* * *
It took John Broom four phone calls to the army infectious disease research facility in Frederick, Maryland, just to get the name of the person he should have asked for in the first place.
“Research,” he told yet another person. “Recombinant influenza.… No, just research.… Yeah, I’m trying to figure what I don’t know.… Hang on.” He grabbed a pen.
John thought,
I’m CIA. You’d think I could get through a bureaucracy faster than this.
“James? Major Theo James. Can you connec— No? Okay. Thanks.”
He hung up and began looking up more numbers to call. It was rule number one for research: there were always more numbers to call.
He heard a rap on his cubicle wall. One of his fellow analysts rounded the corner. “Dude. Where are you?”
John shrugged, thinking,
Um … here?
He checked the time on his computer monitor. It was just a little past four on a Friday. “Why? What’s up?”
The analyst rolled his eyes. “Your going-away party, dumbass.”
* * *
Owen Cain Thorson would not be attending John’s going-away party. He and a team of sixteen battle-hardened soldiers were boarding a modified Boeing 747 SP, fueled up and teed up on the runway at Andrews. No flight plan had been filed on any official document, but everyone knew they were heading for France aboard the fastest thing with wings that was large enough to carry that many men.
The operations computer had spat out a random code for Thorson’s strike team: Swing Band.
These were not traditional CIA spooks. Outside of Thorson, none of them had ever bugged a boardroom or swiped a classified document. They were former SEALS, Green Berets, and Army Rangers. This was not an espionage mission.
This was a hunting party.
* * *
Henri-Luc Deschamps, DCRI, was on call as station chief for Paris. As such, he had at his disposal two independent strike teams courtesy of the French military.
From his subterranean command center beneath the Ministry of the Interior—at Place Beauvau, only blocks north of the Champs-Elysées—the station chief made the calls to bring in both strike teams. That gave him access to an estimated thirty soldiers, complete with air support and mechanized armor. In short, he mobilized the majority of the city’s military-intelligence assets.
Overkill? Maybe. But Henri-Luc Deschamps had just received a file indicating the woman was participating in a conspiracy to kill the president of the United States.
As for Khalid Belhadj? He, too, was implicated in the conspiracy. But French intelligence also had had its share of contretemps with that cold-blooded butcher. Belhadj and his fellow bastards of the Mukhabarat, the Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate, had operated on French soil on at least three known occasions.
It was an account that Henri-Luc Deschamps intended to pay. With interest.
* * *
They got John Broom a Costco cake with white icing and the words
So Long Suckers!
scrolled across it in dollar-green cursive. Someone had crafted a black felt bag, a cord tying it closed at the top. One side featured a decal of the Capitol Building. The other showed a dollar sign and the word
Loot!
The oversized Hallmark card featured Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of gold bullion.
John’s immediate supervisor said a few words, as did her supervisor. A retired director of Central Intelligence sent a handwritten note of thanks; an almost-unheard-of gesture for the analysis side of the building. Stanley Cohen and Nanette Sylvestri both emerged, he from the rarified loft of administration, she from the dungeon.
As people queued for cake and coffee or punch, John took Sylvestri aside. “Pegasus?” he whispered.
“We have ’em.”
John barely maintained his poker face. “Alive?”
She shrugged. “
Have
is too strong a word. Gibron and Belhadj are in France. DCRI has their location. They’re putting together a strike force. It’s all over but the shouting.”
People in the third-floor cafeteria hooted at John and called him over to the cake table to make a speech.
“Why France?”
Sylvestri sipped her punch. “G-8?”
The Group of Eight, the world’s eight most industrialized nations, were gathering in Avignon in less than a week. The president planned to attend as always, this year to discuss the debt crisis.
Nanette Sylvestri threw an arm over John’s shoulder and bussed him on the top of his head. “You got yourself a world-class brain, Mister Broom. Go make us proud.”
As she hustled back to the Shark Tank, John made a “come here” gesture to a young man with a mop of curly hair and Buddy Holly frames. He was a postdoc from the University of Kansas, doing a practicum at Langley.
