Yes, he rubbed his hands together, this could be quite fun.

Jabbar tossed away his apple, stepping forward to hand Haroun a handkerchief to be used as a gag and a plastic zip tie to be used on the woman’s wrists. Haroun applied both, then glanced up at Qasim. “Shall we begin?”

Oh, yes. Qasim was very, very ready to begin. With his blood running hot, he smiled at his men and nodded. “Let us enjoy this first step, my friends, on the journey that will see our names immortalized…”

* * *

Delilah jolted from the darkness to discover her heart pounding, her brain buzzing, her lungs heaving, and her head…

Ow!

With her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she reached up to touch the tender spot—

No. No, she did not reach up, because something was tied around her wrists. Something was tied around her wrists, and something was tied around her mouth, and—

Timberlands! The terrorist! It all came back to her in a flash.

Her eyes flew open, but she could make no sense of her surroundings. Darkness? Dancing light? Craggy shapes?

She blinked. Trying to focus beyond the splitting ache of her head. Eventually the world snapped into view, and she could see a low rock ceiling hanging above her. Flickering yellow light created macabre little shadows in its crevices and glinted on the droplets of water occasionally falling from it. Beneath her was cold, wet stone, but she could hardly feel the chill for the hot terror burning through her blood. The smell of wet earth and bat guano filled her nose just as the dark faces of four men filled her vision.

She recognized one of them. Al-Hallaj… He’d taken her. Against all odds, against four Black Knights and three CIA agents, he’d managed to take her. It seemed impossible. And she might have thought she was in the middle of a nightmare had not the excruciating pain in her head been so unmistakably real.

Crying out when two of the men reached down to grab her shoulders, she absently noticed how the noise was muffled against the salty-tasting gag pulling the corners of her mouth tight. Crunch! The sound of her kneecaps slamming into the rock floor echoed in her ears a split second before her central nervous system registered the agony.

Somebody screamed. Was that her?

Her face felt hot. Were those tears?

She knew she was on her knees. Knew there were hands supporting her. Knew the air inside the cavern was cold. But she could feel none of these things. Not when her body was inundated with pain signals from every direction. Her head pounded. Her knees throbbed. Her shoulders ached from having her hands wrenched behind her back.

But all of that was nothing compared to the agony in her heart when her eyes fell on her uncle. This time she knew the scream that echoed around the cavern was hers. It was her uncle’s name, garbled by the gag.

Oh God, Uncle Theo… Her mind tried to make sense of it all, to claw through the thick, sticky cobwebs the pain and disorientation had stitched through her mind. Uncle Theo…

She couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. There was so much blood. It matted his white hair and stained his shirt, dripping onto the stone floor from a cut near his temple. She couldn’t see his face. His chin was touching his chest. But the blood. So much blood. Just like that awful afternoon with Buzzard…

She screamed again, struggling against her captors, her heart like a flame, her lungs on fire. And now she knew the wetness on her face was tears, rivers of them. They poured from her burning eyes as she screamed over and over again, despite the sledgehammers bashing away at the back of her skull. Trying to wake Theo. Praying she could wake him.

“Aren’t you a vocal one?” observed one of the men as he skirted around in front her. He was dark like the others, with a hawkish nose and a cruel mouth. Was this Qasim? The man Agent Duvall spoke of? The mass murderer of innocents? He didn’t look all that impressive, below average in height and underfed. But he did look like he could be the leader of the group. It was the way he held his chin high, his spine straight.

“Fuck you!” she yelled around her gag, crying out when one of the men holding her in a kneeling position slapped her across the face. Her head whipped to the side. Her lip split open. Pain seared. Blood trickled and dripped from her chin. She could smell it, the iron richness of it. But she didn’t cry out. She wouldn’t cry out. Not again. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. The bastards!

Slowly turning back to face the leader, she didn’t attempt to hide her hatred. It was there in the hot glow of her eyes, in the wide flare of her nostrils.

The leader tut-tutted when he saw her bloodied lip, frowning at the man who hit her. He said something in a language she couldn’t understand before smiling down at her. The expression reminded her of a snake. Vicious. Venomous. Savage. She gulped. She couldn’t help herself.

