“So Sahar wouldn’t have hired him on a whim.”
“Asher Sahar wouldn’t take a piss on a whim. But beyond that, the Viking’s services are often booked far in advance. Now, you answer some of my questions.”
This seemed to amuse the Syrian, who allowed a lopsided smile to appear on his unshaven face. The bags under his eyes were slightly blue. He kept spinning the .45 slowly on the tabletop. “Oh, really? I am not the one chained to a chair.”
Daria smiled meaningfully. “Not today, you’re not. No.”
He paused, then smiled back and shrugged. “Very well.”
“How long has Asher been out of prison?”
“Who knows? I first heard he was out almost six weeks ago.”
“Impossible. I would have heard.”
This earned her a slow, noncommittal blink.
“How is Israeli intelligence reacting?”
This time Belhadj paused, thinking it over, trying to decide how much to tell her.
“Let us say, they are being very quiet. The Knesset has not been informed. We don’t know for sure but we don’t believe the prime minister knows.”
“How did you get onto Asher’s operation?”
“Luck. He hired a Croatian mercenary we were watching. The Croatian led us to Sahar, and Sahar led us to the States. I decided to take command of the surveillance team but, two days ago, they missed a scheduled communiqué. No word since. I assume my people are dead. Okay, my turn: I need you to try to be the chess player for a moment. Say you had money and power enough to get Asher Sahar out of prison. Quietly. Why would you?”
“So I could kill him myself.”
“It’s a serious question.”
She was hungry and freezing and tired of playing by the Syrian’s rules. But if Asher Sahar was truly free and had assembled his old squad? The thought was frightening.
“Not for an intelligence mission,” she said. “You don’t free Asher to bug an embassy or to photograph a deputy minister buggering choirboys. I can think of a dozen crews good enough to do that. I’m not talking about just inside Israeli intelligence, either. Spies, thieves, and mercenaries: take your pick.”
“You should know. You’ve been all three.” It wasn’t an insult, just a brief recitation of Daria’s CV. But it again suggested he knew more about her than seemed likely.
Daria unfolded her legs and sat forward, her back away from the chair, coal-dark eyes locked on Belhadj. “You free an Asher Sahar for destruction,” she said. “You free him for something big and awful. The man may be brilliant but he also is a sociopath. You free Asher if you plan to make horrifying headlines.”
Belhadj stopped spinning the gun.
“Yes.” He seemed to mull the information. Again, he looked as tired as Daria felt. “Thank you. That was my assessment as well. But you know him better than I.”
He stood. The sturdy black auto fit snugly in his right hand. Like many natural-born soldiers, Belhadj’s hands looked more at ease holding a weapon than not.
Daria had answered his questions. If he had no more to ask, she couldn’t think of a logical reason he would keep her alive.
Back in the CIA command vehicle, she’d tried using skin and sex appeal to lure him close enough for a strike and it hadn’t worked. She sat here now, in her tarty underthings, bound to this bolted-down chair, and he’d barely made eye contact with her. That left her precious few options.
Belhadj circled around her, keeping his distance. One shot to the back of the skull had been a favorite method of assassination for decades. Do it right and the bullet ricochets around inside the victim’s skull, turning the brain into porridge. A shot at the base of the skull tends to lessen blood splatter, too. Neat and efficient.
Daria heard a rustling, as if something made of cloth was being removed from a paper bag. No need for a blindfold, obviously.
She willed herself to sit still. When it comes, it comes—if you play the game long enough. She knew that before she had even reached her teens.
She felt a vibration behind her and it took a moment to realize he had uncuffed her left wrist.
Daria brought her arms around forward, the tension in her shoulders lessening. She dragged the handcuff with her, still pinioned to her right wrist.
She stood and pivoted on the balls of her bare feet.
Belhadj threw something at her and she caught it. She held it up in both hands. It was a pilled Royal Air Force sweater, midnight blue and woolen, well-worn cloth patches on the shoulders and elbows, and epaulettes.
The Syrian stood ten meters away, gun held by his thigh. His weary eyes didn’t blink. From the way he stood, Daria wondered when he’d slept last.
