Jake parked close to the building and killed the vehicle’s interior lights. The two Agency operatives manhandled their prisoner directly through the basement’s exterior doors and into an area they’d isolated with sheets hung from the ceiling. Pickens secured Mahad to a chair with more zip-ties, then stood behind him and removed the hood.

Jake slapped him across the face, hard.

He and Pickens were dressed in dusty camo fatigues and jungle boots. Each had a black shemagh wrapped around his head that revealed nothing but his eyes.

Mahad squinted at the halogen work lights that shone in his face, but he was able to see the video camera mounted on a tripod in front of him and the huge serrated knife that was resting on the wooden stool next to Jake. As a man who’d done horrible things to others, it didn’t take long for his imagination to leap to a worst-case scenario.

“Salaam-alaikum,” said Jake. He had spent some time in Yemen the prior year and mimicked its distinctive accent.

The prisoner had been sweating so heavily that the duct tape fell from his face when he tried to speak.

“Wa—”

Jake slapped him again. Harder.

“Wa . . . alaikum . . . salaam.”

Mahad flinched as he spoke each word, wary of being hit again, but his apprehension was soon replaced by a much greater, and far more legitimate fear. Jake lifted the sixteen-inch knife from the stool and rotated the blade a few times, ensuring that the spotlights glinted off its polished steel blade.

“We have a problem, brother,” Jake said. Though most Somalis switched effortlessly between Somali and Arabic, the Americans stuck to Arabic to stay in character.

Jake thrust the knife an inch deep into the wooden stool.

The two Americans were pretending to be al-Shabaab militants. The terrorist group had once been the youth wing of the Islamic Courts Union and, upon its rebirth, it invaded the void created by the absence of a central Somali government, attempting to assert authority over every aspect of daily life. It was infamous for committing frequent and arbitrary executions. Espionage, collaboration, adultery, and apostasy were the most common charges, but the radicals saw nothing outside their purview and, like others who’d corrupted their faith, the rules didn’t apply to them.

Jake and Pickens spent the next ninety minutes unloading an elaborate fiction onto Mahad. They accused the pirate of cooperating with the Somali National Intelligence and Security Agency in the killing of six of their fighters. Jake kept calling him “Ali” and ignored Mahad’s protests that they had the wrong man. Pickens slapped the prisoner around—hard enough to ensure that his survival was not a foregone conclusion. The man was tough, but all resistance ended the instant Jake turned on the video camera and yanked the enormous knife from the stool.

Taped beheadings were a specialty of radicalized Islamists.