“I read Arabic,” the agent holding the satchel said. “We found this where Belhadj had been standing. He must have dropped it and run.”
Thorson studied the sheets. “Is it about the president?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Emory University?”
“No, sir. These are aerial and topographic maps. Look!”
Owen Cain Thorson blinked. Several times. “Oh hell.”
“Yes, sir. No doubt about it. This is Camp David!”
Another CIA agent burst into the room, eyes wild.
Thorson turned to him. Something in the man’s demeanor set off his alarms. Fortunately, Thorson thought, the situation likely couldn’t get any worse.
“What?”
“The, ah, our command vehicle, sir.”
“Right. I saw someone move it out of the bomb radius? That was good thinking.”
“That’s just it, sir. That wasn’t us. Hill caught sight of it, a block from here, heading east.”
“Wait … what?”
“He said there was a woman at the wheel, sir. Slicked-back hair, leather coat. It, ah … it may have been the Gibron woman, sir.”
* * *
In the Shark Tank at Langley, Nanette Sylvestri spun to look at the guy manning the primary communication array. “Say again?”
“Field team says the target isn’t the president’s speech tomorrow in Atlanta! It’s Camp David!”
Sylvestri was at the room’s bank of secure phones before the word
David
was out of the man’s mouth. She had just begun to enter a number when, with a blink, all the feeds from Manhattan died. The audio, the screens, Thorson’s team comms, the computer monitor links. Everything.
Eight
The Middle East
Almost Twenty-five Years Ago
The Tunnel Rat of Rafah had grown from malnourished to lean and strong. The Bedouin cousins who employed him grew rich and—as is the way everywhere in the world—the authorities on both the Egyptian side and the Gaza Strip side got a taste of the profits.
The cousins’ second tunnel was twice as wide and much better lit. The third through fifth tunnels had tracks, cables, and hydraulic pulleys on either side to move the goods and the profits. The flatbed, small-gauge rail car in the fifth tunnel could move the component parts of a car. Or a cow.
The Tunnel Rat of Rafah was now ten years old—although he couldn’t have told you his birth date or exact age—and supervised the distribution of goods in the alleys and back parlors of the Gaza side.
The Bedouin cousins still didn’t know the boy’s provenance or name. They brought in Iraqi tunnel diggers—those guys knew how to dig!—and the Iraqis called the boy “Kahlet.” It meant “filthy beggar.” The Tunnel Rat of Rafah was far too keen an entrepreneur to deserve the epithet. But he also didn’t complain.
Increasingly, he was given control of the most vital cargos. It took him some time to realize they were guns and explosives.
New York City
Daria disconnected the power for all the communications equipment in the CIA command vehicle. She ducked under the steering wheel and dug around for the inevitable GPS transmitter. She tossed it out the window and pulled back into Manhattan traffic.
She had driven massive, three-axle dinosaurs during her stint in the Israeli army. Those standard-transmission beasts had been hell to drive. In comparison, the command vehicle purred like a Lexus coupe.
Her trainers drilled into their young charge’s head:
It’s called “intelligence” for a reason. Before you act, learn all that you can.
The operational command vehicle had been Daria’s true target since she identified it back on Forty-second Street. If “intelligence” was the brass ring, this rig seemed ideal.
* * *
The Grand Cherokee wound its way to the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Nobody minded the traffic. They had nowhere to be and no one was looking for them. Everyone knew the basic tenet of the operation—to perpetuate a massive distraction for the American intelligence community—had been a rousing success.
However, none of the four in the SUV cheered.
Eli Schullman turned his thick bulk as far as the passenger-side seat belt would allow and turned to Asher Sahar in the back. “That was interesting.”
Asher smiled. “Wasn’t it?”
The Cypriot driver looked perplexed. “The targets? Gibron and Belhadj. I don’t understand. I thought we had them. What happened? One second, we were in control. The next … police.”
The Croat mercenary in the other back seat grunted. “Lots of police. Waves of police.”
