Angels of Wrath

1

Abu al Hassan, the new Iraqi prime minister, was about as physically different from Saddam Hussein as possible: tall and thin, bald, with no facial hair and a soft whisper of a voice. The State Department briefing papers presented him as a “dynamic individual” and a “political survivor.” But the CIA duty officer Corrine befriended in the communications center rolled his eyes when she asked for his opinion, and Corrine saw why as soon as she met him. Hassan studiously avoided meeting her gaze while they spoke; his answers to even simple questions were so convoluted and hedged that Corrine wondered if the point wasn’t to make her forget what she had asked. To a man, his staff’s body language made it clear they didn’t have any better an opinion of him. He and his government weren’t going to survive their first political crisis. A five percent dip in world oil prices — already forecast after the run-up of the past few years — would be enough to upset the country’s loan payment schedule and threaten the social and rebuilding programs necessary to keep the economy moving ahead. But it wouldn’t take something nearly that severe: if violence stoked up again around Baghdad, if Iran rattled its sabers, if the Kurds complained that their semiautonomous state was too semi and not autonomous enough, the fractious parliament would divide. Hassan, Corrine now realized, had only been chosen because he was such a nonentity the different factions couldn’t object. Under any sort of pressure he would wilt.

Not a good situation, she thought as he led her on a tour of the new government building. Corrine made the proper admiring noises as they walked through the building, which was architecturally quite impressive, then left with the ambassador to continue the scheduled tour of a hospital in the city.

“I have to leave Iraq for a day or so,” she told Bellows. “Something’s come up.”

“More important than Iraq?” said Bellows, surprised.

“It’s trivial, really,” she lied. “But I have to take care of it. Can you drop me off at the embassy?”

The ambassador leaned forward and lowered the window separating them from the driver. He gave him the new instructions but left the window open. As he started to lean back, Corrine gestured toward the window. Bellows trusted his driver a great deal — a former Delta Force bodyguard, the man had been with him for six years, through many different assignments — but he closed the window to make her more comfortable.

Corrine closed it so they could talk.

“What do you think of Hassan?” she asked.

“A very solid man.”

“He’s a milquetoast.”

“Appearances can be deceiving,” said the ambassador lightly. “He’s very astute politically and very strong.”

“Are you telling me that because you think it’s what I want to hear? Or because you believe it?”

“I’m not sure how to answer that,” said Bellows.

“Is it me? Are you just not taking me seriously?”

“Corrine, of course I take you seriously,” said the ambassador, shocked that she thought that. “Why wouldn’t I take you seriously?”

“Can Hassan survive a crisis?”

“He’s strong. He has a lot of support throughout the country.”

Corrine gave up, and they drove back to the embassy in silence. She still hadn’t decided whether he was deliberately trying to mislead her or had deluded himself by the time she reached the secure communications center.

“Where’ve you been?” Ferguson asked her.

“You wouldn’t want to know. What’s the situation?”

“Vassenka’s in the morgue. On the bright side, we found the ship we think has the rocket fuel. It’s about twelve hours from Basra.”

“Stop it.”

“You think so?” said Ferguson, in his familiar mocking tone. “I was toying with the idea of letting it sail into the horizon.”

“Bob—”

“It’s Ferg. Even my enemies call me Ferg. Rankin and Guns are on their way to give an assist to the navy team that’s going to board the ship.”

“You think of me as your enemy?”

“Depends on the day. What’s with the Israelis?”

“I have a meeting tomorrow with Tischler to iron this out. Parnelles suggested I talk to him in person.”

“How is the general?”

“I don’t know. Slott passed the message along.” Corrine knew Ferguson meant Parnelles, of course, but she wasn’t sure why he called him “general.” As far as she knew, the CIA director didn’t have a military background. But this wasn’t the time to ask him about it. “Ferg, I’d like you in Tel Aviv for the meeting.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Don’t you think you ought to be?”

“If it fits into my schedule.”

“Make sure it does.”

He didn’t answer.

“The meeting is at nine a.m.,” she continued. “You want to meet at the airport, or—”

“I’ll meet you at the building. I have some stuff to do.”

“So do I.” She clicked off the phone, then went upstairs to change into less formal clothes.

2

Judy Coldwell sat with the handbag between her knees, pressing her hands together as the small boat approached the yacht. Her chest began to tremble, and for a moment she feared she was having a heart attack. She closed her eyes and took a long breath, trying to calm herself.

She could do it. She would do it. It was all ridiculously easy. All she had to do was have faith.

Finally the boat drew alongside the yacht. Birk came to the side as she climbed over the ladder, extending his hand and helping her aboard.

“Ms. Perpetua, how are you this early morning? Well, I trust.” He positively beamed. “Come. Have some champagne.”

“Thank you, no,” she said.

“Bottled water, then. Or tea, perhaps tea?”

“Some coffee, maybe.”

“Coffee, yes. Of course. Coffee.”

Birk led her into the cabin sitting area, where a bottle of Dom Pérignon was on ice. He opened the bottle and poured himself a glass as he ordered one of the bodyguards to make some coffee.

“Do you have the weapon?” said Coldwell.

“Of course,” he told her.

“Is it aboard?”

This was one difficulty of dealing with amateurs, thought Birk: they did not understand the protocol. Still, they did overpay.

“It is accessible,” said Birk. “That is not a problem.”

“Is it aboard? I’m told it’s very big.”

“The crates that carry it are large, yes,” said Birk. “No, it is not on board.”

“Where is it?” Coldwell clutched her handbag, fearing that she had been swindled somehow.

“It’s not far. Your agents can pick it up as soon as I give the order.”

“We must pick it up before I pay.”

“You have the money?”

“Jewels.”

“Yes, jewels. Forgive me. Do you have them?”

“I will get them as soon as the transaction is completed.”

“I’m afraid that is not how it works,” said Birk. “You will tell me where they are now. I will retrieve them. Then you will be directed to the missile.”

“You don’t have it on the ship?”

“It would clutter the deck. Now. Where are the jewels?”

Coldwell opened her bag. For a moment Birk thought she might actually have them with her, but she — or more likely the person she was working for — was not quite so foolish. She handed him a man’s wristwatch.

“The alarm screen has the GPS coordinates,” she said. “Don’t push the mode button more than once, or it will be erased.”

Ravid watched through his binoculars as the American woman handed over the watch with the coordinates for the small boat where the jewels had been stashed. It should not be more than a few minutes before Birk’s minions had them and cleared the rest of the transaction.

The gems were the real ones Khazaal had brought to Syria. Birk would never have been fooled with the fakes.

He had not counted on the Americans when he had made his plans, but their complications helped him in a way: their presence gave him a natural excuse to stay behind. Someone had to keep watch over the slippery Mr. Ferguson and his minions; even Tischler could not object to that.

Alter finding that the bodyguards had been waylaid, Ravid realized what was happening and acted without hesitation, a man desperate to obtain the means to his revenge. He already knew the general area where the CIA people were operating; he had only stumbled around for an hour or so before finally finding the proper hotel. Anticipating that he would be searched by the Syrians inside, Ravid had left his substitute jewels outside the hotel and picked them up when he excused himself to answer nature’s call. Swapping them in the boat when the others were taking him to Cyprus was child’s play.

Birk would make a radio or phone call soon, and the next phase would begin. The moment of ultimate decision was at hand. There could be no hesitation after this.

There would not be.

Ravid turned to the men in diving gear at the rear of the boat. “A few more minutes,” he told them. “Be ready.”

Birk answered the phone on the first ring.

“Three million at least,” said his brother-in-law. “One or two are fake, but most are real. Small diamonds and a few rubies.”

Birk smiled. By this time tomorrow, he would have exchanged the jewels in Turkey. After taking care of a few odds and ends, he would head toward the Greek islands where he would have the leisure to plan a more distant voyage.

“Well?” said Coldwell.

“There is a barge at this location,” Birk told her, taking a piece of paper from his pocket. “Those are GPS settings. Use my phone to call your contact, and I will see you off.”

“I’ll use my own, thank you.”

“As you wish,” said Birk.

As she left the Sharia, Coldwell felt the muscles in the back of her neck relax. For the first time since she had heard of her brother’s death — for the first time in two years, really — she could relax. It was in the Mossad agent’s hands now. Her mission was complete.

The small speedboat rocked as the engine kicked to life. Coldwell gripped the railing and then her seat, but for balance only; she no longer had any fear. She gazed at the shoreline, a hazy shadow in the distance. When she returned she would have a long bath, then take a very long nap.

It was amazing how prescient the old religious writers had been. She was the woman clothed in the sun of chapter 12 in the book of Revelation, the Christian prediction of the new age. The dragon awaited her child, but the Lord God protected her.

Was it blasphemy to think of herself as holy as that? As she considered the question, something grabbed her around the neck. The man in the boat had taken a garrote from his pocket and pulled it tight around her throat.

For the first few moments, Coldwell struggled. She grabbed the wire with her fingers and tried to pry it off, instincts getting the better of her. And then she heard a voice that sounded like her brother’s whispering in her ear.

“Let it be,” it whispered. “We will rise again in three days time, the Temple rebuilt.”

Coldwell relaxed her arms. An angel appeared before her, his body a bright light that shone warmly, a fire of faith and reverence. Behind him stood the new world, the shining tabernacle where there would be no sorrow, no death, no pain. He held his hands out to her.

“My God!” she exclaimed. “Thank you for bringing me to this moment.”

She extended her hands toward the angel. As she did, his face tore in two. She saw that it was a mask covering the hideous aspect of a dragon: the Devil incarnate. She began to scream and back away, but the angel’s wings had turned to snakes and held her fast for the burning fire behind him.

The man with the garrote, sensing Coldwell was dead, replaced the wire with a thick metal chain weighed down by iron dumbbells, then pushed her off the side of the boat.

Having gotten up early to consummate the business deal, Birk found it impossible to go back to bed. He decided he would amuse himself by taking the wheel of the Sharia as he set sail northward. The yacht was a large vessel, but a fleet one, and as he laid on the power he felt a rush of adrenaline.

One of his regrets about leaving the area for an extended “vacation” was that it would deprive him of the most rewarding part of his business: meeting interesting characters such as Ferguson, the American agent who had so entertained him of late. What would life be like without such stimulation? Birk was not one to romanticize danger, but if truth be told he would miss that aspect of his business as well or at least the elation he felt when the time of anxiety had passed.

“Two boats, small ones,” said Birk’s brother-in-law, coming into the wheelhouse area behind the helmsman.

Birk turned to look. The boats were small speedboats.

“Break out the weapons.”

The helmsman reached to his shirt to draw his.

“No, not you,” said Birk. “You take the wheel while I see what this is about. Probably nothing.”

As Birk turned, the man fired point blank into the back of his head.

By the time Ravid got to the Sharia, the shooting was over. Birk, his brother-in-law, and the two bodyguards loyal to him had been killed.

So had the American woman, strangled by one of the bodyguards Ravid had infiltrated among Birk’s men. Ravid had debated before deciding this. The woman had to be killed as a matter of operational security as well as tidiness. The fact that she was a fanatic and aimed ultimately at the destruction of Jerusalem weighed heavily against her as well. The world was better off with one less fanatic.

On the other hand, she had released something in him, allowed him to function again, allowed him to really work, he thought. This went beyond simply helping him obtain the missile. Speaking to her of his need for revenge had freed him somehow, and he felt real gratitude: a liability in his profession, but still he felt it.

He hadn’t wanted a drink quite so badly since that night either. Whether that would last or not, he couldn’t say. He wouldn’t count on it.

Coldwell’s pocketbook had been brought to him. Ravid examined it now. She had a few thousand dollars in Euros, less than a hundred American, four credit cards, and a passport which might be of some use in the future.

“Set the course south,” he told the others. “Weigh the bodies down and send them overboard at nightfall. Except for Birk; we will need his to make his ship appear as if it was robbed. Find a place where his body can be stuffed conveniently. Quickly. I must leave as soon as possible.”

3

Ferguson had one indisputable point of reference: the digital photo he had taken when they retrieved the case. He avoided looking at it — he avoided dealing with the problem at all — while he tried to psyche out who had killed Vassenka. Ras provided a semiuseful theory: the Syrian authorities believed Vassenka had tipped the Israelis off to the meeting at the castle and the in-coining airplane, and this was payback.

The theory was wrong, but it told Ferguson that there were probably additional Iraqis and/or fanatics associated with Meles who had escaped Mossad’s revenge bombing. He and Thera spent the early morning hours placing new taps on the local police phones; the NSA already had a healthy operation harvesting information from the central authorities in Damascus. Sooner or later the rest of the scum would turn up in the net.

There was a legitimate question to be asked, though: how much of this effort was truly worth it? With all of the major players out of the picture and the rocket fuel about to be confiscated, the immediate threat had vanished.

Asking the question was another thing Ferguson didn’t bother with until he put Thera on the ferry for Cyprus. Unlike the yacht she and the others had taken the day before, this was a public vessel, a recent enterprise aimed at tourists but mostly used by Syrian workers who found they could earn twice as much on the island as they could in Syria. Which wasn’t saying much.

Thera held his hand at the dock, as if they were sweethearts.

“See you,” he told her as the small crowd began to press forward.

“When?” she asked.

“Probably tomorrow. But who knows?”

“You look like you need a vacation.”

“Think I can get a good deal at Versailles?”

“Ha, ha. I’m serious.” She looked up at him, as if expecting a kiss. “We’re done, right?”

“We’re never done.”

He held her hand for a moment. She had changed into Muslim dress to blend with the Turkish women going home; the comb she’d had in her hair the night before was gone.

Why would she have stolen the jewels? Ferg thought.

Besides the obvious reasons, like greed.

“We’re saying good-bye, right?” Thera told him in Arabic. That was the cover they’d worked out for the plainclothes police who watched the dock.

