Angels of Wrath

1

From the inside, it felt like a slow-motion kaleidoscope, a cut and jumble of color and action and sounds, none of which made any sense to Corrine.

On the outside, she saw a man enter the club, heard someone shout behind him.

He’s going to kill us, she thought to herself.

The man’s head exploded, but his body didn’t. A bullet had caught him.

Ferguson’s.

Ferguson!

The CIA officer jumped over the rail from the bar, gun in hand. The bodyguards leapt to their feet. One ran up toward the suicide bomber Ferguson had just killed, double-checking to make sure the man was dead. The other three were pulling her toward the door. Someone nearby jumped up, and just before any one could blast him waved a Lebanese police ID.

Ferguson saw the room as people: the blues singer, frozen at her piano; the two Syrians trying to get out the door; two young men, teenagers really, running for the back.

And then he realized what the hell was going on.

“No!” he yelled, shooting both of the young men. As they fell, the small submachine guns they’d had beneath their clothes, Mac-11s, fell to the floor.

Ferg bolted out the door behind the marines. Two cars were pulling up.

“No!” he shouted. “Out of here! It’s a trap! It’s a kidnapping! These guys are terrorists. Back through the front!”

One of the car doors opened. Ferguson fired once, then pirouetted in time to get a gunman coming down the alley. The marines started to fire at the gunmen appearing from the cars. Corinne ducked and began running back into the building.

“Yeah, that way,” said Ferguson. “Go! Go!”

Fie grabbed her and threw her through the doorway. As the bodyguards followed, he grabbed the small smoke grenade he had inside his belt, yanked the pin with his teeth, and whipped it behind him. Then he took another and threw it into the room ahead of them.

“Go! Front door! Go!” he yelled as the bomb exploded.

Ferg grabbed Corrine by the back of the shirt and pulled her with him through the pandemonium. One of the bodyguards took hold of Corrine by the right arm and Ferg let go, swooping down to grab the hideaway gun near his ankle. One of the bodyguards grabbed a chair and smashed out a front window. Ferguson heard an automatic rifle popping behind him somewhere, he grabbed at Corrine and helped throw her through the window.

Their driver and escort — more embassy Delta boys — had pulled the Mercedes up. The escort leveled an M249 squad-level machine gun at Ferguson as he came out with the others.

“He’s with us!” yelled a marine. “He’s ours!”

A distinct look of disappointment registered on the man’s face.

Corrine kept insisting that she was all right and could run on her own, but no one listened. They wedged her in the back, all six of them in the Mercedes. Their second vehicle, an SUV with a local driver, pulled up behind them, but there was no time to parcel out the seating arrangements. The Mercedes driver stomped the gas, and the car whipped forward. One of the marines screamed as his ankle got caught in the door, but he managed to get his foot inside as they skidded forward.

Four blocks later, the Mercedes and SUV veered onto a side street so that they could rearrange themselves. Ferguson pulled himself out of the back and flipped over into the front.

“Not here, not here!” he yelled. “This is the last place we want to be. That’s a mosque. Get us the hell out of here. Down the block, go. Go! Go!”

The driver gave him a dirty look.

“Go!” said Ferguson. He pulled his gun up, the small one, though the driver probably didn’t appreciate the difference.

“Listen to what Ferguson says,” Corrine yelled.

“Left, quick right,” said Ferguson, struggling to get his bearings straight as the car lurched into gear. They made it over to Abou Ali Square and headed south.

“All right, there’s a place we can get to beyond the town and get a helicopter in,” said Ferguson. “It’s scoped out.”

“I’m not leaving,” said Corrine.

“Bullshit you’re not leaving. Somebody just tried to kidnap you. Or assassinate you.”

“So I’m supposed to run away?”

“I don’t necessarily disagree with your attitude,” said Ferguson, turning around. “But given that you’re not here for any real reason except to kick in my teeth, I think you ought to get out while the getting out is good. You’re just a target now.”

Corrine, seated between two marines, realized Ferguson was right. But leaving town felt too much like running away.

“Hell, you were going tomorrow anyway,” said Ferguson, pulling out his phone. “Besides, it’ll get you out of another one of those tours.”

Corrine laughed, more out of relief than anything else.

One of the Delta boys had been shot in the arm; one of the marine boys had sprained or possibly broken his ankle in the escape. Otherwise they were unharmed. Ferguson told Corrigan to hustle in the MH-6 helo they had stationed offshore for an emergency bailout. It was sitting on a barge about ten minutes’ flying time away; they made it to the rendezvous point three minutes before the helo did.

“Who do you think did this?” Corrine asked as they waited for the chopper.

“Ordinarily I’d say the Syrians, but they looked a little surprised.”

“There were Syrians in the club?”

“They followed you in. Second bet would be some of the people you had dinner with.”

“They were government people and businessmen.”

“Is that supposed to rule them out?”

“Was it Khazaal?”

“If blaming him will get me permission to kill him, then sure.”

“Ferg.”

“No, I doubt it was Khazaal. He’s not here. Probably it was some group of local crazies trying to score big who heard that you were around.” He could hear the helicopter in the distance. He pointed at two of the bodyguards. “You two guys are on the ground with me. Everybody else goes home.”

One of the men started to object.

“No, listen to what he says,” said Corrine. “He’s with the CIA.”

“Well, don’t tell everybody.” Ferguson smiled. The helicopter had already started to glide in. “There’s not enough room for everybody in the chopper. It’s all right. You’re safe with me. I’ve had my rabies shots.”

Corrine started for the helicopter, then turned back. “Thanks,” she told Ferguson.

“For what?”

“For saving my life.”

“I was saving my own. You just got in I lie: way.”

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“Not unless I’m out of ammo.”

“I wanted to tell you something. I saw a man in the hotel whom I saw with Mossad.”

“Probably an officer,” said Ferguson. “Maybe he runs some agents up here.”

“He denounced me.”

“What?”

“He denounced me.” Corrine had to yell to make herself heard over the chopper. “He said his name was Fazel al-Qiam and he’d been a rep to the UN, an Arab. He denounced me.”

“Did he spell that?”

“No.”

“I’m just kidding. Thanks, I’ll check it out.”

“Can the helicopter get me down to Beirut?”

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to be there tomorrow.”

“It’ll take you to Oz if you want. Go.”

“Thanks, Ferg.”

“Yeah. I’ll hate myself in the morning.” Ferguson turned to the marine and Delta bodyguard staying behind. “Beer’s on me boys. But let’s find a place with a calmer floor show.”

2

The CIA and American intelligence in general were often faulted for not knowing much of what was going on in the world, but to Thomas Ciello, the criticism was not only unfair; it was wrong-headed. The CIA and its brother and sister agencies knew a great deal, so much, in fact, that it was impossible to know exactly what they knew.

Which was the real problem. Even someone like Thomas, who had made a career of knowing what the Agency knew, couldn’t possibly know everything. All he could do was skim and skim and skim, use search tools that made Google look like a disorganized orangutan, and occasionally — only occasionally — take wild guesses.

The wild guesses usually led nowhere. The search engines, however, helped him match the name of a Russian weapons expert with a place he didn’t expect to find him: Syria. Northwestern Syria, as a matter of fact, where Jurg Vassenka had booked a ticket on a rare flight to Latakia from Cairo via Damascus.

Vassenka was an expert in several weapons systems. The one that was most interesting in this case, given the Iraqi connection, was the Russian R-11/SS-1B, more popularly known as the Scud.

Thomas soon realized that Vassenka’s arrival in Latakia would not actually be all that unusual; the Syrian resort on the Mediterranean was a popular place for arms dealers, one of the many facts that the CIA knew that he didn’t. But by then Thomas had found more data on Latakia, including intercepted e-mails from several months before between Khazaal’s Iraqi group and a mosque in the city.

As he started to type the information into a brief report, he glanced at Professor Ragguzi’s manuscript on his desk. After he spoke to Corrigan, he promised himself, he would write an e-mail to the professor and point out his error on the UFOs. Surely a man as great as Ragguzi would appreciate knowing that he had made a mistake… as impossible as that was to contemplate.

3

Even if he hadn’t already made up his mind that Lebanon was a wrong turn, the kidnapping would have cinched it for Ferguson. Had it been successful, the attempt would have brought down the wrath of the local authorities on the radicals in town, something Khazaal wouldn’t have been foolish enough to want.

Figuring out precisely who had made the attempt on Corrine was a problem for smother day, if not an entirely different agency. Ferguson’s goal at the moment was to get out of the country without expending any more ammunition. Syria was the logical destination, but going over the nearby northern border involved document contingencies that would be hard to finesse for his two companions, Special Forces/Delta Sergeant Gordon Ranaman, and Marine Corporal Winchester Abbas. Ferguson decided that it would be considerably quicker to smuggle them across the border in the mountains to the northeast, which involved a great deal of driving, or go by sea, which not only would have meant procuring a boat but also would have deprived him of the car. So he chose the mountains.

There were many things Ferguson could have done with Abbas’s name, but the marine had won a rather unfortunate tag from a drill instructor upon his initiation to the Corps: Grumpy. Ranaman was already using it, and Ferguson saw no reason not to do so himself. Ranaman’s name was pronounced like rain man, thus suggesting Monsoon.

Nicknames decided, Ferg parceled out shifts for driving and sleeping. Two of the three men would stay awake while the other caught what rest he could in the backseat.

Which was how Ferguson came to be woken by this conversation:

“You know where we are?”

“On the road he told us to take.”

“You think we should stop?”

“They’re going to shoot us if we don’t.”

“They may shoot us if we do stop.”

“Looks to me like we can count on it.”

Ferguson bolted upright in the backseat. “Floor it,” he yelled, pulling out his big Glock.

They’d come upon a preborder checkpoint manned by Syrians to cut down on smuggling. Fortunately, the checkpoint was manned by only two soldiers who were a bit sleepy and slow to realize that the Mercedes wouldn’t stop. Unfortunately, the men a half mile away were much more awake, considerably more numerous, and better shots. They proved all three as the Mercedes rounded a curve down the pass on a narrow road leading to the border. The first few shots missed. The second set of rounds bounced harmlessly off the armor-plated hood. The next hundred or so, all fired by a light machine gun, did varying amounts of damage to the fenders and door but did not slow Grumpy, who was driving like a true marine: foot hard on the accelerator.

“Go, just keep going,” Ferguson said, pulling on his night glasses. There was an obstruction set up in the middle of the road, but Grumpy managed to get the Mercedes past it by plowing through a ditch, sideswiping the Syrians’ vehicle, and then barreling through a fence and down an embankment. When the car finally stopped, Ferguson grabbed his pack.

“End of the line guys, come on.” They jumped out into the field and began to run, about twenty or thirty seconds ahead of the Syrians.

“What if this a minefield?” said Monsoon.

“Hey, good idea,” said Ferguson. He reached to his belt and pulled out one of his small pin grenades. As he pulled the pin, he screamed in Arabic, “Mines! Mines!” and rolled the grenade on the ground, following it with a second and more warnings.

After the second grenade exploded, Ferguson cupped his hand around his mouth in a way he hoped would throw his voice and began yelping that his leg had been hurt. Whether his crude attempt at ventriloquism worked or not, the Syrians didn’t bother following.

“Now what do we do?” asked Monsoon when they were finally sure they were clear.

“One rule from now on,” Ferguson told them. “Never let me sleep through the good parts of the movie. Wake me up. OK?”

“Yes, sir,” said Grumpy.

“It’s all right. I forgot marines drive faster than most normal human beings,” said Ferguson. “I thought I had another half hour before we got close to the border.”

The other men laughed.

“All right. Next thing we do is find ourselves another car. And figure out where the hell we are.” He glanced at his watch. “But first I have to call home.”

The GPS device said they were about five miles from An Nabk, a small town on the road north of Damascus. Or as Corrigan put it, the middle of nowhere.

“I can tell you used to work for Rand McNally,” Ferguson said.

“We have a theory.”

“Who’s we?”

Corrigan explained what Thomas had found out about Latakia.

“Thomas admitted Vassenka might be a coincidence,” said Corrigan. “But he does know how to set up Scuds. He’s an expert on the fuel systems. So if the Iraqis had some of the missiles but needed help using them, he’d be able to get them on track.”

“He would, wouldn’t he?” said Ferguson. “Do we think Khazaal has some?”

“No. But you know there were at least two dozen that were never accounted for properly. At least. You could have parts buried in the desert somewhere.”

“I’d think of Khazaal more trying to sell them than use them,” said Ferguson. “He’s more meat and potatoes: rocket grenades, car bombs. According to the estimate I read, he’s supposed to be on his way out.”

“A Scud would change that.”

Sure would, thought Ferguson, especially if it were aimed at Baghdad when the president was there.

Or Israel.

“Thomas got this on his own or after talking to Fouad?”

“Thomas doesn’t talk to anybody,” said Corrigan. “Not in any language they can understand.”

“Fair enough,” said Ferguson. “We’ll be up there by the afternoon. Get me some rooms, backup gear, whole setup. I have two friends with me. Get Thera and the boys over there, too.”

Ferguson told Corrigan about the Mossad agent Corrine had encountered in the Tripoli hotel.

“No diplomat of that name exists,” said Corrigan after a quick check on one of the databases.

“Gee, no kidding, Jack. Here’s the thing, either the guy is a legitimate Mossad agent who was worried about having his cover blown, or he’s a double agent who Mossad ought to know about. Either way, we have to talk to Tischler about him. I just want some more information before I do it.”

“You’re going to talk to him?”

“Who do you suggest?”

“Um, Corrine said she would. She already has the call in.”

“Jeez, Louise, get her a real job, would you?” Ferguson pressed his lips together. “All right. Make sure she knows about the double-agent angle. Tischler won’t admit it, so she shouldn’t expect him to. Maybe I should tell her. Where is she?”

“En route to the embassy.”

“She should have been in Beirut hours ago.”

“She was. She got up early, and she’s on her way to Damascus.”

“What?”

“She was going there anyway. State’s going to file a formal protest with the Lebanese and—”

“Save the details for another time. I have to go steal a car.”

Smugglers in Syria were generally assumed to be heading east toward Iraq, which was one thing in Ferg’s favor. The second thing in his favor was the unexpected availability of a car bearing the faded but still visible indicia of the local Red Crescent society, the Arab world’s equivalent of the Red Cross. Ferguson didn’t steal the car; he bought it for five hundred Euros from a service station/junkyard/chicken farm that had just opened for the day. The vehicle, a ten-year-old Fiat with multicolored fenders, was a veritable bargain even considering the large rip in the backseat and the fact that it burned a quart of oil every two hundred miles.

Monsoon’s Arabic was quite good, his accent smoothed out by a year’s service at the Beirut embassy and considerable practice. Grumpy, on the other hand, knew only a few words, and even Ferg had a hard time understanding them. The marine’s grandfather had come from Iran, and Grumpy claimed to know Farsi very well. Ferguson didn’t know the language beyond a few rudimentary phrases, but he guessed that most people they encountered wouldn’t either. The mix of language skills suggested a potential cover story: they were relief coordinators on an inspection tour, Monsoon working with the UN from Damascus, Ferguson an international visitor from Ireland, Grumpy an Iranian.

The story wouldn’t have withstood very deep questioning, but it wasn’t put to the test; they made decent time north, bypassing the city of Hamah and cutting straight toward the coast and the region north of Tartus. Ferguson did the driving and got mildly lost only twice, both times because the car’s engine started acting up and he decided it would be better to break down off the main highway.

North of Baniyas the engine began overheating, and despite suggestions from Grumpy on how to nurse it the car finally died about ten miles south of Latakia. The distance was walkable, but after a mile they found a bus stop and joined a group of workers heading to town to fill night jobs in the tourist industry.

Tourism in Tripoli had ancient roots, but it had a very temporary feel there; the grayness of the town around the major hotels and the very visible scars of the Israeli occupation seemed to hang like a shroud at the edges. Latakia, by contrast, was brighter. You could see the money in the freshly paved highway and the sleek lampposts, along with the neon Western-style signs and the glittering domes of two new mosques, recently built by devout nouveau riche businessmen.

Tourists from the Middle East and southeastern Europe found their Euros went ten times as far in Latakia as in European hot spots: the casinos paid off a little better and neglected to report earnings to foreign tax authorities. The tight control of the Syrian government made the area extremely safe for tourists; there was no question of kidnapping or crazed suicide bombers here, unless they were under the direction of the government. The dictator and his family owned interests in several of the major resorts and casinos, further encouraging local prosperity. It might be terrible to live under a dictatorship, but playing here was not so bad. Arms dealers and other shady characters had flocked to the city over the past two years, finding the government mostly benign as long as the informal taxes were paid and the occasional favor rendered.

Corrigan found them a suite at an older hotel in town called the Taib, which translated roughly into English as “good,” an apt description. A business-class hotel that had a sedate, understated staff, Taib was around the corner from one of the main streets at the southeastern end of the city. The building’s thick masonry and plaster walls made listening devices harder to place, and the main clientele made them mostly a waste of time. Ferguson’s sweep turned up only one in the suite, and it had dead batteries. He placed white-noise machines in the two bedrooms and common area, then told his companions to rest up while he went scouting.

“You’re not tired?” Monsoon asked as Ferguson tried to work the wrinkles out of a sports coat for his evening forage.

“Nah. I slept on the plane,” he told him. “I have the key, but I’ll knock like this when I’m back.”

He rapped on the bureau, mimicking the first bars of “Jug of Punch,” an old Irish folk song.

“I may even sing to you.”

“What do we do if it’s not you?” asked Monsoon.

“After you shoot the person knocking, there’s a dock at a new hotel called Versailles about a mile and a half from here on the water. If something happens, you call this number and go there.”

Ferguson wrote down a local phone number and gave both men a copy.

“What do we say?” asked Grumpy.

“Nothing. Make sure the call is answered, then hang up. Someone will look for you at the dock. The person there will say your name and will know your social security number. If not, kill him. If you’re not already dead.”

4

Corrine studied her reflection in the mirror. Her blond hair had grown a trifle long; she reached into her toiletry purse and retrieved a scissors to trim the bangs.

The puffy bags under her eyes were a more difficult problem to solve. She daubed on a light veneer of makeup, then rubbed most of it off. Corrine ordinarily wore very little, and even the light touch looked artificial to her. She decided that the excitement of the night before would excuse a pair of heavy eyes, and if they didn’t, tough.

The Lebanese had bent over backward with apologies. When she insisted on continuing on to Damascus, everyone, from the security people to the ambassador, looked at her as if she were insane. But she saw no reason to change her plans. She wasn’t about to let the attempt on her life — if that’s what it was — influence what she did.

The fact that people thought it was appropriate to treat her as a piece of delicate china pissed her off. That was the way she thought about it: pissed off. Profanity and all.

Corrine closed her bag and checked her dress. She was scheduled to attend a small reception at the president’s palace with the ambassador that evening. American-Syrian relations had started to thaw with the incoming administration, although the country remained on the U.S.’s sanctions list for dealing with terrorists.

A knock on the door startled Corrine. She reached instinctively for the small pistol in her bag, even though she was in the embassy, but it was only the steward.

“Ma’am, you have a phone call from Washington,” he said through the door. “I believe it’s the White House.”

“On my way,” she replied, placing the gun back in the bag.

“Miss Alston, assure me that you are all right and that the rumors of your demise are greatly exaggerated,” said the president as soon as he came on the line.

“Mr. President, I’m fine. I hope there are no rumors to the contrary.” Corrine forced a smile for the ambassador, standing next to her in his study as she took the call.

“I was deeply concerned to hear that there was a problem,” said McCarthy. “Deeply concerned.”

“I’m fine.” Corrine summarized the incident briefly. While there were several competing theories, Corrine and the security chief at the embassy favored the one proposing that a group had wanted to kidnap her and hold her for ransom, most likely for political gains but possibly simply for financial. “It comes with the territory,” she said. “I would expect that things will be even more restless in the next few days and weeks, as the outlines of your plan become known. Many people are not interested in peace.”

“Restless does not begin to cover it, my deah, though it is an interesting turn of phrase,” said the president. “I assume your presence had something to do with the arrest of the individual we spoke of in Washington.”

“Something to do with it, yes.”

“Well, it would be very good timing to have him arrested,” said the president. “Very good timing indeed. His trial would underline the commitment to democracy and the future.” Future, in the president’s full Georgian drawl, sounded like a country on the distant horizon filled with precious things. “But you and I spoke of your personal safety before you left.”

“I’m fine, Mr. President.”

“Now don’t get your back up, deah. I know you can take care of yourself.”

“I can, sir.” Corrine felt her face flushing. She felt constrained by the fact that the ambassador was nearby. “Really, Mr. President. I am fine. And I am very capable of taking care of myself.”

McCarthy chuckled. “I would nevah say anything to the contrary, deah.”

5

“Ferguson, is that you?” said the man, spreading his arms in wonder. He spoke in English, with a heavy accent that most people took as Russian, though he was actually a Pole.

“Birk, pull up a chair.”

“I am surprised to see you,” replied Birk Ivanovich, still standing.

“You should be,” said Ferguson. The last time Birk had seen him had been at the end of Ferguson’s trip here a year before, when Ferguson disappeared into a blazing sunset, ostensibly the victim of a bomb blast. “Have some champagne with me.”

“Is it good luck to drink with a dead man?”

“Only with his ghost,” said Ferg.

“I didn’t set that bomb,” said Birk. He glanced at his two shadows, motioning with his head that they should find seats elsewhere in the elegant club room of the Max Hotel.

“If you had set the bomb I wouldn’t be here,” said Ferguson. The waiter came over with a fresh champagne flute and poured a drink for Birk, who was here so often that he had a regular table at the far end of the room.

“To your health,” said Birk, raising the filled glass.

“And yours.”

“Still have the yacht?” Ferguson asked.

“A new one. You should come see it some time. After all, your money helped me buy it.”

“Still have the one-eyed Greek as the captain?”

“Fired him. And the hands. I run it myself.”

“You do?”

Birk shrugged. “For now. You must sail out to see me. It is offshore, of course. I call it the Sharia.”

“Islamic justice? You do have a sense of humor, Birk.”

“I try,” said Birk, downing the champagne. “What are you in the market for today? More missiles?”

“Always looking,” said Ferg. “How hard is it to get things into Iraq?”

Birk made a face. “Why would you go there?”

“Me? I wouldn’t. How hard is it?”

Birk shrugged. “Not hard. But the market there is as bad as ever. What are you bringing in? Milk? Penicillin? That could get a good price. Not as good as under Saddam but still decent. Aspirin… you would be surprised.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of what you trade in.”

Birk made a face. “The Iraqis don’t buy. They sell.”

“You sure?”

“It is the same as when you were here last. They have plenty of small arms. The quality is so-so, but you can make it up on volume. I get my RPGs from there. Cheaper than Russia or Georgia. Ukraine, well, sometimes you can still find a bargain there.”

RPGs were rocket-propelled grenades.

“You buy a lot from them?” Ferguson asked.

“Usually not.” Birk shook his head. “Rifles, yes, if I can find a large lot. But even there, you must be careful. Some of the ones who come here to sell don’t even know the guns themselves. That is the depressing thing. They are not trying to cheat you; they just don’t know. Imagine that!”

“So what are you selling to Khazaal?”

“Khazaal?”

“The Iraqi resistance leader.”

“I know who he is. Please.” Birk shook his head. “You think I don’t know my business?”

“I know you know your business. That’s why I’m here.”

The arms dealer squinted at him in a way that was supposed to suggest that he had no idea what Ferguson was talking about; it had exactly the opposite effect.

Birk drained his champagne. “Business calls,” he said, starting to rise. “Another time—”

Ferguson clamped his hand on Birk’s forearm. “Come on, Birk. Don’t hold out on me. It’s bad form.”

The two bodyguards seated at the table behind Ferguson started to get up.

“Better tell them to get back,” said Ferg.

Birk signaled with his head that the men should relax. Ferguson let go of his arm. “There’s a convention in town that I want to be part of.”

Bilk shook his head. “Too dangerous even for you.”

“Are you invited?”

“They would roast me first.”

“A drink?” said Ferguson. He signaled to the waiter. “Something more serious than the champagne?”

“Why not? Bombay Sapphire. On the rocks.”

“Gin now? Last year it was vodka.”

“I like a change of pace.”

Ferguson took the barest of sips from the gin, then asked Birk what he knew. The Pole told him that he didn’t know much, only that no one should go near the castle north of town for the next few days. After gentle and not-so-gentle prodding and several more drinks, Birk told him that he had heard several Islamic fanatics — he used a Polish word whose most polite connotation was “maniacs” — were either already in town or en route. They were trying to do something in Iraq, but what it was, no one could say.

Birk hastened to assure Ferguson that he did not deal with such men directly, though occasionally he might facilitate arrangements with go-betweens. None, he claimed, were currently buying.

“Is Khazaal in town yet?” Ferguson asked.

“I cannot afford to keep track of which crazy is here or not here.”

“You can’t afford not to.”

Birk shrugged. “I heard, yes, but I don’t see him. He may not be a gambler.”

“When’s the meeting?”

“Maybe three days from now, but my information is sketchy as always. Try the secret police.”

Ferguson had the waiter bring over a full bottle of the gin, but this produced no more information. Finally he mentioned Jurg Vassenka, the Russian expert Thomas had discovered who was heading toward Latakia.

“An overrated Russian on his way out,” said Birk.

“You say that about all Russians.”

“I would not deal with him. He pretends to know systems that he does not know. He passes himself off as an expert, when he is an imbecile.”

“By birth, right?”

Birk nodded solemnly. Though he did business with them all the time, he did not like Russians.

“Is he going to the meeting?” Ferguson asked.

This possibility surprised Birk, though he frowned quickly to hide it. “I doubt it. Is he in Latakia?”

“He will be.”

“For that information, I owe you a favor,” said Birk.

“And I’ll be sure to collect,” said Ferguson.

6

Crusaders had started to build the castle in the twelfth century but abandoned it in favor of other, better sites farther up and down the coast. Its four walls ranged from six to twenty feet high and were doubled in places. There were two covered keep areas, but they were not much larger than a fair-sized bathroom. Overall, the footprint was perhaps a tenth of the size of the famous Krak des chevaliers, the medieval castle farther south near Tartūs, which had been built around the same time.

Ferguson leaned forward against the rocks a half mile away, watching through binoculars as two men worked on the approach to the old fort, apparently laying mines along the long, narrow road that led to the only entrance. Built on a rocky promontory overlooking the Mediterranean, the castle had only two doorways: one above a very narrow staircase cut into the stone that led up from the sea and the other at the end of the long road where the men were working. A sharp, clifflike drop near the castle wall and a rocky ravine helped isolate the narrow road, which had been constructed with a pair of switchback curves that could be covered from the old walls. Nobody without an invitation was crashing the party.

