Agent Will Halliday hopped down. He wore a quilted, hooded parka and waterproof snow pants tucked into boots.
Boyd Renfro pulled up his coat to draw out his phone. He checked the pdf he’d received, frowning.
“Halliday?”
The big man looked like the all-conference fullback he had been in college. He swaggered over to Renfro.
The senior agent glared. “You’re not on this detail.”
“You heard about Stacy?”
“Who?”
“Phil Mendoza’s wife. Stacy. She’s in the hospital.”
Boyd Renfro winced. Stacy Knight-Mendoza was something like seven or eight months pregnant. “The hell happened? She’s not due.”
“Don’t know, man. I got the call, hour ago. Said Phil’s with his wife in the emergency room. Said she’d miscarried and she’s really sick.” Will Halliday’s white parka bobbed in the harsh parking lot lights as he shrugged.
Renfro slapped his forehead. “Jesus! That’s terrible.”
Halliday’s blue eyes didn’t reflect much emotion.
“All right. Guess you
are
up.” Renfro turned and began clomping toward the Federal Building. Halliday, a full head taller, fell in beside him.
“What are we transporting?”
Renfro snorted a nonlaugh. “They didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Supposed to be a cakewalk, though. Let’s just hope we get no more surprises.”
* * *
That hope lasted all of ninety seconds.
Boyd Renfro and Will Halliday stomped snow off their boots at the entry to the rally room, adjacent to the underground parking garage in the Denver Federal Building. Two identical black Escalades, parked perpendicular to the parking stripes, awaited them, along with four other Secret Service agents. The senior-most agent, a wiry veteran with a thick gray mustache, was on his cell phone. His steely eyes found Renfro as he spoke into the phone. “Yes, sir … understood. Yes, sir.”
The veteran hung up. “Morning, fellas. Where’s Mendoza?”
Renfro told them what he’d just learned about Mendoza’s wife. “Halliday here is up next in the rotation. He’s joining us.”
“He’s not joining
us
. He’s joining you.” The veteran motioned toward his cell phone. “CIA just called an audible from the huddle. They’ve got a clear-and-present for POTUS.”
Renfro whistled, high-low. The Secret Service has many missions but all of them—without fail—fall behind the primary mission of protecting the president. Most domestic ops around the country would begin shedding personnel to provide bench-strength for the D.C.-based teams. This one was no different.
“You getting rerouted to Atlanta?”
“Yup.” The veteran pulled car keys out of his pocket and arced them casually to Renfro, who caught them one-handed. “This detail just went from a six-man rotation to three-man. You got point.”
Renfro nodded. “Understood. Go make us proud.”
The veteran and two other men peeled back into the Federal Building.
That left Renfro, Will Halliday, and one more agent. They wouldn’t need the second Escalade after all.
Techies were loading a titanium steel canister, the size of a footlocker, into the back of the remaining SUV. Attached to the canister was a device holding two small tanks of liquid nitrogen.
Halliday’s blue eyes watched the process, missing nothing. “So no one knows what the package is?”
Boyd Renfro shrugged. “No. And we don’t care. You got the walk-around?”
Halliday said, “Yes, sir,” and began doing the requisite visual analysis of the vehicle. First thing he did was pop the hood to check out the engine.
The others didn’t bother watching him.
* * *
The sun was rising off the Southern Rocky Mountains as the Goldfish goosed the Escalade up to seventy-five miles per hour.
From the shotgun position, Boyd Renfro kept a watch on the sparse traffic and light dusting of snow. Will Halliday sat in back, hands jammed into the deep pockets of his parka.
The Goldfish had drawn first shift behind the wheel. By tradition, rookie members of the Colorado-based Secret Service field office were known as “
Goldfish
” because of the high dropout rate during the difficult, first year. Nobody fooled themselves that Secret Service duty was easy. The saying was: “Don’t bother memorizing the new guys’ names. They’re goldfish. If need be, you flush ’em and forget ’em.”
Interstate 70 flattened out about thirty minutes later and began running parallel with the Genevieve River, which was kept at bay by a hundred-year-old levy that ran for thirty miles along the rich farmland.