“Do me a favor?” John asked, and scribbled a note on a festive paper napkin. “Go look this up.”
The postdoc glanced at it. “Are you kidding?”
“No. Go.”
Amid more calls of “Speech! Speech!” John Broom returned to the half-devoured Costco cake and addressed his soon-to-be-former coworkers.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, the party was going strong when John’s cell phone vibrated. He checked the incoming message, then excused himself and stepped into the hall.
“Mr. Broom? I’m Theo James. Understand you’re looking for me?”
“Would you prefer Major James or Doctor James?”
The man on the other end chuckled. “I’d prefer Theo but the darned brass gets hacked off when we say that. I hear you were lighting up the switchboard at USAMRIID looking for me.”
John glanced around to make sure he was alone in the corridor. “You’re one of the army’s experts in recombinant influenza.”
“Yup.” The voice sounded jovial. “Nobody’s experter than me!”
“Listen. Do you have some time? We’re working on a situation and it involves influenza, and I have this feeling I’m being led down the path, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure. We could grab a coffee or something. My daughter’s playing basketball Saturday morning but I’m free after—”
“What are you doing this evening?”
After a beat, the voice on the line came back a little less jovial. “Do we have a zoonotic incident?”
“I don’t know what the hell we have. I could really use your expert advice, and I could really use it tonight.”
“Where and when?”
They agreed on a time and place, then John thanked him and hung up.
As he did, a member of the building security detail entered the hallways. “John. Wow, we’re going to miss you, man.”
John shook the security agent’s hand. “Thanks, Phil.”
“Look, I need to get your ID and keys, and your—”
“Sunday,” John said.
The man’s smile faltered a bit. “N-no. I really need to get them now.”
“I just had someone look up the employment protocols. I’m on the job until midnight, Sunday. And last I checked, I was officially assigned to Pegasus. If Pegasus is still running, I’m still working. I’ll hand in my credentials on Sunday.”
Fifteen
Outside Paris
It was almost 11:00
P.M.
by the time Daria found the square block in which, according to Belhadj’s source, Asher Sahar’s mobile phone awaited. She sat, Toyota taxi idling, in a heavily industrial but down-on-its-luck sector of outer Paris, a few miles east of the city. It wasn’t difficult to figure out which building on the block to search: an enormous, hulking factory took up the entire block. Most of the windows on the ground floor had been smashed and boarded over. Signs and spray-paint stencils warned
DANGER
! and
NO TRESPASSING!
Most of those had been covered over with gang graffiti, Americano-style, which Daria couldn’t translate and didn’t bother trying.
The factory sat on a railroad spur. It had stood unused and quite uninhabitable. It had thrived for decades, used to mass-produce everything from steamer trunks to canned goods, shipping them by sea to the Americas and by train to Central Europe and Asia. It was a brick affair, grimy, built around the nineteenth to twentieth century fin de siècle. A blocklong and a blockwide, with no lights showing at night, it took Daria a good ten minutes to spot the sweep of a sentry’s penlight from a third-floor window. If she hadn’t been looking for it, there was no way she would have spotted it.
Thankful for the full moon and cloudless sky, she finally spotted the change-of-shift on the roof, as one sniper replaced another.
How classically Asher. He’d found himself an impenetrable fortress.
* * *
You can’t, mulled Asher Sahar, tell an abandoned factory by its graffiti.
The outer walls of the suburban Paris factory were grimy and decrepit. But Asher Sahar’s people had had six weeks to work on the fixer-upper.
The northeast corner of the ground floor had been modified substantially. But only the northeast corner, since the floors for the rest of the building were rotting through and treacherous.
Asher’s people had established a grid of aluminum poles directly inside the front door of the factory, sixty meters by sixty meters, then strung sturdy polyvinyl sheets from the poles, creating a room within the room, one foot away from the north and east walls, three feet from the ceiling. They had boarded over all of the first- and second-story windows and had added creosote to the cracks to keep the light inside. Tall banks of halogen lights had been set up at the four corners of the new, plastic cube of a room they had created.