“Yeah,” he said, and he took her in his arms and flattened his lips against hers.

The taste of the kiss was still in his mouth an hour later when he showed some of the jewels to a pawnbroker in the old part of the city. The man closed his eyes when he saw the stones; Ferguson pulled them back across the counter.

“How about these?” he said, taking out two of the diamonds.

The man considered them. “Twenty Euros apiece.”

“Come on, they’re worth more.”

“Your accent is Egyptian,” said the man. “But your clothes tell me you are from Europe.”

“Ireland. I grew up in Cairo. Will that get me a better price?”

“Fifty Euros would be the best I could do. They are decent but not real.”

“What about this?” said Ferguson. He took out the bracelet that had fallen on the ground the night of the operation. The man’s eyes and greedy fingers told him immediately it was real.

“For this—” started the merchant.

“Don’t even tempt me. It’s not for sale,” said Ferguson, pulling it back.

Of all the covers Ferguson had ever adopted, playing a doctor had to rate among the best. It wasn’t just that people seemed to easily accept it; they became positively voluble, offering all sorts of information. And so Dr. Ferguson not only gained a great deal of insight into the autopsy procedures at the university hospital but was also treated to a full tour of the area where corpses were held. In the course of this tour, the assistant to the assistant head pathologist revealed that they had handled an important case just that morning, working on a body that had unfortunately met its demise by coming too close to a hand grenade.

Dr. Ferguson recalled experiences with mines in Bosnia as a young intern volunteering his time. This pressed the cover story to the limit. Ferguson was actually too young to have been there in the time frame when it would have taken place — but the assistant assistant wasn’t keeping track of dates. Ferguson moved on to a discussion of plastic surgery, a specialty he had not indulged in but often wondered about. The conversation flowed a crooked road of techniques and wounds and reconstruction, until at last Ferguson found himself staring at the face of Jurg Vassenka, who was not Jurg Vassenka.

They’d been had. The Russian had managed to slip away.

4

The U.S. Navy had special teams trained to board and inspect ships on the high seas, and Rankin was content to ride shotgun with one as it approached the Chi Lao. Guns chafed a bit at the seamen’s haughty commands when they went up the ladder from the rigid-hulled inflatable boat, but then the whole idea of sailors doing what by rights should have been a marine job didn’t sit well with the leatherneck anyway.

The freighter had started its journey not in North Korea as Ferguson had originally suspected but the Philippines, where it had docked not far from one that had recently come from North Korea. This was all documented in the papers the captain presented to the ensign in charge of the boarding party, as were the stops it had made in the Middle East. It hadn’t docked in Tripoli or Latakia, but Rankin already knew from Thomas’s work that there was enough slack in the ship’s itinerary for it to have lingered a few hours offshore, presumably to get a payment or for instructions. In any event, the papers weren’t what he and Guns had come to see.

“We want to look at the cargo,” he told the ensign.

The ship captain’s English, which just a moment ago had been perfect, suddenly became strained. He managed to communicate that he had nothing but televisions and cooking oil aboard, and was already overdue.

“Then you better help us take a look quickly,” suggested the ensign, “or you’ll be even later.”

Rankin gripped his Uzi as they went down the ladder to the forward cargo spaces. There were shadows everywhere, and while the destroyer they’d come from sat less than a hundred yards away, the boarding crew was very much on its own amid the shadows and cramped quarters below deck. They went to the stacked boxes of cooking oil; the crew directed one of the skids to be opened for inspection. The captain asked if they wanted it done there or above on deck.

“Neither,” said Rankin. “Where are the televisions?”

The ensign shot him an odd look. The captain’s English once more failed. The boarding crew, however, had already located them in the next hold; the crates were arranged so that they would be easily unloaded.

When they finally reached them, the captain began to protest that an inspection would make them even later.

“Tell you what then,” said Rankin, raising his Uzi, “I’ll just fire at random through them. What do you say?”

Guns grabbed the captain as he jerked away and threw him to the ground. The sailors who jumped on him grabbed a small pistol from his pocket.

The first set of boxes they opened contained thirty-two-inch televisions manufactured in South Korea. The second set seemed to as well, until the picture tubes were examined more closely. The flimsy cardboard that protected the rear of the TV sets covered a large plastic piece at the back of the picture tube. The first sign that it was different from that on the legitimate sets was the fact that it screwed off rather than pulled. The second sign was the kerosenelike stench that quickly spread through the hold when it was off. Rankin put the cap back on gingerly.

“Better get this place vented,” Rankin told the ensign in charge of the boarding team. “This stuff catches fire pretty damn easy.”

5

Thera got back to the hotel just as Monsoon and Grumpy were taking their gear out to the van that would run them over to the British military airport at Akroti. A jet there would take them to the States, where they would have a few days off before rejoining their units. Surprised and disappointed that they were leaving, Thera tried not to show it. She kissed Grumpy, which surprised him, and then kissed Monsoon, which didn’t.

“I hope I see you again,” she told him.

“That’d be nice.”

“You have an e-mail address?”

“Sure.”

Upstairs, she tucked the address into her wallet, then went to take a shower. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she undressed, she saw a woman with drooping eyes and a puffy mouth: an old, tired, lonely woman.

Exhausted by the last several days, feeling the aftereffects of the pill she’d taken to keep herself going last night, she burst into tears.

6

“The problem with you Americans is that you think you don’t have to get your hands dirty. You think you can deal with a problem by talking about it rather than taking action, when only action will solve it: strong action, eradicating action. You would have kept Khazaal and Meles alive, risking their escape. We have dealt with them efficiently. We have provided you a solution to the problem which you did not have the stomach to take.”

Ferguson sipped his coffee in the secure room beneath the Mossad building as the Israeli’s rant continued. One thing surprised him: the lecture was coming not from Tischler, who sat stone-faced across from Corrine, but from Aaron Ravid. The slime had not only made good time getting back to Israel but also put the effort into polishing up a speech.

Corrine listened impassively. She didn’t have a lot of experience as a courtroom litigator; most of what she did had come from pro bono work in local courts representing poor people accused of very minor crimes. But she knew how to act during a prosecutor’s summation: nonplussed, occasionally sipping from her water, once in a very great while taking the time to look incredulous.

“Is that the position of the Israeli government?” she asked Tischler when Ravid finished.

“We don’t speak for the government,” he answered.

Corrine pushed her chair away from the table and got up to leave. As she did, she turned to Ferguson. “Is there anything you want to say?”

“Only that this is the best coffee I’ve had in the Middle East. It’s not Starbucks, is it?”

I can’t believe they blew us off like that,” said Corrine outside the building. “I can’t believe it.”

“Relax,” said Ferguson. “Walk with me.”

He turned to the left, leading her down the block, away from the car.

“We’re supposed to be allies,” said Corrine. “We’re supposed to work together.”

“Yeah. That happens sometimes. Not as much as you’d think.”

Corrine pressed her lips together. She wanted to admit that she wasn’t really sure what to do, but she couldn’t say that to Ferguson. Making herself that vulnerable to someone who not only didn’t like her but also resented her would be suicidal.

“You noticed that Tischler didn’t say anything?” asked Ferguson.

“And?”

“That’s what’s important for the next step. Whatever that is.”

Corrine stopped in the street, squinting because of the sun, which poked through the buildings and hit her in the eyes. Ferguson saw the squint and interpreted it as her attempt to look tough, which he thought made her look just the opposite. If it weren’t for stuff like that, she might actually be all right to deal with.

Not better than all right, but all right. On a good day.

“What’s next is we figure out where the Russian went,” said Ferguson. “He’s not in Latakia.”

“You don’t think back to Russia?”

Vassenka could have gotten down to Damascus, hopped a plane to Cairo, and then flown just about anywhere in the world. Alternatively, he could have taken a boat to Turkey or Lebanon or even Israel, driven north in a car, even taken a train.

“Let’s say Khazaal’s friends didn’t kill him. On the contrary, they helped him get out of town. Seems logical. If that’s the case, then he owes them a favor.”

“We have the rocket fuel.”

“True. But we don’t have the rockets.”

“How many could there be?”

“You tell me. There was enough fuel for a dozen at least. You have them in parts? Who knows?” Ferguson still thought that Khazaal had overpaid for the fuel and for Vassenka. But the fact that he had to get the rocket fuel from Korea showed that maybe the stuff was getting harder to come by these days because of the weapons export agreements. When the Russians had first started mixing the stuff using German recipes, it had cost about twenty cents a kilogram, which would work out to less than a thousand dollars a missile. Clearly, the stuff was harder to come by these days.

“One thing I want to take care of in Syria,” Ferguson added. “The cruise missile Birk’s offering for sale. I want to buy it.”

“For a million dollars?”

“That’s cheap. Not only do I take it off the market, but I also can find out where he got it. As far as we know, nobody’s manufactured copies of the SS-N-9 Siren, and it’s never been exported. If we have this one, we may find out differently. Not to mention the fact that we’d be taking a pretty potent weapon off the market. The Siren has a range of over 110 kilometers, carries a 500-kilogram warhead; it’ll do a lot of damage.”

“All right. I’ll fix it with Parnelles.”

Mildly surprised, Ferguson told her that he was sending Rankin and Guns to Iraq to see if they could figure out who was supposed to pick up the fuel and to poke around for Vassenka. He mentioned Thera in passing, saying he was keeping her in Cyprus in case he needed backup.

Which was the truth, just not all of it. He hadn’t decided what to do about the jewels yet.

“Ferg, let me ask you something,” Corrine said, trying not to look at her watch. “What do you think about Iraq?”

“It’s a hellhole.”

“Do you think the government there is going to last?”

“You were just there. You tell me.”

“The ambassador claims it will. He seems pretty confident.”

Ferguson laughed. It was the only answer he gave and the only one she needed.

Since Ferguson had to make a complicated dance to get from Israel to Syria anyway, he made a virtue of necessity and stopped in Cairo for a few hours that afternoon. The new CIA deputy station chief who met with him had recently discovered the pleasure of the pipe, and spent much of their meeting in the café puffing away, to Ferguson’s amusement. Unfortunately, that was about the only thing he got out of the meeting. If Vassenka had stopped in Cairo on his way out of Syria, no one had spotted him.

There had been no fallout from the Fatman incident. “Dead is dead” went an old Egyptian proverb. It might have lost a bit of color in the translation, but it retained all of its meaning.

“That was related to that whacko Christian thing, Seven Angels, right?” asked the deputy between puffs.

“Yeah,” said Ferguson.

“Did the FBI find that lady or what?”

“You lost me there.”

“They had a heads-up the other day, travel-advisory thing, about this woman they were looking for. Real vague. It got flagged because it: was related to your run-in. Routine stuff.”

“Yeah, routine. You find her?”

“She didn’t come to Cairo.”

“You sure?”

“Not on any of the lists. You can check with Dave downstairs if you want. I don’t even remember her name.”

Neither did Dave downstairs, who had to look it up: Judy Coldwell.

It didn’t click with Ferguson either, but it did with Thera.

“That’s the woman I visited in the States. Thatch’s sister,” she said immediately when he mentioned the name. “The bureau said she wasn’t connected with Seven Angels. Why is she traveling overseas?”

“And why the hell don’t we know about it?”

Two hours later, Ferguson had his answer to the question: the FBI had considered the First Team’s involvement in the case over and therefore hadn’t bothered to inform them. He also knew that someone had used Thatch’s name to register at a hotel in Latakia.

“The FBI really dropped the ball, Ferg,” said Corrigan as he finished filling Ferguson in. “They really screwed up.”

“Yeah. Where is she now?”

“Unclear. Thatch checked out. We’re trying to see if we can trace any credit cards that were used.”

“Get back to me when you know something.”

Ferguson called Thera in Cyprus to see if she knew anything else about Coldwell. When he told her that Coldwell had been in Latakia, she volunteered to go there and look for her.

“No,” he told her. “Not now.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure she’s still there.”

“Hell, Ferg. Why am I on ice here?” she asked. “You think I screwed this up somehow?”

“You’re not on ice.”

“Well, why I am here when everybody else is on the job?”

“Just get some rest.”

“I’m sorry I screwed up.”

“I didn’t say you screwed up.”

The emotion in her voice sounded genuine, so convincing, that it was hard for Ferguson to imagine that she could do anything wrong. But it wasn’t easy to figure out if someone was lying from the tone of their voice. Ferguson, who made a science of lying, knew you could never go by what someone said, or even how they said it; you needed the whole context of what they did, and even then it could be a tough call.

Few people were above suspicion where millions of dollars were concerned. Then why didn’t he think Guns or Rankin had taken them? He couldn’t even consider that possibility. Neither was a good liar, but that wasn’t the reason: he knew where they would draw the line. He’d seen them under fire, been next to them through a lot of mud and thunder.

He’d seen Thera under fire, too, though not for as long. Maybe he was just being harder on her, or more distant, because he realized she was in love with Monsoon.

“Just hang loose,” he told her. “Work on your tan. He also serves who sits and waits.”

“Whoever said that was blind,” snapped Thera. She killed the connection before Ferguson could tell her she was right.

7

The building looked no different — absolutely no different — than a public school in America. In fact, as she walked through the halls Corrine couldn’t help but think of her own childhood. They paused at the door of a classroom where the students were learning English; third-graders were reading a storybook about ducklings that would have been appropriate in any American class.

Corrine realized that the officials who met her might distrust and even hate the U.S. The deputy prime minister had chided her for starting her day in Israel rather than coming directly from Baghdad or Jordan. But the children who turned from their lesson to stare at her did so with curious eyes; they were neither suspicious nor particularly troubled by her presence.

“I know that story,” she said from the doorway. “I read that when I was your age.”

She hesitated and then walked into the classroom. The children rose in respect, something that she thought would never happen in America.

“Oh, no, please sit,” she told them. She went to the teacher, a young man about her age. “Might I read that?”