The Goldfish glanced at Renfro, who methodically shucked pistachios, one by one, ate each nut, and then deposited the shells in a 7-Eleven coffee cup. He worked blindly, eyes slowly scanning the traffic and the hillsides.
“So,” the Goldfish said. It was the first word anyone had spoken in fifteen miles. “That’s weird about Mendoza’s wife. I saw her at church on Sunday. She was being so careful about her health.”
From the backseat, Will Halliday said, “You never know, I guess.” He wasn’t worried about the pill he’d put in Stacy Knight-Mendoza’s San Pellegrino water the night before. By the time she eventually died, the drug would have broken down and wouldn’t show up in a standard autopsy.
They drove in silence for a while. The Goldfish said, “Bet you guys wish you’d gotten called up for the president’s security detail.”
Renfro kept digging into the diminishing bag of pistachios between his legs. “It’s not a beauty contest. The presidential detail pulls in who they need. Rest of us do our jobs. Just like yesterday, just like tomorrow.”
In the backseat, Will Halliday felt through the pocket of his parka, found a remote control, and slid the mechanism to the on position.
The Goldfish said, “But have you ever gotten the call to—”
Halliday thumbed the firing mechanism.
Pakk!
He felt the vehicle shudder.
“The hell was that?” Boyd Renfro’s eyes searched the highway in every direction. The sound had been acoustically wrong for a gunshot. Still, his left hand rested on the Glock in his belt holster.
“Hey,” the Goldfish said, and jutted his chin forward. Steam began hissing from the hood of the Escalade.
Renfro glanced at the temperature gauge as it bobbed upward.
“Pull in there,” Halliday leaned forward and pointed toward the gravel parking lot of a motel, not thirty feet from the Genevieve River and its levee. The parking lot held three cars but was large enough for thirty. The motel rooms were laid out in a C shape, and each building was designed to look like a log cabin. A snowcapped sign on a tall stand read
ROCKY VISTA MOTEL.
The Goldfish turned in.
Renfro undid his seat belt and gripped his sidearm. “See anything?”
From the backseat, Halliday said, “Nope.” He drew his own Glock.
The black Escalade glided to a halt in the dead center of the near-empty lot. More steam rose from the hood. The temperature gauge spiked into the red zone.
Renfro said, “Check it out.”
The Goldfish killed the engine and stepped out and down from the SUV, his boots leaving a perfect waffle-sole print in the frozen snow.
Renfro’s eyes moved mechanically, professionally, from trees to the motel’s faux log cabins to Interstate 70 and its thin traffic. “You see anything?”
Behind him, Will Halliday deftly screwed a silencer onto his automatic.
A mid-nineties panel truck flashed its turn indicator and vectored toward the parking lot.
“The hell’s this?” Renfro asked.
The Goldfish popped the hood, obscuring his view of the SUV cabin.
As soon as the Goldfish’s vision was blocked by the raised hood, Halliday placed his silencer against Renfro’s ear and pulled the trigger, once.
Renfro died before his head ricocheted off the dashboard.
Will Halliday climbed out and circled the big SUV. A plume of steam roiled from the engine. The newbie glanced at Will, turned his attention back to the engine.
“I think there’s something here,” the kid said, a gloved finger jabbing at the mechanism that had severed the coolant line. Halliday strolled over to his side. “You did the walk-around before we left the garage. Did you notice—”
Halliday fired once. The Goldfish’s body flopped onto the engine, his squall-line jacket and the skin of his face beginning to blister and crack.
The panel truck pulled up next to the Escalade so as to block the SUV from prying eyes on the highway or windows in the motel rooms. Both front doors opened and two of Asher Sahar’s mercenaries stepped out. Both Israelis, neither looked all that happy to be in Colorado in November.
Halliday opened the front passenger door of the Escalade and helped Renfro’s body fall to the parking lot. He squatted and dug through the senior agent’s pockets, finding the key to the steel-reinforced cage that lined the back of the Escalade. He opened the back door, unlocked the cage, and pulled out the canister and its cooling tanks.
Halliday grinned at the two mercenaries. “How we doin’, fellas?”
The two men did not answer, but took either end of the canister and moved it into the panel truck.