Ferguson flipped up the antenna on his phone. “How’s my U-2 doing?” he asked Lauren back in Virginia.

“Leaving Cyprus in about ten minutes. We’re going to get a Global Hawk to share time so we have around-the-clock coverage. Your devices planted?”

“Yeah, but you’re not going to see much from here that they won’t. I can’t get close enough to bug the place. I’m on that bluff a half mile away; ten feet from here they’d be all over me. I figure no more than four guys in there right now, counting the people planting the mines.”

Ferguson had planted a pair of low-light video cameras to keep the road under surveillance. Small transmitters fed the images into a satellite system that relayed them back to the Cube.

“What do you think?” Lauren asked.

“B-52 as soon as they’re all there. Get all the bees while they’re in the hive.”

“What do you really think?”

“That’s what I think,” said Ferguson. “Best pest eradicator in the business.”

“Have you talked to Ms. Alston?”

Ferguson grunted. “I will.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m going to get moving. Where’s the rest of the team?”

“Should be getting to the Taib any minute.”

“Uh oh. Who do you figure is the best singer on the team?”

“Singer?”

“Better give me Guns. Marines at least know how to hum.”

When Ferguson got to the hotel an hour later, he discovered that Rankin had decided to take the backup room on the second floor and wait for Ferguson to arrive rather than test the Delta boy’s ability to pick out a tune from a knock. This was just as well; Monsoon nearly clipped Ferguson even though he hummed along with his knock.

“You’re too close to the door,” Ferg told him as he walked in. “I would’ve flipped you on your back.”

“I would have shot you first,” said the bodyguard.

“Want to try it again?”

Monsoon wisely declined. Guns and Grumpy were soon trading marine drinking stories while Ferguson huddled with Fouad to discuss the layout and possibilities. It appeared that the castle was intended as a meeting place only. The ruins had nothing in the way of amenities, not even an outhouse. This suggested that the people coming in for the meeting would be spread around town and that therefore the best thing to do would be to look for them and with luck find someone they could bug or get close enough to eavesdrop or follow, on the theory that he would lead them to Khazaal. The more people they were looking for, Fouad argued, the easier it would be for them to find someone.

“Can’t say no to that.” Ferguson grinned at the Iraqi, thinking his father would have made the same point, he felt an ache suddenly to know more about his dad, what he might have done here, but it would have been out of place, too indulgent, to ask.

“Fouad, why don’t you and Rankin take a tour and arrange some of the backup stuff we need. Thera, get some party dresses, something you’d wear to buy a suitcase nuke. Everybody else hang tight.” Ferguson leaned back on the couch. “I’m going to catch some z’s. Somebody wake me up at six, all right?”

And with that, he closed his eyes and gave in to sleep.

Fouad had not been in Latakia for several years, and he found that what little he remembered of the place was wrong. He and Rankin rented two different cars and bought bicycles and other items, squirreling them around town for emergency use. Rankin explained that the contingency arrangements were often handled by a separate advance team, but Syria was a place that the Americans found difficult to operate in, a fact Fouad could have guessed on his own.

When their chores were done, the IraqHed Rankin to several coffee houses, sitting quietly and listening for openings in nearby discussions he might use to gather gossip. It was a task that took patience, and it was clear to Fouad that the American did not possess much of this, though he was wise enough to suffer in silence. Fouad gained little information anyway, learning only where the most devout mosques were; he was clearly a stranger, and his Baghdad accent was probably cause for even more suspicion.

Fouad was not like Ferguson, who could make someone’s suspicions play to his advantage. He was not like Ferguson at all, unable to fake his way deftly through a maze of traps. He lamented this shortcoming to Rankin as they traveled back to the Taib hotel.

“I wouldn’t compare myself to him,” said Rankin. “What he’s good at is lying.”

“He’s good at many things. Like his father.”

Rankin, not particularly interested in hearing Ferguson’s praises, said nothing.

Fouad wondered how a man so different from Ferguson had become one of his closest associates. But that would make sense, he decided: a man as wise as Ferguson would seek a shadow with different qualities. Rankin was brave, not braver than Ferguson but at his level, and he had proven himself resourceful and watchful.

“It’s almost six,” Rankin said. “We’ll get something to eat and head back.”

Soon after Ferguson woke up, Corrigan reported that two SUVs had been spotted going into the castle. Ferguson decided to have Rankin, Fouad, Monsoon, and Guns trail the SUVs with the help of the U-2. He and Thera would troll for information in the casinos and clubs. When Grumpy protested that he didn’t want to stand guard in the suite doing nothing, Fouad volunteered to change places with him. The old Iraqi said he would be only too happy to sit and watch the local TV

“No, sorry. Grumpy doesn’t speak Arabic well enough to talk himself out of anything,” Ferg told him. “There’ll be plenty of time for excitement down the line.”

“How do you know this isn’t the meeting?” said Rankin.

“Because my luck’s been too crappy to get that lucky,” said Ferguson. “Take the laptop and the backpack. Corrigan will set up a download so you can see them in real time. The spy plane has to stay off the coast, but he can see into the city from out there all right.”

“If we find Khazaal, can we shoot him?” asked Rankin.

“No. Better to lose him than shoot him.”

“That sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

7

Having the spy plane overhead simplified things a great deal. Rankin didn’t have to get too close to the castle and in fact decided it was much safer to stay along the highway a half mile away. He split his force into two elements: Guns and Monsoon in a car to the north, he and Grumpy to the south. The image from the spy plane was downloaded via satellite to the small antenna he’d unfolded from his rucksack nearby. The image was decent, though not quite as clean or detailed as that available back in the Cube, and Corrigan had an analyst on the satellite radio line relaying information. The men in the castle were simply checking out arrangements, walking around the area, probably making sure it would be secure and examining the area for bugs and the like. The interior could not be seen by the spy plane, but the men didn’t bother to stay in there very long, moving around the old battlements and nearby land, probably inspecting it for the upcoming meeting.

“I think they’re moving,” Corrigan told Rankin over the radio’s satellite frequency.

“All right. We’re on it.” Rankin had already seen it on the First Team laptop, which received a download over a separate satellite circuit. He closed the case and switched the radio to the team frequency. “Our guys are leaving,” he said. “Guns? You ready to dance?”

“Always.”

“Coming out,” said Corrigan. “Truck one is going north. Truck two… south.”

“They split up,” Rankin told the others as he put the laptop into his pack. “Guns, they should be past you in about sixty seconds. We’re just following,” he added. “Keep far back. And remember that’s a Ford you’re driving, not an M1A1.”

8

Birk’s most serious competitor in Latakia was a Syrian who had grown up in Germany and went by the name of Ras. He tended to lie more than Birk but had better connections with the Syrian police. Unfortunately, a good deal of what they told Ras were lies.

Ras generally spent early evenings in the Agamemnon, a small, plush hotel on the Blue Coast north of Latakia. He owned a table in a room they called the Barroom, a lavish, nineteenth-century dining room with crystal chandeliers and tuxedoed waiters. Ras usually had a ship captain or two at his side; a good deal of his arms were sold to foreign concerns and traveled through Latakia’s port. But this evening he was sipping a vodka martini alone. He frowned when he saw Ferguson but brightened considerably when he realized Thera was with him.

“Mr. IRA,” Ras said to Ferguson in German-accented English as he approached the table. “Your wife?”

“I wish,” said Ferguson. He pulled out the chair for Thera. Unlike Birk, Ras believed the cover story Ferguson had used on his last visit.

“A most beautiful woman,” said Ras, standing and taking her hand to kiss it.

Thera played along as Ferguson had coached her, saying nothing and sitting down; the strong, silent type intrigued Ras and left him howling for more.

“Perrier,” Ferguson told the waiter.

“Is that all?” said Ras.

“With a twist. Thanks.”

“I will have a bourbon on the rocks,” said Thera. She wore a flowered two-piece skirt set whose silk was too tight for her to hide more than one small pistol on her inner thigh.

Ras’s face lit up as he pushed his drink aside. “The same for me. Good bourbon. American. Your best.”

The waiter bowed and went off.

“I hear you had some excitement in town the last time you were here,” Ras told Ferguson, even as he stared at Thera.

“Every day is an adventure.”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“Guilty conscience?” Ferguson leaned back in the chair, observing the rest of the room. Besides the Syrian intelligence agents on semipermanent assignment here, he thought he recognized someone from the French military intelligence agency and a Czech who sold information to the Russians.

“If I had wanted to kill you, I assure you I would not have missed,” said Ras.

“Everybody tells me that.”

Their drinks arrived. Ras made sure to clink glasses with Thera, who took the tiniest possible sip.

“So who was gunning for me?” Ferguson asked.

“You have many enemies here. Many.”

Thera watched as the two men boxed around a bit, Ferguson letting Ras steal long glances at her before prodding the conversation along. When he finally got around to why they had come, it seemed like an afterthought, catching up on gossip: he’d heard the Russian Vassenka was in town.

“Vassenka?” Ras’s face momentarily blanched. “An idiot. I hope not.”

“Doesn’t like you much, does he?” said Ferguson, going with the reaction.

“An idiot.”

“Well, you should have paid him,” said Ferguson.

Thera thought it was a guess, but it was a masterful one. Ras shook his head and held up his glass for another drink.

Ferguson now moved in for the kill, still subtle but more aggressive. Given that Ras believed his old cover story, it was natural that he was interested in Vassenka as a competitor. But even before Ras’s refill arrived, he could tell that the Syrian had no useful information. He lingered a bit, finishing his seltzer before rising to go.

“Leaving so soon?” asked Ras.

“At some point, perhaps we will be interested in rifles,” said Ferguson. “A few days.”

“I can offer so much more,” said Ras, looking at Thera.

Ferguson took her arm proprietarily.

“Didn’t get much from that,” said Thera as they made their way to Buenos, another casino nearby.

“Sure I did.”

“Like?”

“Vassenka’s not here yet, and no one around town has been talking him up. Ras doesn’t know about the meeting, probably because the Syrians haven’t told him. He’ll tell the Syrians about Vassenka, and they’ll be looking for him. If they find him, they’ll tell Ras, and Ras will tell me. If I need him to. That enough for you?”

“It’s OK.”

“You get all the credit,” added Ferguson. “Dress looks good. I’m starting to get a little sweet on you myself.”

She laughed, thinking he was joking.

9

The first truck made a U-turn soon after heading onto the highway, which left both trucks going south in the same direction, separated by about a half mile. Alerted by Corrigan, Rankin delayed leaving his hiding place, guessing that the idea had been to catch anyone following the second SUV. It was absolutely the right move, but it would make it more difficult to track them closely if they split up later on.

Both the U-2 and the Global Hawk that alternated with it used an integrated sensor suite built by Raytheon for surveillance work. The sensor set had an active electronically scanned array (AESA) that allowed moving targets to be identified and tracked at long range. The multihyperspectral electro-optic infrared sensors (in layman’s terms, a very good digital camera that could see in the dark) transmitted a stream of images to the satellite unit and from there back to the Cube and the team’s laptop. More refined though similar to the units that had been used for battlefield and bombing assessment during the 2003 Iraq War, the system provided a commanding view of what was going on in the city. But no matter how advanced, technology had its limits, as became apparent when the trucks pulled into a lot containing similar vehicles just outside the city.

A car lot, where the vehicles had been borrowed or stolen from hours before.

“There’s a bus coming,” said Corrigan.

Rankin cursed and stepped on the gas, but by the time he got close enough to see the bus the men were aboard and it was moving.

“We’ll tag along, see if they get off together,” said Rankin, though he knew it was hopeless. “Best we can do.”

10

Ferguson was just about to call it a night when a large man in an ill-fitting suit walked into the Milad, a crowded club on the Blue Beach. The pale-ski lined, pimple-faced European looked out of place here, but then he probably would have looked out of place at his own funeral.

“Birk wants to talk,” said the man. “At the Max.”

“Very good,” said Ferguson. “We were just on our way over.”

The Max awed Thera. The place was one part European grand hotel and another part Las Vegas fun palace.

“Nice place,” she said as Ferguson tugged her inside.

“It’ll do. Don’t say anything in Russian. Or about Russia. And count your fingers when we’re done.”

Birk was sitting with Jean Allsparté, an Algerian who specialized in arranging transport for items large and small. Ferguson remembered from his last visit that Allsparté spent almost all of his time in town gambling; clearly he was here now for a deal. Birk dismissed him as soon as he saw Ferguson arrive: Allsparté slipped away before Ferguson could get close enough to ask how his luck was running these days.

“Ferg, a pleasure,” said Birk rising. “And with such lovely company tonight.” He took Thera’s hand as gallantly as Ras had but then turned to Ferguson and said, “She leaves.”

“She’s with me.”

Birk shook his head. “No.”

Ferguson gestured to Thera that she should go over near the bar. “Not too far,” he said. He watched her leave, then turned to Birk. “So talk to me.”

“Recently on the market. Very nice.”

“I know you’re speaking English, Birk, but I’m not getting the words.”

“Mashinostroenia.”

“Russian weapons manufacturer,” said Ferguson. “Speak English. Or I’ll speak Polish.”

“The P-120 Malakhit 4K-85 — the Siren cruise missile. One has recently become available.”

“That’s nice.”

The weapon Birk was referring to — known to NATO as the SS-N-9 Siren — was an antiship cruise missile that entered Russian (at the time, Soviet) service in 1969. The weapon carried a five-hundred-kilogram conventional warhead, or nuke. Primarily a ship-launched missile, it was also carried aboard Russian “Charlie II”-class submarines. Depending on how it was launched, it had a sixty-nautical-mile range, with inertial and radar-terminal homing, meaning that once fired it could find its own way to the target.

According to some sources, the Russians had experimented with a video guidance system for the weapon that allowed it to be steered to a precise aim point (though in practice the target would have had to be fairly large: a house as opposed to a door, for example). It was a potent missile, though weapons such as the “Switchblade” (Kh-35 Uran, a Harpoon knock-off) had made it technically obsolete in the Russian inventory.

“Come on. You would like one, no?” prompted Birk. “You bought the SA-2s last year.”

“Different program,” said Ferguson. “What sort of warhead?”

“What would you like?”

“What can you get?”

Birk laughed. “I like you, Ferguson, really. You dance like one of us. You are Polish, no? Tell me you are, and I slice ten percent from the price.”

“Not according to Mom. But she might’ve had reason to lie.”

“Perhaps we should go into business as partners.”

“You’d trust me as your partner?”

“Of course not. That is why you would make a good partner.”

“Maybe when I retire.”

“One million.”

“Too much.”

Actually, the price was low, and under other circumstances Ferguson would have grabbed it. But he had too many other things to worry about and doubted he could talk Corrine Alston into the idea.

“I will find many buyers,” said Birk. “There is a primitive launching system included; no need for elaborate preparation.”

“You have the Titanit radar, too, huh?”

“No, but this is not a serious deficiency. A GPS kit has been installed. There is internal guidance as a backup and—”

“Whose GPS kit? American?”

“Russian, actually,” said Birk. GPS stood for “global positioning satellite” and technically referred to a group of satellites launched by America. But the initials had become short hand for any system using satellites for target guidance. The satellites and the radios that got their bearings from them had many uses; civilians were familiar with the GPS system from mapping programs used for getting directions in high-end automobiles. The U.S. military had pioneered the use of relatively inexpensive “kits” that could be added to otherwise simple weapons: an iron bomb, for example, could be turned into a precision-guided munition with such a system steering its tail fins. The Russians had a satellite network named Glosnass that worked the same way.

Satellite guidance had not been invented when the Siren was first put into service; even if it had been, the Russians wanted the weapon to strike ships, which presumably wouldn’t stay at a fixed point on the earth’s surface very long. But on the black market, such a system would make the missile more desirable to anyone wishing to hit a fixed target. Not only would it be more accurate, it would be easier to use.

A five-hundred-kilogram warhead (a bit more than a thousand pounds) could obliterate a decent-sized building. A nuke could take out a good-sized city.

“Can you get a satellite kit for other missiles?” Ferguson asked.

“Everything is for sale.” Birk sighed. He hated it when negotiations moved off point. “As I understand it, the Siren missile is aimed in the proper direction, then launched. After a certain time the guidance system takes over. The accuracy is very good. Within three meters, guaranteed.”

“Or my money back, right?”

Birk smiled.

“You have an EUC for the missile?” Ferguson was referring to an end-user certificate, a document used by governments to certify that weapons systems had been bought legally. The usual fee for one — fraudulent, of course — started at one hundred thousand dollars.

“That would be pointless in this case,” admitted Birk. “There were not so many made: five hundred, eight hundred… I lose track.”

“I’ll bet.”

“A very good deal for you, Ferguson. A dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.”

“Whose hands?”

Birk shrugged.

“The warhead on the Siren, a nuke?”

“Conventional, alas. But something of this size is very hard to come by. Five hundred kilograms. It would leave quite a hole. And of course you could always remove the conventional payload and replace it with something more to your liking.”

“Do you have more?” asked Ferguson.

“Only the one.”

“If there are so few, where did this one come from?”

“That is always a question I do not ask. One would believe a government,” said Birk. “But I do not deal direct.”

“And the person who has this has only one?”

“Had one. It is now in my possession.”

“What about the guidance system?” asked Ferguson.

“Part of the package.”

“Are there other guidance systems? I might be interested in buying a few.”

“What missile would you like them for?”

“How about a Scud?”

Birk made a face. “An inferior product. I would not sell you one.”

“The guidance system or the missile?”

“Either. The Scud is a piece of junk.”

Not, thought Ferguson, if it were guided by a GPS system, though admittedly this would take a bit of tinkering. “Who would you sell it to?”

“I have no Scuds. Today, I’m selling the Siren. Tomorrow, who knows? Are you a serious buyer?”

“I’ll talk to my superiors and see what we can do.”

“You have a superior?” Birk laughed. “I don’t believe it. Not even God would be your superior. As a show of good faith, one piece of interesting gossip,” added Birk. “First, a vodka.”

“Back to vodka?”

“One strays but always comes home. Drinking is like marriage.”

They shared a shot of an obscure Polish vodka that Birk claimed was the best alcohol in existence. To Ferguson it tasted one step removed from potato peelings — and a step in the wrong direction.

“Look for your friend Khazaal in a mosque,” said Birk.

“Which one?”

Birk shook his head. “You are supposed to be the spy. I cannot keep track of these mosques. They are all alike to me.”

Ferg got up, winking at Thera.

“Five hundred thousand, firm,” said Birk.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

11

Corrine tried twice more to get hold of Tischler without getting a response. When she told Ferguson about it, he didn’t seem surprised.

“His man may have already filled him in,” Ferguson told her.

“Wouldn’t it be polite to return my call? He doesn’t know what it’s about.”

“It would be smart to return your call, because he doesn’t know what you want, even if he thinks he does,” said Ferguson. “But Tischler doesn’t do polite. Think of it this way: he figures you’re going to tell him his man is a screwup.”

“How is he a screwup?”

“He should have skulked away without seeing you, taking the chance that you wouldn’t notice or might not remember, and knowing that even if you did, you’re supposed to be an ally and ought to know enough to keep your mouth shut. This way there was no chance that you wouldn’t notice him.”

“I thought Mossad people don’t screw up.”

“They’re human,” said Ferguson.

“If he’s not going to call me back, the hell with him.”

“I guess,” said Ferguson. He paused a moment, then changed the subject. “Listen, I need a million dollars.”

“What?”

“I can probably get the price down a bit, but it’s going to be in that neighborhood.”

“For what?”

Ferguson explained that he wanted to buy the Russian ship-to-ship missile Birk had for sale.

“I’ll have to talk to Washington,” she said doubtfully.

“They’re going to tell you it’s not in the budget,” said Ferguson. “The program to buy nuclear-capable cruise missiles ran out of funds eight months ago.”

“Well, then, why are you asking me?”

“Because it’s an opportunity to take a pretty potent missile off the market,” said Ferguson. “And because it’ll make my next request seem much more reasonable.”

“Which is?”

“First, let me ask you: are you still ruling out an air strike? Van says he can get some Stealth Fighters overhead in a half hour. Personally, I prefer B-52s.”

“Absolutely, positively not. No aggression on Syrian soil. Nothing like that. We’re trying to improve relations, not end them for all time.”

“All right. I’m going to need a hundred thousand dollars, greenbacks, in the next couple of days. I can’t finesse it with local counterfeit or Euros.”

“For what? Another missile?”

“No. I need some mortars and some other weapons, along with some Semtex, and I’m going to have to overpay to get them.”

“Mortars? You’re out of your mind.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” said Ferguson. “The sooner the better. I’ll make the arrangements myself if you tell Corrigan it’s cool.”

“It’s not cool.”

“Look, I need the money. Otherwise I’m going to have to rob a bank, and I don’t really have time.”

“You wouldn’t rob a bank.”

“I will if I have to.” Ferguson gave her a brief rundown of what he needed the money for. “I know it’s a rip-off, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I want to make it look at least plausible that a rival group hit them. With Fouad’s help, I’ll start spreading the rumor tonight that there’s another group coming to town. We’ll make some rentals, set up a paper trail. All we have to do is give the Syrians a few little tidbits so they can claim it wasn’t the U.S., and we’ll be all right.”

“The U.S. government cannot condone the operation of an international outlaw, much less make a deal with him. You can’t go and buy mortars, for cryin’ out loud.”

“Jeez, Madame Counselor, where have you been for the last century? Even Washington bought arms on the black market.”

“You are not George Washington.”

“You were just going to check on a cruise missile.”

“You said it could carry a nuke.” Corrine sighed. “Tell me you’re not going to kill Khazaal with these mortars.”

“Never mind. I’ll rob the bank.”

“Ferguson, don’t blackmail me.”

“Now there’s an approach I hadn’t thought of.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“Not if I can help it. And not with the mortars.”

“Every cent better be accounted for. Every cent.”

“I’ll get the invoice in triplicate.”

“Be serious, Ferg. You can’t cause an international incident here. You cannot.”

“That’s why I need the money. Look, this is basically what we did to get Kiro in Chechnya.”

“That was in Chechnya. No one cares what happens there.”

“The Russians do.”

Corrine realized that he had her checkmated at every turn. Once again, she felt like a complete amateur and not, she had to admit, without reason. She thought that she had proven herself in the dirty-bomb operation. And she had — with everyone but the most important person, Ferguson. She was never going to win him over. In his eyes, she was always going to be the outsider, the “suit” he had to work around to get his job done. Which was baloney.

“You live dangerously, Bob. I respect that. And I appreciate the fact that you saved my life. But if you go too far here, I’m not going to be there to reel you in.”

“He who lives by the sword, right?”

She could just about see his smirk in front of her.

“I need you to do one more thing for me,” he added. “It’s a little dangerous, so I’ll understand—”

“What?” she snapped, angry that he was manipulating her so transparently.

“There’s a Russian coming into Damascus in a few hours. I was going to send Guns and one of the rentals I picked up from you down there, but I have him working another angle. If you could help out—”

“What do you need?”

“I’m going to use two people who are agents of ours in town, but I don’t want to give them more information than necessary, especially ahead of time,” said Ferguson. “All you have to do is point out who they have to follow, put them on the plane, and that’s that.”

“What if he doesn’t take the plane?”

“Same deal. They should be able to handle it. I’ll have a photo sent to the embassy.”

“All right.”

“One other thing.”

“Yes?”

“He’d be easier to follow if he had a tracking device. One’s being delivered to you personally in half an hour. You twist it to turn it on. Tell them not to twist it until they’re ready to leave it. The battery’s pretty limited. It’s a tiny little bug, smaller than your fingernail. Well, smaller than my fingernail.”

“I have small fingernails.”

“There’s nobody in the airport I trust to get it on his baggage behind the scenes, so it has to go on him.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Not you, them.”

“How are they supposed to do it?”

“They’ll figure it out. I don’t need to know operational details.”

“Very funny.”

“You sure you can do it? If not, I can get someone from the embassy. I just don’t trust the people there.”

Was this some sort of test, she wondered.

“I can handle it,” Corrine told him. “Look, I appreciate the fact that you saved my life.”

“Yeah, well, don’t rub it in. We all do things we regret.”

“You can’t turn it off, can you?”

“Would you respect me if I could?”

She killed the connection before he could hear her laugh.

12

The operation Ferguson had sent Guns on was a long-shot play, one of those stabs in the dark that you made every so often in hopes of winning big time.

The mosque Thomas had linked to Khazaal was Al-Norui Khad in the southwestern corner of the city. Fouad’s brief foray into gossip made it seem possible; the mosque’s resident imam, or teacher, was considered one of the more strident in town, though whether that translated into support for the Iraq resistance was a fair question.

One way to answer that question, Ferguson thought, was to send in a visitor who spoke Russian and could be mistaken for Vassenka.

“It’s either you or me,” he told Guns. “Your accent’s probably better, and my face has been in town before.”

“I’ll do it.”

“We’ll send Fouad in with you. And Monsoon,” added Ferguson. “Because Monsoon’s Arabic is good, right?”

Monsoon ripped off a passage from the Koran.

“All right then,” said Ferguson, echoing his lines. “Blessed be to all of us, peace to the good people of the Book.”

Like many mosques, Al-Norui Khad was actually a collection of buildings interconnected and related, all gathered around an old wall. Though not a very large mosque, even for Latakia, Al-Norui Khad had a good-sized minaret, the tower traditionally used to call believers to prayer. A small dome sat over the sanctuary at the western end of the complex, and there were three other fair-sized buildings that extended inward from the walls. An old inlet from the sea extended in a lagoon along the southern wall. There was only one entrance from the street, which made it easy to watch the mosque. Rankin planted a pair of video cameras in lampposts on either side of the block.

Fouad rambled in first, unarmed but with a bug so they could hear any advice he gave. An elaborate mosaic with blue, yellow, and white stones marked the pathway through the gate and opened into a bricked space beyond the wall. A pair of two-story yellow stone buildings sat on either side of the entrance, looking as if they had grown out from the wall. One was being used as a school, infirmary, and social center; the other, much more dilapidated, seemed not to have been used for some time. Fouad kept up a running commentary, as though he were a crazy man talking to himself as well as others. There were a dozen or so men on the grounds, some on their way to pray and others on errands related to the school or other concerns. A man watched over a book stall; another handed pamphlets out to visitors. Fouad found an administrator’s office and mumbled the route as he retraced his steps. This was where Guns should go and mention that he had recently come from Chechnya and was looking for a place to stay.

The mosque itself sat just beyond the school building. Like several other holy sites in the Middle East, its stones had been converted to Islamic use from an earlier faith, in this case a small church built by Christians sometime around a.d. 600 or 700, which itself was erected over the site of a temple used by Zoroastrinns. The Muslim alterations had enlarged the basic footprint and raised the walls as well as added the dome. Had it not been for a plaque declaring that the building had once belonged to Christians, only an expert would have known. The qibla wall oriented the faithful toward Mecca when they prayed; the space around the courtyard or sahn was dominated by thick pillars that held the roof.

