Jake shouted a dozen rapid-fire questions as he approached with the knife. Halfway through the list, Jake asked the Somali who he worked for.

There was no hesitation, no bumbling, no searching for a plausible lie.

The answer came instantaneously.

Yaxaas.

TWENTY

IT PLUNGED THE whole operation into chaos.

Jake and Pickens had expected their captive to confirm that Badeed was the pirate leader, but Mahad’s identification of Yaxaas forced the Americans to review the logic behind their theory, including their determination that the pirate gang of eight was behind the attacks. They went through every assumption and conclusion step-by-step, but neither man found any flaws in the reasoning.

Jake was confident that Mahad had been telling the truth. He had clearly been afraid for his life during the initial interrogation and answered the questions without hesitation. During subsequent rounds of questioning, Mahad had asserted that he worked merely as a deckhand on the pirate ship, but he became guarded as the questioning focused less on the killing of the six al-Shabaab militants and more on Yaxaas.

Pickens knew of Yaxaas and, while he was a powerful warlord, the CIA officer never knew him to be involved in piracy. They needed more information. They pulled everything CIA had on Badeed and Yaxaas: photos, known business interests and associates, financial networks. Badeed had a long history with piracy and Yaxaas had none, but Yaxaas’s criminal enterprises had grown dramatically in the past decade while Badeed had diversified into many legitimate businesses. The Agency had also requested voice and communications intercepts, but those would take time—assuming the warlords still used electronic devices. Many criminals and terror networks in the post-Snowden era had reverted to sending messages via couriers on motorcycles.

There was nothing to break the tie, and CIA didn’t have the luxury of time while men and money were disappearing from the high seas. They had to be proactive.

The only other member of the gang of eight they could possibly approach was Saahid. The dangerous dead-end road leading to his home had put him at the bottom of their list—discreet surveillance would be difficult, and limited options for ingress and egress presented a real danger if things went kinetic—but they needed to do it soon, before Mahad’s disappearance became widely known and Saahid was spooked.

One of Pickens’s regular sources requested to meet with him on an urgent but unrelated matter that afternoon, which meant Jake would have to perform the initial drive-by on his own. The two men would snatch Saahid that night if it looked doable.

Pickens hit the basement for his daily workout while Jake pored over his laptop, examining satellite images and piecing together several different routes he could use for surveillance, for surveillance detection, or to bail out if the situation went to hell.

He was still working on his computer when Pickens left.