Asher squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the traffic. He played back the scene of chaos in his head. The whole thing: it had Daria Gibron’s signature. Only that woman could take his well-crafted scenario and turn it into comedia del’arte. Asher admired her so much. Now she was free and would soon get involved in Asher’s plans. Plus, the Syrian butcher, who had been digging into his operation, was free as well. It was a tactical nightmare.
“We accomplished our primary goal. Will Halliday will be heading our way soon. Get us to the rally point, please.”
His phone vibrated. He checked the incoming message and spoke to the others in the car. “We accomplished our primary goal. Will Halliday will be heading our way soon.”
He scrolled through his message. “Drop me off, next corner, please.”
Schullman started to speak but Asher smiled at him. “I have unfinished business. I’ll catch up.”
The Cherokee pulled over. “Damn,” the Cypriot groused. “Losing the Syrian fucker was bad enough. But Gibron never even arrived!”
Eli Schullman stayed twisted in his seat. His eyes locked on Asher Sahar. The old friends stared at each other for a few silence-sodden seconds.
“No,” Schullman eventually agreed. “She never even arrived.”
Los Angeles
FBI agent Ray Calabrese didn’t bother going to his West Hollywood condo to pack. He kept a gym bag at work with underwear, undershirts, socks, and a toiletry kit. Plus extra ammunition clips. Within minutes of reading the CIA report on Daria and the plot to kill the president, Ray was in a cab to LAX.
Ray was in line for the United check-in desk when his BlackBerry chirped. It was L.A. Station Chief Henry Deits.
“Heads-up. Spookville is going nutso over this thing with Daria. I don’t know what happened, but the alerts just upgraded from a number one priority.”
Ray willed the line ahead of him to move faster. “What the hell’s the upgrade from a number one priority?”
“Though I walk through the valley.…”
“Got it.” Ray rubbed his face with one beefy, open hand. He liked to think he had a good grasp on Daria Gibron’s ability to create havoc. Once again, he had underestimated her.
“She’s still listed as a threat?”
“Al-Qaida, Daria Gibron, North Korea. In that order.”
The line moved forward almost seven inches. “Okay. Thanks. Try to run interference for me, boss. Let them know the bureau isn’t sitting this one out. She is one of ours.”
Henry said, “Done,” and disconnected.
The line moved forward another two inches. Ray held his temper rather than shoot everyone in front of him. He checked his phone and scrolled through the buffer of intelligence circulars, looking for Daria’s name.
A routine notification had gone out to all law enforcement personnel. A river levee had been breached in Colorado. A motel had been swept away. No word yet on a cause or casualties.
Langley, Virginia
The same routine notification also popped up on John Broom’s tablet computer in the Shark Tank at Langley. The Genevieve River had roared over a broken levy and had wiped out several businesses and homes. Out of idle curiosity, John surfed over to a weather Web site. It had snowed three days earlier in Colorado. Other than that, the weather had been mild.
Odd timing for a levy failure, John thought, his attention returning to Operation Pegasus in Manhattan.
Upstate New Jersey
Daria found a construction site in New Jersey and pulled in. The site appeared to be vacant and had a couple weeks’ worth of trash and debris to show for it. It included a rusty, corrugated covering, perfect for hiding electrical equipment during rain and snowstorms. She parked beneath it.
She had to find a secure way to contact Collin Bennett-Smith and explain her no-show at Grand Central. She just had to hope he hadn’t been swept up in all of this—whatever
this
was.
She rested her forehead on the steering wheel a moment, feeling the adrenaline drain away. She had orchestrated the fake bank robbery and the bomb scare to gain access to the command vehicle. She was positive an intelligence agency was behind her surveillance and the obvious trap in Manhattan.
Dee Jean D’Arc …
Daria … you are burned.
Then there was the question of the dark-skinned man she had seen crossing the street back in Manhattan. She was furious at herself for not attaching a name to the face, but she was sure she had seen him before.
Daria got busy searching the truck. It took her all of two minutes to confirm the rig belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency.
