“Unknown.”
“But we can’t discount it?”
“That would be unwise.”
She peered through the scope. Ledger was still sitting on the floor with his dog. Was he crying? The blowing curtains on Ledger’s window made it impossible to tell, but the American looked like he had something on his cheeks. Tears or dog slobber?
“How dangerous is this man?”
“To others or to himself?”
The question did not surprise the sniper. She was more than half-convinced the marks on Ledger’s cheeks were
not
there because of his dog.
“As a fighter and field agent,” she said.
“According to psych profiles and all other available data, Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger should be considered a Class-A threat.”
The sniper found that very interesting.
There was movement. Ledger abruptly straightened and looked at the closed door against which he sat. Then he and the dog climbed quickly to their feet. Ledger reached inside his jacket but after a moment brought his hand away without a gun. It was clear that someone had just knocked on the door, and it seemed apparent from Ledger’s body language that the visitor was expected.
But who was it?
Rasouli?
Another of St. Germaine’s agents? The Sabbatarians?
Or one of those unholy bastards in the Red Order?
“Oracle. Stand by.”
“Standing by.”
As Ledger reached for the door handle, the sniper leaned her shoulder against the stock of the rifle. Her slender finger stroked the cold metal rim of the trigger guard.
Chapter Fifteen
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 8:47 a.m.
When the delivery man knocked on the door I nearly jumped out of my skin. I leapt to my feet and spun toward the door. Ghost gave a low growl and took up a defensive stance next to me. He was too tactful to mention that I spent five seconds scrabbling inside my jacket for a pistol I wasn’t carrying.
I peered through the peephole and saw a teenage boy in a kufi.
Before he could knock again, I opened the door and he handed me a package, accepted a tip, and departed without saying a word. He threw some cautious looks at Ghost, though, as if aware that this was a ferocious mankiller for whom a packet of goat strips would not assuage a savage hunger. Ghost apparently had the same thought and glared at his retreating back until I closed the door and told him to knock it off.
Inside the package was a carton of Bistoon cigarettes, which I threw out. The other items in the paper sack were the battery and a cell-phone charger wrapped together with a blue rubber band.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and slid the battery into the phone and was delighted to see that it was already charged. I should have given the kid a bigger tip.
Our DMS phones have a USB port, and I fished out the flash drive and plugged it in. It did not look particularly damaged from the outside, but then again the outside was plastic. I was more than a little surprised—or maybe “suspicious” is the appropriate word—that Rasouli gave me the original rather than a copy. I was glad he did, though, because once I uploaded what I could I was going to find a way to get the flash drive into a diplomatic pouch for an expedited trip across the ocean. Once Bug got his sweaty little hands on it I was sure the drive would yield up everything there was to find.
Could Rasouli have had that in mind? Did he know about MindReader? Sure he did, he knew Vox.
My gut turned over. Every time I thought I had a grasp on how much damage—past, current, and potential—that could be laid at Vox’s feet, something came along to broaden my perspective. MindReader was an ultrasecret system and part of its strength lay in the fact that the bad guys didn’t know about it, or if they did they didn’t know what it could do. Vox did. That meant that anyone he told, every government or terrorist organization, would be scrambling now to upgrade their computer-security protocols. Common knowledge of MindReader’s intrusion properties could easily create a new spike in security technology for computers. Grace Courtland once told me that the whole Chinese GhostNet program was their response to
rumors
that something like MindReader existed. And Vox himself had clearly financed some big-ticket research because he had provided the Seven Kings with the only cellular phone system that MindReader couldn’t trace or crack. Bug, the DMS computer hotshot, said that designing such a system could not have been done by accident, it had to have been created specifically to thwart our computer.
I plugged the flash drive into the USB port on my phone and immediately got a bunch of read-error messages. The thing had been in someone’s stomach, so that was no surprise. However, I went through the steps to do a forced upload of bulk data and soon images were whipping across the screen too fast for me to see. Damaged or not, there was a lot of stuff on the drive. The upload failed twice and I had to repeat the steps, but eventually I got the
UPLOAD COMPLETE
message.