Fouad left his shoes and joined the others purifying themselves at the fountain before going to pray.

“God is greater,” prayed Fouad. “All praise be to Allah…”

He had learned the words as a child, but at many times in his life they came to him fresh, their meaning revealed again. Today was one of those times: as the prayers proceeded, so did his understanding. The words from the al-Talbiyah (“Compliance”) were like ringing truth: “Here I am, God, at your command. Here I am!”

What did God require of him? The men he was here to find invoked God. Was it the same God? How could they be so badly mistaken?

But they were mistaken. The Prophet (peace be unto Him) had preached only necessary war, had forbidden the killing of innocents, had offered peace to those who would live in peace with the faithful.

Sadness overcame Fouad, as if he were responsible for the others’ sins and mistakes in addition to his own.

“Glory to my Lord,” he said, flattening himself prostrate on the stones. “Glory to my Lord, Most High.”

Guns timed his arrival so that he came through the gates just after prayers. He headed toward the administrative office, shadowed by Monsoon. Since Fouad hadn’t seen any weapons detectors, or guards for that matter, they went in with pistols under their flowing Arab-style clothes, along with bugs similar to the one Fouad had been given. They milled around the outside of the building for a moment, as if looking for someone, then Guns went to the office and, in Chechnya-inflected Russian, explained that he had just come to the city and desired guidance on a good place to stay.

The man at the desk didn’t understand a single word he said.

Guns repeated it, nearly word for word. The man shook his head.

Guns now tried, haltingly, to say in Arabic where he was from and what he wanted. Ferguson had told him not to worry about his pronunciation, for the important thing was to make clear that he was from Russia, which he did by taking his passport from his pocket and using it as a prop. He then asked if the man spoke French; this won him another blank stare.

“Englishki?” said Guns. “Speak Eug lush?”

“English?” said the man.

“Dab, un little. From Russia. I am from Russia.” He continued in half Russian, half English to mention the town in Chechnya he’d come from and the path he’d taken through Georgia to Egypt, which duplicated the route Corrigan had said Vassenka would take. The man at the desk simply nodded.

“Rooms?” said Guns finally.

“We are not a hotel, my brother.”

“Where? A hotel?”

The man wrote down the address of a place in town. As he did, the phone on his desk rang. He frowned, then picked it up. After a few moments his eyes widened in alarm. He hit the receiver button, then tapped the keys, talking quickly when someone came on the other line.

“I am very sorry,” he said, rising and handing the paper with the hotel to Guns. “I have an emergency.”

Guns followed the man out of the building, toward the mosque, where a crowd had gathered. A siren wailed above the walls. People began to shout. Guns turned and saw an ambulance backing through the narrow passage into the courtyard. A man was carried from the mosque as the rear of the ambulance was opened and a stretcher brought out.

The man they laid on it was Fouad.

13

Even before they came near her, Corrine realized that the two men in the terminal were the agents Corrigan had sent to trail the Russian. That, she decided, was not good; if she could identify them with just a glance, wouldn’t he?

She went back to reading the paper she’d bought. One of her two embassy guards sat in the chair next to her; the other was a row away, watching. “Ms. Alston?” said one of the men, standing next to her. The man smiled down at her. With a white shirt and tie, he looked more like a detective than a spy.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Are you Ms. Alston? Do you have something for us?”

Corrine glanced sideways at the guard, one of the Delta men who had escaped from the club with her. He had a perplexed look on his face. Clearly he couldn’t believe it either.

Corrine glanced at her watch. The Russian’s plane was due in twenty minutes.

“Plans have changed,” she said. “Give me a phone number where I can reach you.”

I’m sorry, Ms. Alston, I didn’t quite catch that,” said Corrigan.

“I said, who the hell were those guys?”

“Egyptians. They’ve done some work for us before. All of our people are tied up chasing down security leads related to the president’s visit and—”

“You’re serious? Those were legitimate agents?”

“We’ve gotten information from them. The Agency has, not Special Demands. Ferg didn’t give me much time. We have to take what we can get sometimes.”

“No. We don’t. I’ll take care of trailing the Russian myself.”

“Uh, ma’am, do you think that’s a good idea?”

“He’s only being trailed to the airport, right? In Latakia?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“I think I can handle that.” She killed the connection as he continued to protest.

Corrine saw the Russian come off the plane, watching as he walked toward the boarding area for the flight to Latakia. The small aircraft, an Embraer EMB-120 Brasilia, held only thirty passengers, and Corrine had already reserved places for herself and the two Delta bodyguards. In order to be prepared in case Vassenka changed his mind at the last minute, the men were outside in rental cars, poised in different spots in the lot. Corrine’s job was to watch him inside and to plant the tracking device.

Not difficult work, she thought. All she had to do was follow along, get behind him in line, and slip the tiny bug onto his sweater. The exterior of the device looked like a burr, the sort of thing you might pick up walking through a field in the fall. Corrine had it perched between her fingers but worried that she would drop it on the carpet. She had no backup.

As the Russian reached the main hallway, he stopped to get his bearings. Corrine started to stop as well, then realized this was the perfect opportunity. She raised her hand slightly, bug ready, and walked into the Russian’s hack. Pretending to be startled, she jerked her hand back, glancing at the bug to make sure it was planted before twisting and falling down.

“Ow,” she said.

The Russian spun defensively, nearly tripping over her. He sputtered something in Russian that Corrine didn’t understand, though she assumed he wasn’t asking for a date.

“Excuse me. I’m sorry,” she said. She got to her feet unsteadily, dragging out her rise as if she were uncoordinated. “I didn’t see you there.”

He frowned at her, said something else in Russian, and then in English told her she was a clumsy oaf. Then he realized how pretty she was and extended his hand.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“I’m fine, yes. Thank you. It was my fault.”

“You are an American,” he told her. “Funny you should be in Syria.”

“Syria is a lovely country.”

“Not for Americans.”

“I’m on business.”

The photo she had gotten from Corrigan made him look a little older than he was in real life. He wasn’t unattractive, though the thick scent of vodka on his breath was a turnoff.

So was the grip on her arm.

“I have some time,” he said.

“You’re going to let go of me now,” said Corrine.

He smiled in a way that convinced her he wasn’t going to. Corrine smiled back and then stomped her heel into his instep. As he started to jerk hack, she kicked again, this time zeroing the heel into the ankle of his other foot. She shrugged as he fell to the floor.

Several Arab men passing nearby came up to assist her, but it was unnecessary. She thanked them, calmly rearranged her scarf, and walked across the concourse, trying not to smirk.

Corrine waited until the Russian had gone to the gate to call her shadows outside. “I think just one of you should come in and fly with me,” she said. “I don’t trust him not to bolt or get off the plane.”

“You’re coming with us?” said one of the men.

“All I have to do is fly to Latakia. Ferguson will take it from there.”

“Uh—”

“Charles, you’re with me,” she said. “Danny, we’ll see you in a few hours.”

14

The power of money had always impressed Judy Coldwell, but in the Middle East it could be absolutely intoxicating. A folded hundred-dollar bill could get one on an airliner that was supposedly booked; two would stop a customs agent’s inquiries. A single fifty-dollar bill was enough to ensure that her registration at the hotel was entered under a name different from the one on her passport — Benjamin Thatch.

Yesterday, Coldwell had stopped in Athens, Greece, where she visited a small pawnshop on a backstreet seldom traveled by tourists. She had retrieved a small suitcase, sewn into the lining of which was a list of accounts as well as the name of a local bank and a bank officer who did not ask many questions, as long as they were accompanied by the right number of hundred-dollar bills. Within an hour he had confirmed that the accounts in Morocco and Austria were accessible. Together, they held about two hundred thousand dollars. Unfortunately, that was a small sum compared to the task that needed to be accomplished.

Coldwell took off her shoes and reached to undo the top button on her blouse. She was tired from the journey, which had included stops in France and Egypt as well as Greece. She would take a bath and then sleep. Tomorrow she would resume her mission.

And do what, exactly? Make herself visible, surely. Find the places where the demons swarmed. She would go to the merchants of hate, mention her brother’s name. Eventually, the contact that Benjamin had made would come to her.

And then what? Would he scoff at thousands when millions were needed?

Coldwell got up from the chair and went to the bathroom. As she leaned over the tub she felt her hands begin to shake. She stared at her fingers; they seemed gnarled, foreign, not hers at all. Fear shot through her; she was not up to the task.

The room turned to ice. Coldwell felt as if she were falling. She had experienced this sensation several times in her life, always at moments of great stress. The first had been as a five-year-old, when she discovered her mother in the basement, her head wrapped in a plastic bag taped tightly so she could not breathe.

Suicide, though the five-year-old had no comprehension what that meant.

Coldwell found herself sitting on the floor, paralyzed. She was a little girl again, staring at the dead body, unable to go back up the stairs.

“I have faced great problems in the past,” Coldwell said aloud. “I can overcome this.”

Still she did not move. She tried thinking of achievements, of struggles. Not a year after she had been hired by the oil company, she had arranged for her boss (a slime and reprobate) to be freed from a Cairo jail after that unfortunate incident with several local boys. That task had been extremely difficult: harder than this, surely, and with greater personal risk. One man had held a knife at her throat and drawn blood.

If she could succeed then, she could succeed now.

Coldwell tried to rise but could not. Little had been at stake in Cairo beyond her life and that of her boss. This… this was an entire millennium waiting to be born.

That was all the more reason that she would succeed, wasn’t it? For she had the great weight of history on her side. Change was coming; it was inevitable. All she had to do was play her own small role in it, a droplet of rain in the stream.

“I can do it,” she said. “I will not falter.”

Slowly, unsteadily, Coldwell rose. A bath would feel wonderful. And after that, bed.

15

Monsoon sidled up next to Guns in the courtyard between the mosque and the outer wall. There were twenty or so men crowded around the ambulance, trying to see what had happened to the man the medics were working on.

Guns sneezed, then reached for a handkerchief. “Fouad,” he whispered to Monsoon. “Find out what happened.”

Monsoon didn’t acknowledge but shifted forward slightly, craning his head to get a better view. Then he asked a man in Arabic what was going on.

“Allah has called him,” answered the man.

“What?”

The man clutched at his heart. “His time,” he said. “It is a sign of holiness and worth to be called while praying,” said the man approvingly. “Perhaps the brother’s greatest wish was granted.”

Listening in the van, Ferguson turned to the small laptop computer he was using to track the signals from the locator devices planted on Fouad, Guns, and Monsoon, making sure they were working. He’d known the moment Fouad collapsed in the mosque that the Iraqi wasn’t faking; he’d gasped and made a muffled chirp like a young bird that had fallen from its nest. He upped the audio and heard him breathing irregularly, struggling for life.

Ferguson couldn’t help thinking of his father, who’d had a heart attack at home. He’d lain on the floor of his study for three days before the housekeeper found him.

A terrible thing, to die alone.

Ferguson pushed his headset to the side so he could talk on the sat phone to Corrigan back in the Cube. “You getting anything from our phone tap?”

“They called for the ambulance.”

“Nothing out of that office Guns went into?”

“We have all the lines you tapped. If that includes that line, we’ll get it. There’s no calls. You should have just planted a bug there,” Corrigan added.

Ferguson hated explaining things he thought should he obvious. “If I put the bug in there, and we’re right that Khazaal is going to be going there at some point, they’ll find the bug,” he told him. “Then we have to go back to square one.”

“They’re low probability of intercept,” said Corrigan.

“Did you read that out of the sales brochure?” Ferguson snapped. It was really a waste of time to get into details with other people, really a waste of time. “Listen, I need you to do something that’s going to seem strange, but is very important,” he told Corrigan. “I want you to call a number and give someone the access code so they can call my phone.”

“You sure?”

“Corrigan, do what I tell you. Here’s the weird part: the number is in Cuba.”

“Ferg—”

“If I explain it to you, I’ll have to kill you. So just do it. All right?”

He gave him the number.

“Am I looking for a response?” Corrigan said.

“You’ll get a machine. Give the access code, nothing else. Make it a one-time-use code.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“Coming out,” muttered Guns, just loud enough so it could be picked up by the bug he was wearing.

The ambulance started to move. Ferguson put the laptop down and moved to the front of the van, where Rankin and one of the marines they’d borrowed were sitting.

“Skip, you take the con back here, OK? Keep monitoring the area, checking the bugs, but don’t go in,” said Ferguson. “When Thera checks back after renting the hotel rooms, tell her to come over and spell you guys. Don’t keep the truck here too long. I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t let Fouad go to the hospital alone.”

“He’s just an Iraqi.”

It was really useless to explain anything to anybody, Ferg thought, moving to the back door.

The ambulance took Fouad to Al Assad University Hospital. The hospital, a satellite of the larger and more famous facility in Damascus, had facilities on par with the best hospitals in the U.S. and Europe and was considered one of the outstanding hospitals in the Middle East.

Beyond the high level of care, the university connection presented Ferguson with an opportunity for a convincing cover: the Syrian government’s Ministry of Health sponsored a number of programs for visiting doctors, including an exchange with the Syrian-American Medical Society. A sign in the lobby directed doctors attending the society’s convention to proceed to Suite A-21; Ferguson didn’t need any more hint than that to stroll down the corridor in search of the meeting. Unfortunately, he was dressed somewhat poorly for a visiting doctor, and so he began ducking his head into the offices that he passed, looking to exchange his stained, Arab-style coat for a shorter jacket. It took three tries before he found a snappy blue blazer beckoning from a rack. Two doors down he found a stethoscope, but it wasn’t until he took a wrong turn and bumped into a laundry cart that he completed his costume with a pair of green scrub pants. A bit much maybe — especially since they were large enough to fit over his “civilian” pants and then some — but sartorial excess could be excused in a heart specialist.

Suitably dressed at last, Ferguson decided to forgo the seminar — in his experience, always boring once the donuts were exhausted — and instead took up rounds, venturing toward what he hoped was the emergency cardiac care unit. He intended to tell anyone who stopped him that he was a visiting doctor simply here to observe procedures, but no one stopped him. In Syria, as in much of the world, a stethoscope and purposeful expression were enough credentials to sway most people without a medical degree.

Contrary to the opinions at the mosque, Fouad had not died, though admittedly his pulse was weak and his breathing very shallow. He was wheeled into an emergency unit for treatment. Shadows passed around him and voices hummed in his ears, but Fouad couldn’t make sense of anything except the tremendous pain surging through his body. It came in waves, starting as an excruciating bolt that knocked the wind from his lungs; from there it increased tenfold and then a hundred times beyond that. He wondered why he was putting up with it. Couldn’t he just sleep? Shouldn’t he sleep?

The hums grew louder. He felt himself moving away from the pain: the pain didn’t subside, just moved across the room somewhere, physically distanced from that part of him that was thinking.

“Hey,” said a voice, whispering in his ear.

Fouad turned and saw his neighbor Ali. They’d been boys together in Tikrit, blood brothers since the day they stole the teacher’s pen and were caned for it.

Ali had died in the Iran War. But long before that his spirit had been broken, depressed by what had happened to their country under the dictator. Like Fouad he worked for Saddam, first as a government inspector and then an army officer. His sense of fairness was too highly developed, Fouad thought. Everything about the regime pricked at him day and night, until finally his soul seeped from his body around the clock. The day he’d volunteered to go to the front and face the fanatics, Fouad had shaken his head for a full hour, already sure of his friend’s fate.

But now his boyhood friend smiled at him.

“You’re going to make it, Fouad,” said Ferguson, kneeling down next to his gurney and whispering in his ear in his Cairo-scented Arabic. Ferguson knew he was lying, but the urge to say something positive was so strong he couldn’t resist. He held the Iraqi’s hand. “You’re going to make it.”

Fouad didn’t see Ferguson; he saw his boyhood friend. It was a happy day when they were nine, sipping water. Nothing special, just a happy day.

So I have done my duty, sometimes well, sometimes not. And that is the total of what I am: a small man who navigated between the difficult rocks. That is what God gave me to do, and I have done it. And now I go to play with my friend, a reward neither special nor exalted but a reward I cherish all the more…

As the machine monitoring Fouad’s heart began to flat-line, Ferguson reached for the tiny bug implanted near the lapel of the agent’s coat, tugging it from its perch with a discreet but strong pull. He stepped back as the others in the room tried to revive the Iraqi, a task they knew would be fruitless yet felt compelled to undertake.

Ferguson’s eyes felt hollow. For a moment he stood in space, unaware of where he was, unconscious of the danger he himself faced if caught.

Were the others working for Fouad or for themselves? Why was it so necessary to defy death?

If you didn’t struggle, what else did you have?

Ferguson faded out of the room. He found an empty lounge, scanned for bugs, then turned on the sat phone.

A number was waiting. The international code indicated it was in Austria, though that would be only one stop along the way. He punched it in.

“Hello, Michael,” he said when a man on the other end of the line picked up.

“Fergie. I’ve been thinking about you,” said the man. His voice was that of a man in his early sixties whose English mixed hints of Europe and the Middle East.

“Good thoughts, I hope.”

“Always.”

“Listen, I need a favor. A very big favor.”

“I owe you my life. What can I do?”

“I need information about a man who may be working for Israel. I know what you’re going to say, but here’s why I need it: I want to rule out the possibility of Mossad being involved in an assassination attempt on a member of the administration.”

“They would not do that.”

“I have to rule it out.”

Ferguson glanced up at the doorway, making sure he was alone. He had debated whether to pull this string, since it might set off other repercussions, but in the end he needed an answer; he could accept only so many coincidences.

“The name?” asked Michael.

“Fazel al-Qiam.”

There was a long pause. “You are asking a great deal.”

“Could you get me a photograph?”

This time the pause was even longer. “I don’t know about that. It would depend on too many factors to say.”

“The cover’s a public one.”

“Still—”

“I’ll give you an e-mail address. I owe you one.”

“The debt is still heavily in your favor. But you have asked a great deal.”

Ferguson gave him the e-mail address, then killed the line and hot-keyed into the van. “Rankin?”

“It’s Guns, Ferg. Rankin’s doing a reecee.”

“Fouad died. Heart attack.”

“Man, that sucks.”

“He was smiling,” said Ferguson. “For what that’s worth.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s going on?”

“Corrigan called. The guy I talked to inside the administrative building called the Riviera hotel and told someone in a room there that a Russian had come in. He told him about the hotel he’d given me.”

“Bingo.”

“Corrigan says the Riviera’s a tourist hotel, high class,” added Guns. “You think he’s there?”

“Maybe they’re giving him the corporate terrorist rate.”

“What about that hotel the guy at the desk suggested? You want me to check in?”

“No, that may he too dangerous,” Ferguson told him. “We’ll get some video bugs in the lobby and tap the phones and see what shakes down. Where’s our Russian missile expert?”

“Plane should be leaving from Damascus in about ten minutes. Corrigan’s still tracking it.”

“Once you get confirmation that he’s on the flight, take Monsoon and get over to the airport so you can track him. Be careful with this guy; he’s been around the block a few times and he served in Chechnya.”

“Will do.”

“One other thing: there should be an e-mail coming to one of my addresses in a few minutes. I want you to forward it to Corrine’s e-mail address. To do that you’re going to have to open it and cut and paste, because the address I’m using is good for one shot only. Ready? There’s a lot of numbers in this.”

Guns took the address down. “Will she know what it’s about?”

“No. I’ll have to tell her. I’m trying to figure something out, and I want to make sure I’m looking at the right person. All right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“My butt or your butt?”

“I don’t know how to forward e-mail.”

“You kidding?”

“No, this system—”

“All right. Have Rankin do it.”

“Thanks, Ferg.”

“Watch what he does, OK? It’s rocket science.”

The Riviera was a chic hotel catering largely to very well-off Europeans and Arabs. Located in the center of the city on 14 Ramadan Street (the number being part of the street name, not the address of the building), it had an extensive staff, including a private security force, one of whose members frowned at Ferguson’s scrub pants as he sauntered into the lobby, checking his watch and taking a seat as if waiting for a friend. A casual glance showed there was little possibility of getting beyond the lobby to the elevators without elaborate preparation; the way was guarded by two men wearing bulky sweaters over bulletproof vests.

Nor was Ferguson given much of a chance to assess the situation. Within sixty seconds of his sitting down, a squat clerk with a twitchy moustache came toward him to ask what he was doing.

Ferguson jumped up and took his hand in greeting, pumping vigorously.

“Dr. Muhammad,” he said in English, throwing an Irish lilt to it. “I am looking for Dr. Muhammad, who is going to the conference at the hospital. He is an old friend from Cairo I studied with many years before. I could not believe my good luck at finding him registered for the conference.”

The man replied — in Arabic and English — that the esteemed doctor was unknown to him as a guest in the hotel.

“No?” Ferguson scratched his chin. “Could you look? Muhammad.”

“That is a very common name. Like Smith in your country. But I assure you, he is not staying here. Our guests are all well known to us.”

“Smith isn’t common in Ireland,” said Ferguson, trying to establish himself as Irish, not American. “I come from the south and Smith would be British — English. English, you know?”

The man didn’t know, but finally went to the computer under the weight of Ferguson’s spiel. Ferg’s attempt to catch another guest’s name failed; the computer screen was small and turned from his view.

They had no Dr. Muhammad, and in fact no doctor at all. The clerk named several rivals. As Ferguson lingered, one of the men with the bulky sweaters came over and grabbed his arm. Ferg only just managed to stay in character, yelping but not pulling the man over his shoulder.

A good move, as it turned out, for the man was simply clearing the way for a phalanx of bodyguards who swept through the lobby. Ferguson stared at the men, who were all dressed in light brown fatigues, expecting to see Nisieen Khazaal in the middle of the group.

Instead, he saw a face he recognized not from this mission but from another a year and a half before: Meles Abaa, a Palestinian wanted for murdering ten Americans and two Israelis in an attack on a tourist bus in Ethiopia, and even more in another attack on an airliner headed to Rome from Israel three months ago.

The latter attack had taken place after Ferguson’s team, faced with a decision about whether to go after him or pursue their primary objective, had decided to bypass a chance to get Meles and concentrate on their objective, which was recovering several ounces of enriched uranium. Ferguson hadn’t made the decision — he wasn’t in charge of the mission, which took place before Special Demands existed — but he had agreed with it. Meles wasn’t on the “get” list at the time, and they needed approval to try and capture him, let alone assassinate him, which his presence on the list now entitled Ferguson to do.

The security man let go of Ferguson and walked hack to his post without an apology or even a glance toward him. Ferguson straightened his coat, said thank you to the man who had helped him, and went quickly outside. But Meles was gone.

Ferg took a turn around the block, sizing up the area and finding the telephone line into the hotel so they could set up a bugging operation once it got dark. The line came into the second floor, which was inconvenient. He was just deciding how inconvenient when his sat phone vibrated in his pocket.

“Ferguson,” he said, leaning against the wall to talk.

“Ms. Alston should be landing at the airport in about ten minutes,” said Corrigan.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“She’s following the Russian. They’ll be landing at the airport in ten minutes.”

“What the hell is she doing following the Russian?”

“There was a problem with the agents I lined up.”

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Corrigan. Jesus.”

“She’s not going out of the airport. I thought I better tell you, because Guns mentioned—”

“Yeah, all right. I’ll take care of it. Next time she tells you she’s going to do something like this, tell her no, OK?”

“She’s the boss.”

“That only means you can’t slap her,” Ferguson told him. “Unless you have a very good reason; and this would qualify.”

Corrine sat two rows behind the Russian, and she spent the entire flight watching him. Neither alcohol nor food was distributed on the flight, but he’d come prepared with a flask bottle, sipping at regular intervals. He didn’t look like a weapons engineer to her; he looked more like an alcoholic, and a classic one at that.

When they touched down, she stayed with him into the terminal, following as he headed to the baggage area, apparently to claim luggage that had already been checked through. By the time he got it, Charlie had hooked up with Guns. When the Russian passed her in the baggage area of the small terminal, Corrine made eye contact, stopped, and crossed her arms. The Russian laughed and grabbed for his foot as if it were all a joke, then continued past.

Corrine, playing her part, shook her head and walked around the side to where her suitcase was waiting. As she reached the end of the hall someone grabbed her from the side.

“Never turn your back on an asshole.”

“Ferguson!” she said.

“Not that I’m the asshole in question.” Ferg smiled at her, then noticed one of the attendants eyeing them. “Make like you’re happy to see me.”

“You’re not—”

He kissed her. As their lips parted, she reared back and slapped him.

“That was in the line of duty,” he said.

“So was that.”

“Step into my office, dear, so we can have a proper quarrel.” Still holding her elbow, Ferguson steered her toward the side hall. Corrine pulled her arm away as they walked. He stopped next to the men’s room.

“What do you have? A death wish? What are you doing in Latakia?” Ferguson asked.

“Can we talk here?”

“I got the two bugs they had down here already, but that’s a good point. It’s been a whole ten minutes.” Ferguson reached into his pocket and took out his bug scanner. The area was still clean.

“Why are you here?”

“You needed help; I helped.”

“Corrigan sent two people to do the job.”

“They were buffoons.”

“Says you.”

“Do you know them?”

“Even if you were right, you should have let Charlie or someone else handle it. I’m sure he’s done crap like this before.”

“You’re forgetting I was in Russia.”

“I’m not forgetting anything. You were stopped there, too. Sooner or later your luck is going to run out.”

“What about yours?”

“I don’t need luck.”

“You’re such a bullshit artist. I have to go. I have a plane to catch.”

“Wait.” Ferg grabbed her as she turned away. “Since you’re here. Something new has come up.”

He told her about Meles. “I want to take him down.”

“No,” she said. “You can’t.”

“No? He killed a hundred and twenty people in the airplane that crashed going to Rome. A lot of them were Americans. He’s on the list; I can take him. I don’t need permission. That’s the idea of the list.”

“You can’t jeopardize this mission, Khazaal is more important.”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Ferguson. “Meles is more of a threat, Khazaal stays in Iraq. Besides, I’ll figure a way to get them both.”

“It’s too close to the president’s visit to the Middle East. The political repercussions will be too much.”

“What repercussions? It’s just pest eradication.”

Corrine shook her head. “I’m not chancing it.”

“He’s on the list.”

“I’m overruling the list.”

“Why is Khazaal different?”

“He’s not. You’re just arresting him and turning him over to the Iraqis.”

“Then I’ll arrest Meles,” said Ferguson, though he knew this would be even more difficult than getting Khazaal.

“No.”

Ferguson folded his arms in front of his chest. “You don’t even know what I’m going to do.”

“Neither do you, I bet.” She, too, folded her arms. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I have to tell you, Corrine, it’s taking a hell of a lot of self-control here not to slug you.”

It took just as much self-control on her part to simply turn and walk to the airline counter for her flight back to Damascus.

