looking down at him.
“I am not a dishonorable man,” the Arab said softly, “but you should have let me leave. Without me, you and your friends would be dead.”
“You stopped it?” Ethan asked.
“Who do you think tipped off the IDF and disposed of Byron Stone? MACE deceived all of us, and I was making amends. Now you have again forced my hand, Mr. Warner.”
“Joanna,” Ethan said, twisting the photograph of her in his left hand and holding it up to Rafael once more. “Please.”
The assassin considered the picture for a moment.
“Joanna must have gotten too close to the truth long before I did, in Colombia and then again here in Gaza. She learned that MACE was abducting wealthy civilians and then negotiating their release with their own agents in order to reap the ransom payments. I learned this only today from a man named Spencer Malik, recently deceased.”
Ethan stared up at him. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Rafael muttered. “The only man left alive who will know now is an American, a pastor named Kelvin Patterson. But I do know that she was not killed.”
For a brief moment in Ethan’s awareness, time ground to a halt.
He stared up at the man who had so casually erased the pain that he had harbored for so many years. He felt something released from his chest, the dense and festering abscess suddenly lanced. He closed his eyes, not feeling the hot tears that rushed down his cheeks and spilled onto the ancient earth.
Rafael stared down at him, surprised.
“You have fought bravely,” he said in a somber tone, “but now I must protect myself. And for that, you have to die.”
Rafael leaned his weight into the blade.
And Ethan fired the pistol in his right hand.
The bullet slammed upward through Rafael’s hip, shattering bone and plowing through his internal organs before bursting from his shoulder in a fine mist of blood. Ethan smashed the blade aside as Rafael shuddered from the blast, pushing him away and leaping to his feet as Rafael collapsed onto the dust.
Ethan looked down at the assassin as he lay on the ground, blood leaking from his wounds.
“Remember Hassim Khan?” he asked rhetorically, and saw a shadow of recognition flicker behind the pain in the assassin’s eyes. “You’re done, asshole.”
Ethan aimed between Rafael’s eyes and pulled the trigger once. The assassin’s head quivered and the life in his eyes vanished as quickly as the bullet punctured his skull and buried itself in Gaza’s baked soil.
A swarm of Israeli soldiers burst into the courtyard around Ethan.
“What happened?” Lieutenant Ash demanded, looking down at the corpse.
“I found your informant.”
Lieutenant Ash shook his head, a disapproving look on his face. “Well done, he’s useless to us now. What do we do?”
“We find Byron Stone.”
“That could prove a problem,” Lieutenant Ash said. “We just heard on the radio that the vehicle he was traveling in has been hit by an explosive device. Byron Stone is dead.”
“What about the MACE jet? Can we ground it?”
“I don’t know.”
Ethan thought furiously for a moment, and then turned to the lieutenant.
“Can you get me to the airport, quickly?”
“Why should I?”
Ethan wiped his dirt-stained face with his sleeve, trying to stave off the exhaustion that was now tilting the earth beneath his feet as though he were standing on a boat on a rocky sea.
“Because it’s the last chance I have to end all of this. They abducted my fiancée, Jerah, might even have killed her, and I don’t want to see a single one of them get away with it.”