General Stark lifted a stack of papers on the table near his elbow. “Do you know what this is?” he said.

Keller shook his head. “No. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“This is pages and pages of leads about Elizabeth’s possible location. This is lists of more than two hundred high-level detainees with ties to Islamic extremists who are currently being questioned.  This is seven dozen covert operations that have taken place just today in an attempt to find her. This is frozen bank accounts and police raids in Switzerland, in Brussels, in Paris, in Madrid, all over Germany, and in London and Manchester, not to mention in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Minneapolis. This data is an hour old. There’s more flooding in all the time.”

“What are you saying, General?”

“I’m saying Elizabeth Barrett is one person. Yes, she’s an important person, but one person nonetheless. And many, many competent people are working to find her, whether she’s dead or alive. In the meantime, we have bigger fish to fry.”

“So we, the people in this room, have no responsibility to her?” Keller said.

“Sir, we do have a responsibility to her,” Stark said. “In all likelihood, she’s already dead. And when the video turns up of terrorist savages beheading her for the world to see, our job is to avenge her death with a firestorm that no one will ever forget. We need to have a plan in place to do that.”

Stark paused, and nodded at the truth of what he had just said.

“That’s our responsibility.”

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

6:25 p.m. Arabian Standard Time (10:25 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

Sinjar Mountains

Nineveh Governorate

Northwestern Iraq

They were both running out of time.

Ahmet sat on the dirt floor across from the girl Elizabeth. They were inside an old stone building, which was very badly deteriorated, and left over from some distant past that had long ago faded from memory. There was no longer a door, and most of the roof had collapsed. There were large chunks of broken rock all over the floor.

They were high up on the western edge of the mountain ridge. By Ahmet’s guess, there was less than half an hour of daylight left. Once the sun set, it was going to become cold up here. The night would be frigid, probably with a biting wind.

The mujahideen planned to execute the girl in the morning, after prayers. Ahmet thought she might not survive that long.

“You have to get me out of here,” she said, in a low voice.

She was still wearing the orange jumpsuit in which they had dressed her for the video. She wore a black scarf over her head. The clothes were not warm. She had no gloves, no hat, and she was wearing open-air sandals on her feet.