I scrolled back through the contents at a slower speed until I found a series of JPEGs, one of which was the picture Rasouli had showed me. It looked so innocent, so nondescript in its metal case. And though I know that machines have no personality, I could not help but ascribe the word “evil” to it, as if the malign intent of its creators had been somehow transferred to the device during its construction.
I took a breath, engaged the code scrambler, and punched a speed dial. The phone rang three times.
“Go,” was all Church said, which is more than he usually gives when he answers a phone.
“Boss, I have a Firehall One situation.”
“Is there a finger on a trigger?” His voice sounded as calm as if I asked him who pitched for the Orioles last night.
“Unknown. But … from the vibe I got from my source I’d say this is something coming at us rather than already here.”
“Tell me.”
“I just uploaded the contents of a flash drive to the server. It’s damaged goods. It’s filed under my name and coded for you, eyes only.”
I could hear him tapping keys on his laptop as I spoke.
“Okay, I have the data. Where did this originate? Who’s your source?”
“You’re going to love this,” I said, and told him everything. He did not interrupt once, and I hoped that he was alone because this was going to really test his Vulcan calm.
After a short pause, Church asked, “Were you able to verify his connection to Vox? Could Rasouli have simply thrown the name at you to win your trust?”
“I don’t think so. Vox told him to tell me that he vetted Grace and she was clean. He said ‘She wasn’t one of mine.’”
There was a longer pause. “Interesting.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“Rasouli made no move to arrest you?”
“Just the opposite,” I said. “Rasouli teased me by saying that one of the devices might be in the U.S. He couldn’t have been more vague if he’d spoken in code, though.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“I’m not sure I’d believe him if he said the desert was made out of sand. But…”
“Where are you?”
“My hotel room.”
“Bug might be able to salvage more of the damaged files. I’ll reroute a local asset to pick up the flash drive. Wait for his call.”
“I don’t think I should leave the country while—”
“You’re not. You’ll be taken to a safe house you can use as a staging area. We’ll evaluate the situation so be prepared to go after that device in Iran. I’ll have Echo Team rendezvous with you there.”
“Speaking of my team … did everyone make it out okay?”
“Everyone but you. Safe and sound and over the border.”
“Outstanding. What about the packages?”
“The three young people are with their families. They’ll go to London for a thorough physical, and we’ll have them home in forty-eight hours.”
“Not seeing anything in the news.”
“Iran hasn’t acknowledged the incident. There’s some question here about how they’ll play it. Fifty-fifty split between them producing dead soldiers and claiming that we launched an illegal attack that resulted in casualties; or they reach out to us on the sly and agree to a public statement that they worked with us to insure the safe release of suspected spies who have since been cleared. My money is on the latter. State is prepping a variety of responses,” he said.
“Be nice to have the good guys win. Those three kids were pretty tough. They didn’t break, and we both know the Iranians didn’t go light on them.”
“Admirable,” Church agreed, and that was about as sentimental and weepy as he ever gets. “What do you need, Captain?”
“I’m equipment-light. I need weapons and gear. Can your asset drop that stuff off?”
“I can arrange weapons, but he won’t have a field kit. Echo Team will bring the party favors. And I’ll have Bug send you the latest disarming protocols.”
“Once last thing, Boss,” I said. “Do you think this is the return of the Seven Kings?”
“Impossible to say at this juncture,” he said. The line went dead.
In my best impersonation of Church I said, “Why, thank you, Captain Ledger, damn fine work.” Ghost gave me a look and went back to his dried goat.
I studied the picture of the bomb. Jesus. Someone wanted to nuke the entire Mideast oil fields.
Understand, I gave just about half a warm shit about the whole oil wars thing. I cared even less about the politics of it. But there were hundreds of millions of people in the region. I thought of all the people coming and going in the café. Their families, their kids. All of them. Working, eating, sleeping, loving, and living on top of four, maybe six, nuclear bombs. Maybe more.