“If anything happens to her, I’m going to take it out of your hide,” Ferguson told Charlie, the Delta bodyguard. “Because I want her around so I can stomp her ass when this is done.”

16

Rankin leaned back against the side of the building, rubbing his chin. They’d gotten rid of the van, figuring it might be a little too conspicuous after a few hours and were taking turns milling around near the mosque entrance. So far, neither Khazaal nor Meles had been spotted nor had any bodyguard types. When night fell they’d be able to plant better surveillance cameras on the wall, and the job would be considerably easier, for now, though, all he could do was shrug off the stiffness and try and stay alert. He rambled down the block. He’d donned a headdress and a Bedouin’s long robes to alter his look. He had papers showing he was looking for work if stopped.

He paused at a street vendor, pointed to a kebab, and thrust a bill into the man’s hands. He ate the food hungrily, not realizing how famished he was.

As he turned back to walk up the street, a white Mercedes pulled up to the curb, followed by two Toyota SUVs. The doors opened and a set of bodyguards got out, checking the block. Rankin stopped, concentrating on his food for a moment, or so it appeared. He hooked his thumb beneath his coat, holding it up as two men got out of the last car.

One was Meles Abaa. The other was the man whose face he’d seen a few hours before, when he’d helped Guns forward the e-mail to Corrine: Fazel al-Qiam.

17

“I can’t believe the Israelis are gaming us,” said Corrigan. “I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah, well, maybe they are and maybe they’re not, but they definitely have somebody inside, and they definitely didn’t give us a heads-up when they had a chance,” said Ferguson. “And I’m still not entirely exonerating them for the attack on Alston in Tripoli.”

“No way, Ferg.”

Ferguson didn’t believe it either, but he was surely in the middle of something he didn’t completely understand. Fazel al-Qiam’s real name was Aaron Ravid. Ferguson was reading between the lines, but it looked like he was a long-time operative who had been infiltrated into Syria several years ago. He had impeccable credentials as an Arab “intellectual” (read “closeted terrorist”). He had even been to the UN as he told Corrine. The CIA file on him was extremely thin, and it was only because of the UN assignment that lie had been ID’d as an Israeli plant, a fact the Agency would not inform Mossad about, since it might inadvertently reveal information about bugging at the UN’s New York headquarters.

Why had he been in Tel Aviv? Had the pass in the building been a coincidence or a hint too subtle for Corrine to get?

Or a pass for his benefit, so he saw his target?

Why had he shown up in Lebanon? That couldn’t be a coincidence.

And what was he up to with Meles?

Corrigan asked Ferguson the same question.

“I don’t know,” Ferg told him. “It was some sort of meeting. He’s at the Versailles, one of those posh places on the beach up north. Meles went back to the Riviera. The Russian hasn’t hooked up with them yet, and I still don’t know where the hell Khazaal is. I’m beginning to think he’s a figment of our imagination.”

“He’ll turn up,” said Corrigan.

“Yeah. Meles has to have a ton of money to take over half a hotel.”

“Just two floors,” said Corrigan. “We’re pretty sure from the phone taps it’s two floors.”

“All right, so he only has a half ton of money.”

“Maybe the Syrians are subsidizing him. Or the Saudis. Or a whole bunch of other people. You going to grab him?”

“Alston says I can’t.”

“What? He’s on the list.”

“I know. It’s not settled,” added Ferguson. “I’ll work something out.”

“Ferg-”

Ferguson changed the subject. “Anything from the taps?”

“Nothing so far. You figure Khazaal’s in the mosque?”

“I think it’s a pretty good bet. We’ll have to get some bugs inside if the taps don’t turn anything up.”

The National Security Agency used a computer program as well as translators to transcribe important intercepts or wiretaps, and the NSA’s experts had been called in here to help. But all the bugs and translators in the world were useless if the people you were listening to weren’t talking.

Ferguson put his legs out on the coffee table and glanced at his watch. “Speaking of Alston, why don’t you connect me to her? It’s pumpkin time.”

“Yeah, she’s supposed to call in from the embassy. She went to another reception.”

“Call me back,” said Ferguson, snapping off the phone. He gazed across the room, staring at Thera curled into the corner of an upholstered chair.

He needed another Iraqi liaison to make the arrest, but the president’s upcoming visit to Baghdad had stretched the already thin intelligence corps to its limit. It was a BS problem, Ferg decided. They could paper over it by depositing Khazaal with the Iraqis once they had him, and the Syrians and political considerations be damned.

All considerations be damned. His job had nothing to do with considerations.

Tell the people who died in the plane Meles had blown up about considerations.

Fouad had smiled when his monitor began to buzz. Was it a real smile or just a reflex?

The poor guy’s body was on ice in the hospital and would remain there for at least a few days. They couldn’t recover it without endangering their gig. The fake ID Ferguson had given him claimed he was a Saudi, but anyone who checked would hit a dead end.

His phone buzzed. Ferguson flipped up the antenna and answered.

“Hello, Cinderella. How was the ball?”

“It was quite lavish,” answered Corrine. “The president of Syria is quite a gentlemen.”

“He’s also the kind of gentleman who encourages problems to disappear in the middle of the night.”

“So what’s new?”

“Have you looked at your e-mail?”

“It’s definitely the guy.”

“His name is Aaron Ravid,” Ferguson told her. “He’s a Mossad agent.”

“Well, we knew that.”

“Here’s something we didn’t know: he’s in Latakia, and he just met Meles.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yeah, I’m doing stand-up. Did Tischler return your call?”

“No. I would have told you.”

As he’d told Corrine, Ferguson had first interpreted Tischler’s reluctance to return Corrine’s call as an indication that his agent had already fessed up; avoiding talking to her not only meant that he didn’t have to say he was sorry but also made unnecessary the obvious lie he’d have to tell about the man being an agent. But this was too much.

One thing bugged Ferguson: they hadn’t picked up any trail teams or shadows or Mossad people lurking in the shadows behind Ravid either in Beirut or here. Which maybe meant that the poor sod was on his own. Or that Ferguson wasn’t doing as good a job as he should be.

“You have to go to Tel Aviv and have it out with Tischler,” Ferguson told her. “Find out why he has an agent meeting with Meles.”

“You think he’ll tell me?”

“Bring a baseball bat with you. A big baseball bat.”

“All right, I’ll try. But—”

“You tell him you saw him in Tel Aviv, you saw him in Lebanon, and then say we ran into him again here. Tell him to stop screwing with us.”

“And if he doesn’t tell me what’s going on?”

“Tell him we think he’s a double agent, and we’re going to take him out.”

“You can’t kill him,” said Corrine.

“Why not?”

“Ferg. Tischler will see it’s a bluff.”

“It’s not.”

“It better be, especially if he’s a Mossad agent.”

“Either he’s a double agent, or there’s something going on that they’re not saying. Either way I don’t want to get screwed.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to gather information.”

“Yeah.”

“Bob—”

“Just play it like that, all right? Try it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Worst case: if he is a double agent, they know about it.”

“You think he’s a double agent?”

“I’m not sure,” admitted Ferguson. “The odds are against it. Mossad’s pretty thorough. But I don’t know what they’re doing here. You change your mind about Meles?”

“Bob, you can’t take him.”

“It’s a bad decision, Corrine.”

“Why, because it’s not the one you would make?”

“Because people are going to die if I don’t take him.”

“You think I haven’t thought about that? It’s not as simple as you think.”

“I don’t think it’s simple. I think I can knock him off. I don’t think there’s going to be another chance. You’re worried about international-law BS. I’m worried about reality.”

“This isn’t a legal issue. Khazaal is more important. And you don’t even know where he is yet.”

“I will.” Ferguson hung up abruptly, corralling his anger. There was something to be said about keeping the focus on Khazaal, but, damn it, he had Meles cold. He could take him, blow up the entire stinking hotel if he had to, blow it up and be done with the slime.

He got up from the couch and walked over to the half bath, pausing to peer at Thera’s curly hair and almost cherubic cheek. Inside the bathroom, he turned on the cold water, letting it run as he dialed the general’s home number.

The answering machine picked up. It was about half-past five at night in the States; the general would probably still be at the office.

“Hey, General, it’s Ferg. Look, I have a question for you. Kind of appreciate your getting back to me. I’m in your favorite place without a paddle.”

He hesitated a second, then hit the end button.

Back in the suite room, Thera had started to snore. Ferguson lifted her up and carried her into one of the bedrooms, kneeling so he could lay her gently into the bed. He smoothed her hair back behind her ear, then reached down and pulled her boots off, leaving the gun holster in place. She mumbled and rolled over as he threw the cover over her.

“Cute,” she said in her sleep.

“Yeah, you’re damn cute yourself,” he told her. Then he got out of the room while he still could.

18

The hot water scalded his back and legs, but Ravid remained under the shower. It wasn’t an act of purification but just the opposite: the outer layer of his skin needed to be hardened; the epidermis needed to be deadened so it could survive. Only by singeing his body could he make himself impervious to the filth of Meles and his ilk.

In the car, Ravid had come close to strangling the Muslim madman. The only weapons he had were his hands, but the impulse to do so had been nearly too strong to resist. He kept reminding himself that he had not exercised or trained in nearly two years, that he had lost some weight and muscle in that time, and that he might not be able to finish the terrorist, who was himself in good shape. His instincts argued against his logic, suggesting that he might use his teeth and his knees and legs and feet, every ounce of his strength, and if he did this, surely he could not lose. Twice he had been almost ready to give in, but the car had stopped and the chance lost.

It was not his job to kill Meles; quite the opposite, in fact. If he struck he would most likely ruin everything. Tischler would not forgive him.

Ravid knew all of this, but these things did not influence him. He cared little for what Tischler thought. If he struck, Tischler and the others would be irrelevant; even if he succeeded, the terrorist’s bodyguards would kill him on the spot.

As the water went from scalding to lukewarm, Ravid fantasized about letting his instincts win and saw himself struggling with Meles. In his daydream, he killed the terrorist. Then, as the bodyguards killed him — a quick and merciful shot through the head — he realized he was not satisfied. He’d been cheated, he thought, of any real revenge for his wife and child’s deaths.

Was that the real reason he had hesitated? The death of one man, however despicable a murderer he might be, would not sufficiently quench his thirst for justice.

Not justice. Revenge. There was no such thing as justice. God, if He existed, provided justice. He did not exist, and therefore there was no justice, just brute emotion.

Ravid wavered as the water turned cold. Perhaps he would have felt relieved after all. Perhaps his muscles had atrophied and he simply didn’t want to admit it. His stomach, once taut, hung toward the ground.

He turned off the water and got out of the tub. Drying himself, he thought of Khazaal, the Iraqi murderer, and the jokes he had made about Jews.

“Oh yes, the Jews,” Ravid had replied, speaking as a closeted terrorist himself. “What can we say about them?”

Khazaal had brought jewels with him from Iraq as part of a complex arrangement brokered by Meles and others to furnish the Iraqi resistance with a catastrophic attack on the new government. Among the stops they had made today was one to a jeweler who might estimate their worth. Ravid had arranged the meeting. Even though he had not seen the jewels — they were kept in a small briefcase — he knew from the jeweler that they were worth two or perhaps three million dollars.

Would that much money fund revenge?

Ravid wasn’t sure. It would surely buy serious weapons — Khazaal was proof — but it was a matter of buying the right weapons. How would they be used? Where? Would killing a hundred, a thousand, a million Muslims satisfy him?

The question was too difficult to face. Instead, Ravid considered how he might get the jewels. Stealing them would require killing the bodyguards: impossible, as the theft would immediately he noticed. Better to switch them somehow.

Impossible. There wasn’t enough time now. And besides, he was watched too carefully. If he got the jewels, he would never be able to use them.

Ravid tried to put the idea out of his mind as he finished dressing, but it remained with him. It was comforting in an odd way, an abstract problem to occupy his mind, a theoretical danger to divert him from the great peril his mission here posed. It distracted him as well from the thirst that kept creeping into his mouth, the desire simmering in the distance of every thought and emotion. He wanted a drink nearly as much as he wanted revenge, possibly more, definitely more, as hard as he tried to banish the idea. He defeated the desire a dozen times a day, but always it was there, sneaking back, whispering from a distant room. Thinking of the jewels and Khazaal helped push it away.

By the time he was ready to leave the rented apartment for a round of late-night visits to the local cafés, Ravid had come up with several different plans to swap the jewels just before the Israeli action began, and even knew where he might find the substitutes.

His fantasies died with the first step he took from his house. Two Arabs were watching from across the street. He pretended not to notice, continuing toward the main boulevard a block away. These were almost certainly Meles’s men and thus not difficult to lose, but his best course was to let them follow; they would report back to their master exactly what he wanted them to say. He ground the molars in his mouth together and pushed his gaze toward the pavement, narrowing his world to the small space before him as he walked.

19

Corrine was not shocked to find her plane met by a Mossad officer when she landed. She acted as if she expected no less and kept her lawyer face on as she was led, without explanation, down to the secure conference room once again. This time it was empty. Corrine stared at the wall, her expression as blank as she could possibly make it, until Tischler came in and closed the door.

“Fazel al-Qiam,” she said.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Tischler.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have time to play chess this morning, Mr. Tischler,” she said. “I realize that you have a great number of obligations, which surely explains why you don’t return my calls. I, too, am busy. I’ve stopped on my way to Baghdad because some of our people tripped over Fazel al-Qiam in Latakia. After he tripped over me here and in Lebanon. What exactly is going on, Mr. Tischler?”

Tischler remained silent. She smelled the same hint of shaving lotion that she had on their first meeting, but now it seemed part of an act, too contrived, as if he thought he could impress her by dressing nicely and keeping every strand of hair in place. He wore a nice watch and a handsome ring on his pinkie, along with a thick wedding band: all props, she thought, to help put her off.

“It might have been helpful if you had informed us that you were in Latakia,” she added. “You knew we’d end up there.”

“I really wouldn’t want to get into a discussion of operations,” said Tischler.

“I hope for your sake that al-Qiam is not a double agent,” she said. “We’ve heard rumors that he is better known as Aaron Ravid.”

Tischler said nothing. Corrine waited a moment, then pushed back the chair and went to the door. He remained at his seat as she left the room.

This was the way she had to act from now on, she told herself: harder than the people she was dealing with. Otherwise they were going to treat her like a pushover. And if they thought that, her own people were in jeopardy.

Corrine was in the lobby heading for the exit when one of the plain-clothes guards stopped her.

“I believe you left something behind downstairs,” said the man.

“No, I don’t think that’s true,” she said.

“I’m told it is.”

The man smirked, and if the patronizing tone in his voice hadn’t sealed her decision, that did. She smiled at him and then patted his elbow. “Afraid not, thank you. Mr. Tischler knows how to contact me… if he wants.”

The pat was a bit over the top, but if she was going to play the hard-nosed bitch it would be better to be so obvious that no one missed the point. Corrine walked to her car and told her driver to take her to the airport, where the chartered plane was waiting.

She expected Tischler to make another try, this one in person. But he didn’t.

Once aboard the civilian Cessna Citation that had been leased to take her to Baghdad, she called Corrigan and told him what had happened. She also put in a call to Slott, deciding to personally update him on the meeting. She also felt it possible that Tischler would choose to deal with him rather than her. But Slott’s assistant answered the phone. The time difference meant that it was still quite early in the States. The aide asked her if it was worth calling and waking him at home; Corrine said no.

“Tell him that Tischler declined to say anything, and tell him to call me as soon as he can. I’m en route to Baghdad.”

She clicked off the phone. The copilot had come back to see if she was ready to leave.

“There’s some lunch in that fridge over there,” he said. “Sandwiches. They’re fresh.”

“Thanks,” she told him. “Maybe later.”

“We’ll be in the air in ten minutes.”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

She sat back in one of the plush seats. By the time the Citation’s wheels left the runway, she was fast asleep.

20

Rankin didn’t realize the stooped old man with thick glasses and cane outside the mosque was Ferguson until the man pressed his fingers into his forearm.

“You oughta cut your nails,” he grumbled.

“Let’s go say our prayers. I’m a little slow, and you’re deaf and dumb,” Ferguson told him.

“Hmmph.”

“I know you can do dumb. It’s deaf I’m worried about.”

Always a wise guy, thought Rankin to himself.

Ferguson smirked at Rankin’s frown but noticed that he kept his reaction to himself. They’d done the deaf man routine on an earlier mission, and Rankin had pulled it off very well.

The pair made their way inside the compound, moving slowly toward the mosque. Rankin felt uneasy, not because of the mission — that was a given but because they were going into a holy place. It was the kind of thing that ought to be out of bounds; even if the crazy idiots didn’t respect that, someone ought to. He’d thought that in Iraq, too, though it was a real luxury there.

Not that he’d let it stop him.

Ferguson mumbled his prayers in sing-songy chat as they paused to take off their shoes.

“I’m gonna fall,” he told Rankin.

“Uh-huh.”

Ferguson crumbled to the ground. As Rankin knelt to help him, Ferguson pulled out a pair of shoes from beneath his long dishadasha, or robe, and placed them in the corner, making sure the camera hidden in the toe of the left shoe had a good view of the entrance to the mosque.

“I’m all right,” Ferguson said in Arabic as others came up to help Rankin with the frail old man. “All right. My grandson is deaf, but a good lad. He didn’t mean to drop me.”

Several of the men close to Rankin shook their heads and berated him for not taking proper care of his grandfather. Rankin glowered at them, even though he was supposed to be deaf.

Ferguson babbled away as they walked inside. He told the others that they were pilgrims from southern Egypt, seeking to travel to as many holy places as possible before God called him to rest. His patter soon wore out his listeners, and they were left alone to purify themselves and join the faithful in prayer.

His cover now established, Ferguson played the role of devoted pilgrim and tourist after prayers. He examined the old pillars carefully; he wanted to find a second spot to plant a video camera if the first failed. Shimmying up them without being seen would be impossible, however, as there were at least four rather discreet guards milling through the hall, large men who probably had weapons hidden beneath their clothes. Ferguson managed to catch the eye of one of the men, nodding at him, but the man didn’t nod back.

“You oughta not get in their face like that,” Rankin said as they put their shoes on outside. “Guy looked like he wanted to kill you.”

“Can’t kill me for praying,” said Ferg.

“You weren’t praying.”

“Sure I was, Skip. You weren’t listening.”

They walked to the left of the interior courtyard, in the direction of the abandoned building, which seemed to Ferguson the most likely candidate to be hiding Khazaal. They got as far as the long, low step that led to the door before someone yelled at them to ask where they were going.

“Don’t stop,” Ferguson whispered, still shuffling ahead. “You’re deaf.”

“Umph,” said Rankin.

The person shouted again. This time Ferguson stopped and turned toward him. He raised his head slowly, looking up and down, and then started to turn back.

“You fool. Where are you going?” said the man, grabbing Ferguson’s cane.

Ferguson repeated his earlier story about being a pilgrim and tourist, exploring the holy shrines of Islam with his devoted though deaf and dumb grandson… A man who, alas, was not sharp in the mental department, perhaps as a result of being kicked by a Jew when he was young.

Even this last bit failed to win the sympathy of the man who had stopped them.

“This place is off limits to the likes of you,” said the man.

“Is it a shrine?” asked Ferguson.

“It is an empty building, fool,” said the man.

He pulled Ferguson’s cane from his hand. Rankin grabbed him. Fear sprang into the man’s face.

“No, no,” said Ferguson, tapping his ersatz grandson’s arm. “No, no. Peace be unto you, brother. Peace be unto you.”

Two other men came over. Both were dressed in business clothes. The taller of the pair began to speak, using calm tones and introducing himself as the imam’s son.

Then he started asking Ferguson about which mosques he had been to.

This was not a difficult question in and of itself, for as it happened Ferguson had been to many. He began with the expected, saying how the greatest experience in his life had been Mecca: an obligation for every able Muslim but, more than that, an experience of joy and faith impossible to duplicate elsewhere on earth. He then moved through Saudi Arabia, then to Yemen and then to Egypt. The Imam’s son still had not tired — in fact he seemed genuinely interested — and so Ferguson found himself in Beirut, where the Omari Mosque was incomparable.

“God must have been very pleased to take it from the nonbelievers,” said Ferguson.

“That happened here,” said the Imam’s son.

“So I’ve heard. But there was no trace.”

“Oh, yes. Come.”

By now, Rankin had a truly bad vibe about the Imam’s son. He tried to signal this to Ferguson by tugging at his arm, gently at first, and then more insistently. Finally his pull became obvious to everyone.

Rather than using it as an excuse to leave, Ferguson began berating his grandson, threatening to lash him with the cane and saying that it was not time to eat yet. Rankin did his best not to react, cringing like the long-suffering grandkid he was supposed to be.

The Imam’s son gently pulled Ferguson away, starting him toward the mosque. Ferguson wrapped his arm around his and planted a small audio “fly” and a tracking device on the man’s jacket.

What the hell is he doing?” Monsoon asked Thera out in the van. They were parked two blocks to the north, barely in range of the bugging devices they were using. “He should be getting the hell out of there.”

“It’s a calculated risk,” Thera told him. “He hasn’t found what he’s looking for. Khazaal has to be inside. He’s the only one Meles would have come to meet. At least that’s what Ferg thinks.”

“Sounds to me like the guy’s trying to trap him. He’s asking too many questions.”

“Probably he doesn’t believe him.”

“We don’t have enough people to get him out if something goes wrong,” Monsoon said.

“He knows what he’s doing. Ferg’s been in this kind of situation before.”

Monsoon took a sip from the bottled water. As a Delta op, he’d been involved in some difficult operations, including a hostage rescue in Peru that had gone sour. But these people pushed things too far; if they saw a hairy situation, they tried to make it ten times worse.

“He have a death wish?” Monsoon asked.

Thera turned and looked at the Delta soldier. She was going to scold him but held back.

“He might,” she said. “He might.”

Rankin could feel his heart pounding as they walked slowly along the pillars in the mosque, the Imam’s son pointing to the stones left from the older church. These guys didn’t believe they were who they said they were, but they were stuck now; cutting and running for it wasn’t going to get them out alive. Besides the two plainclothes guards at the back of the prayer hall, Rankin had spotted four men with Kalashnikovs outside.

He glanced at Ferguson, still hamming up the old man act. There was no sign that he was nervous. He could’ve been on the stage in a high school play, yapping out rehearsed lines.

Rankin had had a bit in a high school play once. He’d flubbed the five words he had to say.

Ferguson seemed to fall against him. Rankin grabbed at his arm, then realized that Ferg hadn’t fallen, but was bending forward to spit on the rocks of the Christian church.

“No, you shouldn’t show such disrespect,” said the Imam’s son. “They are children of the book, even if they are wrong in their conclusions. Jesus Christ was a great prophet. Peace be unto him.”

Chastised, Ferguson bowed his head, then spontaneously dropped to his knees and rubbed up the spittle. As he did, he slipped the knife secreted up his loose sleeve to his hand, ready to be used. The Imam’s son gently tugged him to his feet.

A moment of decision: there might not be a better opportunity to grab him by the throat.

The tug was gentle. Ferguson remained in character, mumbling his apology and begging forgiveness, practically doubling over even as he rose, admitting he was unworthy and a fool besides.

“No, old man, you are not a fool. I am sorry I yelled at you,” said the Imam’s son. “You are a devout believer, a faithful child. God will smile on your soul.”

He led them back outside, and offered a place to stay. Ferguson thanked him profusely, saying that first they must complete their visits to the other mosques in town and then with God’s grace return.

Outside the mosque, Ferguson started for his shoes. Four men with AK-47s were milling nearby.

“Just a minute,” said the Imam’s son, grabbing Ferguson’s forearm tightly.

Guns pushed his glasses up, trying to peer across the street through the doorway of the outer wall without making it too obvious that he was staring inside. Ferguson had told him to remain outside if at all possible; even in disguise there was always the chance that someone would remember him from yesterday.

Two men with AK-47s, stocks folded up so the weapons looked more like machine-pistols than rifles, walked from the left and came through the opening. Guns took off his glasses as if to clean them but stayed where he was for a moment as the men checked the block. One of them put his hand to his ear — he had an earphone there though Guns couldn’t see it — and then both men came out of the doorway, heading eastward on the street.

Guns kept his glasses off and walked the other way, catching a glimpse of the knot of men in black shirts and pants as they came out. A pair of cars came around the corner, accelerating and then stopping in front of the mosque.

“You seeing this?” Guns whispered to Thera.

“Oh, yeah. There’s our boy. Just keep walking. We’ll have the Global Hawk tag the car in its ID system. Once we recover Ferguson we can find out where it went.”

Ferguson pushed his teeth together as the Imam’s son let go of his arm. Khazaal had passed not more than five yards from him, but he was gone now, the bastard.

“Strong arms,” said the Imam’s son, staring into Ferguson’s face.

Ferguson smiled and bowed his head.

“You have much hair,” added the man.

“Were every strand a prayer to holy God, it would not be a tenth of what I owe,” answered Ferguson.

“A van will take you to the next mosque,” said the Imam’s son. He snapped his fingers and shouted directions to one of the men nearby. Ferguson protested lightly, saying he was unworthy to accept such kindness but then accepted with gratitude.

One of the men with the AK-47s came over from the courtyard, walking with them to the street. Two other guards were nearby; the Imam’s son bade them good luck and farewell, then turned abruptly and went inside the administrative building. Ferguson took hold of Rankin’s arm, stalling for a moment to size up the layout, but it was clear that if they ran for it they’d be cut down before they made the street.

Comin’ out,” said Guns. “Finally.”

“We see,” Thera told him from the van. “Four guards.”

“Shit.”

“It’s all right. Take a breath and hold it. Ferg is talking.”

Guns started walking behind a group of smartly dressed women, paralleling Ferguson and Rankin. The two ops were sandwiched by men with guns. Thera was right; Ferguson was chatting up a storm.

Guns hopped into the street, deciding to cross and get closer. He moved without thinking of the traffic, which though light wasn’t nonexistent. He just missed getting run over by a battered Renault, whose driver swerved and laid on the horn. Guns put out his hands in apology as another man leaned out the window and cursed him and his children’s children for being so careless.

One of the men with Ferguson pulled open the sliding door to a white Toyota van and prodded him inside. Ferguson pulled himself upward and got in, groaning all the way. Rankin followed. The van had three rows of seats: two guards got behind them; the other two crammed into the front with the driver.

“We better follow,” said Guns.

“We’re taking it,” Thera told him. “You hang back. Go up to that café at the corner and relax.”

Relax? Yeah, sure, thought Guns. He’d put that on the agenda, but it didn’t look like he’d be getting to it anytime soon.

They’d gone about two blocks when Rankin felt the barrel of a gun pressed against his neck.

“You heard that horn,” said the man behind him. “I saw you.”

Rankin turned in the direction of the gun but said nothing, clinging to the last vestiges of his cover. The men in the front turned and started yelling at the gunman.

Ferguson started to laugh.