“Would you like me to tell you what I just told Sami?” he asked conversationally, as if this was a social occasion and not an abduction and precursor to what she knew would be a torture session.

Torture session…

Would she be able to withstand it? She prided herself on her strength, but she never bargained to be put to the test this way. Mac! Where are you? Are you coming for me? Do you even know I’m gone?

“Miss Fairchild,” the leader spat, his smile fading. “I asked you a question. I expect an answer. This will go easier for you if you cooperate.”

“Fuck you,” she snarled again, but the volume was gone from her voice. All that screaming had shredded her vocal cords. When she swallowed, her tears ran down the back of her nose and burned her damaged throat.

“Indeed,” the man said. “That is the plan. Which is why I told Sami he would have to wait to bloody you. Because the rest of us like our women to look pretty while we fuck them.”

Her limbs began to shake uncontrollably as the fire in her blood turned to glacier ice, as the flames that had mere moments ago been her lungs and heart banked, leaving the organs frozen solid.

Evil…

The word whispered through her head. And, yes. As she stared into the soulless pools of Qasim’s dark—he had to be Qasim, right?—eyes, she knew she was seeing pure evil. There was no humanity there. No compassion. Just ugly malevolence and…death.

And that’s when it hit her. She was going to die here. But first…she was going to experience horror.

Jesus, help me! Mac…!

* * *

“If you think we’re stayin’ here,” Mac thundered at Agent Fitzsimmons as they stood in the small clearing around an abandoned ranger’s station in Shawnee National Forest, “you’re crazier than a shithouse rat!”

“You have no jurisdiction,” Fitzsimmons snarled impatiently, slipping an extra clip into his pocket. The guy was back in SWAT gear, flash-bang stun grenades attached to his vest, headset radio clamped around his ear, and a Spyderco knife velcro-ed up near his shoulder. Even in the twilight filtering through the softly swaying trees, Mac could see that his face was like a hurricane. Not that he blamed the guy. Less than an hour ago, Fitzsimmons had watched his buddy’s body being covertly loaded into the back of a black SUV, the pool of Wallace’s blood cleaned away as if it’d never existed.

Which was exactly why Mac was insisting he and the Knights join the CIA wet team going in after Delilah and Theo. Well, that and the fact that he trusted his skills and those of his teammates over anyone else’s, but right now that was beside the point. Because, given Wallace’s brutal murder, he wouldn’t put it past these spooky boys to go in weapons hot. Exacting a little revenge for their downed comrade, and damn the two innocents caught in the crossfire.

No lie, Mac would sooner slit his own throat and the throats of every single CIA bastard gearing up around him than allow that to happen.

Delilah… For the love of Christ, he could hardly breathe for the fear squeezing his chest. Barely think for the terrible images ripping through his brain like mortar rounds.

Ten minutes after they discovered Wallace’s body—the longest ten minutes of Mac’s life—Agent Duvall finally received word on the numbers assigned to the three cellular phones Hasan and al-Hallaj purchased in Canada. It took two minutes more to pinpoint the locations of the devices. Well…two of the devices, anyway. The first had been taped beneath the seat of Delilah’s motorcycle—which was obviously how al-Hallaj had been able to track her to the Noel Motel. The second phone trace put the caller smack-dab in the center of the Shawnee National Forest. But the CIA had some trouble tracking the third device. Something about spotty cell tower coverage, an issue with triangulation, marginal signal strength, yada, yada, what the fuck ever. All Mac had cared about was getting to the Shawnee National Forest…

The drive from Olive Branch, Illinois, to the park should have taken seventy minutes. Mac and the BKI boys mounted up and made it in thirty-five, even beating the CIA wet team that arrived via chopper a few seconds later.

Which brought them here, to this moment. One very pissed-off CIA agent squaring off against one unspeakably terrified BKI operator. Of course, Mac couldn’t let anyone see how terrified he was. How his heart was pounding out of control. How his kneecaps felt like they’d been replaced by globs of Jell-O. How his hands shook before he curled them into fists.