The GID man had lost some hair and gained a good twenty-five pounds but he was still unmistakable. They’d actually done a few operations together back when Rapp was still in his early thirties. He remembered the man as reasonably solid, a bit cynical, and not particularly religious by Saudi standards. Last Rapp had heard, he’d moved into middle management and become another anonymous cog in the Saudi intelligence machine. Probably the best a man with lukewarm feelings toward Allah and no relation to the royal family could do.

Or was it? Would someone like Isa be tapped as the handler of a CIA mole with the kind of access that Kennedy had described? Rapp doubted it. More likely the Saudi was just another buffer designed to separate the mole, the GID leadership, and the prince from Gideon Auma. And now that the Saudis thought that Auma had performed his function, the continued existence of those buffers had become an inconvenience.

The question was how high would the purge go. Based on the fact that even Marcus Dumond couldn’t figure out how the Agency had been hacked, probably pretty high. And that meant that Isa would likely be the next man on the ladder to find himself holding up the edge of a building.

38

EVERYTHING was unknown now. And if there was anything Rapp despised, it was unknowns.

He piloted his rented SUV through the empty streets, using an address for Bashir Isa that he’d gotten from a private intelligence company’s database. Was it current? Accurate? Those were a few more unknowns. Being cut off from both the CIA and Claudia wasn’t particularly convenient. Digging up and filtering information wasn’t really his end of the business.

Did Isa have a family? Probably. And if that was the case, it would be tricky to take him at home. The safer bet would be to head out into the open desert where the royal family had been hiding its skeletons for centuries.

On the other hand, someone like Isa would probably have a home office, a laptop, and maybe even some inconvenient information he was keeping as an insurance policy for just this kind of eventuality. Rapp sure as hell did. Loyalties in this business could turn on a dime and it paid to have an exit strategy.

Or maybe Isa had moved up in the hierarchy enough to rise above loose-end status. Rapp continued to doubt it, though. Giving high-level CIA records to one of the world’s most brutal terrorists in order to help him attack the richest man in history was a path that led over some pretty thin ice. The prince would want the number of people who knew about a bullshit move like that to be pretty low. Best guess, two: the prince himself and his handpicked intelligence director.