The teacher, embarrassed, turned to her escorts, who besides the school principal included the deputy prime minister and the American ambassador. By the time he told Corrine that he would be honored, she had already taken the book and pulled over a chair to the children, beginning to read. When she was done, she told the children that she had gone to a school in California just like theirs.

“The paint was not as pretty, but I think the teachers worked nearly as hard as yours.” She smiled. “Do you have any questions? What would you like to know?”

For a moment, she felt as if she might be able to change things, to affect the children in some way with some simple answer about her own hometown or youth. If they knew that she was just like them, she thought, then when they grew older they might be able to see America as their friend, which it should by rights be.

But the moment wilted. The children had no questions for her, and Corrine began to feel foolish. She glanced at their teacher, then back to them. When no one said anything after a few more seconds, she asked if they got homework every night. There were a few nods, and she said something innocuous about how she used to hate homework but did it anyway.

Later, the officials took her to a refugee camp to the west of the city. The camp looked more like a tightly packed city at the foot of the mountains than a camp, but the incongruity that struck Corrine was the great beauty of the towering hills behind it. It was as if God had placed a reminder of His power and abilities in front of the citizens.

But whose God? The God of Abraham: the God of Jews, of Muslims, and Christians. They shared this land and this God but had nothing but strife to show for it.

The deputy prime minister had other appointments and took his leave. “I will pray for peace and a full agreement,” he told her as he said good-bye.

“I’ll pray with you,” said Corrine.

8

It wasn’t exactly a case of déjà vu, but when he stepped off the helicopter, Rankin remembered the last time he’d gotten off an aircraft in Baghdad, roughly two years before. Then he’d been hunting for one of Khazaal’s rivals, though he didn’t know who Khazaal was at the time. He didn’t know who anyone was in Iraqi. He thought he did; that was the problem.

When the war started, Rankin was assigned to work with a Special Operations task group searching for Saddam. When the dictator was found, Rankin was shipped out to Afghanistan for a few months. After catching two members of al Qaeda, he was “rewarded” by being assigned to lead the team hunting for the Crabman back in Iraq.

The Crabman’s real name was Fathah Tal Saed, but everybody used the dumb nickname. It came originally from the way the hajji slime had looked in one of his pictures. The picture turned out not to look much like him at all, but that was beside the point.

The Crabman had tried to collect on a reward offered by Osama bin Laden for the assassination of Paul Bremmer, the American ambassador and civilian head of the occupying government before power was turned over to the Iraqis. A lot of people actually were gunning for Bremmer, but the Crabman and his band of murderers had come a little too close for comfort.

It took two weeks to find the town north of Tikrit where he had fled after his latest attempt failed. It took three weeks to find out where he was in the town. It took five minutes to kill the son of a bitch. And it took a lifetime to get out of there once they did.

For the record, the after-action report claimed it took only three days and nights to “exfiltrate” once the assignment was completed. But those things never ever got the story right, even when they were written by the people who’d been there.

Especially not then.

Two years had changed the airport, turning it into a facility that might actually be considered efficient and attractive somewhere else. Once they cleared customs and the security area, they found a suite of car-rental desks; Corrigan had arranged for a car, which turned out to be a tiny Ford Fiesta. Guns took one look at the vehicle and went back inside to negotiate an upgrade. This proved surprisingly easy, and they were soon on their way into town.

Guns yawned. “Doesn’t look as bad as you said it would.”

“They built a few new things.” He flinched involuntarily as a car zoomed close to pass.

They were staying in the equivalent of a Days Inn, a new motel at the north of town. Applying a move from Ferguson’s playbook, Rankin took two double rooms on opposite ends of the second floor. For security they would stay together, but this gave them a backup to use just in case. They were walking from the car to the room when a voice Rankin hadn’t heard in a lifetime echoed against the freshly sealed macadam.

“Hey, Sergeant. Hey, Rankin! Steve?”

Rankin turned slowly, as if acknowledging the voice meant more than simply recognizing it. But when he did, and when he saw James Corning, he smiled, genuinely glad to see him.

“What the hell are you doing here, James?” Rankin asked.

“Same old, same old,” said James. He held up his scrawny hand and gave Rankin a mock high five.

“Still pissed off at the world?” asked James when he saw Rankin’s scowl.

“You still writing lies?”

“Oh, you betcha. Bigger the better. What are you here for? Do something wrong?”

“Yeah. I got to work it off.”

They looked at each other for a moment, Rankin towering over James, James practically dancing back and forth as if he were buzzed on amphetamines, though in reality he didn’t even drink coffee.

Alcohol was a different story.

“I have an interview with the new prime minister, so I can’t hang out,” James told Rankin. “But we should have a drink.”

“Maybe.”

James thought that was funny and started to laugh. “You here for the president?”

“No,” said Rankin.

James thought that was even funnier. “What are you here for?”

“Looking for Scuds. You see any?”

James thought this was a joke — it did sound like one — and he laughed twice as hard as before. “You got a sense of humor in the last two years. I’ll give ya that. Listen, I’m in two-ten. Knock on the door. Same old, same old.” He did the goofy thing with his hand again, slapping at the air, and walked off.

“What’s he, some sort of reporter?” Guns asked as they checked out their rooms.

“Yeah. Except he’s OK. He was with me north of Tikrit when I got Crabman.”

“The whole time?”

“Whole time. He’s OK.”

Guns nodded. He had heard the story in bits and pieces, the only way Rankin told it. Even though he had worked with the guy for going on nine months, he still didn’t know everything that had happened.

“He’s not the guy who shot the woman?”

“No. That was Colgan. James shot the kid that tried to turn us in, and the two policemen who came for us.”

“Oh,” said Guns. “I didn’t know journalists could do stuff like that.”

“I told you he’s OK, right?”

“Whatever.” Guns shrugged. He didn’t have any feelings about journalists, one way or another.

Rankin finished scanning the room with the bug detector. He put his gear into one of the drawers, setting a small motion detector in the lower corner so he could tell if it had been tampered with.

“James is the guy who dove on the hand grenade that turned out to be a dud,” said Rankin. “Did the ultimate good deed and lived to tell about it.”

“Wow.”

Guns hadn’t heard that part of the story at all. He waited for Rankin to explain, but the other man simply went to the door. “Let’s go to Iraqi intelligence and get that bit of BS over with.”

9

The analysts had tentatively identified the alias Judy Coldwell had used to travel to Europe and then the Middle East: Agnes Perpetua. She had used a Moroccan passport. But no one by that name had registered in any of the hotels in Latakia.

“What about the rest of the country?” Ferg asked Corrigan.

“Jeez, Ferg, Syria is a big place.”

“Immense,” said Ferguson. “Try Damascus.”

“Well, there I’m ahead of you, because I did already, and she’s not there. Not in any tourist hotel.”

It wouldn’t be hard to register under a different name. If the Syrians were more cooperative, and if they had infinite amounts of time, they might be able to find her. But neither was true. Ferguson needed a shortcut, but couldn’t think of one.

“Did you try Thatch?”

“Of course we tried Thatch,” said Corrigan. “We also tried her maiden name and some other different combinations. And we’ve looked at flight lists. Nada.”

“What’s she do again?”

“She’s an accountant.”

“Any hints from her clients? Where’s her husband?”

“Jeez, Ferg. Let us do our job all right? Next you’re going to ask if we started tracking her credit cards.”

“Did you?”

“Screw yourself, of course we did.”

“Keep looking for her,” said Ferguson. “Check back with me when you find her.”

“If I find her.”

“Better make it when, Corrigan.”

Ferguson rented a boat and took a spin out to the area where Birk generally anchored his yacht. It wasn’t there.

Back at his hotel, Ferguson was just taking a cola from the minibar when his sat phone rang.

“Ferguson,” he said, grabbing it.

“There are times, Bobby, when you sound so much like your father it sends a chill down my spine.”

“Hey, General. How are you?”

“Incredibly busy, distracted, and forgetful, unfortunately,” said Thomas Parnelles, the head of the CIA. “How are you?”

“Probably the same. Except for the forgetful part.”

“Memory and concentration run in the genes. I understand you had some difficulty the other night.”

“Our party got crashed.”

“Shame.”

Ferguson had known Parnelles all his life, and it was difficult when talking to him to separate the vast bulk of their relationship from the fact that Parnelles was the head of the CIA. The two roles — surrogate uncle, director of intelligence — were quite opposed to each other. Parnelles had no problem: he’d been segregating his life since before Ferguson was born.

“I had a call from Tel Aviv,” continued Parnelles. “I spoke with David Tischler. We hadn’t spoken in many years.”

“Good friend of yours?”

“Not particularly. He was rather junior when I knew him. Your father liked him. They worked on a project or two together and did some traveling. But I’ve always been at arm’s length with everyone at Mossad.”

Tischler had never mentioned Ferguson’s father. Good discipline, Ferguson thought; he wanted to keep everything at arm’s length.

Ferguson’s approach would have been entirely different.

“He was very impressed with Ms. Alston,” Parnelles continued. “He had something he wanted to share, but she was in transit, to Palestine, and he didn’t know where to get a hold of you.”

“So he called you?”

“As a matter of fact he did. I was surprised,” said Parnelles, in a tone that suggested the opposite. “They had a radar plot of an aircraft taking off from the Latakia airport two nights ago.”

“Funny, the Syrians said it was closed.”

“I heard that as well. The airplane went northward, toward Turkey, before it was lost on radar.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a time on that, would you?”

“Only that it was very late. You can’t have everything.”

“No, but you can ask.”

They were telling him about Vassenka, Ferguson guessed. Too bad he’d already figured it out.

“You called me the other night, Bobby. Was something wrong?”

You tell me, thought Ferguson, but he said, “I think it’s resolved itself.”

“That’s very good to hear. I have a great deal of confidence in you. And Ms. Alston. She’s the president’s representative on Special Demands.”

Yeah, thought Ferguson. She’s the designated guillotine victim if something goes wrong.

“I have to be going now, Bobby. You take care of yourself. We should have a drink when you get back. I have a new single malt I’d like to try.”

“I’ll be there.”

10

If the airplane had gone directly to Iraq, it would have been easy to trace. The fact that it had gone to Turkey made things slightly more difficult. Thomas had already requested access to all of the radar and other aircraft intercepts over the border. He could look not only at the summaries but also at the raw data and could call on three different people to help interpret them. But all of the flights over the Iraq border had departed from Syria. It seemed pretty clear from the Israeli data, which he had by now verified with separate NATO intercepts off Cyprus, that there had been a flight out of Latakia to Turkey — Gaziantep, to be specific; not the largest airport in the country but not a dirt strip either. It had its share of regular flights, mostly to other places in Turkey but in about a dozen instances to countries around the Middle East.

Thomas’s mind drifted to Professor Ragguzi and his theory about the Turkey sightings or rather, to Professor Ragguzi’s two-word response to his query. It was unbelievably arrogant. Because he was right, wasn’t he?

Of course he was.

Thomas went back to the list of flights. There were none into Iraq. So either Ferguson was wrong about the plane having Vassenka, or he was wrong about Vassenka going to Iraq. Either way, wrong.

Not that it would bother Ferguson, probably. Thomas knew him only from what Corrigan told him, but it seemed like nothing would bother him.

Unlike Professor Ragguzi, obviously.

The plane was a four-engined turboprop, probably an An-12BP “Cub,” though someone had erroneously called it a Hercules C-130. Obviously, the plane had taken off again, nearly right away. But where was it? Not in any of the intercept sheets. A plane that large would be relatively easy to detect unless it flew very, very low. Frankly, it wasn’t a good choice for sneaking across a border, unless you had to carry something pretty heavy. It was more the sort of airplane you might use as an airliner or heavy commercial transport.

Did Professor Ragguzi know something he didn’t know? Nonsense. Thomas had a record of every spy flight out of Turkey, beginning with modified B-29s and running through to the U-2s. The spaceship sighting corresponded indisputably with a series of U-2 flights. Encouraging the UFO stories to take attention away from the U-2s was pure CIA, precisely the sort of thing the Agency used to do during the cold war. And would still do now. Any intelligence agency would.

Even an extraterrestrial one?

Was that what Professor Ragguzi was getting at? Were the aliens using the U-2 missions the way the CIA used the UFOs? Hiding in plain sight?

In “plane” sight?

Thomas began hammering his keyboard, realizing where the plane had gone.

Corrigan winced when he saw Thomas coming through the door. The analyst looked even more wild-eyed than normal, assuming there was a normal.

“Ha! Ha!” shouted Thomas.

“Are you all right?” asked Corrigan, carefully positioning himself behind the monitor.

“Ha!” he yelled even louder.

“I really don’t have time to guess what’s going on,” said Corrigan.

“In plain sight. Hiding in plain sight. Plane sight. Ha!”

Corrigan knew that if he could remain calm and not overreact, Thomas would soon calm down enough to tell him what it was he had discovered. But staying calm while a man was yelling “Ha!” at the top of his lungs in an ultrasecure bunker was a task that would try a Zen master. And Corrigan wasn’t a devotee of Eastern religion.

“Ha!” shouted Thomas.

“No more. What have you found?”

Thomas shook his head. Corrigan could be so slow at times. “The UFOs used the spy missions to hide their flights.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It was a scheduled flight. The plane from Syria landed in Turkey. Eight hours later, it took off for Iraq. Tal Ashtah New,” he added. “Took off a few hours ago and is back in Turkey. It’s a scheduled flight. The one from Iraq wasn’t; that’s what threw me off. I thought smuggler, and that’s what I looked for. It was a regular flight. A big plane. Four engines.”

“Great,” said Corrigan, who wasn’t about to open Pandora’s box by asking what that had to do with flying saucers. “Let me get Ferg.”

“Tell him Thatch used his credit card this afternoon in Tel Aviv.”

“What? Thatch? The Seven Angels suspect who was blown up in Jerusalem?”