“He hears with his eyes and fingers,” Ferguson told the others, still laughing. “Shoot the gun and you will see. He hears it. Watch.”

Ferguson clapped his hands together. Rankin jerked his shoulder up in reaction.

“He’s a fake,” said the man in the back.

The man behind Ferguson reached forward with his gun. Ferguson, still feigning amusement, turned and insisted that the men must fire the weapons and see what he was saying. “You will see, you will see. Shoot.”

“We’re not firing in the Imam’s van,” said one of the men in the front.

Ferguson leaned across to the front seat. The man near him grabbed his hand as he reached for the horn.

“Beep it,” urged Ferguson. “Watch. He hears the air. It is quite phenomenal. Watch. Watch!”

The driver hit the horn. Rankin now practically jumped upward in the seat.

The man in the front who was in charge told the driver to stop up ahead near an open lot. He pulled in. The men got out. Rankin let himself be jerked from the van, a bewildered look on his face. He landed in a heap in the dirt, then slowly got to his knees.

“Fire the guns and watch,” said Ferguson as he got out of the van. “Watch him. He will jump.”

“Maybe we should fire at you,” said the man who’d first put the rifle at Rankin’s neck.

Ferguson took his prayer hat off his head and pushed out his chest. Then as a final gesture tossed down his cane. “Accept my soul, my Lord God. Thank you for this favor,” he said. “Thank you for sending the angel to deliver me to Paradise.”

The man leveled his gun at Ferguson’s face, then pushed the barrel down before shooting. Bullets splattered into the grounds a few feet from him, ricocheting wildly.

Ferguson didn’t flinch — much. “Old fool,” said the man. “Let them walk.” They got back in the van and drove away.

Ferguson bent to pick up his cane. Rankin got up and reached it before he did.

“We’re still being watched,” Ferguson whispered. “I don’t think the Imam’s son totally bought the act. But those idiots did.”

He straightened, then pointed up the street. “Thera can pick us up after we go into that café at the corner. We’ll dump our disguises in the back and come out there.”

He began to walk. Within a few steps he had fallen into a rhythm and begun to hum.

It took Rankin half a block to realize it was “Finnegan’s Wake.” He hoped to hell the people watching them didn’t know any old Irish folk songs.

21

“So, were you nervous?” said Ferguson as they headed back to the hotel in the van. He’d waited until they reached the other mosque, where he changed out of his costume and made sure the people trailing him had left before getting Rankin.

“I wasn’t nervous,” lied Rankin, “but next time don’t tell them to shoot me.”

“I didn’t tell them to shoot you, just to shoot the gun. There’s a difference.”

“I doubt they saw one.”

“The Global Hawk tracked the van with Khazaal up to the castle,” said Thera. “Meles is on his way in that direction, too.”

“What about the Russian?”

“Hasn’t left the hotel.”

“He may have a way around the sensors,” said Ferguson.

“Or maybe he’s not in on this meet,” suggested Rankin. “Maybe this is about Khazaal and Meles. Your source said the meeting wasn’t until tomorrow. Maybe they’re getting together before the rest of the players.”

“Do we still want to scare them out of there, Ferg?” asked Thera. “If they go to the mosque, we’re in worse shape.”

Ferguson took the laptop and paged through some of the video showing Khazaal. One of his men had a small briefcase with him.

“Hey, Rankin, this look like a case for an Uzi to you?”

Rankin looked at it. “Maybe a mini Uzi; it’s so thin. But why? It’s not like they need to fool anyone.”

“Probably has the jewels in it,” said Thera.

“Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. So riddle me this, Batgirl,” he added. “Iraqis don’t buy, they sell.”

“What’s the riddle?”

“Iraqis don’t buy, they sell,” repeated Ferguson. “But our Iraqi is going around with a case that has so many jewels in it, he doesn’t leave it with the people in the mosque, he doesn’t even trust Meles, you see?” Ferguson pointed to the pictures. “He’s keeping it out of his reach, away from Meles’s people. These guys travel in a separate car.”

“Might he his lunch, Ferg,” said Rankin.

“Assume it’s not. What’s he going to buy here?”

“The Russian,” said Rankin. “He needs him to run some missile system.”

“Corrigan’s guess.”

Rankin frowned. He wished Ferguson hadn’t mentioned that.

“That’s not a reason to reject it,” added Ferg. “But ordinarily, you don’t pay in advance for services rendered. Maybe he’s trying to buy something, too. Eiher way, if we snatch the case, we stop the deal.”

“Just as easy to snatch him,” said Rankin.

“No,” said Ferguson. “Because I can’t touch him. I don’t have to be so careful with the guards; they’re not going to stand trial.”

He was making a fine distinction — a very fine distinction — but hadn’t that been Corrine Alston’s point? The administration wanted Khazaal to stand trial in Iraq.

She wouldn’t like the fact that the guards were killed, if that happened. Bui in the context of everything else, she’d accept it.

Maybe.

Definitely if he got Khazaal alive.

Snatch the jewels, and even if he missed Khazaal he’d change his plans. The Iraqi would be more vulnerable if he had to improvise, infinitely more vulnerable.

“So what’s he buying?” Thera asked.

“Something he doesn’t have,” said Ferguson, thinking of Birk’s offer.

While Ferguson was washing the gray out of his hair back in the hotel room, Guns and Grumpy added booster units to pick up signals from the bugs Ferg had left in the mosque. The boosters, each about the size of a cigarette carton, took the signals and broadcast them to the satellite system. Ringing the target area with the boosters not only provided insurance if one of the units malfunctioned or was discovered but also allowed them to plant even smaller audio flies inside later on.

Guns had one more unit to place, this one on the water side of the compound. An ancient wooden waterwheel stood about ten feet from the road on the north side; it looked to Guns the perfect place to put the booster, assuming he could get out there. A narrow stone ledge that had once been part of a dock or walkway ran almost all the way toward it, but what exactly would he say he was doing if someone came down the road and saw him?

He sat for a few minutes, puzzling this out. Then he hit on an idea: he’d claim he had dropped something into the water and hoped to fish it out. To make it more authentic, he dug into his pockets looking for something. He didn’t come up with anything, at least not that he felt he could afford to lose, so he took off his watch. It was a cheap plastic model, but it had been a present from his brother. Rather than throw it in he pocketed it. If he got to the point where he was being searched, the watch was going to be the least of his worries.

Guns reached over to the wall and pulled himself up. His foot slipped off one or two of the stones, but he managed to make it to the wheel. There he took the booster from his belt, activated it, and slipped it into the rung at the top.

As he started back he saw that the wall angled toward the land just beyond the wheel, forming a wedge that ran to a small rocky beach. A chain-link fence blocked off the beach, but from where he was he could just see the edge of a boat in the angled inlet made by the wall. As best he could remember, the boat had not been in the photos he’d seen earlier from the Global Hawk. Guns decided to reconnoiter, though the only way to do this was to go back the way he came, walk around several blocks, and then slip into the back of the large building above the fenced-off beach. The building was a laundry. Guns got past it without any problem, then hopped the fence and walked onto the rocks.

From the other side, it had looked as if he could just reach across to the boat from the rocks. But now that he was here, he saw it was actually six or seven feet from the shore. He also saw that there was a doorway in the mosque wall that opened right above the boat.

Guns took off his shoes, rolled up his pants, and plunged into the water. He took about two steps before he realized it was deeper than he’d thought, far deeper — it came above his knees — and with the next step dropped off to his chest. He was committed, though; he pushed down and swam to the wall. He pulled himself up on the slimy stones, twisted a bug so it would work, and stuck it in the wall. The boat bobbed nearby. He was tempted to take it, and then had another idea: why not plant a fly in it?

As he reached into his pocket, he heard voices coming from the other side of the wooden door. He quickly tossed a pair of flies into the boat. Then, not knowing what else to do, he slipped down into the water, took two long strokes, and dove under the surface.

Guns swam as far as he could underwater, then stayed down for two more good strokes before coming up. He took a gulp of air, then slid back down, pushing as strongly as he could, he repeated this two more times, until he felt the water starting to push him forward. He broke the surface and found that he was now about thirty yards beyond the boat. He pushed backward, kicking his legs beneath him. The speedboat had backed away from its mooring and circled toward the sea. By the time it passed him it was riding the waves at a good clip, heading northwestward along the coast.

Guns took a deep breath and began swimming back to the beach where he’d left his shoes. Four strokes later, he realized he hadn’t made any progress against the tide.

Meles is moving,” said Thera, knocking on the door to the bathroom. Ferguson grabbed a towel and pulled on pants, then went out to the common room, where Thera had been watching the feed. The Global Hawk surveillance system showed two SUVs parked in front of the Riviera. The computer processing the unit’s images could be programmed to track and zoom in on up to one hundred different objects within its viewing range; it could distinguish objects roughly a meter square, which made tracking trucks relatively easy, though the city streets could complicate things.

“Khazaal’s still at the castle,” said Thera. “You think that’s where he’s going?

Ferguson studied the feed. If they were meeting — a good guess, given that Khazaal’s vehicles were at the castle — then if he went to take Khazaal, Meles would be fair game.

So that was the solution. Except he wasn’t ready.

“Wake up Rankin and Monsoon,” he told Thera. “Where’s Guns?”

“Still down by the mosque with Grumpy.”

Ferguson bent down to the laptop and selected the area. But the resolution was not quite fine enough to see people.

“He have a bug showing where he is?” Ferg asked Thera.

“Supposed to.”

He picked up the sat phone and called Guns’s phone. There was no answer.

Rankin and Monsoon, sleepy-eyed, came over.

Ferguson fiddled with the computer, looking for the screen that would show where Guns was. A signal came up offshore, north of the mosque.

“I’m going to take a run out there,” Ferguson told Thera, grabbing his gear. “See if you can get ahold of Van and make sure he’s ready for a pickup. Keep Khazaal and Meles in view if you can. Khazaal’s more important. Rankin. Monsoon. You’re with me.”

It didn’t seem possible that the tide could be this strong. Guns thought it must be some defect in the way he was swimming, not curling his hand right or something. But no matter what he tried, nothing worked.

After nearly fifteen minutes struggling against the tide, Guns felt his arms starting to cramp. He tried to relax, coasting for a bit, but the weight of his pants and long shirt dragged him down. He decided he didn’t need the pants, and stripped to his military-green shorts, then off came his shirt. He had a pistol strapped to his waist and another at his leg; he pulled off the one at his stomach but kept the other. He turned and started stroking with the current, but this didn’t take him any closer to the shore.

“I hate the water,” he said out loud. “If I wanted to die in the water, I would have been a sailor.”

You’re not going to die, he told himself quickly, but once the idea had been planted in his head it began to grow. He tried to fend it off by concentrating on the job at hand, which was to find some way — any way — out of the current. But with each stroke his arms got heavier and his legs more tired.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “Let’s go, marine. Stop being a sissy.”

The pep talk worked for about two minutes. He tried to float to rest, kicking his legs and leaning his body out nearly flat against the surface. When he started to swim again he saw a large boat on the horizon about a half mile offshore. He decided that was his destination and that once he reached it he would be saved. So all he had to do was stroke for a few more minutes, he told himself, ten or fifteen at the most. Then he would get there and give them some cock-and-bull story about falling off a tourist boat, completely in Russian, and be saved.

He’d be ribbed about this forever. Served him right for jumping into the water. He should have had Grumpy covering his butt.

His arms were lead and stiff and dead.

A motor ripped in the distance. Guns turned to see where it was. As he did, his arms collapsed and he sunk below the waves. Something hard grabbed him around the neck and shoulder and dragged him upward.

The air felt like a shock when he broke the water.

“Don’t they teach marines how to swim?” yelled Ferguson. He was swimming alongside him.

“Ferg, man, am I glad to see you.”

“Yeah, no shit. Kick. Come on. We have to grab that rope. See it? Rankin can’t steer to save his life.”

Guns managed a feeble kick, but it was Ferguson who did all the work, towing the marine to the rope and then pulling them both to the boat, where Rankin and Monsoon fished them from the sea. Guns collapsed against the side of the vessel.

“I owe you one, man. I owe all you guys,” said Guns.

“Bet your ass,” said Rankin.

Ferguson stood and tried knocking the water out of his ears. The harbor would not rank among the world’s cleanest, and he was covered with a film of oil. The only reason he couldn’t smell it was that the stench of raw sewage and dead fish was too strong.

“Where’s Grumpy?” asked Guns.

“Not where he was supposed to be,” said Ferguson.

“It wasn’t his fault,” said Guns. “I left him on the other side of the mosque and told him I’d be back.”

“We left him where we stole the boat,” said Ferguson, only slightly mollified. “I told him if the owner came back he should offer himself in trade.”

“You shouldn’t have told him that,” said Guns.

“Why not?”

“He’s a marine. Trained to follow orders. I don’t think he’s got much of a sense of humor.”

22

The scent of the vodka nearly overwhelmed Ravid. When he had started out this evening to get a sense of what the arms dealers were doing, he had felt strong, even dismissive of the need for liquor. But now desire clawed up from his chest, more powerful than sex, more powerful than the will to breathe when underwater. He wanted, he needed a drink.

Was that why he had given himself this assignment after all? Because he knew he would succumb? Because he had to succumb in the end?

Ravid tried to ward it off. He returned to the plot to take Khazaal’s gems, but its elaborate twists no longer interested him. He thought of his wife and his son, forced his mind’s eye to reconstruct their pictures. He thought of revenge, the need to annihilate his enemy. He wanted justice —

No, all he wanted was a drink. He didn’t even care if it damaged his cover. Why would it? Many Muslims, especially those who had tasted the luxuries of the West, sinned by drinking. It might even be argued that it helped his cover, for what spy would dare to sin openly?

He didn’t care. He wanted a drink.

Ravid turned around as if he were here to meet someone.

Who? One of the arms dealers. Birk, the notorious Pole. Andari, the half Italian, half Armenian whom everyone thought was a Jew.

Perhaps he would go up to one of them, just as a diversion, just to keep himself from giving in.

But if he didn’t want a drink, why didn’t he just leave? He was free to walk out. He could easily walk out.

He should walk out, he told himself. And yet he felt he couldn’t.

The bartender tapped Ravid’s arm from behind. Ravid jerked around, as if jolted by lightning.

“Drink, sir?” asked the man in English.

Ravid stared at him for twenty seconds, thirty. “Vodka,” he said.

As soon as he pronounced the word, blood rushed to his head. He felt warm, almost hot. Relieved and ashamed at the same time.

A woman brushed by him. Ravid turned quickly, his eyes following her as she made her way toward one of the arms dealers, Birk.

The bartender put the vodka down behind him. Ravid forced himself to stare after the woman, ignoring the greater temptation.

He would never stop at one drink. His mission would be lost. Very likely he would lose his life. Tischler would have nothing to do with him. Any chance of revenge would be lost.

What chance, though, did he have of revenge? He knew several people, many people, men in similar situations, who would help. He could form an army of the wrathful, he thought. Together they could take their revenge.

If he had the strength. Not to gather them — that was nothing, that was a child’s task. The strength he needed was to not drink. Not to remember his wife and child. Not to remember but to stay focused on the present.

The smell of alcohol rose around him, overwhelming everything else. He put his hand to his face, closing off his nose, trying to force the scent away. He wanted to leave yet his legs seemed glued to the spot. Finally he got himself moving, eyes riveted on the woman who had just bumped into him. He began following her, telling himself she was attractive and reminded him of his wife. A lie, but useful.

The woman — Judy Coldwell — stopped at Birk’s table. It had taken her much longer than she had thought to find him, and now she had to screw up her courage just to speak. But with the first word, the rest flowed; it was if she were an actress, playing a part, and that made it easy.

“Do you remember me?” she said first in Arabic, then in English. Her Arabic was still rusty — far too rusty, really, to be properly understood — but Caldwell knew that using it before English was generally helpful.

Birk didn’t know quite what to make of her. She was attractive, and while he thought it possible she was some sort of journalist, he decided he might amuse himself for a few moments while it was still relatively early. He swept his hand across the table, inviting her to sit.

“Do you remember me?” she repeated as she sat.

“I should, with a face as lovely as yours,” said Birk. “But I’m afraid I do not.”

“Three years ago, I worked for a firm that needed to equip its security workers,” said Coldwell. “We needed to get around some inconvenient regulations and some nosy officials. You were able to sell us some items.”

“Of course,” said Birk. He didn’t remember the transaction, but that was unimportant. “And now you find yourself in need of more. I have to say that inflation has taken quite a toll—”

“I’m here for something else entirely,” said Coldwell. “I’m taking the place of Benjamin Thatch. He’s been delayed.”

“His name is unfamiliar.”

“Perhaps not with others. I was hoping perhaps you could mention it.”

“Mention it?”

“Some people may be looking for Thatch instead of me. Of course if this is inconvenient, we could arrange to pay for your time.”

Birk could tell from her accent that the woman was an American. Could this be a hopelessly lame attempt by his friend Ferguson to trick him?

“You’re a reporter?” he asked.

The woman’s face blanched. “Absolutely not.”

“CIA?”

“No. I am with a group called Seven Angels. We assist different people.”

Birk laughed. “A charity?”

“Not exactly, no.”

A few yards away, Ravid slid back in toward the bar. The bartender saw him and approached once more, holding the drink out this time. “No, thank you,” said Ravid. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few bills. “For your troubles. And if I might have a seltzer, no alcohol.”

The bartender shrugged. Ravid straightened, straining to hear the conversation at the table. He could hear no more than a few words, Seven Angels among them.

They struck him because they were the name of a group mentioned in the background briefing as he brought himself up to date. An American group had made some contact with a number of Islamic groups, including members of the cells meeting in Latakia. Seven Angels wanted to provoke some sort of apocalyptic dawn by funding attacks in the Holy Land. It had been rolled up completely by the Americans following a freak event in Jerusalem around the time he had been recalled.

Ravid leaned closer, trying to hear, but the interview was over; she was already getting up.

Ravid began to follow, slowly first, then quicker, pushing toward the exit, and his future.

23

When Peter Bellows saw Corrine at the airport, he shouted to her. He felt almost as if he were her uncle, though he hadn’t seen her more than once a year over the past decade.

For her part, Corrine didn’t feel like a niece; Bellows was her father’s friend, not hers, and since receiving the president’s instructions had tried to distance herself even further mentally, thinking of him as the “American ambassador to Iraq,” not her father’s old chum. She smiled bashfully and put out her hand, but Bellows wrapped his arms around her and kissed her cheek.

“It’s been so long, Corrine,” said Bellows. “How are you, hon?”

“Very well, Mr. Ambassador. Yourself?”

“Oh, stop that Mr. Ambassador stuff. Peter’s fine.” He winked at her, indulging in an almost fatherly pride at how far his friend’s little girl had come. “Your father says hello,” Bellows added. “I spoke to him just last night. He claims you never call.”

“He always says that.”

“God, you look good. Now I don’t mean that in a sexist way.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” she told him.

“Would you like to freshen up back at the embassy or look around town?” he asked.

“I’m fresh enough.”

“You said it. I didn’t,” said Bellows, leading her to the cars as a swarm of bodyguards followed.

Two years after the formal turnover of government to the Iraqis, the city remained pockmarked and battered from the occupation and the continuing struggle with a hodgepodge of insurgents. The Iraqis were clearly making progress, and in fact two-thirds of the country was arguably as calm as any place in the Middle East. The area around Baghdad remained the exception; while it wasn’t anywhere near as dangerous as it had been even a year before, Americans were still targets here. A sizable portion of the remaining U.S. military presence was concentrated in and around the capital. American troops and dignitaries traveled in convoys whenever possible, their routes never announced in advance.

But Bellows seemed jubilant and even carefree as they rode from the airport and toured the sprawling city. He spoke in glowing terms of a new housing development that, in Corrine’s eyes at least, already looked rundown. From there they drove to a new shopping mall outside of town. Corrine realized that the ambassador wanted her to be impressed, hoping that she would interpret what she saw as a sign that normalcy was returning to the country.

The empty shelves and idle clerks in the mall had the opposite effect. There were at least three dozen Iraqi government soldiers in the building and another dozen Americans, outnumbering the shoppers nearly twenty to one.

Iraq might be on the road to democracy, but it was a long road, with many twists and turns, and it would be years before the country rose from poverty, let alone began to live up to its economic potential. In two months, the bulk of the remaining American troops were scheduled to withdraw. Corrine couldn’t help but wonder what would happen when they were gone. Besides reducing security, their removal would hurt the local economy, which was benefiting from cash payments for bases as well as from the GIs’ personal spending.

Bellows shrugged off the question.

“A few hiccups, nothing more,” he said as they rode back to the embassy. “I have a few meetings I can’t duck. Should we get together after dinner? Late? I’d love to catch up.”

“Sure,” said Corrine. “That’d be good. I have a few things to do myself.”

The embassy complex — it had been built at the end of the occupation, one more spur to the economy — was so new that it smelled of plaster as well as fresh paint. There were three small dormitory-style residence buildings for VIPs. Though Bellows suggested she take a room in the ambassador’s residence near him, Corrine demurred; she planned on using the secure communications facilities, which were located in the basement of the largest of the VIP buildings (the Yellow House, so called because of the exterior color). Staying there would make it easier to come and go. She also wanted to keep a little professional distance between herself and Bellows, though she didn’t tell him this.

Like its predecessor, the embassy had extensive secure facilities manned twenty-four hours a day and located in an elaborate bunker. Corrine found her room, then went down and checked in with Teri, her secretary at the White House. Teri ran through a long list of calls and then demanded to know if the rumors were true that she had been shot at.

“No. There was some sort of fracas in a nightclub, but my bodyguards hustled me out before things got too crazy,” said Corrine, crossing her lingers in front of her.

“Is that really what happened?”

“Would a lawyer lie?”

“Ha.”

After she managed to allay Teri’s fears, she phoned Corrigan to see what was up with Ferguson. The First Team leader wanted to talk to her, Corrigan said. Corrine kicked off her shoes and curled her legs up in the chair as she waited for the connection. The long day had her tired out already, and she was a little disappointed by the ambassador; he hadn’t taken her questions seriously.

Or maybe he had, and that’s why he was putting a smiley face on everything.

“How do you like sunny Baghdad?” said Ferguson cheerfully when the line connected.

“It’s all right. What’s going on?”

“I know where Khazaal is staying, a mosque in town.”

The word mosque swept away her fatigue. “You can’t blow up a mosque.”

“I didn’t say I was going to. Can I make the arrest without a replacement for Fouad?”

“Go ahead, but don’t do it in a mosque. Not in a mosque.”

Ferguson said nothing.

“Unless you really have to,” she added finally.

“I don’t think I will. I’ll talk to you.” He snapped off the line.

Corrine rose and went upstairs in search of a shower.

24

As it turned out, Khazaal left the castle around the time Ferguson was grabbing Guns from the riptide. Meles, meanwhile, didn’t go there, visiting a small cottage a mile outside of town, apparently to see another delegate to the upcoming conference.

The flies Ferguson attached to the Imam’s son’s clothes yielded nothing except for a few jokes at the old man’s expense. Good fodder for the CIA Christmas party, but of dubious intelligence value.

The flies that Guns tossed in the boat, however, provided several interesting tidbits when the boat returned from a trip to the port area. According to the transcript Corrigan forward to Ferguson:

sbj a: [garbled]… Tomorrow night

sbj b: All of them?

sbj a: As many trucks as you can get, yes. And brothers who are trustworthy.

sbj b: The Yemen? [series of individuals named by pseudonyms or nicknames, none

identified as yet..]

“Which you think means what?” Ferguson asked Corrigan.

“Thomas thinks it means the meeting is set for tomorrow. He’s found an airplane that was leased in Turkey a week ago with money from Morocco that came from Iraq. That airplane has a flight plan filed for Latakia tomorrow night. That jibes with what your source told you.”

“The airplane is going to pick up Khazaal?”

“That’s Thomas’s theory. It landed somewhere in Lebanon a few days ago, but then flew back to Turkey.”

“Near Tripoli?” That would have made sense if the men they had apprehended were to meet Khazaal there.

“I asked Thomas, but he accused me of jumping to conclusions without facts. It seems logical, right? But those guys you grabbed still aren’t talking. Slott won’t send them over to Guantanamo and Cor — Ms. Alston won’t approve, uh, coercive methods.”

Ferguson’s plan, still vague, was to grab the Iraqi as he came out of the meeting. That was problematic, however; Khazaal would be on his guard, and once the attack started he’d fight to the death. The plane represented a better opportunity, but by then Khazaal might have completed whatever deal the jewels were intended to cement. The trick was to think of them as separate events.

“Tell Thomas he did a good job,” Ferg told Corrigan.

“I’m afraid to encourage him. He has yet another UFO theory.”

“Hey, I have some of those myself. What does he think the jewels are supposed to buy?”

“Just the usual: weapons. I have a theory,” added Corrigan.

“Fire away.”

“I think it’s mercenaries. They’ll bring in suicide bombers from Hamas or something.”

“They have plenty of whackos in Iraq already,” Ferguson told him. “Iraq is a net exporter of crazies. Just like guns.”

“I think you’re wrong. It’s not easy to get people to blow themselves up, Ferg.”

“When does that plane land?”

“It takes off around six p.m., and it should be there within one to two hours. A bit of time to turn it around on the ground… it gets back here somewhere between ten and two.”

“Thanks for narrowing it down for me. My money set?”

“Wired in, with Ms. Alston’s approval.”

“All right. I have to talk to Van and then I’ll get back to you on what else I need. Definitely the Global Hawk or U-2. An Elint plane would be nice.”

“There’s no signals coming out of there, Ferg. With the president’s trip next week and everything, it’s a real bear to spring resources. And even Special Demands has a budget.”

“Corrigan, do you pay for this stuff out of your pocket?”

“No, Ferg, but you know what Slott is going to say.”

“Does he pay for it out of his pocket?”

“He’s going to say if there’s no high probability of data, resources would be better conserved—”

“To which I say, ‘use it or lose it.’ I like my saying better.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one he’s going to yell at.”

“No, he’s going to yell at Mizz Alston,” said Ferguson, snapping off the phone. He looked up at Thera, who was watching the video feed on the lap-lop. “Hey, beautiful, did you buy just that one dress the other day?”

“It’s a skirt set,” she told him.

“Is that a no?”

“I can’t wear the same thing?”

“Don’t be gauche.” He grabbed the blazer he had borrowed from the hospital. “Come along. Uncle Sam is about to take us shopping.”

Thera found a gorgeous blue dress in the Versailles shop that fit so well she was ready to spend her own money on it, until Ferguson whispered the price. They put her conservative Arab clothes in a bag, along with the weapons that wouldn’t fit beneath her dress without creating unsightly bulges. Ferguson found a blazer next door and a shirt to go with it. For Monsoon and Grumpy, along as shadows and sartorially challenged, Thera selected a pair of brown suits and black shirts that made them look like rap stars trying to look like bouncers. Not a bad effect, Ferguson thought.