When did I make an enemy of them?
she wondered. Among the first things she found was a thermos of coffee. She also found a baggie with a roast beef sandwich and a bag of salt-and-pepper Kettle Chips. Such good hosts, the CIA. Her next big find was a folder with a file on the operation. She was a little surprised that a CIA hit-team would bring paper documents, but perhaps the op had come together too fast to brief everyone beforehand.
She noted the name of the takedown operation:
Pegasus?
Her Greek was rusty. Wasn’t that some kind of horse?
A horse? Bastards. Why not go all in and call her a fat cow?
She doffed the capelike coat, sat at a command desk, massive boots up on the table, ankles crossed, drank coffee, ate the sandwich and chips, and began studying the file. There was no word on her old friend, Colin Bennett-Smith. But the first name she saw floored her.
Khalid Belhadj.
Syrian assassin, soldier, and spy.
That’s the man she’d seen crossing the street.
Belhadj!
She swore in a half-dozen tongues.
Belhadj?
When she recovered from the shock, she read on. According to the CIA, Daria wasn’t meeting Bennett-Smith. She was meeting Belhadj. And (or so said the file) she would be selling him a sniper rifle. Their target: the president of the United States. The CIA mission had been to capture or kill both Daria and Belhadj.
The wording was crystal clear. There were no colloquialisms, like
terminate
or
remove.
The file said
capture
or
kill.
Both outcomes were sanctioned.
She read the file, front to back. She scrounged around for a pen and discovered a hidden cache; a Ziploc baggie of three chocolate chip cookies. It was maybe her best discovery yet.
She nibbled the cookies and read the file again, front to back, this time jotting notes.
The situation was very bad. Much worse than she’d imagined.
She and Khalid Belhadj? If the CIA believed all this, who was spoon-feeding it to them? Who had sent her the fake e-mail from her old friend, which lured her into the killing field?
And who had dredged up the ancient code from her childhood, warning her at JFK that she was walking into a trap.
Dee Jean D’Arc.
… That code predated Colin Bennett-Smith and Shin-Bet and her service in the Israeli Army. For Daria, that code predated puberty.
It was the code of a long-dead woman.
Meanwhile, there was the Belhadj problem. Was this his operation? The man wasn’t known as brilliant but he was famous for his dogged determination. What he lacked in imagination he more than made up in guts. Yes, she thought, Belhadj had the balls to carry out a mission on U.S. soil.
But why her? Why drag Daria into this? They had never met. To the best of her knowledge, the Syrian bastard didn’t even know she existed. To her, his was just a face studied in scores of PowerPoint presentations, dozens of computer searches.
Finished with the file, Daria searched the command vehicle again. She found a locked steel cabinet. She recognized it as a weapons cache. She retrieved one of the truck’s fire extinguishers, pleased that Americans are so thorough in their safety protocols. She turned the tank upside down and used the nitrogen propellant to freeze the lock on the steel cabinet. She reversed the extinguisher, right-side up, and brought it down heavily on the lock.
The cabinet revealed an elegant and opulent array of CIA weapons. She smiled. Handguns, shotguns, stun guns, sniper rifles with sights, Tasers, machine guns. Even a Browning Automatic Rifle. “These are a few of my favourite things…” she sang softly.
She dug around some more and found a gym bag with a change of clothes. The owner must have been around five-eight: his clothes could be altered to fit her and she felt foolish in the clubbing outfit.
She took the thermos of coffee and a couple of energy bars and shoved them into a tote. She found a personal cell phone. She almost dialed Ray Calabrese’s mobile from memory but paused. It would be better if Ray stayed well clear of this mess for the time being. She would fill him in later, if necessary. She pried the back off the mobile and scanned it for CIA tracking chips. She found one, ripped it out, ground it under her heel, and jammed the mobile into the tote.
Daria prepared a carryall with a change of clothing, all the money she could find from the agents’ bags, and enough weaponry to start—and finish—a decent firefight. She moved forward to the cabin of the truck and checked the front and side windows. She’d drawn no police and, as near as they could tell, no CIA.