While they worked, Halliday retrieved a cheap, purple vinyl backpack from the panel truck. It didn’t weigh much. Halliday slung it over one shoulder, checked to see there were no eyewitnesses, then trudged away from the highway, across the empty parking lot, through the snow, and clomped into a scrubby expanse of grass. Waxy weeds poked out of the snow. The field ended at the foot of the stone wall that had redirected the Genevieve River away from the highway. A Works Projects Administration wall, it was sturdy and thick, not pretty but competently crafted, and given a chance, it could stand for another two hundred years. Will Halliday tucked the backpack amid the weeds at the base of the river wall.
He jogged back and joined the mercenaries in the panel truck. The silent men pulled back onto Interstate 70. A mile later, Halliday grinned at the Israelis. “Everyone having fun?”
The mercenaries glowered at the inappropriately cheerful American.
“Sweet Jesus. You guys gotta learn to enjoy a job well done! Look: how often do you get to do this?”
He drew the detonator out from beneath his seat and made a show of punching the red button.
A mile behind them, the purple backpack’s explosives shrieked and evaporated a quarter ton of stone and mortar.
The Genevieve River roared into the motel and its parking lot, smashing everything to bits.
Four
The Middle East
Almost Thirty Years Ago
Khalil Al Korshan met his cousin, Mahammad Alamour, as he did a few times per week, at a favorite teashop in the southern half of Rafah. The tea was good, but the cousins picked the shop because they could watch the new security wall and sentry posts being installed on the Philadelphi Road, which separated the Egyptian side of Rafah—their side—from the half of the city inside the Gaza Strip.
The Bedouin cousins had just come from the tailor shop that their families had operated for decades. Many of their best customers had lived in the denser, northern end of the city. But at the dawn of the 1980s, the year of the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty, everything had changed now that the Jews and their damn wall had split the city in two.
The cousins ordered hot tea. They had just been down in the basement of the tailor shop, examining their newly excavated tunnel, which led straight north.
“It’s too small,” Alamour grumbled, keeping his voice low. “There’s barely room for the pallets, let alone for a worker to get them through to the other side. I’m telling you, the tunnel needs to be twice as wide.”
“And I’m telling you,
ibn ’amm
, that you worry too much. A wider tunnel would get spotted. Either by the police on this side, or the Israeli Defense Forces on that side. Either way: poof.” Al Korshan bundled his fingertips together and blew on them, as one might blow on a dandelion.
The larger, more populous sector of Rafah lay north of the checkpoints that split the city itself. All entry points into north Rafah, and the rest of the Gaza Strip, were heavily guarded by Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. The Jews watched all vehicles like hawks and all shipments were inspected. Reports of shortages on the Gaza side—from food to medicine to clothing—were rampant.
Which is why the Bedouin cousins, Khalil Al Korshan and Mohammad Alamour, had excavated their tunnel under the Philadelphi Road. Their family had known for years that shortages just mean profits for those with the will to make it happen.
But Alamour’s visual inspection of the tiny tunnel, with its long and frayed cable stringing together weak yellow work lights, had been vastly disappointing. There was no way workers could maneuver pallets of goods through the long, narrow tunnel.
Al Korshan sipped his tea, enjoying the sagelike flavor of the desert herb, habuck.
“Ibn ’amm.”
The term meant
cousin
. “I think I have a solution. Look behind you.”
Alamour turned in his aluminum chair.
An urchin stood outside the teashop, filthy face pressed up against the glass. He watched as a patron at another table stood and reached for the basket of week-old newspapers from Cairo, printed in Arabic, French, and English. As soon as the patron stood, the street child bolted. He was rail-thin, maybe six or seven years old. He dashed into the shop, grubby hands snatching the remainder of the patron’s breakfast roll, and was out the door before the patron turned or the teashop owner, smoking from a tin of Prince of Monaco cigarettes, could react.
The owner shouted a curse but the homeless boy was already out of sight.
“Fast, that one,” Alamour observed.
“I see him here most days. Feral, starving. And stronger than he looks. A patron caught him last week. The demon child fought like a Janissary. The Six-Day War would have lasted a lot longer than six days if the Faithful had had a few soldiers like him, let me tell you.”