I stood up, swayed for a moment, then ran like hell into the bathroom, dropped to my knees in front of the toilet and vomited. It was so immediate and desperate that I could hear myself screaming as I threw up.
My stomach spasmed on empty and I dropped the lid with a bang. Ghost was in the doorway, barking at me, scared and nervous. I pulled some toilet paper off the roll and wiped my mouth.
“It’s okay,” I gasped, reaching out with a trembling hand toward Ghost. He gave my knuckles a nervous lick. “It’s okay.”
I flushed the paper and used the sink to pull myself upright. I ran the water on cold and stuck my face down into the spray. I rinsed out my mouth and tried to spit out the taste of terror.
The shakes hit me then and I had to ball my hands into fists as I walked into the bedroom. You can only play it like Mr. Cool for so long before the realities of emotion and brain chemistry show up to kick your ass and prove to you that you’re just as human as everyone else. Maybe Mr. Church has a lock on invulnerability, but I haven’t cracked the code yet. I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried not to cry.
In the movies, Bruce Willis doesn’t cry. He’s a stoic. He’s also working off a script that he
knows
has a happy ending. I wasn’t. What if it came down to me to stop these things? Me and what I can do pitted against the potential loss of life that numbered several hundred million. I’m one guy. A year ago I was just a cop.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, and I could hear the raw horror in my own voice.
Chapter Sixteen
The Hangar—DMS Central HQ
Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn
June 15, 12:49 a.m. EST
Mr. Church typed his personal code into his laptop and brought up the Rasouli files. He scanned the index and then began viewing the files one by one. His face was relaxed, composed, without expression, as data, charts, diagrams, lists, and photographs came and went, came and went on his laptop screen.
The room was still except for music playing softly. “Smokin’ At The Half Note” by Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery. The current track was Tadd Dameron’s “If You Could See Me Now.” Mr. Church appreciated the simple intensity of Wes Montgomery’s guitar work on the track, and he let it play through before he did anything.
Mr. Church selected a vanilla wafer from a plate, tapped crumbs off of it, and took a small bite. He munched quietly for several seconds. He was a large man, broad-shouldered, strong and blocky. It was generally believed by those who knew him that he was north of sixty, but people agreed that age did not seem to touch him. The gray in his hair was the only real mark; and the scars on his face and hands suggested that his years, no matter how many they were, had not been idle.
His eyes were half-closed behind the tinted lenses of his glasses as he looked inward, assessing what Ledger had told him, working through the implications of the information on Rasouli’s flash drive. If anyone had been in the room they would have thought he was a man lost in the subtleties of a piece of classic jazz. There was no outward sign of agitation.
A slender cell phone sat on the desk blotter next to his laptop. The image on the laptop’s screen was the one Joe Ledger had sent via e-mail. When the song ended, Mr. Church picked up his cell and opened it, punched a number, entered a code that engaged a 128-bit scrambler, and waited for the other party to answer. After three rings, a man’s voice said, “Hello?”
Mr. Church said, “Mr. President, we have a situation.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Kingdom of Shadows
Beneath the Sands
One Year Ago
The fat American sat uneasily on the edge of a metal chair that was draped with red velvet. He was not accustomed to being uneasy. For most of his life it was other people who were uneasy around him. The other man—if “man” could accurately describe the pale figure who sat opposite him—was not like other people. The American doubted this creature feared anything.
Their chairs were identical, ponderous wrought-iron monstrosities looted centuries ago from a desecrated mosque. A single small candle in a shaded sconce cast the only light, and its pale glow was far too fragile to hold back the enormous walls of darkness that closed in on them from every side. The American could only guess at the size of the chamber in which they sat. During the long and convoluted walk down here from a hidden entrance in the city above, the American could see that it had been carved out of the living rock, and was forever filled with shadows that dripped and whispered. The black mouths of tunnels trailed off into darkness all around them. The American knew that there were guards in those tunnels—creatures equally as pale and strange as this man—but he could not see them.