“We check our weapons at the door,” Ferg said as they rode in a taxi to Agamemnon. “The Barroom is a very posh place, which means we can’t bribe the help but we can slide the guns in through the window in the men’s restroom.”

Ferguson made a show of handing his big Glock to the attendants at the hallway entrance to the club, then went through the metal detector and set it off. They pulled him aside. “Oh, it was probably this,” he said, holding up a penknife. “Sorry about that.”

They took the knife and wanded him with a handheld metal detector. Not satisfied even though it didn’t beep, they patted him down.

“Tickles,” said Ferguson, who finally passed through the gate without setting the machine off. Thera was waiting for him.

“Did you do that on purpose?” she asked as he took her arm.

“What do you think?”

“I know you must have, but I can’t figure out why.”

The maître d’ approached them, nodded graciously, and then showed them to a table overlooking the bar.

“I want them to remember that I was clean,” said Ferguson as they sat. “And I wanted everybody in the place to get a look at how cute you are, especially Ras.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Look, he’s coming to us tonight. Perrier with a twist,” he said as a waiter fluttered toward them.

“I’ll have a champagne cocktail,” she said.

“No bourbon?” asked Ferguson.

“The night is young,” said Thera. “How are we going to get our guns?”

“Monsoon’ll figure it out.” Ferguson rose. “Ras, how are you?”

“Mr. IRA and wife,” said Ras, sitting. “So lovely.” He asked Thera what she was drinking and then ordered the same.

“You don’t strike me as a champagne cocktail kind of guy, Ras,” said Ferguson.

“Mr. Ferguson, I have to say, you have impeccable taste in women. Your wife is so intoxicating she makes me forget who I am.”

“Too bad I don’t have the same good judgment when it comes to picking business associates.”

“How so?” asked Ras, making a not very subtle attempt to stare down Thera’s cleavage.

“I mean that you have not been completely honest with me,” said Ferguson. “You told me you had not heard that Vassenka was in town, and now I hear that he is.”

“If he is or not, that’s not my concern. I didn’t know that he was when you asked.”

“So now you do?”

Ras waved his hand. “The Syrians may think so. I have an open mind.”

“What do they say about Suhab Majadin?”

Ras didn’t recognize the name.

“An Iraqi,” said Ferguson. “A Shiite.”

“You are dealing with him, Mr. IRA?”

“I always deal with the highest bidder. But I have other business with Suhab Majadin. Personal business. Business that I would like to conclude, especially if I had the opportunity by chance to meet him here.”

They sipped their drinks for a while. Ras asked Thera some questions about her background. Thera said that she was from Turkey but was otherwise purposefully vague.

As Ras glanced at his watch, Ferguson leaned forward. “If you sell anything to Suhab, you’re going to make a lot of people very angry,” he said. “And by sell I include trade, loan, or gift.”

“One never makes a gift in this business,” said Ras.

Ferguson leaned forward on the table. He said nothing and made no gesture that could be interpreted as conventionally threatening. Yet even Thera felt a tingle of fear.

“Where’s Suhab?” whispered Ferguson.

Ras shook his head.

“You’re dealing with him?”

“I don’t even know him.”

Ferguson straightened, then leaned back in his seat, staring at Ras. Then he grinned, in effect releasing him. Ras strode away, his composure not quite restored.

“Can we bug him?” Thera asked.

“He’d find it.” Ferguson sipped his seltzer.

“So what are we going to do now?” Thera asked.

“Dance the night away,” said Ferguson. “Then go for a swim.”

25

Despair seized Judy Coldwell as the taxi approached the hotel. For the first time since receiving the Reverend Tallis’s message she doubted, truly doubted, her ability to carry out the task.

It was not that the meeting with the Polish arms dealer had gone badly. On the contrary, while clearly he didn’t remember her or the AK-47s and grenades he had supplied her employer three years before, the Pole seemed to have taken her seriously. He had even tried to sell her a weapon.

She thought he had. Surely he hadn’t been just making conversation by mentioning he had a cruise missile for sale. But that was what had depressed her. He claimed to want five million dollars for it.

Five million dollars!

A serious buyer would surely bargain him down — if she remembered correctly, the rifles had sold for about half his initial asking price — but even so: who would be impressed by a few hundred thousand dollars when millions were needed?

A hole opened in her stomach as the taxi pulled up in front of the hotel. She must not lose hope, she told herself. The weight of history was on her side.

Coldwell gave the taxi driver a good tip. Inside the hotel, the short man at the desk smiled at her lasciviously. She forced herself to smile back.

A man trotted across the lobby toward her as the elevator arrived. She got in, then grabbed the door to hold it for him.

“Thank you,” said the man. He reached for the floor button and pressed five, even though she already had.

“The Pole is not a very reasonable man,” said the man as the doors closed. “But he is willing to bargain, which is a plus.”

Startled, Coldwell asked if he had been sent by Birk.

“No, not at all. But perhaps we can work together.”

“I’m not quite sure what you mean,” she said.

“Seven Angels?” said the man, Aaron Ravid.

“Yes,” managed Coldwell.

The door opened on her floor. Coldwell stayed frozen in place. When the door started to close, Ravid put his hand out to stop it. “We should find a place to talk. Your room is surely bugged.”

When they finally reached a part of the beach Ravid thought was safe from eavesdroppers, they stood together for a few moments without speaking. It was Coldwell who spoke first, suspicious yet feeling almost confident, as if she were an actress playing out a well-known part.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Ravid gave his cover name, Fazel al-Qiam.

“I am here for Benjamin Thatch,” said Coldwell. “To complete the arrangements.”

“Yes,” said Ravid.

He waited for her to continue, but she did not. Finally he saw no other choice to push the conversation but to admit that he was not the person she was apparently waiting to meet. As soon as he did, however, a frown appeared on her face. He volunteered that he had heard of Seven Angels and knew that the group was willing to help those “with the proper agenda” in the Middle East.

Coldwell listened to him carefully, believing that he was lying now about not being her contact. Benjamin would have presented the group as being sympathetic to the Islamic goals of jihad; it could be counterproductive to explain the true nature of what they wanted, though Coldwell believed most groups would take their money anyway. She was afraid that when she told him she had only two hundred thousand dollars, he would simply walk away.

After a few minutes, Ravid decided that he had gotten all the information from the woman that he was likely to get. She was an amateur at best, a poseur at worst, and if she had real money it would surely be fleeced off of her by one of the many snakes in the seaside hotels within a few days. He watched her face, thinking of how to best break this off. As he did, a light on the water caught Coldwell’s attention and she turned away. The sweep of her head took him by surprise: he saw not Coldwell but his wife. As Ravid pulled himself back to reality, back to the present, Coldwell turned her head back to him.

“I have little money,” she said, deciding to state the situation simply and get it over with. “I can get two hundred thousand, no more.”

“It’s not enough,” said Ravid. He thought of Khazaal’s gems. For a moment, only a moment, he inserted her into the plans he had thought of the other day.

“What would your target be?” Coldwell asked.

Ravid looked up at her. “Mecca.”

Coldwell didn’t understand. She thought she had heard wrong. Before she could say anything, Ravid flew at her. He gripped her blouse and pushed her down, his rage erupting. Two years of anger flashed into his hand as he pushed it against her chest. The suicide bomber, the Muslims, his keepers at Mossad — everything erupted.

Coldwell looked up at him, unable to speak, certain that she was to be killed. She put her hands against his chest, starting to push him off, knowing it would be futile but determined to have her last act on earth be one of courage.

“Yes,” said Ravid as she pushed against him. He let go and stood back. His wife would have fought that way, too.

The rage vanished. In its place was something logical and cold, another kind of wrath, one with a chance to be fulfilled.

“I want to destroy Mecca,” he told the woman. “And you can help me. In this way, both of us can benefit.”

26

A layer of thin clouds obscured the moon over the eastern Mediterranean. Water lapped against the side of the boat. The breeze made the air a bit chilly. It was a fairy-tale sort of night, the kind that makes you think nothing can go wrong anywhere in the world, the sort of night that makes even a cynic feel safe while slumbering in bed. Zrrrpp…

Zrrpppp…

The two guards fell to the deck of the boat, paralyzed by Taser shots from fifteen feet away. As they hit, a man in a frogman’s suit leapt up the ladder of the boat they had been guarding. In his right hand he carried a weapon that looked like a rubberized M79 grenade launcher, which was more or less what it was. He leveled the launcher in the direction of the bow, where two other guards were sitting, and fired. A large shell sped from the barrel, striking the bulkhead just beyond them. As it hit, a nylon and metal mesh net mushroomed from the canister, along with a heavy dose of gas derived from the same chemical family as methadone. The victims struggled for a moment, but they had had a long day and had been close to sleep even before the attack; the effect of the gas was overwhelming.

The frogman bent to the two men who’d been hit by the Tasers. The men were still conscious though paralyzed. He pulled a hypodermic needle from the pouch at his belt, tore away the plastic guard and slammed it home in the first man’s leg. He repeated the process with the second man. The drug took effect within three and a half seconds of being administered. By that time, the frogman’s two comrades, Thera and Monsoon, were aboard. In their hands were weapons that looked like oversized spearguns covered in rubber: Tasers designed for working in water.

“Monsoon, you have the deck,” he said. “Thera, let’s go find Sleeping Beauty.”

Birk Ivanovich hated to be woken up before ten a.m., even if it was by a beautiful woman who looked as if she’d just stepped out of a dream.

A wet dream, as a matter of fact: she had on a tight-fitting diving suit, and her hair and upper body were still damp.

“Who are you?” he said, simultaneously trying to rise from the bed in his cabin on the Sharia.

He wasn’t successful, because Ferguson had taken the precaution of restraining his hands before waking him.

“Rise and shine, Birk ol’ buddy,” said Ferguson from the foot of the bed. “Time to do some business.”

“Ferguson, how did you get onto my boat?”

“You invited me the other day, remember?”

“My guards?”

“Upstairs sleeping,” said Ferguson. “I keep telling you, Polacks guarding Polacks is never going to work. By the way, when are you going to hire a full crew? You have only four bodyguards on duty. That’s fine for the Syrians, but what if a real enemy came calling?”

“Undo my chains,” grumbled Birk.

“Just belts,” said Ferguson. “You’re a really heavy sleeper, Birk. You’re lucky I didn’t do something you’d regret.”

Ferguson nodded at Thera, who leaned over and undid them. Birk stayed motionless for a moment, then grabbed for her. Thera, prepared, had no trouble fending him off with a hard punch to the chest, calculated to stun rather than incapacitate. Birk fell back, blinked a few times, then rolled to the other side of the bed, grabbing for a weapon.

“I got it already,” said Ferguson, holding up the pistol. “So the Walther P1A1 has the arms dealer’s seal of approval?”

“A gun is a gun,” said Birk. “Why are you here?”

“I want to make a purchase.”

Birk’s face brightened and he sat up. “What do you want?”

“Is the missile still for sale?”

“Yes,” said Birk.

“When can we take delivery?”

“Three days. Or maybe four.”

“Three days?”

“I need a day or two to make arrangements. You know how it goes.”

“Is that how long it’s going to take you to get the missile for the Iraqi?”

Birk made a face. “What Iraqi?”

“Khazaal.”

“I told you, I’m not dealing with him.”

“You shouldn’t. It would decrease your life expectancy. And you see how defenseless you are.”

“I’m not dealing with him, Ferguson. I haven’t been invited to their party. I’m not trusted, and I don’t care to be. Not there.”

“Why is the Russian in town?”

“I don’t know. Honestly.”

“Are the Israelis involved?”

“Mossad? Here? You believe the stories that they are supermen. That is a myth they like to spread. They were powerful once. Those days are gone.”

“How much do you want for the missile?”

“A million. As I said the other night.”

“Three hundred thousand.”

“Be reasonable. I have others interested.”

“Oh really? Khazaal?”

“There is a good market for a weapon like this,” said Birk. “Someone offered me five tonight.”

Ferguson laughed.

“I can get two million,” said Birk, annoyed not that his bluff was called but that he had made such a halfhearted attempt. He was not at his best when first waking. “You must meet my price.”

“I don’t know how high I can go,” said Ferguson. “If you’re serious—”

“Very serious.”

“I have talk to the bean counters.”

“You were to do that the other day.”

“No, the other day I had to get clearance from my superiors. Now that I have it, I can see what’s in the piggy bank.”

“You’re becoming more like the Russians every day, Ferguson. This is not a good direction to take. What happened to the man I was going into business with? Where is the boldness?”

Ferguson smiled. “In the interests of goodwill, I’d like to buy some other items.”

“Not on credit,” said Birk.

“Considering that we’re doing business—”

“Not on credit, Ferg. No, no, no. You know better.”

“We can roll it into the other deal, with a little interest.”

Birk shook his head.

“All right. But I need to take delivery by this afternoon,” said Ferguson.

“It will be figured into the price. What do you need?”

“C4—”

“I have a Czech substitute. Very high quality.”

“Acceptable. I need something along the lines of the M252, the 81 nun mortar.”

“I can get you two of the British designs. Same weapon. How many rounds?”

“At least four good ones. High explosives. I’d like some training rounds and an illumination round or two.”

“Training rounds? Why?”

“I’m out of practice. I need some rifles.”

“M16s? Or will AK-47s do?”

“Well, what do you have?”

“Oh, we have many things,” said Birk, finally warming to his role as a dealer. “If you want a machine gun, I have these very nice H&Ks made in Mexico. I came by them just the other day.”

“Mexico?”

“Your army chose the Minimi over it, but I think the trials were rigged.”

“Yeah, but Mexico?”

“Labor is cheaper there. What can I say?”

“I’ll take two, but I need regular rifles as well. Kalashnikovs. Couple of thousand rounds. And something like a MILAN antitank weapon.”

“Now we are becoming serious,” said Birk. This was his way of saying that he did not have the item, but could find suitable substitutes. “Not RPGs?”

“I need something better. Longer range.”

“Battle tested.”

“Sure, if I don’t mind being flattened by the return fire.”

“Handled properly, there will be no return fire.” Birk knotted his brow. “I have a pair of older Gustavs. Good weapons. Hard to find ammunition.”

“How many rounds?”

“Just two. But I can let you take them very cheap.”

“I’ll bet.”

The Gustavs — M2 Carl Gustav recoilless rifles — were Swedish-built antitank guns. They fired an 84mm round to about 450 meters; the missile could penetrate up to eighteen inches of armor.

“Are you going to war with all of this?” asked Birk.

“More or less. I need some crappy radios, too. Something easy to intercept. Russian.”

Birk rolled his eyes. “As you wish.”

They haggled for a bit over price after Ferguson finished giving him the shopping list. The mortars were very expensive: the list price on the versions that the U.S. used was just a shade under $25,000, and while Birk couldn’t get quite that much for a used British model, he held out for more than half. Ferguson got some throw-ins, including a pair of white phosphorous rounds, but he was not in a position to haggle and probably wouldn’t have gotten a much better deal elsewhere in the city if he had been. Birk claimed to be taking a beating by selling the Gustavs for only five thousand dollars apiece, which was actually a fair deal, especially as an RPG-7 (the basic lightweight Russian rocket-launched grenade) would have cost about the same. The total — as Ferguson had predicted several days before — came to just under a hundred thousand dollars.

Thera, tiring of the back and forth, went topside to check on Monsoon. He had removed the mesh from the two guards at the bow and stowed it in a canvas bag. Though it covered about ten square feet, the thin filament filled the space of a large skein of yarn.

One of the men moaned. “Think he needs another shot?” Monsoon asked Thera.

“Nah, we’re out of here. You can OD on that stuff.” She could tell from Monsoon’s expression that he didn’t think that would be a particularly bad thing; in his eyes, an arms dealer’s goon was as much of a scumbag as a terrorist was. “Killing him would be counterproductive in the long run,” Thera explained. “It’s not worth the risk.”

“He’s not going to be happy when he wakes up anyway.”

“Ferg’s call.”

By way of conversation when the deal was concluded, Ferguson asked Birk what other gossip he had heard about the meeting. Birk mentioned some minor terrorists as he dressed.

“What about Meles Abaa?” asked Ferguson. “I hear he’s at the Riviera.”

“Another person I would not deal with.”

“Why not?”

“The Israelis would not like it. It doesn’t pay to anger them.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any Mossad agents in town.”

“That would get back to them. They do not like Meles. That is the difference between you and the Jews, Ferguson. You say you do not like someone, and you watch what he is doing. The Jews, chrtttt, they slit his throat.”

“I should be more like them, huh?”

“I don’t tell anyone how to run their business.”

Up top, Birk looked over his bodyguards and shook his head. “I can’t even fire this one,” complained the arms dealer, kicking the biggest one. “Tomanski is my brother-in-law.”

“You’re married?” said Ferguson.

“My sister’s husband.”

“You don’t look like the type to have a sister,” said Ferguson. He pulled out a wad of Syrian bills. “I’ll leave this to cover their medical expenses, will they get to spend it or will you?”

“Tell me how much it is, and I’ll dock it from their pay.”

“Fair enough. I don’t feel like swimming back, so I’m going to borrow your boat. I’ll take your brother-in-law with me. He can bring it back when he wakes up. When will things be ready?”

“In the afternoon. Three o’clock.”

“I’ll meet you. Where will you be?”

“The Versailles, but…”

“Not a problem,” said Ferguson, understanding that Birk would be doing business. “I’ll just call. Same number?”

Birk nodded.

“Come on, Sleeping Beauty.” Ferguson bent down and picked up Brother-in-Law.

“Not him!” yelled Thera. “He’s almost conscious.”

It was too late. Whether awake or in drug-induced sleep, the man grabbed Ferguson’s neck in his arms. Ferg leaned forward, spun to the side, and when that failed to release the stranglehold, pushed off the boat, taking Brother-in-Law with him.

The cold water revived the bodyguard enough to panic, and he tightened his grip rather than loosening it. Ferguson jerked his elbow hard against the man’s side, expecting that would release him, then kicked upward. His progress upward could be measured in micrometers. Brother-in-Law was a real meat and potatoes kind of guy, with emphasis on the potatoes; he weighed a hundred pounds more than Ferguson.

“Cover him,” Thera told Monsoon, gesturing at Birk as she dove off into the water to help Ferguson.

By now Ferguson had decided he actually needed air and so took extreme measures, bowing his head down and ramming Brother-in-Law into the side of Birk’s boat. That did the trick: Brother-in-Law’s grip didn’t loosen but the rest of his muscles sagged, and Ferguson was able to kick them both upward to the top about a half second before his lungs would have imploded. Thera fished for the back of Brother-in-Law’s shirt, grabbing it as Birk threw a line down into the water.

“He weighs a ton,” complained Ferguson, ducking back down and finally extricating himself from his grip.

“Keep him,” said Birk. “Get him out of here.”

“Is he alive?” whispered Thera as they pulled Brother-in-Law into the small skiff.

“Don’t check until we’re out of Birk’s sight,” said Ferguson. “He’ll add the funeral to the bill.”

Brother-in-Law was alive and managed to open his eyes a few minutes later as they headed toward Latakia’s commercial port area.

“Sorry I had to hit you,” Ferguson told him.

Brother-in-Law said something in Polish. Polish wasn’t one of Ferguson’s languages, but it didn’t sound much like “have a nice day.”

“You speak English, or do I have to speak Russian?” Ferg asked.

Brother-in-law spit. “Speak Arabic before Russian,” he said in English.

“I’m going to make up for getting you in trouble with Birk but not for slamming you against the yacht; that was self-preservation,” said Ferguson.

The next sentence was in the universal language: he took out five American hundred dollar bills and held him in front of Brother-in-Law’s face. “I need a little help onshore. Nothing you’ll get in trouble for.”

“What?”

“I need some bicycles and a pair of trucks. I can’t drive the trucks at the same time. One bill now, the rest later.”

Thera stared at Ferguson. Was he crazy? How could he trust this guy when he had just about killed him ten minutes before?

“OK,” said Brother-in-Law reaching for, the bills.

Ferg gave one to him.

“Where are we buying these trucks?” Thera asked.

“I wouldn’t use the word buy,” said Ferguson. “Borrow, maybe.” Ferg was going to take them from a so-called charity organization that was actually a fund-raising front for terrorists funneling money into Palestine and Iraq. “But Brother-in-Law and I are going to take care of it on our own. You and Monsoon are going to the toy store at Versailles. The shops in the hotel mall there all open at eight. I don’t want you hanging around; in and out first thing, OK? Don’t be in the lobby, don’t walk the halls, nothing. In and out.”

“You think a toy store’s dangerous?”

“You’d be surprised,” said Ferguson, who actually didn’t want them seen by Ravid. “I saw a remote-controlled car there. Get as many of those as you can. Even better would be an airplane. If you see one, grab that, too. But make sure it’s good one; the cheap models’ll only go to seven hundred and fifty feet. We want the high end. Twenty-five hundred if you can.”

“What about a boat?”

“Only if you’re planning on taking a bath,” said Ferg. “After you go shopping, take a nap. You need all the beauty rest you can get.”

Birk’s brother-in-law turned out to be unusually adept at jumping cars and even relished the idea of victimizing the Charitable Brotherhood, which even he knew was nothing more than a collection of slimes masquerading as concerned citizens. Ferguson had him follow in the second truck as he drove across town, first north and then west to a residential area at the edge of the city. He’d taken Brother-in-Law along not as a gofer but as an insurance policy in case Birk had been lying about dealing with the Iraqis or otherwise became curious about the Americans’ location in town; the trucks were a misdirection play that would keep someone hunting for them busy while Ferguson set up the operation.

“Hungry, comrade?” asked Ferguson as Brother-in-Law climbed into the cab. He said it in Russian, and the other man reacted immediately, practically spitting as he said in English that all Russians were dogs and he would do well to wash his mouth out after using the language.

“Don’t like them, huh?” said Ferguson.

“Phew.”

“Something personal, I hope.”

Brother-in-Law didn’t reply. Ferguson took the road to the coast, then instead of going south took a right on the highway.

“You look hungry,” he explained. “We’ll get something to eat.”

Brother-in-Law grunted, but then told Ferguson that there was a decent place for breakfast a mile up the road, one where there weren’t too many Russians or Syrians.

“If you don’t like Syrians and you don’t like Russians, why are you here?” Ferguson asked. “Family obligations?”

This drew a long, convoluted story about the need for the family to recover a farm it had lost during World War II because of the Russians. To Brother-in-Law, Syrians were Russians with head scarves and robes (even if the majority in Latakia didn’t wear them).

“How about the Iraqis?” asked Ferguson. He ran his fork through the scrambled eggs. Apparently Brother-in-Law liked runny yolks and potatoes so crisp they endangered fillings.

“All Iraqis are idiots,” said Brother-in-Law.

“But Birk deals with Iraqis all the time.”

Brother-in-Law made a face but didn’t answer.

“Sometimes?” said Ferg.

Brother-in-Law knew better than to say anything, but if Birk had a deal going with Khazaal he either didn’t know about it or didn’t realize Khazaal was Iraqi. The latter seemed pretty far-fetched; the former remained a possibility.

After breakfast, they drove to a bicycle shop in the center of town where he bought a dozen used bicycles and had them loaded into the back, from there they went back to the dock where he’d tied up the boat.

“Give my regards to Birk,” Ferg told Brother-in-Law as he handed him the promised money and another hundred for goodwill. “You probably ought to tell him I gave you a hundred to help. Knowing Birk he’ll want a cut.”

The Brother-in-Law smiled and slammed the door.

Thera and Monsoon returned to their hotel with an armload of toys and a large bag of batteries. By the time Ferguson returned — he’d stashed the bicycles in several strategic locations and parked the second truck near the first — Guns and Grumpy were racing two of the cars around the suite.

“I have to go check in with Van,” Ferg told them. “Then I’m going to catch some z’s. Give those to Rankin when he wakes up. And don’t wreck them; he needs them to make some bombs.”

27

Colonel Van Buren had just come back to his office when the call from Ferguson came through. He checked his watch. It was a little past ten a.m.

“You’re up early,” he told Ferguson after he picked up the phone.

“Haven’t been to bed,” said Ferguson.

“No wonder you sound tired.”

“Nah, must be the connection. Listen, Van, I’ve been thinking. I can’t blow them up when they’re meeting, right?”

“Right.”

“But they don’t know that.”

“OK,” answered Van Buren, not entirely sure where Ferguson was going.

“So what I do is, I make them think they’re being attacked, which gets them the hell out of there on our time schedule. We follow Khazaal, who probably heads back to the mosque—”

“You can’t take him there either, Ferg.”

“I’m not going to. We’re going to set up so that it looks like we will, though. Move people in and out of the area, make sure they’re seen.”

“Then what?”

“He’s going to do the logical thing and go for his airplane. I take him there. We compromise the air conditioning so it shoots dope into the cabin. The only question in my mind is whether we do it on the ground or in the air.”

“Ground is easier and safer,” said Van Buren. “I can put two platoons of Rangers at the airport, land them near the plane. We’ll use the civvy 737 you guys dropped out of. I think it can land on that field.”

They worked out the arrangements and contingencies, talking over the various options. While taking him on the ground at the airport would be easier than doping him in the air, it was likely to lead to political complications if things went wrong, since there would be plenty of people around to notice. But as they worked the possibilities back and forth, it still seemed a better bet.

“I have to separate him from the jewels in case this doesn’t work,” added Ferguson. “That’s the tricky part. I have to do it before the meeting starts.”

Ferg explained that the Iraqi kept the jewels near him but not with him, clearly not trusting any of the people he was dealing with. Ferguson needed a plan to separate the cars before the meeting, while he still knew where the jewels were.

“What if he changes the way he does things before the meeting?” asked Van Buren, sensing from Ferguson’s dismissively breezy tone that he hadn’t finished thinking the mission through. “Maybe that’s the one time he brings them with him.”

“It’s possible,” said Ferguson.

“What are they trying to buy?” Van Buren asked.

“That’s what has me beat. There’s at least one serious cruise missile on the market here, and a Russian expert who should know how to use it is in town. But the guy who has access to them claims he hasn’t been approached.”

“Like an arms dealer never lies, huh?”

Ferguson laughed. He was tired; the laugh was way too loud. Van Buren worried that Ferg was pushing himself too far. You had to be a little reckless to do what Ferguson did, but it was a controlled kind of recklessness, and despite his goofy veneer Ferguson was one of the most controlled people Van Buren had ever met, much more deliberate even than the anal drill sergeants who had introduced him to the army a million years before.

Recklessness, controlled or uncontrolled, left little room for mistakes.

“You OK, Fergie?” Van Buren asked.

“I’m more than OK. I’m the best.”

“Yeah, I know all that. You OK?”

“I’m all right. A little tired. I have to take a nap. How’s your kid? Signed with the Red Sox yet?”