She pulled the RAF sweater over her head, freed her hair from the collar, and threaded her arms through the sleeves, holding the free end of the handcuff in her right fist as she did. It was a tight fit and she tugged it over her breasts and down her torso. It covered most of her bum. But it was deliciously warm compared to the cami and panties.
“In front,” Belhadj said.
She understood. She encircled her wrist with the free cuff and clicked it closed.
“Come.”
He began walking toward the warehouse’s garage-style door. As he did, he dug a set of keys out of the pocket of his thick canvas trousers. Daria padded behind him, suddenly aware of her tactical advantage in his blind spot. Israeli military and intelligence officers train in a form of martial arts known as Krav Maga. It addresses exactly this sort of scenario: taking advantage of blind spots. Taking the offensive.
“Sahar is freed by someone powerful to do a terrible thing, yes?” He turned his head slightly but Daria remained outside his field of vision. “He is brave or confident enough to conduct his operation on American soil. His mission is to steal something. Did I tell you that part?”
“I believe you mentioned it.” Daria was only five meters behind him now. With the sturdy metal links between her wrists, if she could get her arms over his head and her hands to either side of his neck, she could then put one foot on the small of his back and launch herself in the air. Her fifty-two kilos would throw him off balance, toppling him backward. The fall likely would break some of Daria’s ribs, and there was a better-than-even chance of snapping her sternum, but at least she would have crushed his larynx.
Sacrifice my queen to topple your king? How is that for fucking chess?
But she hesitated as Belhadj did the unthinkable: he stuffed the Springfield into his shoulder holster.
What the hell?
Belhadj used both hands to undo the massive padlock that held the garage door closed.
“Sahar is a weapon of mass destruction,” he said, slamming aside the bolt that held the door down. He bent at the knees and used both hands to shove upward on the door. The metal shrieked and rust flecks rained down off the tracks.
Daria hesitated.
Belhadj lifted the door just higher than his own head. He wiped soot off his palms and stepped out of the warehouse.
Daria followed.
They stood in an alley. The building across the way was redbrick and equally aged. The alley beneath her bare feet was well-worn cobblestone. A lazy, light snow drifted down from a gunmetal gray sky.
Belhadj turned and pointed to his left. “So why, knowing all that, does a man like Sahar come here?”
Daria followed the line of the Syrian’s left arm, past his fist and his one pointing finger.
She stood barefoot on the freezing cobblestones, her breath misting around her head, eyes snapping wide.
“Holy hell…”
Belhadj pointed at the Eiffel Tower.
Eleven
Langley, Virginia
“Everyone?”
Stanley Cohen hardly raised his voice but the fifty-plus people in the subterranean operations room at CIA headquarters quieted down and turned in his direction. There was no available seating so John Broom leaned against the far wall, coffee cup in hand. Nanette Sylvestri stood by his side. She wore a braided cloth friendship bracelet her granddaughter had made for her. John knew it was her good-luck totem during operations.
Nanette wasn’t just the person in charge of the Shark Tank; yesterday, she had been promoted to run Pegasus, taking Owen Cain Thorson’s spot. John was pleased. She was the perfect person to call the plays for so large an operation.
“Folks? Thank you.” Cohen coughed into his fist. He looked pasty and drawn, but then again, he always did. “We had a pretty good setback in New York on Wednesday. The good news: we know the target of these players and we know they have aerial photos of Camp David, something that we believed didn’t exist. The bad news: it’s forty-eight hours later and we have no idea where they are. Up to now we have confined our search to the eastern seaboard but we’re expanding the net to cover the rest of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Nanette?”
She moved away from John and stepped to the front of the room. “While yesterday’s search turned up nothing, it did give our own John Broom time to dream up a new scenario. I’ve often said there is nothing more frightening than John Broom with time to kill.”
A wave of good-natured heckling rippled through the room.
“We have two competing theories right now, which I’m going to call Pegasus A and Pegasus B. We all know Pegasus A backward and forward but I think it’s helpful to go back to square one from time to time. I’ve asked Agent Thorson to lay it out for us. Owen?”