“Ha!”

11

Jean Allsparté gave Ferguson a look of mock horror as the American CIA op slid in at the end of the table at the King Saudi Casino, putting down a stack of chips and pointing at the dealer. The game was blackjack, and Ferguson’s luck ran hot for the first five hands; he won four of them. Now armed with a decent stake, he began betting more strategically, keeping better track of the hands and adjusting his wagering accordingly. After a dozen or so hands, his pile of chips had grown considerably.

Allsparté was both amused and annoyed at this, and kept glancing at Ferguson. He began betting haphazardly. Ferguson waited until Allsparté had a particularly lucky win — he hit sixteen and got a five — then announced in a very loud voice, “I can’t believe you’re counting the cards. And so blatantly.”

“I don’t count cards,” said Allsparté in Algerian-accented French.

The dealer stepped back to take a sip of water. A manager came over and had a word. A larger card chute was ordered over and more decks added to the deal. This annoyed Allsparté immensely: the desired effect. He tried hard not to be flustered, but the larger deck threw off the Algerian’s system, for contrary to what he told Ferguson, he did count cards. After a string of losses, he could no longer contain his impatience. He grabbed his drink from the table and stalked up to the tiered lounge area a short distance away.

Ferguson played two more rounds, collected his chips and went up to the table.

“What do you want?” asked Allsparté in his native French. He did not use the polite pronoun.

“Birk,” said Ferguson. His sat phone, set on vibrate, began to buzz, but he ignored it. “I’m looking for him.”

“You ruin my night because of him?” said Allsparté, using even less polite pronouns.

Ferguson scratched the side of his temple.

“I need to find him.”

“What was he going to sell you? I will get it ten percent cheaper, just to be rid of you.”

“Missiles,” said Ferguson. “Scuds.”

Allsparté made a face and picked up his drink, but at last he was being serious. Ferguson watched the Algerian calculating what to say.

“The Polack is not so crazy as to sell Scuds,” said Allsparté finally. “And not to you.”

“To who then?” Ferguson mixed real questions with dodges, making it more difficult for anyone to follow his trail.

“He has none. Birk would never sell a Scud.”

“Did Vassenka buy from someone else?”

“Which agency do you work for? MI6? Or the Americans?”

“I have my own interests.”

“Which are?”

“I’m looking to blow up something very big.”

“The only thing that Birk had that would interest you was a cruise missile,” said Allsparté. “He mentioned to me that he would sell it soon.”

“An American missile?”

“Don’t be absurd. A Russian weapon.”

“Where did he keep it?”

“Around.”

“In the port?”

Allsparté shrugged. “I don’t inquire too deeply.”

“Did you transport it for him?”

Allsparté shook his head.

“Is it still for sale? Or did Vassenka buy it?”

“You should know that Vassenka is not a user of missiles.”

“Khazaal.”

Allsparté shrugged.

“Did Khazaal buy some rocket fuel or Scud parts?”

“You have an obsession with Scuds; you must work for the Americans.”

“I can pay a good price for Scuds.”

“You should talk to Birk. He is the seller, not I. I move things at his request.

“What have you moved lately?”

Allsparté shook his head. “Very little.”

“You know where he is?”

“I do not keep track.”

“What about the Siren missile. I want it.”

“Really, you should address your questions to him.”

“I need a serious missile,” Ferguson told Allsparté, deciding to push things as far as he could. “Birk was going to sell me a Siren missile. But Birk disappeared.”

“A shame.”

“Where can I find something similar?”

“Have you spoken to Ras?”

“Claims he can’t help me,” said Ferguson, which was true.

“Well, then, neither can I.”

“Did Birk sell the Siren to Khazaal?”

“What would an Iraqi do with a cruise missile?”

“Same thing I want to do.”

Allsparté shook his head. “If I knew where Birk was, I would tell you just to get you away from me. I can’t stand your odor. But I do not.”

Ferguson leaned very close and lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “If I find out you’re lying, it’s not going to be pretty.”

Allsparté stared at him for a moment, then nodded almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know where he or the missile is.”

The aircraft the Israelis had tracked and that Thomas had traced was large enough to carry a Siren cruise missile and its associated hardware. Which suggested to Ferguson that whoever had helped Vassenka had purchased the missile from Birk and taken the weapon with the expert to Iraq. Birk might even have sold the weapon to Vassenka himself, provided the Russian would pay the undoubtedly steep premium he would ask. Birk complained a great deal about Russians, but in the end money was stronger than his prejudices.

Ferguson plied the casinos for another two hours, but failed to hear anything about where Birk was. Nor did the bugs pick up activity in Coldwell’s room. The video image had been tentatively matched against a driver’s license picture. The match was not perfect, but for Ferguson the ID was synched by the fact that Coldwell had disappeared from her Chicago-area home. He didn’t think she had bought Birk’s weapon and wasn’t surprised that she was missing again: Coldwell had probably approached someone with a less well-developed sense of propriety or humor than Birk and paid for her insanity with her cash and life.

“I have been wondering when you would show up again,” said Ras when Ferguson walked into the Barroom. “But where is your wife?”

“She has a headache,” said Ferguson.

They bantered back and forth a bit, Ras noting that the town had been quiet of late.

“Funny you should mention that,” said Ferg. “I hear your competition is hiding out.”

“What competition?”

“Birk.”

“Why would he hide?”

“Supposedly because he supplied the Israelis with the weapons that were used to blow up the Iraqis at the airport.”

“Birk? Never.”

“It’s what I hear.”

“I would not believe that.”

“Someone told me he’s hiding out in the yacht he sold to buy the Sharia. It’s called the Saudi King and anchored near Jezira,” said Ferguson.

“Why would he hide there? Everyone knows he sold it.”

“I think that was the idea. Then again, maybe not.” Ferguson poked the lime twist in his drink. “People tell me things, and I believe them. I’m just a gullible fool.”

An hour later, Ferguson slid a small speedboat around the ships moored off Jezira, a floating dock large enough to earn the Arab name for island. Corrigan’s photo analysts had not been able to find Sharia anywhere off Syria. Clearly the yacht was gone, but was Birk? Linking him to the attack at the airport was the surest way Ferg could think of to find out if Birk was or wasn’t in Latakia; if the authorities came looking for him here, then clearly he was nowhere else to be found.

Of course, there was always the possibility that Birk was aboard his old yacht. Ferguson decided to eliminate that possibility before the police arrived. He drew up next to the large craft and hauled himself aboard. The vessel was empty, but it took longer than he’d planned to check it out. There were several large crates in the cabin area, and for a few minutes Ferguson thought he had actually stumbled onto part of the cruise missile. This did not prove to be the case, though the discovery did pique Ferguson’s interest: the crates contained naval mines. He took some photos with his digital camera to be used for future reference and went below to see if some sort of mechanism had been set up to disperse the mines, as impractical as this seemed. It had not, nor was there anything else aboard to explain the mines further. Ferguson decided it wasn’t worth puzzling out at the moment, and returned topside to leave.

As he untied his boat, he saw a large shadow about a half mile away, close enough for him to see that it was a Syrian corvette that operated out of Tartus to the south.

Its guns could make mincemeat of Ferguson’s boat in about thirty seconds, but the ship wasn’t half the threat the two Zodiacs he spotted coming from the shore were. And to prove that particular point, bullets began to fly from their bows.

12

Rankin heard noises inside the room that suggested James was not alone.

He knocked anyway. When James didn’t answer, he knocked again.

“Go away!”

“Hey, James, I gotta talk to you.”

“Rankin, buddy. I’ll be with you in half an hour.”

“Gotta talk to you now.”

“Can’t do it.”

The girl who was with him in the room giggled.

“I’m coming in,” said Rankin. “I have a key.”

He was bluffing, though he did have a set of picks. Unlike Ferguson and Thera, he wasn’t very good at undoing locks. It’d be easier for him to simply break down the door.

“All right. Hold on.”

The girl James was with sat in a chair in the corner when the door was open, watching quietly from under a blanket. She looked awfully young, but Rankin wasn’t in a position to ask for a driver’s license. James stood near the bed in a pair of jeans and no shirt, his pigeon chest heaving. He took a swig from a bottle of red wine.

“I need a translator,” Rankin told him.

“So?”

“Somebody I trust.”

“You don’t mean me.”

“It has to be somebody I trust. The army guys, I just haven’t worked with them. And I’m not working with these civilians.”

“Stephen, come on. This is a different place.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m not army. I’m not anything.”

“But I trust you.”

“Screw that. I’m kind of busy.” James took another swig of the wine, then offered it to Rankin. “Want some? It’s French. It’s pretty decent. Cost fifty bucks a bottle in the States.”

“I need you to come with me, James. I really do.”

“Listen, Stephen, I love you and everything, but, no.” James went over to the girl and whispered something in her ear. She nodded, then went into the bathroom, her bare behind poking through the blanket as she walked. Rankin started to speak, but James put up his finger to quiet him. The girl emerged a few minutes later in a long Arab dress that made her look even younger. James pressed money into her hand, then gave her a kiss.

Rankin stared at the floor as she left.

“I need your help,” Rankin said when James closed the door.

“Nah, come on. Let’s go get drunk. There’s this really great strip joint a mile from here. Where’s your buddy? We’ll have a party.”

“James.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sake.” James shook his head, but Rankin knew from the way he did it — from the frown on his face, from the look in his eyes — that he was coming. James was the guy you met in Hell who wouldn’t let you down. “Can I write about it?” he asked.

Rankin shook his head.

“Stephen, Jesus.”

“Maybe in a couple of years you could write about it.”

James laughed. It was a bitter, tight, very quick laugh. “I’m not going to be alive in a couple of years.”

“Depending on what happens, you might be able to write about it in a couple of years.”

James cursed. “All right. Wake me up when it’s time. I’m not driving. I hate driving in this country.”

“It’s time. Come on. I have a gun for you.”

“We’re going now?”

“I have a machine gun. Guns is getting the Humvee.”

“No Humvee.”

“It’s an armored one. We may need it.”

James shook his head, but Rankin had already started out of the room.

13

Ferguson knew Ras’s contacts with the Syrians were good, but he hadn’t realized they were quick as well. He’d thought he would have another ten or fifteen minutes at least before they could get anyone out here, and then it would only be policemen who might fire their guns once a year if that. The people firing at him now were coming incredibly close to the yacht and to his small boat, close enough, in fact, that he decided to plunge into the water and begin stroking toward a group of boats two hundred yards away. By the time he reached them the Syrian marines in the Zodiacs had reached the yacht. Rather than confiscating his small boat, they perforated the bottom and watched it sink.

In the meantime, the corvette drew closer and began playing searchlights across the water. Ferguson saw another pair of Zodiacs headed up from the south and figured there would soon be a boat from the corvette as well. There were sure to be soldiers or policemen on shore. His best bet seemed to be swimming north.

Fortunately, it was a pleasant night for a swim, and he began stroking to the north. Unfortunately, the Syrians had sent another pair of Zodiacs from that direction. He reversed course and did his best freestyle back to the boats, pulling himself into the nearest dinghy as the rigid-hulled inflatables began crisscrossing the area. Lying on his back in the bottom of the boat, he pulled out his sat phone and called 911.

Actually, it was Van Buren, who was orbiting offshore in the MC-130.

“How about we try that diversion?” suggested Ferguson.

“When?”

“Ten minutes ago would have been great. But now will do.”

Ferguson stowed the phone and listened to the Zodiacs approach. His arms and shoulders were sore, and his neck stiff; hopefully his muscles would respond better once he got back in the water. He didn’t particularly feel like going back in, but it was better than the alternative.

Guided by the GPS signal in the phone, the MC-130 zoomed toward shore. Roughly three miles from the mooring area — and well within range to he detected by the corvette — it fired off a shower of flares. This was followed by a hard bank as the corvette began peppering the air with flak. One of the bullets from the gun struck the plane and its fuel tank exploded, sending it spiraling into the water.

Or so it appeared from the water. The MC-130 had actually jettisoned a large disposable fuel tank that had been rigged to explode in flames; a pair of small parachutes kept it airborne just long enough to heighten the effect. Ferguson thought he could hear a whoop of elation from the Zodiacs over the roar of their engines. Three of the four that had pulled up near Birk’s old yacht immediately began racing for the supposed wreckage. He slipped over the side and began stroking south, angling toward shore.

The cramp in his neck disappeared, but his arms remained tired; even his legs felt drained. He pushed on, his goal the rocky beach. But within a few minutes he realized he wasn’t making much progress at all. He thought he felt the temperature of the water abruptly change. Remembering the riptide that had taken Guns, he started to get serious about cutting across the current. When that didn’t work, he rested for a minute. This wasn’t a mistake because he really had no other choice, but the tide took him back to the north in the direction of the corvette’s searchlights.

A minute wasn’t much of a rest, but it was all he was getting. Ferguson threw himself into it, pushing directly toward the beach. Head down, he slammed his hand against the shallow rocks sooner than he thought possible. He wrapped his arm around the stone and held on, the water tugging at him, still trying to pull him out to sea. After awhile he pulled up onto the rocks, wincing because of his bare feet. He made it to a relatively level portion of land and sat down, leaning against a boulder and thinking he would rest a few minutes before heading south along the shore and returning to the hotel. But his arms were too heavy to move, and his legs felt pasted to the ground.

Ferguson remained there, a sodden mass, for a half hour, watching the headlights that occasionally swept along the road above. He’d climbed up next to a boat landing. Studying the lights he eventually realized that if he’d gone just six or seven feet farther to the south, he could have walked up a paved path from the sea. Crawled, more likely.

He was just thinking that he was in an exposed, easily seen position when a set of lights turned down the ramp. Too tired to run, he slipped to the side behind the rock, trying to hide as two men got out and came down to the water, only a few feet from him.