“He’s got to go to college.”

“I’d tell him to take the money and run.”

“That’s why you’re not his dad,” said Van Buren.

“Lucky for him.”

28

The alarm on Ferguson’s watch beeped incessantly, growing louder until its owner finally found the button to turn it off. He stared up at the ceiling, momentarily disoriented.

Did I take my stinking pills, or not?

He couldn’t remember. The need to travel lightly had simply made the compartmentalized pill minders impractical, but there were times when even he could have conceded they were useful. Ferguson, still not sure, took a dose just to be sure; better to be a little hyper than seriously dragging, which was the effect missing even one round of the T3 replacement had on him lately.

Outside in the common room, Rankin was dismantling the remote-control cars. “I assume there are going to be explosives to go with these,” he said by way of greeting.

“Yeah, I have to go pick them up. You didn’t take apart my airplane, did you?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. Why the hell don’t we use a real setup instead of this cobbled together crap?”

“Two words: plausible deniability.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“That’s one word,” said Ferguson. “But it’ll do.”

Ferguson intended that the weapons that he used would suggest the tactics favored by some of the insurgents in Iraq, specifically the southern Shiites who had access to some of the British equipment left behind in the war. His visit to Ras was intended to introduce the name Suhab Majadin to the local authorities. Ras hadn’t recognized it, but the Syrian intelligence service would. Suhab was the leader of a faction that hated Khazaal and vied with him to head the insurgency. A thorough investigation would show that Suhab was back in Iraq and had in fact been paid off by the present government to tone down his activities. But a thorough investigation was unlikely in Latakia.

“Where’s Thera?” Ferguson asked.

“Still sleeping.”

“Wake her up, will you? I have another errand for her and Grumpy.”

“Why don’t you wake her up?” said Rankin.

“ ‘Cause if I go into her room I’m not sure I’ll come out,” said Ferguson.

Forty-five minutes later, Thera and Grumpy found themselves in the casino of the Versailles, playing the slots with bogus slugs and watching for Birk. Thera’s appearance had changed considerably: most notably her hair was now fiery red and stretched well down her back. The effect was startling, even with the black lipstick. Unfortunately these changes were accompanied by one far less flattering: she had gained what looked like fifty pounds, the smooth curves now considerably rounder under her long skirt.

Even disguised, Ferg had warned her that Birk might recognize her if she got too close, and so she let Grumpy do the hard work, betting colors on the roulette wheel, where the video bug that had replaced the button in his shirt could get a good view of Birk, who was testing his skill at calling sevens on the nearby craps table.

From what Thera could see across the room, Birk was alone, except for his bodyguards. Ferguson wanted to know who he was meeting here. He suspected Ravid, since he was staying at the hotel, though Thera wouldn’t have been surprised to see Khazaal or Meles or even one of the men from the mosque.

Birk was still alone when Ferguson’s phone call came. Birk took the call, listened, said something, then hungup and continued playing. Ten minutes later, he cashed out his chips — he was ahead — and went into one of the lounges. Thera followed, with Grumpy right behind her. The lounge was tiered; they took a table together on the top tier, diagonally across the room from Birk and positioned so that Grumpy’s video bug would catch the face of anyone sitting at his small table.

“I was in the middle of a run, you know,” said the marine. “A few more rounds and I could have retired.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” said Thera, surveying the room. She realized from his silence that he’d taken her seriously. “I was kidding. What would you do if you won a fortune? Go fishing?”

“I hate fishing. Too boring,” said Grumpy. “I’d learn how to play golf and play every day.”

“Golf?”

“I always thought that would be a good thing to waste time on.”

Across the room, a woman approached Birk. Thera turned to summon a waiter so she could get a better look. The woman was tall and with light features, almost surely a Westerner, and, thought Thera, vaguely familiar. “You getting that?” she asked Grumpy when she turned back.

“I think so.”

“Keep watching,” said Thera. “I’m going to the restroom.”

She got up and took a circuit of the lounge area and bar, and even went back into the casino and the hotel without seeing Ravid or any of the others she might have suspected. By the time she returned to the table, the woman who had been meeting with Birk was gone and the arms dealer was on his cell phone.

“Talked for a few minutes, then said bye-bye,” said Grumpy. “Didn’t look all that happy. What do you think? Unsatisfied customer?”

Thera shrugged. The image would be looked at by analysts back in the States, who would compare it to known agents and others on their watch lists. Most of the players in international arms smuggling were male; Thera guessed the woman was a go-between for someone, maybe even a stranger picked at random to deliver a seemingly innocuous message or help check surveillance.

They had another hour and a half before they had to meet Ferg. Until then, they’d stay with Birk as long as he was in the hotel. Birk had ordered a bottle of champagne and clearly wasn’t going anywhere. “Let’s get ourselves another round of Cokes,” said Thera, signaling to the waiter. “And then maybe you can explain what’s so interesting about whacking a defenseless little ball into a black hole all day.”

After he called Birk, Ferguson rented a car from a rental agency in the center of town and took it to a shipping company in the port area. At the start of the operation he’d had a “goodie box” sent up with different tools of the trade, mostly obscure items that were impractical to carry around but potentially of use. The box did not include any explosives or weapons, since they would have likely been detected by X-rays or more sophisticated scans.

The shipper was reasonably secure and reliable, but most of the companies in the port area were subject to occasional scrutiny by the local police, with everyone in and out noted. There was no way around this, and so Ferguson decided to take the job himself, figuring he was the most likely to be able to bail himself out of trouble. He dropped Monsoon two blocks away, and told him what to look for. Sure enough, he saw the pair of Syrian plainclothes security types sitting in their battered sedan as he drove up.

But things went quickly at the counter inside, without the telltale frowns and eyeblinks that typically gave away an undercover operation. Ferguson took the box — it was the size of a microwave, though not quite as heavy — boosted it up on his shoulder, and carried it outside to the car. He’d gotten it into the trunk when he heard an approaching muffler that had a vaguely official rattle to it. When he slammed the trunk and turned around, the two plainclothesmen he’d spotted were getting out of the car, which they’d positioned to make it impossible for him to leave.

“Ahalan,” Ferg said cheerfully in Arabic as they approached. “Hello.”

Neither man smiled. Ferguson switched to English, putting his Dublin-laced brogue into it. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. How are y’today?”

“Passport,” said the man nearest him.

Ferguson took out his Irish passport and presented it, smiling brightly. Monsoon had stopped across the street and was looking on.

“Your visa is not in order,” said the man.

“I got it at the embassy,” said Ferguson, acting surprised. “I must have made a mistake somehow.”

“Why would an American be in Syria?” said the other policeman.

“I’m from Ireland,” said Ferguson. “Dublin. I’m on vacation.”

“If you are on vacation, why are you accepting a package for business?”

The dimensions of their scam — or, more specifically, their demand for a bribe — were now clear: the policemen would charge Ferguson with violating his tourist visa unless he offered to make up the difference between what the document cost and what an imaginary short-term business visa would. This could be quite expensive, but the real cost to Ferguson was time; he had a number of things to do this afternoon. So there was a slightly testy note in his voice as he expressed surprise and assured the men that he wanted always to comply with the law.

“Then you will let us search the car,” said one of the policemen.

“The car? Why not?” said Ferguson, holding up his hands. “Go to it.”

Across the street, Monsoon leaned against a car watching as Ferguson dealt with the police officers. He had a small Taser in his hand. The basic guts were similar to the weapons he and Thera had used to subdue Birk’s guards, but its range was limited to a little over twenty feet because the dart it shot was attached to the device via wires. More important, he’d only be able to take out one of the policemen.

But Ferguson seemed to have it under control. Monsoon watched as the Syrians went through the rental, which of course was clean since they’d just gotten it.

“What are you doing?” asked a man in Arabic behind him.

Monsoon scratched his ear and turned slowly. A Syrian almost exactly his height glared at him from a few feet away. The man had expensive shoes and a shiny watch; Monsoon guessed that he was the owner of the car he’d been leaning against and apologized in Arabic.

“What do you have in your hand?” the man asked, pointing to Monsoon’s crossed arms.

Monsoon rolled his eyes but decided it was best to make a discreet exit. As he took his first step, however, the man identified himself as a customs agent and reached to the back of his belt. As it turned out, he was only going for an ID, but Monsoon couldn’t afford to take a chance. He brought up the Taser and fired point-blank into the man’s neck, jolting him to the ground.

Ferguson had seen the little fiasco developing across the street. He was ready, therefore, when the police officer nearest him reached for his gun. Ferguson dropped him with an elbow to the side of the head, barely having to move. The blow was hard enough to pry the gun from the policeman’s hand. Ferguson caught it in midair, barrel first, and used it as a hammer to make sure the policeman would stay down. By then the other man had scrambled around the adjacent car, fumbling for his radio as well as his gun. Ferg took one of his mini tear-gas grenades from his belt, pulled the pin, and threw it under the car.

“Take the car,” Ferguson shouted to Monsoon as the canister exploded. He threw the keys to the Delta boy then jumped in the police car and backed it up far enough to move the other car. As he did, the policeman began emptying his service pistol into the vehicle; the tears in his eyes hurt his aim, but he got close enough to the car to send bullets through all of the windows. Ferguson dove out on the passenger side, rolled, and jumped to his feet, running to the rental car as Monsoon pulled out. He managed to get the back door on the driver’s side open before the policeman could reload. They raced down the block, then had to pull a U-turn and go back because it was a dead end. The policeman managed to get one shot in the trunk.

Six blocks later, Ferguson told Monsoon to pull over and pop the trunk; even if the cops hadn’t gotten a good description of the vehicle, their compatriots would soon be stopping every rental in the city.

“We’ll walk to the minibus station up the street,” Ferg shouted as he went to grab the box.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” asked Monsoon.

“Probably not. Let’s run instead.”

29

The president’s voice sounded almost tinny on the secure communications system when Corrine spoke to him from the basement of the Yellow House.

“Miss Alston, I trust that you are well,” he said after an aide had made the connection for him.

“Fresh as a peach,” she said, throwing one of his expressions at him.

“Well put, Counselor.” She could just picture his grin. “And how is Baghdad?”

“Ready for you, such as it is.” She gave him a quick summary of what she had seen around town yesterday, along with the highlights of an informal briefing from the ambassador. “I didn’t get into security matters about your trip,” she added when she finished.

“That’s quite all right. The Secret Service will see to that. They’ve already blabbed my ear off.”

Corrine wanted to tell him to stay in the States. She knew he wouldn’t take her advice, but she felt as if she ought to say that, ought to somehow go on record with him that she was concerned for his safety. Not that Iraq was as dangerous as it had been even a year before, just that he was such a huge, tempting target. If fanatics could try and kidnap or blow her up in Lebanon, imagine what they might do to him in Iraq.

Or Jerusalem and Palestine when he went there.

But she couldn’t tell him any of that. If she did he’d say something along the lines of Now, now, Miss Alston, don’t be a frightened pony. The snakes look bad but they don’t bite.

So why was he allowed to act like a fretful hen on her behalf?

“And the personnel matter related to our representation in the region?” the president asked.

“I’m working on it.”

“I’d like to know one way or another when I arrive.”

“I’ll try, Mister President,” she said.

“That’s all I can ask,” he said, hanging up.

30

Unlike the vehicles that Meles had used to check out the castle, Khazaal traveled in SUVs owned by the mosque. After analyzing the video recorded over the past few days, the gurus back at the Cube had realized that Khazaal used two specific trucks, probably because they were armored. The trucks were kept in a parking lot across from a police station several blocks from the mosque. The lot was guarded only at the entrance, which made it easy to penetrate: a chain-link fence covered the hack and front, and the lot was deep enough that the vehicles could not be easily seen by the guard. It would be a simple matter to go over the back fence and tamper with the truck, at the same time preparing a diversion for the guard if his suspicions were aroused. It would take little more than ten minutes to tune the vehicles to first Team specifications, said specifications including a radio-controlled device that would choke off the flow of exhaust through the tailpipe, thereby making the engine run slower or stop completely.

While customizing the electronic ignition or fuel system would be more efficient, tampering with it would be much more involved. Placing an electromagnetic unit designed to interfere with the system would also work, but was likely to be spotted during a bomb check. The inserts, included in the “goodie box” Ferguson had retrieved, had diaphragms that would mechanically expand on command. Inserted into the tailpipe with the help of a flexible stick that looked like a tightly coiled spring, the devices were impossible to see without taking the exhaust system off or X-raying it.

The flexible stick had a grapple at the end that gave Rankin a hard time on the second truck: it failed to release after he had positioned the unit. He started to pull the stick out but something snagged. He pushed the stick in and tried again, only to have it stick farther in, just at the edge of his fingertip.

“Got movement at the door of the station,” said Grumpy, who was acting as lookout. “Four guys coming in your direction.”

Rankin crawled behind the truck, then, deciding to take no chances, he climbed up over the four-foot fence and lay on the ground as the men approached. It was a good thing, too; the men were the drivers of the vehicles. They checked for bombs, but when making sure the tailpipes weren’t obstructed used their eyes rather than their fingers and didn’t see the black probe jammed deep inside.

“Tell Ferg they’re on their way,” Rankin told Grumpy. “I’ll meet you at the bikes.”

Overhead surveillance was being performed by both the U-2 and Global Hawk, giving them backup as well as lengthening the scope of their coverage area. There was also an EC-130H Commando Solo aircraft orbiting at much lower altitude offshore. Its equipment could pick up a variety of radio signals, eavesdropping on Syrian military channels as well as any longer-range radios or phone systems Khazaal and the others used. The aircraft could also jam radios and other devices if things got hairy. For tonight’s mission, equipment had been added to tie an operator aboard the aircraft into the command network used by the First Team. The man and his relief had real-time displays from the Global Hawk and U-2 so they could relay information to the ground ops.

“Subject ears are en route,” said the operator in a Texas twang.

“You have to be from south Dallas,” said Thera, drawing out her Houston accent. She and Monsoon had disabled the boat at the rear of the mosque and were now in the van, monitoring the feed a few blocks away.

“Ma’am, you have me dead to rights.”

Thera switched back and forth between the feeds. Ferguson had to know which car Khazaal got into, which meant watching the video bugs. But with the two SUVs about ten minutes away, a truck pulled up and blocked the bug with the best view. Thera switched to the backup, but the shadows from the light obscured the street, and she couldn’t be absolutely sure she would see it.

“Time for plan B,” she told Monsoon, adjusting a headset beneath her scarf. “You hear me, Dallas?” she asked the operator aboard the EC-130.

“Loud and clear, ma’am.”

Thera and Monsoon got out of the van and began walking down the block. They waited until the trucks were about thirty seconds from the mosque. Thera nodded at Monsoon and began to run, turning the corner just as the first vehicle came down the street. There were armed men near the wall of the mosque compound. Two turned to challenge her.

“Help me, help me,” she cried in Arabic, her Houston twang subverted into the hysterical scream of a Syrian woman wronged by a stranger. “My husband has beat me. He’s a monster.”

The guards had been interested if not sympathetic until the mention of her husband; as modern as Syria might be, women were still expected to do as they were told in marriage. The man nearest Thera flung her aside; she managed to keep her balance long enough to see Khazaal get into the lead SUV.

Just as he had the other day, another man carried a briefcase and got into the second vehicle. The men left Thera in a heap against the wall as the trucks backed down the road. She got up quickly, making sure she was positive which SUV had Khazaal and which had the briefcase.

“They’re on their way,” she said. “Khazaal is in the lead car. The target is in truck two. Ferg, you got that?”

“Thanks, darlin’,” he said. “Remind me to beat the daylights out of your husband when I see him.”

The SUVs currying Khazaal and his bodyguards turned off their head lights after they reached the highway, making it difficult for the lead vehicle to keep track of the trail car as they started to separate. The muffler restrictor’s effect was difficult to calibrate, and the vehicle didn’t fall behind significantly until the dial on the device reached fifty percent. Ferguson, sitting below the ridge a half mile from the castle, followed the trucks’ progress on the team’s backup laptop, retrieved from the goodie box.

“Move that up to about sixty percent,” he told Guns, taking the remote-controlled airplane in his hand. Powered by a two-stroke gasoline engine, the small plane took several tries to start, and when it finally did, the propeller nipped Ferguson’s finger. He threw the plane aloft and then grabbed the controls, steadying it into a stable though light flight pattern.

The toy plane had a range of about 2,500 feet but with easy-to-fly controls designed specifically for rich parents who wanted to impress their offspring for the weekend. Even so, Ferguson struggled to get it to go exactly where he wanted, using the tiny running lights as a visual guide. He wanted the people on the ground to think that a UAV was spying on them. The trick was to get it close enough to be noticed, but not so close that it could be seen as a toy. From a distance, the plane’s small size would be interpreted as meaning it was higher than it actually was.

“Sixty percent,” said Guns.

“Check the second SUV,” Ferguson asked, still getting the hang of the remote airplane. “How far behind?”

“Two hundred yards. Lead vehicle is just a mile away from us.”

Ferguson nudged his right wing down and took the plane into a bank, turning northwestward and flying back toward his position. Then he slid around back to the south, confident now that he had control of the craft, or at least enough control to accomplish his goal. As the airplane came back over the road, the LED lights flickered and went out. Grumbling, though he could still see the aircraft, Ferguson flew it toward the lead SUV as it came around the turn, then headed toward the castle.

“Somebody in the lead car saw the aircraft,” reported the controller aboard the EC-130E. “They just broadcast a heads-up.”

Ferguson piloted the plane directly over the castle wall. He issued the commands to make it bank back, but the box had been wildly optimistic about the controller’s range; the airplane was now on its own and continued out to sea.

“We have a half mile between the cars,” said Guns. “Truck two is almost in position alpha.”

Ferguson threw down the control. “Go to one hundred percent. Stop the truck.” He put his hand over the earpiece. “Jam the radios,” he told the crew on the Commando Solo. “Let the party begin.”

While the gear aboard the electronics aircraft obstructed the frequencies Khazaal and pals had just used to communicate, Ferguson dropped to the ground next to the 82mm M2 Carl Gustav antitank gun. The recoilless rifle had a short forward bipod that helped steady it as he sighted for the road.

“Truck’s still moving, Ferg,” said Guns. “Slow. I can’t get it to stop.”

“Not a problem,” said Ferguson, zeroing in on the road. “Truck one?”

“Around the bend, turning down the road to the castle. They’re out of sight.”

“Hang on.” Ferguson fired at the SUV. As the missile whizzed away, he realized he’d blown it. Worried about the tendency of the rocket to fly high, he’d overcompensated and fired into the ground a good fifty yards from the road. He tossed aside the launcher in disgust and picked up the backup weapon.

“Stand back,” he told Guns. He peered through the telescope at the side and let loose from a standing position. This round scored a bull’s-eye: the three-pound, twelve-ounce shell hit the base of the hood and windshield, one of the weak spots in the armor treatment. The rocket obliterated the front half of the vehicle.

“Let’s ride, boys,” said Ferguson. “Skippy, cue the light show.”

Rankin had hoped to wait until the SUV was inside the castle to begin his simulated attack, but the truck stopped about a hundred yards from the entrance and began backing up the access road, probably concerned about the trail vehicle.

“Mortar,” he told Grumpy, adjusting the focus on his night optical device to see if he could make out who was in the truck.

Grumpy dropped the first shell into the British weapon. The round whipped into the air with a hoarse whu-thumpppp and fell just outside the walls of the castle, where it exploded with a more satisfying thrappp. He followed up with two dummy shells, which landed in the same general area, and then another live round close enough to a minefield on the northern flank of the access road to set off several mines.

Rankin, watching the shells hit through his night optics glasses, had Grumpy adjust to the south; the Delta sergeant got the white phosphorous shell precisely in the middle of the roadway about twenty yards behind the SUV.

“They’re taking cover,” said the controller in the EC-130K, interpreting the images from the Global Hawk.

“Start the tape,” said Rankin.

A crewman aboard the aircraft turned off the jamming gear. In its place, he began broadcasting a prerecorded set of radio signals that made it sound as if a platoon-sized group was maneuvering outside the walls. The voices were in Arabic, and the frequency was the same as that used by the Syrian army. “Commander Suhab” was mentioned several times in the brief conversation, just distinct enough for anyone recording to make out.

“Ready on the machine guns,” Rankin told Grumpy. Two men with automatic rifles had come out, crouching near the entrance.

“Sure I can’t hit them?” asked Grumpy, hunching over the weapon’s tripod.

“No,” said Rankin.

“Shame,” said the marine, firing at the road.

Ferguson and Guns rolled off the hill on the sturdiest bikes he’d bought.

Even thirty yards away they could feel the heat.

“How long is it going to burn for?” Guns asked.

“Not sure. Guess I should’ve brought a fire extinguisher, huh?”

The flames settled for a moment but then flared into a fireball. Ferguson got off the bike and reached into the oversized knapsack he’d taken with him for their small chain saw.

“Going to be hot as hell, Ferg,” said Guns as the flames died down.

“Yeah. But I’m kind of in a hurry.” Ferguson walked around the truck, trying to figure out where the briefcase would be.

A flare shot up from the castle, illuminating the night. The gunfire there intensified.

Ferguson triggered the saw blade and started in on the roof and then the door. Rather than pulling it out he was able to kick it to the side and down, singeing but not burning his boot. The scent of burned flesh hung over the car, overpowering all of the other smells, even the exhaust from the buzz saw.

The briefcase was right near the rear door, attached by a handcuff to the guard’s charred wrist. Guns grit his teeth together and grabbed hold of the briefcase, pulling on the chain hard enough to snap several bones in the dead man’s hand and free the case. He dropped it on the ground and spun to his knees, his stomach suddenly queasy.

The briefcase was barely a foot and a half wide and less high, no thicker than a large paperback book, Ferguson picked it up, examined the lock, and look out his picks. The lock took some work — forty-five seconds — and Ferguson had to balance the small case upright on his knee. When the clasp snapped open it fell, spilling most of its contents to the ground.

A jumble of gold chains, watch bands, necklaces, and loose jewels spilled out. There were sapphires, a number of small diamonds, emeralds. Most were fairly small, but that would only make them easier to sell. There were some gold rings and chains as well. Ferguson guessed conservatively that they must be worth close to three million dollars, maybe considerably more.

It was also a lot more than Khazaal would need to travel in Syria or to hire Vassenka.

Ferguson scooped them back into the case, then took a quick snapshot with his digital camera. Guns got his stomach settled and came back.

“Wow, that’s a lot of gold,” said the marine.

“Yeah. Hang on to it for me,” Ferguson told him, handing him the case.

“Me?”

“Don’t trust yourself?”

Unsure what else to do with it, Guns stuffed the briefcase beneath his shirt.

“We have to get out of here,” said Ferguson.

“Hey, you forgot that,” said Guns, pointing to a bracelet on the ground.

Ferg scooped it up with one hand and grabbed the chain saw with the other. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

Van Buren secured his seat belt only a second or two before the 737’s wheels hit the cement runway. The plane settled with a jerk, the pilot fighting a rush of turbulence as he brought the plane onto the unfamiliar runway. His official flight plan had him landing at Damascus, but they’d been rerouted with the help of an agent there who had bribed a controller to order the pilot to hold pending a military investigation of another plane on the runway. The 737 pilot had then declared a fuel emergency and been rerouted here. The fact that Damascus had ordered the rerouting meant no questions would be asked about the plane’s sudden arrival.

If questions were asked, any one of the forty-two heavily armed men in the rear of the plane would gladly provide an answer, complete with explosive punctuation.

Van Buren threw off his restraints as the jet trundled onto a taxiway. He went forward to the cockpit, where the copilot told him that the controllers had directed them to a hangar area near the terminal ordinarily used by Syrian National Airlines for its weekly flights to Damascus and Cairo.

“They say we can refuel there. It’s about a mile from your target,” said the copilot. He showed Van Buren the location on a simplified diagram of the airport they had prepared before the mission. The plane’s crew were contract workers on retainer for the CIA.

“We want to get out before we get there,” Van told him. “Just in case they have any people working at the hangar. Can you swing it?”

“Not a problem. There’s a holding area just up ahead,” said the pilot. “We’ll stop there long enough for your people to slip out, and claim we’re getting our bearings if anyone asks. You’ll be a half mile from your target.”

“Let’s do it,” said Van Buren.

Grumpy fired through half the box of belted ammo before stopping. “Nice gun,” he said of the H&K machine gun, picking up a second to fire from the hip.

Rankin grunted. So far, the pseudobattle belonged to the attackers, who had clearly caught the small force inside the castle by surprise. But that wasn’t going to last forever; the defenders had very powerful motivations, beginning with the briefcase of jewels. The two men at the gate to the old fortress had been joined by six or seven more. As soon as Monsoon’s gunfire stopped they sprinted down the road, sprawling on the ground.

“Give them another blast, and let’s get out of here,” Rankin told him. He pulled up his mike as the gun spat shells at the road. “Jammers still off?” he asked the controller in the EC-130.

“Roger that.”

Rankin had prepared a series of improvised explosive devices and rigged them to detonate with the help of the radio controllers in the toy cars, a simple but effective trick he’d learned from hajji slime in Iraq. When the wheel on the control unit was turned all the way, the signal on the other side closed the circuit and flashed the igniter, detonating the small block of explosives he’d placed by the road. The units had a limited range — three hundred feet was pushing it — but in this case it was the idea and flash that counted.

“Here they come,” said Grumpy, jumping up from the now bulletless gun. He ran and grabbed the bike, kick starting the small engine.

Rankin was already rolling down the hill. When he got to the road he slapped the switches on and detonated his bombs. The hillside began popping as if it were the Chinese New Year.

As the attack on the castle wound down, Thera and Monsoon launched a raid of their own. It began with two garbage cans hauled innocently down the street by Monsoon, who placed them near the mosque wall and walked away. Thera, having doffed her jilbab to reveal black fatigues, drove a stolen pickup truck down the block, stopped near the entrance to the mosque compound, and ran back up the street. One of the men watching the mosque shouted at her to stop, but the explosion of a small bomb in one of the garbage cans persuaded him not to press the issue.

A moment later, a fire in a box at the rear of the pickup truck began cooking off bullets. Fed by oily rags and a collection of gasoline-drenched cardboard and wood, the fire in the truck worked itself into a bonfire, igniting the thousand or so rounds of ammunition scattered in the back like firecrackers.

When Thera reached the end of the block, she unfolded the stock on the AK-47 she’d been carrying and aimed it at the power transformer on the nearby pole. It took her three shots to find exactly the right spot on the device to make it arc and explode. The night flared white, and then the entire block and mosque went dark.

They’ve called over to the Syrian police, trying to figure out what’s going on,” the controller on the EC-130E told Ferguson. “They think it’s a robbery.”