A complicated pyramid of oxygen tanks and compressors was installed, as well as external air vents added to the exterior of the building, then grimed over to avoid being noticed by the daytime neighbors. By the third day, the air pressure inside the white plastic cube room was slightly lower than the air pressure in Paris: In the event of a tear in the sealed fabric walls of the room, air would rush in, not rush out.
Next, a complicated, military tent, also with an aluminum frame, was set up and sealed within the cube but farther back from the factory door. It created a room within a room within a room.
Outside of the white plastic cube, the factory remained dark and dank. Asher did a walk-through that evening, shortly after eleven, to make sure everything was in place. A few electric lanterns had been set on the floor at strategic places, reflecting light up onto his emotionless face and sparse beard as he passed silently through the remainder of the ground floor, picking his footing carefully. The light glinted on his wire-frame eyeglasses. The lanterns had been turned to their lowest setting with photographer’s black umbrellas perched over them to keep their light low and focused on the wooden floor, away from the windows.
Much of the ground floor was unstable. Rats squeaked and skittered under the boards, and the stink of sewer water permeated portions of the warehouse. During their first day at the factory, one of the mercenaries had fallen through a termite-infested floor and broken both his ankles. Eli Schullman eventually found a safe route to the roof, mostly using rickety catwalks and a makeshift ladder of horizontal, C-shaped rebar bolted to the brick wall. They used red bandannas to mark the safe passage, so each shift of sniper-watchers could gain access without falling.
Since then, they had maintained twenty-four-hour surveillance of the building for six straight weeks.
Asher returned to the brightly lit cube room and sat in a folding iron chair, a gray winter coat pulled tight around his thin body, long legs out, crossed at the ankles. He felt a slim volume in his coat pocket and remembered that he had picked up a copy of
Night Flight
by the doomed aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Asher always tried to read literature from the country he operated in.
He looked around. Of the eight men with him, three were former Mossad, four were mercenaries from around the globe. The eighth, the newest arrival, was Will Halliday, recently of the Secret Service. It had been Will who had contacted Asher’s benefactors and offered to help any way he could. Halliday had lost too many good men to terrorist attacks. He was a committed anti-Islamist. Now he was fully part of the mission. A true believer. Being paid a king’s ransom, yes, but a believer nonetheless.
Asher’s eyes roamed the oddly futuristic white cube room. It was such an odd contrast to the dilapidated factory around it. It made the perfect rendezvous point. They just had to wait for the pathologist.
* * *
Across the street and half a block down from Asher’s factory-turned-fortress stood an old, dilapidated, and badly rusting grain elevator. No grain had been stored there for more than a dozen years.
Throwing a large, oilskin carrying case over his left shoulder, Belhadj climbed the exterior ladder to a narrow iron-mesh balcony, about a hundred meters up, ignoring the lingering pain from the electroshock weapon. He reached the balcony and found a vertical curtain of rust-red iron, dangling by twisted wires from the handrail. It was barely big enough to lie down on but would shield his body from the warehouse. He lay on his stomach. Among the items Belhadj had stolen from the CIA command vehicle—technically Daria had stolen it first and he had stolen it from her—was a pair of powerful Bushnell 10X42 ARC Rangefinder binoculars. He raised the binoculars to scan the vicinity, forcing himself not to flinch when he rotated his right shoulder. He noted one man leaning in the shadows of the front door, smoking. It took him almost no time to spot the sniper-surveillance man on the roof of the oddly disproportional factory, almost two blocks away. The man had camouflaged himself with cardboard boxes. He lay on a roof that appeared to be undulated like a skateboard park. He wondered how the man made it up there without breaking his neck.
Belhadj dutifully and slowly scanned the perimeter; every street, every alley, every rooftop. His diligence paid off when he spotted two men in an aged panel truck, sitting and smoking. Both had military haircuts and bulging biceps. Asher Sahar’s external line of security, doubtless.