The men had seen him on the ground and came over, shouting at him that they were policemen and he was in a great deal of trouble. One kicked him in the ribs, asking in Arabic if he was drunk or drowned. The other grabbed him and started to pull him up; as he did, the sat phone fell from one of Ferg’s pockets. The man dropped Ferguson in a heap and picked up the phone. The phone had a thumbprint reader as well as a password number for security, so there was no chance of it working. The man fiddled with it for a few minutes, then tossed it to his companion, who threw it out into the sea.

When the first man returned and tried to pick up the drunkard by the shirt, he suddenly found himself flying in a somersault toward the rocks. Ferguson jumped up and aimed a kick at the other man, bare foot connecting with the Iraqi’s knee. The man grabbed Ferguson as he fell and managed to pull him down with him. Ferguson kicked at his chest but the man held on, his fingers like metal clamps. The fatigue that had immobilized Ferguson just a few minutes ago vanished; he rolled and smashed the man’s head with his fist, pounding him into unconsciousness with three blows to the temple.

In the meantime, the first man drew his pistol and began firing wildly, the bullets sailing well over Ferguson’s head. Panicked, he quickly emptied the magazine. As the gun clicked empty, Ferguson threw himself forward and plowed headfirst into the Syrian, knocking the wind from him. Two sharp blows to his head put him out for good.

Ferguson grabbed the gun and looked at the man’s belt for more ammunition. All he could find were a pair of handcuffs. He cuffed the man’s arms behind his back and did the same to his companion. Then he sized up the men and borrowed the clothes of the larger. His pants were too wide but more than an inch short; the shoes, at least, fit snugly.

Smaller than an American vehicle and without the bubblegum light at the top, the police car nonetheless came fully equipped with everything Ferguson wanted at the moment: four wheels, a full tank of gas, and a key to save him the trouble of jumping it.

Ferguson turned the wrong way out of the road leading to the ramp and found himself driving north rather than south on the highway. The easiest way to correct this was with a U-turn in the middle of the road. He misjudged the distance and went off the other side, the tire slipping down into a ditch and taking part of the exhaust with it. The pipe clattered along loudly. Ferguson was no mechanic, but he found a suitable solution by veering off the side again, scraping the pipe sufficiently to leave it and the muffler behind.

Except for its effect on Ferguson’s ears, the noise wasn’t a problem on the highway; given that the hotel was only a mile or so away, he figured he could tough it out. But as he neared the hotel he saw a pair of military vehicles at the front entrance and decided to keep going.

The sat phone would be sending a GPS signal out because it had been tampered with. If he didn’t call in soon, Van Buren would initiate the bailout plan. Unfortunately, Syria wasn’t very big on roadside telephone booths. Ferguson drove all the way to Latakia without spotting a place to park. Finally, he parked on a side street near the train station and got out, figuring there would be a phone inside. He had to put his hands in his pockets to keep the borrowed pants from ending up around his ankles, but there was a phone at the corner, and he called the number that signified he was OK.

Feeling a bit like a homeless man living in a borrowed set of pants, Ferguson walked south through the city, looking for a place where he might hide out and sleep. After several blocks he thought of the hotel they had escaped from and the bikes they had left in the alley nearby. As he turned down one block, he caught a glimpse of the moon. The sight of it between the buildings and his fatigue played on his mind, and within a block he was softly humming “The Rising of the Moon.”

Death to every foe and traitor

Or would strike the marching tune —

And we’ll arm our boys for freedom

‘Tis the risin’ of the moon…

The bicycles were still there. He took one and pedaled south, riding for nearly an hour until his legs felt so tired he thought they might fall off. He found a spot of brush near the water on the other side of the railroad tracks to hide.

Ferg lay on his back, staring at the stars, the words to “The Rising of the Moon” still echoing in his head.

14

The guards who challenged Rankin, Guns, and James on the road into the airport at Tal Ashtah New had American Ml6s and sidearms, but everything else about them was Iraqi. Rankin stared at their ill-fitting pants and their untucked shirts as their sergeant checked the ID cards. In Rankin’s opinion the Iraqi army was good at one thing and one thing only: running away. All the real fighters joined the resistance groups.

The guard gave the cards a cursory glance, then handed them back. Rankin gave him the name of the air freight company they were looking for, seeking directions; the Iraqi simply waved at them, not wanting to be bothered.

“There can’t be many buildings here,” said James, leaning forward from the backseat between Rankin and Guns. “And what’s here’ll be falling down.”

Contrary to James’s prediction, the first building they saw was in good shape, and the second was brand new.

“That way,” said Guns, seeing the sign for Mesopotamia Express, the name of the company that flew the aircraft Thomas had tracked. The macadam road turned to concrete; the company’s building sat to the left, in front of a large ramp area. A four-engined aircraft sat in the back. After spending much of their day yesterday tracking down useless leads about people who might have been connected to the shipment of the rocket fuel, this felt like they were really on to something. Even though Guns realized it was unlikely they would find Vassenka or the cruise missile Ferguson had told them about here, he checked his M4, making sure it was ready for action.

“Let’s check the plane first,” said Rankin.

They drove over and parked alongside. There weren’t any guards or even employees nearby. A high-winged design that looked like a slimmer version of the American C-130, the Russian-made An-12 dated from the late 1950s. T his particular plane had been around since the mid-1960s. After serving in the south of Russia for more than a decade, it had been transferred to Iraqi military service. It was now on its third owner, a company run by a pair of former Iraqi pilots, one of whom had received a bonus from the dictator after the first Gulf War for running to Iran with his MiG. The plane had been well maintained mechanically but looked a bit of a hodgepodge on the outside, with the remains of old paint schemes and even different ID numbers littered along its fuselage. There was a door on the pilot’s side beneath the high wing. This was generally reached with the aid of an exterior ladder. There were no ladders nearby, and the wheel fairing made it difficult to climb high enough to get a foothold, but Rankin got enough of a foot- and handhold to reach the recessed handle.

The freshly risen sun streamed shafts of light through the windows into the long, bare interior. Ropes lay scattered around the tie-downs, but otherwise the cargo bay was empty.

The warehouse doors at the rear of the company’s building were closed, but the front door was open. Rankin, Guns, and James walked past the small reception area into the back, Rankin thinking of what Ferguson would have done in this situation, the others glancing around warily. Guns held his M4 at his side, as if there were any way to be discreet when carrying an automatic weapon into a building.

Two panel trucks that looked like downsized UPS vehicles sat to the right. Assorted pipes, small boxes, bundles of Arabic-language newspapers, old wooden crates, and a pile of rubber mats were arranged opposite them. None of the boxes was big enough to hold a surface-to-surface missile or its related hardware. Rankin was just going around to check the trucks when a fat man in mechanic’s overalls came out from around one of the vehicles and demanded to know what they were doing there.

“Looking for someone?” asked Rankin in Arabic. The phrase came easy on the tongue; he’d said it a million times in Iraq. “What are you doing?”

“You’re the intruder,” said the man, switching to English. “What is it you want?”

Rankin took a step toward the mechanic, who made the mistake of starting to square off as if to punch him. The American’s reflexes kicked in, and within a split second he had the Iraqi on his stomach, arm pinned behind his back. Rankin drew his pistol and pointed it at the man’s face, though given the fact that he hadn’t been intimidated by Guns’s rifle this was probably a useless gesture.

“I think we’d all be better served if we asked a few questions calmly,” suggested James. “I doubt there’s much here for anyone to get very upset about, much less shot.”

He repeated the words in Arabic. The Iraqi, somewhat more subdued, shrugged. He said that he worked on the trucks and knew nothing about the aircraft.

“We don’t want to know about the aircraft,” Rankin said in English, letting James translate. “We’re looking for a very big package.”

“A package that was supposed to go to us but didn’t,” added James when he translated, adding justice to their claim for information.

Guns went over to the desk near the window and rifled through the drawers. He found a strongbox with some bills and a notebook, and a larger ledger divided into columns. The writing was in Arabic. He held it up.

“Hey, James, can you read this?”

The journalist came over and struggled through a few lines. They were cities and what he thought were the names of the drivers or the person responsible for the delivery.

“Let our friend here read it,” said Rankin.

He jerked the mechanic to his feet. The man stared at the ground.

What would Ferguson do? Rankin asked himself.

Probably be able to read it; the SOB seemed to know every stinking language going. But if he couldn’t, he’d bribe the man to get him to help.

Unlike Ferguson, though, Rankin didn’t travel with a wad of counterfeit local currency. He reached into his wallet and took out fifty dollars American, half of the money he had.

“Read it for us,” he told the mechanic, holding the money toward him. But Rankin hadn’t handled the exchange deftly enough; the incident became a matter of pride for the Iraqi, who would have refused a bribe of a hundred times that amount. Rankin, angry at himself as well as the man, tossed down the money. “Take the books. Let’s get out of here,” he said.

They found a schoolteacher to translate the ledger books. The woman thought they were a bit eccentric until James explained that they had found the books along the side of the road and were trying to figure out where they should be returned. The deliveries were to cities and towns within a hundred-mile radius. There was no information on what was delivered.

All but one of the deliveries had been made to the south, in the direction of Tikrit.

“The thing’s range is what, a little better than fifty miles?” said Guns. “So they’d have to drop it off, then take it farther south.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” said Rankin. “From these books, the deliveries could be envelopes. Neither of those trucks was big enough for a Siren missile.”

He glanced over at James as he said that. James shrugged. He’d already figured out what they were looking for, more or less. As far as he was concerned, knowing the name of the missile wasn’t much of a big deal, unless he had to write about it.

Rankin called Corrigan and gave him the information. Corrigan told him they were already alerting the Iraqi authorities as well as U.S. forces about the possibility that the missile had been brought into the area.

“What about the Russian?” Rankin asked. “Can you check the hotels?”

“I doubt he’d stay in a hotel,” said Corrigan. “Besides, we don’t have unlimited manpower.”

“What’s Ferg think?” asked Rankin. “Did that Birk Ivanovich or whatever sell them the cruise missile for sure, or is this still a hunch?”

“I don’t know. Ferg’s out of communication right now.”

“What do you mean, out of communication?”

“He was being chased last night near Latakia, offshore. Van Buren ordered a diversion, and he seems to have gotten away. He called in from the city a while later, but he got separated from his sat phone. We don’t know what’s going on.”

Rankin stared at the phone. “He’ll turn up,” he told Corrigan finally.

15

Ferguson felt something brush against his leg.

Still half-sleeping, he thought it was a dog, and twisted his head to see what was going on. He couldn’t see anything, and it was only when he curled around for a better view that he realized it was the Mediterranean, lapping against his body; the copse he’d found to hide in was on the sea, and at high tide the water covered what he’d thought was dry land. He rolled onto his haunches, rubbing the crust from his eyes and trying to get his bearings. It was past three o’clock in the afternoon; he’d slept for close to twelve hours.

Brushing the sand and dirt from his face, Ferguson pulled off his shoes and borrowed pants, stripping to his bathing trunks. Then he waded into the surf, splashing water on his face and hair, shaking his head like a St. Bernard clearing its water-logged coat. It was an overcast, muggy day; insects buzzed around him. He reached into his shirt pocket for his small pillbox and took his medicine, washing it down with seawater as he had the other day. Then he sat back in the bushes, trying to plot out his next move.

When he first heard the helicopter, he didn’t think much of it. But as it gradually got closer Ferguson decided to move to a spot where he couldn’t be seen. His bicycle lay fifty yards farther south, in a ditch by the dirt road he had taken here. It was too far to retrieve without being seen.

A clump of low trees sat ten feet away. They wouldn’t provide a lot of cover, but they were better than sitting out on the rocks. He moved back and stood behind the trunks of two, flattening his body against them. He thought there was a possibility the helo had been sent by Van for him, but as it came closer he saw that it was an Aerospatiale Gazelle, an oldish general-purpose type used by the Syrian military and painted in the swirls of Syrian camouflage. And it was definitely looking for something, if not him; it moved at a deliberate pace down the shoreline.

The chopper flew south about a hundred yards then slowly circled back. It skittered slowly toward a small wedge of sand and rocks to Ferguson’s left, looking very much like it intended to set down.

He decided he’d make a run for it when it did. If he could get to the highway he might find a place to hide or even a truck or something to hop onto. The helicopter took its time descending, however, and for a moment he thought, perhaps wishfully, that it was going to move on. It leaned ever so slightly to one side, shuddering as its pilot momentarily lost his touch five or six feet above the ground.

When he saw that, Ferguson bolted. The ground was hot against his bare feet, but he didn’t stop, sliding into the ditch in front of the highway as the helicopter’s engine revved. Ferg crawled on all fours for about ten yards, then dashed across the road. The helicopter moved along the water behind him. A truck appeared from the dip in the road ahead, moving slowly up a long grade. It was an old farm vehicle, struggling to make it up the long hill, and he thought he might be able to hop in the back fairly easily. The only question was whether the truck would get there before the helicopter pilot flew over the roadway and spotted him.

Ferguson squatted in the ditch, waiting. The chopper started over the land. As he waited for the truck, Ferg saw a car coming down from the north; it was tempting to wait for it, since it was going in the direction he eventually wanted to take and surely could go faster than the truck. But it might not stop for him, and he had no weapon to use to help persuade the driver. With a split second to decide, he stayed with his original plan, rocking forward and then leaping up as the truck passed. In two bounds, he had his hands on the wooden stakes at the rear; he swung up his feet and held on.

The rear was filled with crates of lettuce going to market in Latakia. As he pulled up and got into the bed, the helicopter passed overhead. Ferguson looked back toward the beach area and saw that it had dropped several soldiers, one of whom was running toward the road.

Except it wasn’t a soldier. It was Thera.

16

“Remember that restaurant on the road leading to town, Stephen? They had great beer. Always cold. How do you think they got beer there?”

“They made it at a still. They just put it in some old bottles they had.”

“No way.”

