“Yeah,” said Mac, unexpectedly coming face to face with another of his past sins. “I know who he is ... they are, um, whatever.”
He remembered Eliza Porter Elkins vividly. To him, she was and always would be “Lizzie.” It was a crazy time. The surge going full force, thousands of new troops pouring into the country. Missions carried out 24/7. Kill, kill, kill. IEDs on every street. So many of his brothers cut down. In a word, “hell.”
And then there she was. A blond beauty asking smart questions. What happened, happened. He didn’t regret it. But she’d seen things a different way. A way Mac had no business seeing things when he was counting his life in days, maybe hours. But try explaining that to a woman like her. A woman who got what she wanted. A woman with some juice, even then.
“What’s going on down there?” asked Jane. “You’ve got a lot of very important people very scared.”
“I found out who abducted Ava,” said Mac. “Prince Tariq bin Nayan bin Tariq al-Sabah.”
“TNT?” Jane’s surprise was evident. “He’s a dilettante, a showboat.”
“You know him?” asked Mac.
“Not in any professional sense,” said Jane. “I’ve seen some of the pictures he posts. He’s like the Kardashians on steroids. He’s the world’s biggest car nut. His father made him Minister of the Interior last year to get him to spend more time at home. So far, it hasn’t worked.”
“An influencer,” said Mac. “Whatever that is.”
“What does he want with Ava?” asked Jane.
“They know each other,” said Mac, replaying the scene from the security camera. “When they met, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. They talked for a second, then things went south. Looked heated. Out of nowhere, a woman jabbed a syringe into her neck. Some kind of drug. Ava was down in five seconds. She never saw it coming.”
“That doesn’t sound like Ava,” said Jane.
No, Mac had to admit to himself. It didn’t. Ava saw everything coming.
“All this happened in the restaurant?” said Jane. “I don’t get it.”
“He had help,” said Mac and explained how Gerard Rosenfeld had aided and abetted TNT to steal Ava out of the nearly empty restaurant.
“I’m afraid to ask how you know all this,” said Jane.
“Don’t,” said Mac.
Before conking out, he’d done a search on TNT. It took ten minutes of scouring his social media pages to get a picture of his opulent lifestyle. Clothes, watches, and like Jane said: cars, cars, cars.
Journalists shed a more informative light on him. Boarding school in England. College in the States. A bachelor’s degree from USC. No dorms for him. He took over the top floor of the Four Seasons Beverly Wilshire hotel. A scandal about a gift of a Rolex to a professor. Questions about how much coursework he’d in fact completed.
That wasn’t all Mac had discovered. The Al-Sabah royal family maintained an official website showcasing biographies of all its members—a total of some 653 men, women, and children. TNT wasn’t quite the dilettante Jane claimed. There was another side to him that he seemed to want to keep hidden—a subject about which he didn’t post pictures on social media. TNT had completed officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in England and, afterward, graduated from the rigorous three-month US Army Ranger course. A Rolex would not buy you a Ranger tab; that you had to earn. Mac knew this from experience. The course was brutal, bordering on life-endangering. In ninety days, he had lost thirty-seven pounds, dislocated his shoulder, and, for one grueling three-hour stretch, gone blind from dehydration. His Ranger tab counted among his proudest possessions.
TNT was also a sharpshooter who’d competed for his country at the Olympic Games. He was not just the good-looking, jet-setting billionaire he wanted the world to believe. There was steel beneath the polished veneer. And more. Ambition.
Which man, Mac wondered, was the real TNT?
“You asked me if we had something running in Paris,” said Jane. “We don’t, at least nothing anyone is talking about. I haven’t had time to check with Mossad, not that they’d tell me. But those guys who cameafter you in the hotel yesterday ... the one whose name you gave me is a member of the Royal Guard, the Saudi king’s bodyguards. Wherever the king goes, they go with him. If they’re in Paris, so is the king. His name also came up as being a member of the Tiger Squad. One of their trained assassins. He was there in Istanbul when they cut up Khashoggi.”
Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi American dual-national journalist lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was strangled to death before his body was chopped into pieces and placed into trash bags for discreet removal. His murder was payback for a few scathing articles about the Saudi royal family.
“That explains the knife,” said Mac.
“What? Dad! Those men came to kill you?”
Well, thought Mac, they certainly weren’t the ones who sent the fruit basket. “I don’t get it,” he said. “First TNT, then the Saudis. But, listen, Jaycee, there’s an Israeli involved, too, and he’s not one of the good guys. Yehudi Rosenfeld.”
“A relation of the other one?” asked Jane. “From the restaurant.”
“His brother,” said Mac. “Know him? He’s a member of the Knesset, part of the Kach Party. They’re way to the right. Anti-Arab, pro-settler, as extreme as an Israeli politician can get. Apparently, he co-opted his brother to help TNT.”
“Why would Ava be working with TNT, the Qataris, or the Saudis, for that matter?” asked Jane. “And what are the Qataris doing palling around with the Jewish National Front? They hate each other.”