“It is,” Ferguson said. “Make the call to the army Tell them that radicals have attacked the president’s hotel. Give them the castle location.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ferguson and Guns had ridden their bikes back up the hill, where they could see the men in the castle regrouping. He picked up one of the Russian radios he’d gotten from Birk and began improvising a one-sided conversation about a pickup truck approaching behind the team making the attack, addressing “Commander Suhab” and asking for directions on what to do next. He pressed down the talk button and fired his AK-47 right next to it, then threw the radio down.

“Jam all their communications,” Ferg told the controller in the EC-130E. “Jam everything within fifty miles. Rankin, you out of there?”

“We’re clear.”

“Get to that turnoff and wait.”

“You think I forgot what I was supposed to do?”

“You never know, Skippy. This stuff is so much fun even I forget what I’m doing sometimes.”

Van Buren had split the assault group into three elements, each named after their primary task. “Field,” composed entirely of Rangers, had been charged with securing the area near their target plane and then preventing an escape by the subject in the second phase of the operation. “Plane,” a team of Delta troopers drilled in taking over aircraft, had been assigned to secure the aircraft itself. They would also take Khazaal after he arrived. “Support” would cover contingencies as well as provide scouting and security around the planes during the operation.

The men fanned out across the airfield. Van Buren and a communications sergeant stayed with Support, moving into position about twenty yards from the tarmac where the target aircraft, a Rockwell Commander, was being fueled. The flight crew had not taken the precaution of posting guards, and the only complication was the tanker truck, which had just arrived to deliver fuel. But even this worked to the assault team’s favor; the truck and its driver occupied the pilot and copilot as the attack team shifted forward.

Captain Melfi snuck around the driver’s side of the fuel truck with three of his troopers. As the man who had come to fuel the plane spoke to the pilot, Melfi and the others sprang out, shotguns point-blank at the men. The guns were loaded with nonlethal rubber shot. As the pilot started to turn to the aircraft, Melfi and one of his men fired, sending the man in a lump to the ground. The copilot and fueler surrendered without a struggle.

“Plane is secure,” Melfi told Van Buren.

“Roger that,” said the colonel. It had gone even easier than he had hoped. “Now all we have to do is hope the rooster comes back to the hen house.”

Guns and Ferguson had cycled about five miles south when the controller in the EC-130 warned that two police vehicles were heading their way. The Americans pulled off the road, hiding in the brush until the vehicles had passed. Then Ferguson pulled out the laptop and got the feed from the Global Hawk, taking stock of the situation.

Realizing they were no longer under fire, the men in the castle had swarmed over the burned-out SUV; several cars and trucks, including Khazaal’s, were parked near it on the road. One well placed bomb there, Ferguson thought to himself, and a dozen of the world’s worst scumbags would be sent to their final reward.

Unfortunately, another dozen would eagerly take their place.

Meles’s Mercedes and several other vehicles were still inside the compound.

“What do we do if they stay there?” Guns asked.

“Eventually they have to leave,” said Ferguson.

“You think he’ll go without his jewels?”

“If he thinks Suhab Majadin has them, he may, because he’ll figure he knows where to find them,” said Ferguson. “But we’ll have to see.”

“Hey, look at this,” said the controller.

Ferguson and Guns hunched over the screen. The Syrian police vehicles that had passed him had driven right up to the burned-out SUV and were now enveloped in tracers. There was a flash: one of the visitors had used an RPG on the police car.

“The odds on his bugging out just improved considerably,” Ferguson told Guns. “Let’s get into position for phase two.”

Thera threw her gray jilbab over her shirt and pants, and donned a two-piece scarf. Then she and Monsoon headed toward the Riviera, intending to see how the rest of Meles’s contingent had handled the situation. But they found the streets near the hotel filling up with police and Syrian soldiers. They drove around the area, made a report, then went over to the hotel where the Russian weapons expert had been staying. He didn’t appear to be in his room. Thera decided a little reconnaissance was in order. She left Monsoon on the street and went inside, walking through the lobby briskly as if she were a guest. She got off the elevator on the first floor and took the stairs to the third. By the time she reached the Russian’s room she had slipped a set of lock picks from her pocket.

A hard rap failed to get an answer. Thera rapped again, saying she was from housekeeping and had been sent up with an extra pillow. When she didn’t get an answer, she slid a pick into the lock, nudging upward with a flair of body English. The lock gave way but the door didn’t; she took a wedge-shaped pick and opened the fifty-year-old dead bolt above it. Picks back in her pocket, Thera pushed the door open and stepped in, scooting it closed behind her and locking the door.

As she turned around, the light went on, and she found herself staring at the curved barrel of a Czech-made CZ52. Though a reasonably large pistol, it looked rather small in the big, beefy hand of the Russian weapons expert Jurg Vassenka.

Rankin and Grumpy rode their bikes to a strip of storefronts three miles north of the castle area. Two of the three stores here were empty, but the third housed a Syrian convenience store where customers could buy a variety of fast foods, groceries, and even clothing and hardware items. Unlike in America, the store’s hours were highly irregular, and the owners who manned it had gone home long ago. This was fine with the Americans, who took their bikes around the back and caught their breath.

“They’re mounting up,” the controller in the aircraft said a few minutes later. “Looks like they’re going south in one big convoy: Khazaal’s truck, Meles, the whole lot of them.”

“You got that, Rankin?” asked Ferguson.

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Hang loose until they clear past the police. If you can get into the castle to take a look around without too much trouble, do it. Otherwise, bag it and meet us back at the airport. Don’t cut it too close.”

“Not like you, huh?”

“Not like me.”

The Russian held the gun in both hands as he approached Thera. There was no question of reaching for one of her weapons under the long Arab dress; at this range, the 7.62mm rounds in his gun would make her look like Swiss cheese long before she could return fire.

The Russian said something to her; she replied in Arabic that there must be some sort of mistake. The Russian yelled at her, and after pulling the chain across the door, slapped her across the face with the pistol. The blow sent her to the floor. While Thera could have done without the pain, she was able to slide her hand to her waist, where she had a small Smith & Wesson. But as she tucked her thumb under the button on the jilbab to get at it, the Russian hauled her up by the hair and tossed her against the wall, this time hard enough stun her.

“What’s going on?” said the Russian in broken English. “What are you? Police?”

“My room,” said Thera, her brain too scrambled to give her a better alibi.

The Russian grabbed hold of the back of her jilbab and pushed her toward the door. He pressed his gun against the side of her face and told her, half in English and half in Russian, to open it. When she did, he pitched her head into the hall as if dunking her into the water, obviously intending that anyone outside shoot her before him.

“We go,” he said.

Thera coughed. “Where?” she said in English.

He said something in Russian that didn’t sound very promising.

“Where are we going?” she asked again. She wanted the others on the radio circuit, including the EC-130E and the people back in the Cube, to hear.

“Move,” he said, propelling her into the hall. She started for the elevator, but he grabbed her, pointing her toward the far end of the hall. “Move.”

“Outside, yes. I’ll do as you say.” A large window sat at the end of the hall. Thera walked to it. The window had a fire escape outside, but it was also wired to sound an alarm if opened. A small sign in Arabic and English warned of this; Thera pointed to the sign and tried to explain.

The Russian didn’t buy it. He yelled at her, pointed the gun at her head, and opened the window himself. As the alarm began to sound, he cursed and threw her out onto the grate, quickly following.

31

Corrigan hated this part of an operation. He had literally a world’s worth of information at his fingertips — feeds from the Global Hawk and the U-2, near real-time transcripts of intercepted transmissions from the EC-130E, the First Team’s radio chatter from the scene — but it served mostly to remind him how far removed from everything he was. All he could do was sit and watch.

He rubbed his eyes, staring at the screen. He had a large map of Latakia open on the desk to help him keep a visual image of the operation in his head. Van Buren and the Special Operations forces were at the airport several miles southwest of the city. They had just radioed in that they had control of the airplane Khazaal was going to use to get back to Iraq. The police and army were responding to the castle and several sites within the city. A contingent was moving to shut off the port, but so far forces had not been sent to the airport. The security there had not been notified, thanks not only to the jamming by the EC-130 but a selective cutting of the lines by Van Buren’s people.

Thera and Monsoon were on the south side of the city, searching the hotel where the Russian had been staying. Ferguson and Guns were at the northern outskirts of Latakia, waiting for the convoy that was heading down the highway from the north. Ferg suspected that it would bypass the city and head straight to the airport. He and Guns were still on their bikes but had a car stashed not too far away that they could use if necessary. Rankin and Grumpy were north of the castle on bikes. In a few minutes they would move down to check it out if they could.

“Something’s going on with Thera,” said Thomas, the First Team analyst who’d come down to the Cube to help monitor the data. He was sitting in the second row of temporary desks to Corrigan’s left. “Listen in to channel two.”

Corrigan hit the preset, which isolated on her microphone. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Yes,” said Thomas. “Don’t you think that’s very odd?”

Corrigan looked at the analyst, then hit Ferguson’s preset on the communications panel.

“Ferg, I think we have a problem.”

32

“Five million dollars is a very large sum.” Coldwell pushed the drink that had been set down away. She had not ordered it, but she was glad now to have a prop. “Two million dollars.”

“Considering the capabilities of the missile, it is quite cheap,” said Birk. “Five million dollars — the weapon cost more than five times that to make.”

“The price includes the associated systems?”

“Enough systems to launch the weapon, yes.” Birk forced himself to smile. He did not like the way she said that. Clearly she had been coached, but that was to be expected, surely.

Not by Ferguson, he thought. Ferguson would simply have handled this himself.

Who then? He had to be careful whom he sold to. Or rather, he had to make sure the price was commensurate with the risk. Five million was a handsome payoff, but was it handsome enough?

As long as the target was not Israeli, he thought, he would be safe. The Europeans and Russians were so inept that they would have trouble even discovering what hit them, let alone mounting any sort of revenge. The Arabs were more or less the same. The Americans were capable of being nasty but were slow and clumsy, as Ferguson proved. Besides, the woman had hinted that the target was Arab, which suited Birk just fine.

He would travel for a while in any event. Perhaps he would retire. With a good sale here, he could.

Try his luck in Asia in a year or two? Get rid of his family relations, find a nice native woman to see to his needs?

Why not?

“Five million is too much,” said Coldwell. “Two million.”

“Ah well,” said Birk, leaning back. It was so easy to tell when amateurs were bluffing.

“I simply don’t have five million,” said Coldwell. “Two million.”

“Two million?” Birk hesitated a long moment. Two million was a fair price on the present market, but should he settle for a fair price? In truth, prices were depressed right now, especially for large pieces of hardware. In the old days (two or three years ago), a missile like this might fetch five million easily.

But Birk was not one for nostalgia.

“Two. Done.”

Coldwell had been prepared to go higher — Ravid said three — but the secret to a good negotiation was to make the other person think he had won. “Very well,” she said. “If we can work out the arrangements.”

“What arrangements?” said Birk.

“The turnover, and I will need technical information.”

Birk shrugged. He hated these riders in the end game. Always there would be some chiseling down the line: ten thousand dollars for missing wires, one hundred thousand dollars to compensate for an antiquated GPS system. “I’m sure we can work the details out.”

“Very well.” Coldwell rose.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll contact you when I’m ready to take delivery.”

“Wait, now,” said Birk. For a moment he feared he had been set up and would be arrested.

“I must make other arrangements. I’ll be in touch.”

“Hold it now, please,” said Birk. He realized that his voice had nearly cracked and smiled at himself. This was either part of her negotiating tactics or just the by-product of her being a naïf. Either way, there was no reason to panic. Certainly not.

Coldwell stared at Birk. He didn’t trust her, but that was to be expected. She didn’t trust him. It was the basis of their relationship.

The one person she did trust was Ravid. She hadn’t until he told her why he wanted to destroy the Muslim holy city. There was no emotion in his voice when he told her of the death of his wife and child; his tone had been flat and unaffected. That was how she knew he spoke the truth. She didn’t even hold his attack against him; it was to be expected in his position.

“Who are you working with?” Birk asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say. I’ll be in touch.”

“Tell me that it’s not Khazaal.”

She shook her head.

“An Arab?” Birk asked.

“I can’t say.”

But he saw it in her face: not an Arab. “You’ll be in touch?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, be in touch,” said Birk expansively. “Have some champagne before you go.”

“Another time,” said Coldwell.

33

“This brandy is very good.”

“I’m sure,” Corrine told Bellows. “But, really, I can’t.”

“Still on duty?” The ambassador put the snifter down, and went over to the chair. “It is after ten.”

“The president’s counsel is always on duty.”

“McCarthy runs everybody ragged, I hear.”

“I wouldn’t say that. He has high standards.”

Bellows swirled his glass gently, then took a sip, savoring the liquor. “So tell me, Corrine. Why exactly did he send you?”

“To take a snapshot of the Middle East before the president arrives.”

“The State Department has a regular advance team for that.”

“The president likes a personal touch.”

Bellows nodded but added, “There’s a rumor that you work for the CIA.”

“Well, there’s a rumor I’d like to encourage.” Corrine laughed. “I hope you’ve helped spread it.”

“Well, I did think it was preposterous.”

“I don’t think it’s preposterous,” said Corrine. “I think I’d make a very good spy.”

“You would, you would.” He took another sip. “But, seriously, why are you here? You’ve been traveling throughout the Middle East. It’s not because of the trade legislation. That’s clear.”

“The trade legislation is part of it,” said Corrine.

“The initiative between Israel and the Palestinians?” asked Bellows. If that were the case, he thought, she was in way over her head. Corrine was a good girl but young, and certainly unschooled in the nuances of diplomacy, let alone the Middle East. Not that he would tell her that.

“I’m just familiarizing myself with the area,” said Corrine. “It’s been quite a while since I was in Israel and Egypt. And I’ve never been to Iraq. Or to Syria, which turned out to be a much more beautiful country than I had realized.”

“It’s rumored that the president is going to appoint someone to shepherd his peace plan for the Palestinians and the Israelis,” said Bellows, deciding to cut to the chase. There was no reason not to be forward with her; she was his friend’s daughter, practically his niece. If she could help, she surely would. “Am I in the running?”

“Would I know?”

“Would you?”

“Well, I guess if I were a spy, I might.”

Bellows was a veteran of several administrations, democratic as well as republican, and he knew a prevarication when he heard one.

“I do want the job. I would take it if you’re here to offer it,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“Will you recommend me?”

“You’re an old family friend. You don’t think the president would take a recommendation with a grain of salt? Or a barrelful?”

“Iraq has turned the corner,” said Bellows, reprising a speech he’d given on their tour after she arrived. “The country is stable. It’s an example to the Middle East.”

“You don’t think the resistance is lying low until after the last of our troops are withdrawn?”

“Not at all.”

“You can be honest with me.”

Bellows put down his drink. “You’ve seen the city. What do you think?”

“I haven’t been here long enough to form an opinion. I’d be more interested in what you think.”

“Well, I think Iraq has turned the corner, as I said.” Bellows didn’t have a real opinion of Iraq. He knew only that the secretary of state believed it was useful to cite progress and that it was therefore useful to him to do the same, especially if he wanted a more important position.

Like peace envoy. And then maybe secretary of state.

The beeper at Corrine’s belt began to buzz. Corrigan or someone else on the First Team wanted to talk to her.

“I have to return this call,” she told the ambassador. “I’m sorry. I have to go down to the bunker.”

“Of course. We’ll chat later on.”

“I’d like to.”

“And you can have some brandy.”

“We’ll see about that.”

34

Rankin and Monsoon were heading back toward the castle when Corrigan called Rankin on the radio.

“Ferguson wants you to head down toward Latakia. We may have a situation with Thera. We’ve lost contact with her.”

“Where’s Monsoon?”

“He’s outside the building where the Russian was holed up. Thera’s inside somewhere.”

“I thought the Russian was at the meeting.”

“We’re working on it. Just get there, OK?”

“Yeah. We’re going.”

When Monsoon had seen the lights go on in the hotel room, he assumed that it was Thera. But she’d gasped a few seconds later, the sort of sound a person made when they tripped, he thought. From that point on, her radio had been dead.

He went to the side of the building when the fire alarm began to ring, looking for a way to get in. Then he heard someone on the fire escape and saw it was Thera and the Russian.

He slid to the corner of the building and took out his radio unit to dial into the shared team circuit. Before he could, Ferguson buzzed in on the man-to-man line.

“Watchya got goin’, Monsoon?”

“Thera’s in the Russian’s building. He must’ve been inside. He’s got her and taking her up the fire escape. Him or someone else. I couldn’t tell.”

“Track them. Don’t get too close. Tonto and I are two miles away,” said Ferguson.

“I don’t know if I can get her back without shooting him.”

“He’s dead as far as I’m concerned,” said Ferguson. “Don’t hit her, though.”

“That’s fine.” Monsoon slung his AK-47 over his shoulder and ran around to the fire escape, leaping up to pull the ladder down.

Thera moved up the fire escape slowly, partly because she was still disoriented from being slammed against the wall and partly because she thought it would give Monsoon and the others time to catch up. The Russian grumbled and pushed, but, overweight and not in particularly good shape, he stopped every few rungs to catch his breath.

When they reached the sixth floor, Thera felt the rattle on the metal below and realized Monsoon must be following. Now she changed her tactics and began scrambling upward. But the Russian was too close. He reached up and grabbed her ankle, pulling her down. She kicked at him; he punched back.

“Hey!” yelled Monsoon below.

The Russian answered by firing two shots from the CZ52. The slugs clinked off the metal.

Thera scrambled upward, reaching for her pistol beneath the bodice of her dress. Vassenka, huffing, caught up and managed to grab her leg, pulling hard enough to make her lose her grip. She fell against him, clawing but sliding past to the steel deck. The Russian fired blindly at Monsoon below, then started to climb again.

By the time Monsoon reached Thera, she had gotten her gun out and struggled to her feet. Her knee had twisted and a stream of blood was spurting madly from her nose.

“Let’s go,” she told Monsoon, half hopping and half running for the ladder. “Come on.”

“You stay here. Your face is bashed.”

“It’s just my nose,” she said, pulling herself up the ladder ahead of him.

At the airfield, the Delta Team bound the plane’s crew members and the fuel truck attendant, then carried them into the nearby field where they would be out of the way. They drove the fuel truck up the ramp area and outfitted it with an explosive device so it could be blown up as a diversion if necessary. Two men pulled on civilian clothes that made them appear to be pilots. By the time they were dressed, two canisters and a delivery system had been connected to the ventilation system. The canisters would deliver a mixture of oxygen and Enflurane into the cabin. Enflurane was a last-acting general anesthetic used during operations. The mixture would incapacitate everyone in the pressurized cabin within a minute if not less.

After checking the aircraft, Colonel Van Buren trotted over to the support team, huddling with his communications sergeant as he checked in with the group watching the approach. The 737 pilot reported that he was ready to go; he had the engines idling.

“Colonel, we have some contacts here we thought you’d like to know about,” said the operator aboard the EC-130E. “We have a pair of Dornier DO 28, liaison/transport types flying very low to the water, offshore on a line to Latakia airport. I’m advised that Israel operates this type of aircraft, designated as the Agur, and uses them for maritime patrol and occasional transport. They have the capacity to land on a short runway and can carry up to fifteen troops, sir.”

“Are these aircraft Israeli? Are they heading here?”

“We’re not sure,” said the controller. “Neither plane has answered radio calls and I’m informed they don’t have functional IFF.”

The friend-or-foe identity device was essentially a radio beacon declaring who the plane belonged to. The fact that the devices were not operating and their pilots were not talking, strongly suggested that they were Israeli aircraft and that they were on something more serious than a routine training mission.

“Sir, the F-15 escorts have the aircraft in sight and are requesting guidance. They can shoot them down at this time.”

“Negative,” said Van Buren. He turned to the communications sergeant. “I have to speak to Corrigan, right now.”

Ferguson threw down his bicycle in an alley near the hotel. He had his gear, including his MP5, in the large rucksack on his back; he pulled two stun grenades from one of the pouches on the back of the pack but left the submachine gun inside, not sure whether he’d have to go into the hotel or not. Guns was just coming down the block.

“Monsoon? Thera? What’s up?” said Ferguson over the radio. He reached to his belt to select their channels; neither answered.

“EC-130 control, are you in contact with Thera?”

“Negative. I have Sergeant Ranaman.”

“Monsoon? Ranaman? Where the hell are you?”

Monsoon’s out of breath voice responded. “We’re on the fire escape. He’s getting away.”

“Where’s Thera?”

“She’s here. She’s banged up but OK.”

“Where’s the Russian?”

“He just reached the roof.”

“I’m on my way. Don’t go up until you hear from me. Don’t shoot him if you don’t have to.”

“But you said—”

“That was then; this is now. Relax. Everybody get on team frequency. This is a sharing time.” Ferguson pulled off his rucksack. Guns had just arrived. “I’m going up to the roof,” he told him. “Watch the door. We want Vassenka alive if we can get him. We may be able to get him to play with us after Van takes Khazaal. Rankin and Grumpy are on their way.”

Guns glanced at the big Glock in Ferguson’s hand. “I thought you wanted him alive.”

“This is for persuasive purposes only,” said Ferguson, sticking it in the belt of his black fatigues. He opened the pack and took out his sawed-off shotgun and a package of plastic bullets. He also grabbed a gas mask, slinging it around his neck but not donning it.

Guns took out the grenade launcher and packed it with a large, non-lethal round, thick enough to stun a horse.

Ferguson trotted to the hotel, lowered his shotgun so that it was at his side, and walked in. The desk person said something to him. Ferguson put up his empty hand, signaling as if to say “one minute,” and kept walking.

A bellhop ran up toward the elevator as Ferguson pressed the button. The man looked as if he weighed three hundred pounds and wanted to pound Ferguson into the floor. Ferguson raised the shotgun, which persuaded him that following the stranger into the elevator would be very foolish.

By the time he reached the top floor, Ferg had taken out a flash-bang and removed its pin, holding it in his left hand. The door opened on an empty corridor.

“Monsoon, where are you?” he said into the radio headset.

“We’re just under the roof.”

“All right. I’m at the stairwell,” said Ferguson. “Let me see if I can sneak onto the roof. When I’m ready, you draw his fire. Don’t forget: we want him alive if we can take him that way.”

“You sure?”

“No, but let’s pretend I am.”

He reached for the doorknob, turning it slowly with the hand that held the small pin grenade. He pushed into the space, once more throwing himself to the ground, ready to fire; once again there was no one there.

Third time is going to be the charm, he thought, grabbing his night glasses and putting them on awkwardly as he went up the steps to the roof door.

Thera reached through the blouse of the long Arab dress and took two smoke grenades from the webbing sewn inside. As she gave one to Monsoon, the Delta trooper gave her a slight nod.

Something in his face at that moment attracted her. It was hard for her to say later on exactly what it was, but she could always pin it to that look, that one moment.

“Ferg says ‘go’,” said Monsoon.

They threw the smoke grenades over the top. Monsoon raised his rifle, fired to the side, then ducked.

Ferguson opened the door slowly as soon as Monsoon began to fire. He was facing away from the end of the edge of the roof where Thera and Monsoon were.

He didn’t see the Russian.

The smoke spread from the other side as he crawled out. He moved a few feet to the right, then farther, almost to the edge. Still nothing.

“Vassenka! Listen to me,” he yelled in Russian. “Listen, I’m here to make you a deal. We’re not the Syrians. We want to do the deal with you. One hand washes the other.”

There was no answer. Ferguson told him again in Russian that he wanted to make a deal and that they would pay him twice what the Iraqis were willing to spend.

“I have references,” he added. “Good ones.”

Still no answer.

“A deal?” he said in English.

Silence.

“Monsoon?” said Ferguson.

“We’re on the roof. Don’t see him.”

“All right, be careful. This is me, here.” He waved his arm.

“We see you.”

“Guns, you got anything down there?”

“Negative.”

“Keep your eyes open.”

Twice Ferguson saw shadows he thought were Vassenka; both times they were nothing. Finally he began looking over the side and found an open window.

“Guns, he’s off the roof,” said Ferguson. “We’re coming down.”

Guns stood about twenty feet from the entrance to the hotel in a shadow cast by the light from the front. He saw the doors open and raised his weapon as two women in long black robes with heavy veils came out.

Perfect disguises, he thought.

“Wait,” he said in Russian, running after them. “Wait.”

The two women turned to see a man with a large gun running after them. One fainted; the other stood frozen in fear. Guns tore the scarf from the head of the one who remained standing, then stooped to pull the veil off the other one, sure he had found Vassenka. He felt a twinge as he reached, a warning. He jerked away, pulled his gun up, almost firing point-blank at the prostrate body. At this range, the force might very well have killed her.

Her, not him. The fabric fell away from the woman’s face. It was a woman, not Vassenka.

Guns heard footsteps and looked up. Someone was running from the front of the hotel toward a cab that had just stopped to let out a passenger.

“Stop!” he yelled. Guns leveled his weapon to fire, but Vassenka grabbed the man who had just gotten out of the cab and held him as a shield, pulling him into the car. As Guns began to follow, the cab backed up wildly, made a quick U-turn, and began driving in the other direction. In desperation, Guns leveled his grenade launcher and fired. The plastic bullet blew out the back window, but the cab didn’t stop.

Corrigan’s voice usually hit a higher octave when he was excited, and he was excited now.

“Israeli liaison says he knows of no operation,” he told Van Buren.

“Do this,” said the colonel calmly. “Tell them that my fighters have two aircraft in their sights. They will shoot them down if they are not Israeli aircraft. Give them their location.”

Before Corrigan could acknowledge, the controller in the EC-130 broke into the line. “Colonel, the cars are approaching the gates to the airport. They’re a mile away. Very light traffic at the moment. Police still haven’t responded your way.”

Van Huron turned to the communications sergeant, “Tell the teams the caravans are a mile away.”

“Israeli aircraft have turned into an orbit,” added the controller. “Some sort of holding pattern just offshore. In Syrian airspace, but apparently undetected by the radar. No radio signals from them that we can detect.”

“I have Ms. Alston on the line,” said Corrigan.

“Corrine, the Israelis—”

“I heard. Jack, put me through to the liaison.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Van Buren heard Corrine tell the Israeli — a duty officer for Mossad — that he had exactly five seconds to acknowledge that the aircraft were his, or they would be shot down as a threat to her operation.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Yes, they’re yours?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” said Corrine. “Jack, get me Mr. Stein. Colonel, please pass the word that the aircraft are friendly. As long as they don’t interfere, they should be permitted to proceed.”

“Thank you.”

“At the gate,” said the controller, referring to the cars.

“Here we go,” said Van Buren.

As the words left his mouth, an explosion rocked the western end of the airport near the entrance. It was followed by a larger explosion and then two more. The ground under Van Buren shook as badly as if he were in the middle of a California earthquake.

“What was that?” asked someone on the shared radio channel.

“Our target,” said Van Buren, even though he wasn’t close enough to see.