Guns checked the map as he drove, listening to the two men describe how much Tikrit and the surrounding area had changed over the past year. It was as if they were speaking about a place they’d lived all their lives, not one they’d spent only a few weeks in. But they’d been glad enough to get out of there after the last place they checked proved to be nothing more than a fruit stand.

Neither man had said anything about what had actually happened when they’d been together two years before. Guns didn’t figure there was much sense prying, especially where Rankin was concerned, and, besides, driving through this part of Iraq required every ounce of attention he could muster.

The attacks that were a regular feature of life during the first year of the occupation were well in the past, but animosity toward Americans still ran deep. Guns and Rankin had donned generic green fatigues as soon as they arrived in Iraq, and there was no question of fitting in. Even the children they passed gave them dirty looks.

The last delivery they had to check was in Al Fattah, which lay to the east of Tal Ashtah New, roughly forty miles by road north of Tikrit. As they had at all of the other stops, Guns took his M4 with him when he got out of the vehicle; even though the day had turned very warm, he pulled on the bulletproof vest. Rankin did the same. Only James left his in the car. He’d taken it with him but hadn’t bothered to put it on.

They’d refined their story by now and presented themselves as inspectors trying to make sure that goods had been properly delivered. Armed men asking about packages might draw stares in other countries; in Iraq it seemed to be par for the course. Nobody seemed surprised by their questions, though getting them to cooperate was more than a little difficult.

The drop-off point had been a lumberyard. A man who said he was the manager led them around to the back and showed them two large pallets of two-by-fours the trucks had brought. He offered copies of the paperwork, but they declined. The yard covered roughly five acres with enough construction materials to build an entire city. There were piles of bricks and stone and sand, huge cement pipes, old timbers, even long I-beams of steel and a heap of scrap metal. Many of the items had been salvaged from wrecked buildings, but there were new materials as well, including PVC pipe and massive coils of electrical wire. Most of it was out in the open. A new building was going up at the far end of the yard, near a rusting railroad siding. It was only half completed, and in fact had been that way for a while, but the manager waxed eloquent about the booming business, talking excitedly about how great their opportunities were now that democracy had come. Security was an important concern, he added; they were always trying to get more and better guards, and worked with the American authorities to do so. He meant it as a hint; contractors were forever changing jobs here.

The manager was one of the few Iraqis they’d met who didn’t openly sneer at them. His guards were armed with American Ml6s, and Guns guessed that they had been trained by one of the firms that had helped provide protection during the early days of the occupation.

Rankin looked at the men and thought any one of them could have been gunning for him two years before. He checked through the yard, then went out and looked at the train siding. There was a single car there, an old tanker with the word kerosene stenciled on the side in English. The thing smelled as if it were leaking: one joker with a cigarette and the whole damn place would go up. He walked down a ways, saw some old tires and discarded sewer pipes along with another pile of battered bricks.

When they got back in the car, Rankin stared at the fence.

“You ever do any construction work, Guns?”

“No.”

“You, James?”

“Work with my hands?”

“I never heard of getting wood by airplane,” said Rankin. “That’s not the sort of thing you fly in.”

“We looked around the place pretty good,” said Guns. “I’m sure they could hide some guns and such but nothing as big as the missile we’re looking for. I looked in all the wood piles. There were no crates that I saw.”

“A lot of toilet seats,” said James. “No missiles.”

“We’re out of range here anyway. Over a hundred miles.”

“Maybe it was here and they moved it,” said Rankin.

“Easy enough,” said Guns. “Doesn’t help us now.”

“What do you think about that railroad track?” asked Rankin.

“Pretty rusty. Tanker car on it looks older than you.”

“What do you think, James?”

“I think we should get something to eat. And then a whole lot of vodka.”

Rankin considered that. “Where would you get vodka in Tikrit?”

“Tikrit? You don’t want to go there.”

“Wasn’t my question.”

“Couple of places. There’s a Russian bar on the north side. They’ve got real stuff. Or they used to. Before the war.”

“Let’s check it out now.”

“You really want to go there, Stephen?”

“No. But that’s where we’re going. Tell Guns the turns, all right? I have to call in.”

Most of the people in the bar were involved in the oil industry in some manner, even though Tikrit itself was hardly an oil-producing center. Following the occupation, Russians had filled many of the middle-level management jobs in the oil industry, both in the field and in the offices. Company management — in general foreign — trusted them more than they trusted the Iraqis; the Iraqi workers didn’t resent taking their orders quite as much as they would have an American’s.

Guns’s Russian worked well here. The bartender asked him where in Russia he was from. Moscow was an easy and noncommittal answer; but he supplemented it with a mention of Chechnya, saying he’d served there until recently and peppered his conversation with geographical details he remembered from their last mission. Without mentioning Vassenka by name, he said he was looking for a friend who’d come to Iraq very recently and also knew Chechnya. The bartender didn’t seem interested, and Guns simply took their drinks over to the table where James and Rankin had already sat down.

Ten minutes later, a man approached them, speaking volubly in Russian about atrocities in Chechnya. Guns thought it was a test and said nothing. Finally Rankin decided their best course was to leave. As they got up, the man became more vocal. They left money on the table and started for the door. As they reached it, the bartender came out from around the bar, tapped Guns on the arm, and suggested that he look for his friend in Balad, a town to the south a little less than fifty miles north of Baghdad.

“Jurg, right?” said the bartender.

Guns nodded.

“He was still looking to hire men yesterday. Perhaps he will have room for you on his crew.”

“Spasiba,” said Guns. “Thank you.”

17

Saved by Van and Thera — the helicopter was actually a rental that Van Buren’s men had painted a few days earlier in case it was needed — Ferguson returned to Cyprus. While waiting for some replacement clothes from town, he vanquished his hunger with a large steak and got an update from Corrigan.

The Defense Department analysts brought in as consultants were having a field day poking holes in the theory that the SS-N-9 would be used in Iraq. The fact that the missile was a naval weapon seemed to them to rule out any possibility of its use on land. Admittedly, it was designed to travel at low altitude over open terrain, where it would have an unobstructed flight path, but it could be used over land, and Vassenka was supposed to be enough of an expert to make sure it would work. If the missile had been fitted with a GPS guidance system, it stood an extremely good chance of hitting its target. Whether it was the optimum tool for the purpose wasn’t the point. Vassenka himself would undoubtedly have preferred something along the lines of what NATO called the SS-12 Scaleboard, a large, liquid-fueled rocket with a range of roughly five hundred miles. Or for that matter a Scud, fitted with a similar guidance system.

Ferg thought that Vassenka might be able to fit the Scuds with GPS kits; along with alterations to the notoriously fickle steering fins and so-so engine, the improvements would make the missile considerably more effective than those Saddam had used during the first Gulf War. The location of these Scuds was admittedly a huge question. Most of the analysts doubted that the resistance could be hiding more than one or two, though they conceded that Vassenka might have been “retained” to supply some from Korea or elsewhere along with rocket fuel and his improvements.

In any event, with the rocket fuel confiscated and Khazaal dead, the Scuds no longer seemed to be a threat. Rankin and Guns were checking leads on who might be left in Khazaal’s organization, making sure they didn’t have the Scuds. It was a long shot, and this wasn’t their sort of work, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that they hadn’t turned up anything.

Which brought them back to the Siren missile.

“I’m with the intel guys on that,” said Corrigan. “You wouldn’t use it against an urban target. It flies too low.”

“For somebody like Vassenka, that’s not going to be a problem,” Ferguson told him. “If he can make a Scud accurate, he can make a Siren missile bit something in a city.”

“You don’t even know for sure that there was a missile.”

“Don’t start, Jack,” said Ferg.

“I’m just pointing out—”

“Let me do the thinking, OK? Birk doesn’t lie about what he’s selling,” Ferguson added, softening his voice a little. “Make sure Rankin knows I think the Siren might be a real threat. Tell him not to pay too much attention to the intelligence people. Not that he ever does.”

“There’ll be extensive coverage of the area where the missile could be launched from,” Corrigan said. “Even though they don’t think it’s possible, they don’t want to end up looking like fools. Predators, a Global Hawk, all sorts of aircraft will be overhead.”

“All right.”

“Airborne jammers will block the Glosnass and GPS satellites if there’s a launch,” added Corrigan. He was referring to devices designed to block the signals the guidance systems used to orient themselves. “A lot of systems are in place.”

“Didn’t the Air Force use a GPS bomb to destroy one of the Iraqi jammers during the war?” asked Ferguson.

As a matter of fact, the Air Force had, but jamming remained more art than science. Even if the GPS system was successfully blocked, the missile would carry a backup internal guidance system; the best defense was to find it before it launched.

“You going to Iraq?” Corrigan asked.

“I have some things to check out over here,” said Ferguson. “I don’t know at this point that I can come up with anything that Rankin or CentCom won’t.”

“I’ll tell him you said that.”

“You’ll give him a heart attack. Have you found Islamic Justice yet?” Ferguson added, serious again.

“Come again?”

“Birk’s yacht, the Sharia?”

“We told you, it’s not in Syrian waters or anywhere nearby.”

“Is that a no?”

“Yeah, that’s a no.”

“I have a new place to look: off Israel.”

“Israel?”

“Fifty to sixty miles from Jerusalem.”

“Ferg, we have every available photo expert looking around Baghdad for the missile launchers.”

“Get me the satellite photos and I’ll look.”

“Ferg, to pick out a yacht that size… All right. It’ll take a few hours.”

“E-mail them as soon as you can. I’m not sure where I’ll be.”

Ferguson found Thera waiting outside the secure communications shack.

“Dinner?” he asked.

“A little early.”

“Not by the time we get there.”

“We’re going to Iraq?”

“No. I think Rankin can handle that all right. I have another wild goose chase for us. Grab your gear. Pack some sensible shoes.”

“Always.”

“And a bathing suit.”

“I have my diving suit.”

“Bathing suit. It may come in handy.”

18

The security people had already heard about the Russian missile and Vassenka by the time Corrine spoke to them. They were skeptical, especially when they heard that the missile had supposedly been delivered to Tikrit.

“It’s well out of range,” an Air Force major told her. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“The idea was that they would move it,” she said. Corrigan had arranged for Rankin to give her a briefing an hour before. They were following a lead on Vassenka, though she had gathered from Corrigan that it was a long shot.

“We’ll have coverage around the clock,” said the major. “If they come out to set it up, we’ll see them. It won’t be a problem, believe me.”

“I’d like to,” said Corrine.

The others looked at her, waiting for her to add something optimistic, but she didn’t.

19

The marina where Thatch’s credit card had been used catered to very well-off locals and a few extremely wealthy tourists, providing general services and specializing in week-long rentals of cabin cruisers. From the amount of the charge on Thatch’s card, it appeared that the account had been used for one of the latter: a deposit equivalent to a thousand dollars had been charged, along with a fee close to five hundred entered separately.

Ferguson wanted more information than the simple line in the account would give. When he and Thera arrived, the marina’s business office had just closed, which was perfect, actually.

“How do you figure that?” asked Thera as he walked back up the road toward their rental car.

“I am pretty hungry,” he told her. “Let’s go have some dinner and come back later.”

“Later?”

“I prefer to do my breaking and entering at night.”

A half hour later, having not only talked his way into the exclusive Ile de France restaurant several blocks away but also secured a table with a superb view of the Mediterranean, Ferguson ordered a bottle of Les Bressandes, a Burgundy red that was both obscure and très expensive. He was not quite the wine snob that the choice implied; he chose the wine as well as the restaurant primarily because of the price. He watched Thera as she studied the menu, trying to gauge her reactions to the place, the prices, and the ambience. He was back to looking for context, though he remained aware that there were limits: a person might be comfortable with wealth or uncomfortable, envious or indifferent; none of those things made him or kept him from a being a thief. Or her, in this case.

“Here’s mud in your eye,” said Ferguson, clinking glasses with Thera after the wine was poured, scandalizing the overly pretentious wine steward who had hovered nearby.

“Wow, this is good,” said Thera, taking a sip. She looked around the restaurant. “You eat in places like this all the time?”

“When the job calls for it.”

“And it does here?”

“Absolutely.” Ferguson picked up the menu. “I’m going to have a lot of food: soup, salad, the whole nine yards. Get a good feed bag going.”

Thera saw the look of disdain on the waiter’s face as he overheard Ferguson’s American slang. But when he asked Ferguson in a rather forced French accent whether Monsieur was prepared to order, Ferg ripped off his order in French so rapid and fluent that the man — who came from the Ukraine, not France — was lost.

“You love doing that to people, don’t you?” Thera asked. “You just love riding them.”

“He was pretty pretentious.”

“But you would have ridden him anyway.”

“Probably.” He reached into his pocket and took out the bracelet. “Look what I found on the beach.”

Thera took it. “Wow.”

“You can have it, if you want,” Ferguson added.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Told you. I found it on the beach.”

She took it in her hand, unsure exactly what to say. “Ferg… Listen, Bob, I don’t want to be part of this.”

“Part of which?”

“Part of whatever it is you’re doing. You’re skimming money, right?”

“What if I were?”

“God, you can’t. That is so—” She folded her arms in front of her chest, surprised that he was so blatant about it. Then she worried what he might do.

“That’s from the briefcase, isn’t it?” she said. “And you didn’t turn the money in from the car in the desert.”

“Why would I take money?” he asked her.

“You tell me.”

“Why would you do it?”

“I wouldn’t.”

She’d been a little too loud. From the corner of her eye she saw heads turning in their direction. Thera reached for her glass and took a slow sip.

“You think I held that money?” he asked her. The idea that someone might question his honesty had never occurred to him.

“Yes.” Thera stared at his eyes, trying to decipher what was going on. Was he testing her?

“Why would I hang on to that? It was counterfeit.”

“No.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“Really?”

“Check.”

“Should I call Corrigan?”