It was a touch of class, her asking the former operation leader to make the presentation.
Thorson took two steps down the auditorium-style room to stand by Nanette’s side. He nodded to a techie who sat at the controls of the audiovisual table. Images of Daria Gibron and Khalid Belhadj appeared on two of the eight flat-screen TVs in the Shark Tank.
“The president is attempting to broker a deal between Democrats and Republicans on the Hill to sell the next generation of attack drones to Israel, as soon as they come off the assembly line and get beta-tested. We believe this man”—Thorson nodded to the screen—“Major Khalid Belhadj, came to the United States to kill the president. Since he couldn’t easily sneak weapons into the U.S., he planned to meet this woman, Daria Gibron, who would supply him with a sniper rifle with silencer and scope.”
Thorson nodded to the techie and a third TV screen sprang to life, showing a side view of an olive-colored sniper rifle with a bipod stand, which ended with something that looked like mini snow skis.
“According to the documents we recovered from a satchel in New York, the gun she was selling him was a PSG-90. Swedish, similar to the Brits’ L96 series. She also was selling him a case of sabot rounds.”
That caught John’s attention. Sabot bullets can penetrate most armored shielding, including that used by some portions of the presidential motorcade.
“Four-point-eight-one mike-mike, tungsten carbide bullets. There’s a degradation of accuracy for most shooters but the slugs exit the barrel at better than forty-four-hundred feet per second. For a shooter of Belhadj’s skill, the slight reduction in accuracy is more than made up for by the fact that he can put bullets on target twice as fast as he could with most NATO rounds.”
He pointed to Belhadj’s photo again. “We originally thought the assassination was scheduled for Wednesday at Emory University in Atlanta. It’s snowing in Georgia, and the PSG-90 is ideal for arctic conditions. But the discovery of the Camp David aerials has changed all that.”
He nodded again and a fourth image appeared. It was an eagle-eye view of Washington, D.C., ranging from the White House to the Hill. “The presidential security detail is avoiding Camp David, obviously. And if they have photos of Camp David, they could have Andrews Air Force Base, too. So the president is staying in the White House, completely secure, until we find Belhadj and Gibron. Now, he is scheduled to attend the Group of Eight summit in Avignon but we are negotiating with the president’s chief of staff to cancel the visit. I can tell you now, the White House does not want to cancel.
“All domestic intelligence agencies have been alerted, as have all law enforcement agencies. We cannot assume the bad guys have just given up and gone home. They are, as of now,
the
most hunted humans on Earth.”
Done, he nodded to Nanette Sylvestri.
“Right.” She crossed her arms. “I’ve asked John Broom to offer up Pegasus-B. John?”
John joined them down front. He slid between the techie and the master controls for the flat-screens. “Can I … do you mind?” He fiddled with the controls for a second, and a map of the eastern United States appeared on one of the monitors.
“Okay. Here’s the competing theory: I can’t tell you where Belhadj and Gibron are, but I can tell you where they
aren’t
. They aren’t in D.C., and they aren’t in Atlanta, and they aren’t near Camp David. This whole thing has nothing to do with the president, who was never in any danger from either of them.”
Thorson said, “The satchel—”
“The satchel was conveniently dropped right where your field agents could find it. It’s a ruse. The real action was here.”
John played with a computer mouse. The map slid sideways, westward.
“Colorado. And the levee break of the Genevieve River, which resulted in the deaths of at least nineteen people and the destruction of forty-four homes and businesses. Among the dead and missing, as of Thursday evening, were three Secret Service agents on a transport mission. They’re the real story. Everything else is sleight of hand.”
Thorson rolled his eyes. “So now you think Belhadj and Gibron blew up a river in Colorado? When we have them sighted in New York City at the same time?”
“No. Daria Gibron and Major Belhadj had nothing to do with this. I don’t know why they were meeting in New York, but they were a distraction. For us. The real investigation, the real threat, is out there in Colorado.”
Nanette said simply, “Explain, please.”
“High-ranking Israeli sources informed us that the president is the target of a foreign assassin. Protocol says the president’s security detail gets tripled-up.”