“Corrigan wouldn’t know counterfeit money if he printed it himself. Call Van Buren. We’re due to check in anyway. Give him our location and say ‘Oh, by the way, that fifty g’s Ferguson found in the desert…’”

“But maybe you lied to him.”

“I guess. And I swapped it out with counterfeit money I just happened to have with me.”

“I will ask him.”

“You should.”

Their dinners came, and they ate in silence. If she was giving him a performance, Ferguson thought, it was a world-class one.

So who took the jewels?

Oh, thought Ferguson. Sheesh. “Talk about in front of my face,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?” said Thera.

“A lot of food here,” he said, picking through the vegetables.

When dinner was over, Thera went and called Van Buren. The colonel confirmed that Ferguson had turned in the counterfeit money.

“Why are you asking?”

Embarrassed but relieved, she said, “I’m getting nosy in my old age.”

Even though it was well past sundown, the tiny lights lining the marina docks as well as the building made anyone at the front easily visible. The back of the building, however, was cast in shadow, and the window was open. Unfortunately, the building backed onto the water, which meant the only way in was to climb up out of the waves or a small boat. Ferguson picked one up from a row stacked on shore and plopped it into the water.

“You think there’s a burglar alarm inside?” asked Thera.

“I’m kind of hoping they don’t have anything worth stealing,” said Ferguson, leaning down and paddling with his hands. “I wouldn’t want to be tempted.”

“Am I going to hear about this for the rest of my life?”

“Just a good portion of it.”

Ferguson paddled the boat under the window and held it against the structure. The open window argued strongly that there wasn’t an alarm, but Thera checked anyway, bringing up the infrared glasses and using them from the corner of the window to look first for a pyroelectric sensor and then a laser or similar device. Pyroelectric sensors, commonly found in cheap motion detectors, worked by scanning the air for a change in heat energy. While not difficult to defeat — Ferguson had a soapy substance that would blur the sensor’s window, effectively dulling its vision — the sensor itself had to be spotted, and looking around the room carefully took some time.

“Ah, just stick your head in. If the alarm goes off, we’ll know something’s there,” said Ferg.

“Maybe it’ll be a silent alarm.”

“The stuff they have that’s worth stealing is out on the water,” said Ferguson. “If they didn’t chain the small boats, they’re not going to go crazy with burglar alarms. The front door is probably open.”

“Patience is a virtue,” said Thera, pulling out the bug detector to look for a device that used sonar or radio waves.

“I thought it was one of the deadly sins.”

“Oh, the nuns would be proud of you.”

Satisfied that there were no alarms, Thera pulled herself up and into the building. By the time Ferguson followed, she had found the computer and was hunched over the keyboard, waiting for it to boot up. The machine wasn’t password protected, but the point-of-sale program used to record rentals and credit card charges was.

“We can steal the drive,” Thera suggested. “Have someone analyze the data.”

“We don’t have to do that,” said Ferguson, staring at the wooden board where the boat keys were hung. Double sets sat on each peg, except for one: A3. The alphanumeric system referred to the mooring places. Worst case scenario: they could have figured out what the boat looked like by comparing the photo of the marina on the wall with the boats outside. But that wasn’t necessary; the boats each had a little paper file with important information in the cabinets next to the desk, and Ferguson found that A3 was a fiberglass cabin cruiser that could sleep six. It was called the Jericho, and its engines had been serviced two months before.

“This is the boat,” he told her, showing her the file.

“Who’s using the card? His sister?”

“I’m not sure yet,” said Ferguson. “Except that it’s not Hatch.”

“It has to be the sister,” said Thera. “Or Mossad. They had access to his wallet and card.”

“Could be us,” said Ferguson.

“You can rule us out.”

“Not yet. Come on. We need to get to the airport, and I have to check my e-mail.”

20

The security was so tight that Rankin, Guns, and James had trouble getting into the city. Troops had staked out all of the areas that Rankin and Guns had ID’d from satellite photos as possible launch sites and several others besides. Heavily armed Iraqi units crisscrossed the major roads and many of the minor ones, and there were already several helicopters and an AC-130 gunship orbiting overhead. An insurgent couldn’t set off a firecracker in town, let alone set up a cruise missile.

More important, there were no Russian bars in the city, and even if there had been, they’d be closed; a nine p.m. curfew had been imposed.

They stopped at a temporary battalion headquarters near a checkpoint north of the city, catching some coffee and gossip. Word of the missile had been broadcast, and in fact a patrol had already investigated what turned out to be a false alarm.

The senior NCO on duty offered them a tent to sleep in. James wanted to take him up on the offer, but Rankin and Guns insisted they’d find their own place to stay. Which struck James as funny; the military guys were the ones who were supposed to be willing to rough it, not him.

James slid into the back of the Hummer, trying in vain to sleep as the truck bounced along the road. Rankin drove, the sound of the tires drilling into the side of his head, his body tense. His Beretta sat in his lap, and every so often he glanced toward his Uzi next to him.

“So you caught that guy up in Tikrit, huh?” said Guns, trying to talk to stay awake.

“Pretty far from there,” said Rankin.

“Musta been tough, huh?”

“Catchin’ him was easy.”

Guns waited for more, but Rankin didn’t volunteer anything else. After a minute or two, James slid forward. Guns thought — hoped — he’d supply more of the story but he didn’t. Instead he asked what Guns did “in real life.”

“This is real life,” said Guns. “I’m a marine.”

“For real?” asked James.

“Well, yeah. What do you think?”

“How’d you get hooked up with Stephen?” James asked.

“Lucky, I guess.”

“Classified, huh?”

“It was an accident,” said Guns.

“Everything in life’s an accident,” said James.

“You believe that?” asked Rankin.

“Pretty much.”

“Lonely thing to think,” said Rankin.

“You think God moves us around like pieces on a chessboard?” asked James.

“I didn’t say that,” answered Rankin. “You don’t believe in God at all.”

“That’s not true. I told you, I don’t believe in God in our image, as something we can understand. I think God’s mysterious, beyond us. That’s why I don’t get hung up on religion.”

“You can’t just turn religion on and off,” said Rankin.

“I didn’t say you could.” James leaned back in his seat. “What do you think, Sergeant?” he asked Guns. “You go to church?”

“When I can.”

“Which one?”

“Next you’re going to ask what kind of underwear he likes,” Rankin said.

“I’m a boxer guy myself,” said James.

“Methodist,” offered Guns, but the other man had pushed back in his seat, watching the shadows along the road.

21

The security staff at the American embassy gave Ferguson an incredibly difficult time when he asked to use the secure communications facilities, so much so that at one point he was tempted to deck their supervisor. He didn’t, but only because she looked like the type who might enjoy that sort of thing. She didn’t know him and wasn’t impressed when he offered to give her Parnelles’s home phone number. Finally he managed to convince her that she should call Slott to see if he was legit. The woman didn’t have the guts to come out and apologize herself, sending one of her red-faced peons out to show him to the room.

“You wouldn’t want them to let just anyone in,” said Lauren when he called the desk.

“Yeah, I hear Yasser Arafat was at the door just the other day,” said Ferguson. “Listen, I need to feed you a picture of a boat for the satellite interpreters.”

“Ferg, we’re really stretched.”

“No kidding. I thought you guys were goofing off. Tell you what, though, take the people you have looking for the Siren missile around Baghdad off the job. It’s not there.”

“Where is it?”

“The Red Sea, I think.”

“The Red Sea?”

“Near Mecca,” said Ferguson. “But I’ll worry about that. I want them to look for a Scud within range of Baghdad.”

“Huh?”

“That’s why Vassenka went to Iraq. I don’t know if the plane is a red herring or not. I have to talk to Rankin.”

“What am I doing?”

“You’re going to receive a photo of a boat that I send you and find someone who can tell me what it would look like in a satellite photo,” said Ferguson. “Better would he to find someone who could figure that out for me, but I’ll do it myself if I have to. Then you’re going to send an alert out about a Scud missile in Iraq. Don’t bother canceling the cruise missile; there’s always a possibility I’m wrong. It’s happened two or three times in my lifetime.”

“Ferg.”

“All right, once. But there’s always a chance.”

Rankin sounded as if he were sleeping when he answered his phone.

“Rankin.”

“Hey, Skippy, top of the morning to you.”

“Ferguson.”

“Listen, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Vassenka and what Khazaal had going.”

“And?”

“Khazaal had to have had a Scud or at least parts for one. More, maybe. Vassenka’s there. He must have brought fuel with him.”

“I thought you said he brought a cruise missile.”

“Never mind that.”

“Ferguson—”

“The other thing that I’m thinking, I’m going to bet that Vassenka improved the range. Because at a hundred miles, we would have found it already, right?”

“They have a hundred-mile range,” said Rankin.

“I think it’s a little more. Check with Lauren. You know what? Tell her to get Thomas Ciello working on this. Get a rundown of all the mods Vassenka might try. The range has to be more. That was probably the key to the plan in the beginning.”

“Ciello? Is that the UFO nut?”

“One and the same,” said Ferguson. “I’ll tell you, though, the way things have been going lately, I think I’m starting to believe in UFOs.”

22

The adrenaline shook Ravid so fiercely that he couldn’t sleep. Finally he got up and began pacing around the small boat. The man at the helm nodded but said nothing.

They were beyond the Suez, the Egyptians paid off, and their paperwork taken care of. With every mile it became easier, but with every mile his heart seemed to beat faster. There were only hours left.

Once the missile was launched, Ravid would kill himself. He would not wait until it struck the target. What was the sense? He knew it would strike, and frankly if it didn’t he would not want to taste the bitterness.

He had debated how exactly to do this — there was no question that he would do it — and finally decided to simply place a pistol in his mouth. It was a sure and simple solution, though it presented a problem: he didn’t have a pistol.

He would have to borrow one but before the time for the launch. Well before. Otherwise they might try and stop him when the time came.

That was the strange thing, wasn’t it? To stop someone from killing himself — what was the point?

Ravid curled his feet beneath him as he sat on the deck. Something itched at the very back of his throat.

He took a long, slow breath, thinking about the day he got married, remembering the moment when he looked at his new wife and felt incredible lust. And the day their son was born. He had nearly been stopped at a checkpoint the day before, disguised so he could come see her.

The ache remained. The men had brought beer with them; there were bottles in the cooler.

Ravid thought of Mecca and its destruction. He envisioned his revenge.

Not his only, nor that of the men who had come gladly to help him, an army of the wrathful, but revenge for everyone murdered by Muslims in the name of their God. For Jews, Christians, Israelites, Americans, Buddhists, Chinese — everyone. Let the Muslims taste what jihad truly was.

Ravid rose. The thirst had receded again. A light breeze blew; he felt it cool his face as he turned toward the dim lights of the shore in the distance. Hours now. Just hours.

23

Unable to sleep, Corrine got out of bed at 4:30. She took a shower and got dressed, then left her room in the embassy annex to go over to the main building, where a command center had been set up to keep track of the president’s progress. He was running late: no surprise there. Air Force One was now scheduled to touch down at 9:12 a.m.

The precision of the estimate would have amused him.

Corrine poured herself a cup of coffee, checking the overnight reports. While she’d been preoccupied with the First Team and the possible SSN-9 missile, the Secret Service, military security, and Iraqi interior ministry had been chasing down literally dozens of other rumors and possible plots. A suspected suicide-bomb factory had been raided overnight; rather than giving up, the five men inside had ignited their weapons store. Two of the soldiers involved in the raid had died. A truck filled with rocket-launched grenades had been stopped on the highway leading to the airport a few hours ago; its driver had been shot. A patrol of American soldiers had been sent into a town to the west of the airport after a report that a surface-to-air missile had been spotted; a firelight had followed.

Corrine imagined McCarthy looking at the reports. He’d nod, then say something about how much trouble it was to shoe a horse that hadn’t been properly cared for. “Doesn’t mean you give up,” he’d say.

She’d heard him use that expression several times about Iraq and many more times about other problems in general. That was one of the things she liked most about him: he was always realistic and somehow optimistic at the same lime. “Look far enough ahead,” he’d say, “and you can’t help but smile.”

She was about to check in with Corrigan when one of the Secret Service people interrupted to tell her that the caravan for the airport was about to leave.

“Can you arrange for me to take a later one?” she asked.

“This is the last one, ma’am. They’re going to shut down traffic at six.”

Corrine managed to squeeze into one of the three vans that were heading over to the airport. The procession was sandwiched between a pair of armored Humvees. Two Delta plainclothes bodyguards sat in the front of each of the vans. Corrine barely had time to buckle her seat belt before the van started moving; by the time they left the compound the trucks were doing over fifty.

Speeding onto the highway, Corrine caught a glimpse of pink at the edge of the horizon, a brilliant band of predawn light greeting the day. Jonathon has a good day for it, she thought. He was the sort of man who liked to smile at the sunrise, saying good weather was in his genes.

“Faster!” yelled one of the men in the front of the van.

As Corrine started to look up to see what was going on, something exploded. Her body become weightless, even as her eyes remained fixed on the beautiful fringe between earth and heaven.

24

Thomas Ciello sat in his office staring at the computer. On the left part of the screen was a summary report by one of the CIAs weapons teams about the possibilities of a missile being used in Iraq. Prepared six months before, the paper declared that if Scud missiles remained in Iraq, they were most likely stored as component parts scattered in hiding areas. Assembling the devices would require expertise and time. The analysts, being of a mathematical bent, had even put this into an equation, attempting to show that expertise might compensate for a lack of time and vice versa.

On the right part of the screen was a report from the Agency photo-interpretation team that had just finished examining the area around Baghdad at Ferguson’s request, looking for a Scud missile or a prepared launch site. The report filled two pages, but the summary amounted to a single word: nothing.

Thomas had looked at the satellite and U-2 photos appended to the report and found nothing to suggest that the interpreters had missed something. A new series of infrared images would be available in a few minutes, and he was already near the top of the dissemination list.

Needing a break, he got up and went to his desk, retrieving a candy bar from the bottom drawer. As he unwrapped it, he started skimming through Professor Ragguzi’s book again. He hadn’t gotten very far the other day, thrown off by the Turkey reference. Now that he knew it wasn’t a mistake, he could start reading again. It was as if he’d been blinded by that, as if all he could see were errors or potential errors. Now that he understood the professor’s point, he could read it again with a clearer, fairer mind.

Oh, he realized. That’s the problem. Everyone’s looking for the missiles.

He pushed the candy bar into his mouth, threw the blanket over his desk, and ran to talk to Corrigan in the Cube.

25

Rankin pulled the sat phone from his pocket as it began to vibrate. He pried the antenna out from the body of the phone awkwardly as he drove, both hands on the wheel. The others were dozing, and the truth was he felt like pulling over and joining them.

“You need to look for sewer pipes,” said Corrigan.

“What are you talking about?”

“Hold on.”

A new voice came on the line. It was Thomas Ciello. “They’re hiding the missile somewhere.”

“You think?” said Rankin.

“A sewer pipe or something like that. I have the interpreters on it. There are a couple of places in Tikrit. I think you should go there.”

“Why would they hide it in a sewer pipe?” Rankin’s experience with intelligence types had not been very good, and Thomas was crazier than the rest.

“Not in it; with it. From the air, it would look like it belonged. You’d really have to get up close to check it. I have them looking at old sites,” added Thomas. “I think maybe it was in a pile for a long time and then recently moved. There are about forty sites within the hundred-mile range, and nearly double that if we got to a hundred and fifty miles. It would be nearby, I think. I mean, we could look through the whole country, but—”

“A hundred and fifty?” asked Rankin.

“Oh yeah. I was going to tell you that, too. That’s the total range Vassenka can achieve. There are a few simple modifications. The rocket fuel has to be properly prepared, but once that’s taken care of, everything else falls into place.” The analyst spoke quickly, as if he were afraid that he would run out of breath before he got his entire idea out of his mouth. “It’s probably going to be set up at the last minute, so maybe there’s a place with an overhang or something they’re counting on, even say a tarp or something. I wanted to look at every mosque that had a roof repair recently or ongoing, and—”

“Could you hide rocket fuel in a kerosene tank?” asked Rankin. “Not a tank; a tank car. Like a train.”

“Kerosene?”

“It said kerosene.”

“The Russians developed it from the V-2. There were experiments,” said Thomas.

“What are you mumbling about?” asked Rankin.

“I have to get back to you.”

“Do that.” Rankin tossed the phone to Guns, sitting in the seat next to him, then pulled a U-turn across the two lanes of traffic.

26

Something about the way the van’s momentum shifted reminded Corrine of an accident she’d been in as a six-year-old. She hadn’t thought of that moment in years, but it came back to her now, and she pushed her neck down against gravity, hunkering in the van as she had in the sedan that had gone off a mountain road in a snowstorm two decades before. She felt the six-year-old’s mixture of horror and fascination, the fear when her mother didn’t answer right away. She heard the loud crack of the airbags and the long hush that followed, the incongruous silence as the car lay in the field, slowly being covered by snow.

And then she was back in the present, the van on its side, thrown off the pavement by the force of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bomb buried beyond the shoulder of the highway.

“Out! We have to get out!” said one of the bodyguards.

“Out, yes,” Corrine said. She grabbed at her seat belt latch and undid it, then pushed up against the door. The door flew from her hand. One of the soldiers who’d been riding in the rear Humvee reached in and grabbed for her, helping her pull herself out. She jumped down to the ground, pushing against the chassis to steady herself. Remembering where she was, she ducked down and took out her small Smith & Wesson pistol, holding it in both hands as she scanned the side of the road.

“In the Hummer! Everybody in the Hummer! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” shouted the soldier who’d helped her out.

A helicopter whipped toward them.

The driver of the van had been lifted out and helped down to the pavement, moaning. The airbag had exploded in his face, and he was burned. Corrine grabbed his arm and led him toward the Humvee. She pushed him inside and then ran back to the van. The passenger on the far side of her had been cut by a piece of metal or glass in the door and was bleeding profusely. Corrine grabbed the sleeve of her shirt and ripped it off, trying to stop the blood.

“Into the Humvee,” said one of the soldiers. “Come on now. Out of here.”

“We need a medical kit,” she said.

“In the Hummer, ma’am. Come on.”

Corrine kept her hand pressed to the man’s neck as the soldier took him in his arms and carried him to the truck. She wedged herself into the back, where a medical kit lay open on the floor. She grabbed gauze and wrapped it over the sleeve and wound, pushing in tightly to try and staunch the flow of blood. She could feel the man’s pulse ebb and flow beneath her fingers.

“Hospital,” she said.

“We’re in! Go!” yelled one of the soldiers, and the Hummer jerked forward.

“This is one screwed-up place,” muttered someone. Corrine didn’t know who said it, but she certainly agreed.

27

Getting to Yanbu on the coast of the Red Sea at the lip of the Saudi Arabian desert was only half as hard as finding a serviceable boat there, finally Ferguson found a man who ran a diving business who agreed to rent them a vessel for the day, as long as they paid twice the normal rate in cash. Ferguson didn’t have that much cash; it was Thera who suggested the bracelet.

The man said he would take a credit card.

Once they cast off, Ferguson had Thera take the wheel. He unpacked their weapons from the duffle bags and called Corrigan for an update.

“I have a lot of stuff going on here, Ferg.”

“Gee, Jack. No kidding. I thought you were hanging out knocking down beers.”

“Rankin thinks he knows where the Scud missile is.”

“Good. can you get me a Global Hawk down here? The satellite image is pretty old.”

“Every available asset in the Middle East is over Iraq. There’s a satellite coming over your area in twenty minutes. A team is standing by to analyze it. That’s the best I can do.”

“Where’s Van?”

“They’re en route to back up Rankin.”

“All right,” said Ferguson. “The photo guys know what the Sharia looks like?”

“They’ll do their best.”

“Call me back.” He snapped off the phone.

Thera looked over from the wheel. “What did he say?”

“Not much. I figure we have about twenty miles before we have to really worry. Open the throttle up and let her rip.”

“It could be a wild goose chase. The boats in the satellite photo aren’t necessarily the ones we’re looking for, and they might not have come this way.”

“I hope so,” said Ferguson. He was putting two and two together and coming up with forty-four: the most recent satellite photo showed a yacht like the Sharia in the Red Sea. He hadn’t been able to find the speedboat, or, rather, he’d seen plenty similar. His theory was that the Sharia had gone south alone for some reason, with Coldwell or whoever had used Thatch’s credit card joining up from Tel Aviv. He might be wrong, but being wrong would be easier to deal with than just missing them.

“Did you really think I stole the jewels?” asked Thera.

“I still do.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Nah. You would have plugged me in the back by now if you had.” Ferguson reached into his bag and took out a battered Boston Red Sox cap to shield his eyes from the sun. Then he took out his binoculars and began scanning the horizon in the direction of Mecca.

28

There were guards at the entrance to the lumberyard. Behind them, the fence was locked and chained. James told the men that they had business with the manager. The men told him the manager wouldn’t be in until ten or eleven, and the yard wouldn’t open until then.

“Tell them we’ll wait inside,” said Rankin.

James tried it, but the guards claimed not to have the keys.

“Have them call the manager.”

“No phone,” translated James. “I think they meant the manager. That’s very possible. Half the country doesn’t have working phones.”

Rankin looked at the men. There were four of them. They were separated well, positioned in such a way that they could pummel the vehicle if anyone inside opened fire. The fence to the yard opened on a set of barriers and a stationary forklift; it was impossible to simply crash the gate and get in.

“Tell them we’ll come back,” said Rankin.

“Ask for a place to have breakfast,” suggested Guns. “A good, long breakfast.”

“You hungry?” asked Rankin.

“If they think we’re having breakfast, they won’t be watching for us.”

“You got that from Ferg,” said Rankin. He turned to James. “Ask for an American-style breakfast.”

They drove a mile down the highway to a spot where the road curved and they could stop without being seen from the lumberyard. When they stopped, Rankin called Corrigan in the Cube. “What did the space cadet find out about kerosene?”

“Kerosene was used for the very first set of rockets developed,” said Corrigan, who was reading notes Thomas had prepared. “It would require heavy modifications but is potentially usable, if an expert prepared the rocket. Other possible fuels include—”

“That’s good enough for me. We’re going to do a reecee on the lumberyard. Have Van meet us there.”

“He’s twenty minutes away.”

“We’ll be inside. Tell him about the building.”

“Do you really think—”

Rankin killed the phone and stuffed it into his pocket. Ferguson didn’t get second-guessed like this. When he said something, people saluted.

“You think we should update the CentCom security people?” Guns asked.

“They’re only going to tell us again to check it out and get back to them,” said Rankin, opening his door. “We can get up there before CentCom gets back to us anyway. Gear up.”

“I’ll stay with the car,” said James. “Somebody’s got to, right?”

“No. We may need you,” said Rankin. “If we come across someone who speaks only Arabic.”

“Your Arabic’s fine, Stephen.”

“Yours is a lot better. I’m all right with a few phrases, but once they get going, I get lost.”

“It’s a long walk,” said James.

“Don’t be such a wimp.”

“I am a wimp.”

“Yeah, right.”

Guns didn’t think it would be that bad an idea if someone stayed back with the vehicle, but he didn’t feel like arguing with Rankin. They put their weapons into civilian-style knapsacks — having guns out might panic the wrong people- and trotted across the road. They continued across a patch of scrubby land to the railroad tracks, then walked down them in the direction of the lumberyard. After about fifty yards, Guns spotted a ditch on the far side of the tracks. They had to pick their way over rubble at several spots, but it covered their approach. They walked to within fifty yards of the tanker car, where Rankin saw a guard slouched in the shade.

“Case closed,” said James.

“Doesn’t prove anything. We have to get inside.”

“Just send the police out here.”

“Man, James, you really are wimping today,” said Rankin.

“I tell you, I’m a coward.”

Guns looked over at the journalist. He thought he’d see him smile or wink, but the look on his face was very serious.

“You have your sat phone?” Rankin asked him.

“Yeah.”

“I have a number for you to call if we get greased.”

James took a small pad and pen from his pocket and wrote it down. “I don’t know where we are.”

“The guy you talk to will. You call that number and you duck. You got me?”

“Stephen—”

“You duck. Run the other way. No heroics. Because they will take out everything in their path. Everything.”

James shook his head.

Rankin looked at Guns. “We flank this guy?”

“I think I can crawl up behind him if you attract his attention.”

“Shoot him if you have to.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

Guns crawled two car lengths beyond the tank car, then got out of the ditch and moved to the tracks. He thought of climbing up the car and attacking the guard from above but decided he’d have trouble if the Iraqi moved before he could attack.

When Rankin saw that Guns was in position, he moaned, softly first, then louder. The guard walked a few yards in his direction, gun pointed at the ground.

Guns began to follow, stepping as lightly as he could. When he was no more than twenty feet away the guard stopped. Guns froze, standing so silently he could hear a rasp in the man’s chest as he breathed.

The Iraqi turned toward him anyway. Rankin took him down with a burst that caught him in the side of the head.

Guns cursed, then leapt toward the fence. Rankin ran and grabbed the gun the Iraqi had dropped, then joined Guns as the marine put his rifle to the lock on the twelve-foot-high gate where the train entered the yard and blew it off.

The gate didn’t budge when they pushed. Rankin reared back and threw himself against it. When it still didn’t move, he began to climb. He had just reached the top when a guard appeared from the area of the building. The man yelled something, then dropped to one knee and fired his Ml6.

Losing his grip, Rankin slid down the fence to the ground inside the lumberyard. He crumpled to the ground, safe behind a pile of lumber. Guns managed to pry enough of the gate away from the fence to get in without exposing himself to the gunfire.

Rankin pushed up and fired a burst from his Uzi. As he ducked back under a hail of bullets, he saw a long hose that ran from the building out toward the gate they had just climbed. “Guns, you remember that hose?”

Guns looked over. The hose, a little thicker than a standard garden hose and red, sat in the middle of the aisle he had walked down the day before.

“I don’t think so. You smell that? There’s kerosene all over the place. Worse than the other day.”

Rankin wasn’t sure about that, but he did know this had to be the place.

“Call in support,” he told Guns. “Get an attack plane or an Apache up here to take out that building. The rocket has to be in there. Get them up here fast.”

A heavy machine gun drowned out the last of his words.

29

Ravid checked his watch. The American satellite was just now passing overhead. They would begin to assemble the missile as soon as it was gone.

According to his calculations, it would take a bit over two hours to get the missile ready for launch. They would be vulnerable to detection during that time, of course, but it was unlikely anyone would be watching too closely. Certainly the Americans would have every available resource focused on Baghdad. And the Israelis would not bother to protect Islam.

Two hours, and revenge would be his.

Revenge and so much more.

30

By the time they got to the hospital, the man Corrine had tried to save had bled to death. She realized it a few blocks away, but refused to let go of him, as if admitting the obvious was some sort of sacrilege. Only when the doctor started to reach into the Humvee for him at the emergency entrance did she remove her hand and shake her head.

“You better look at the others,” she said.

Inside the building, a nurse steered Corrine to a gurney.

“No, I have to get to the airport,” Corrine told her. The woman started to argue, but Corrine just walked away. She saw a female doctor working on one of the men who had come in with her. His arm had caught some shrapnel, but the wounds weren’t serious.

“Do you have a shirt I could borrow?” Corrine asked. “I’m not wounded; this isn’t my blood.”

The woman’s shirt was a size too big, but it was clean. Corrine found a pair of fatigues in a nearby locker and pulled them on as well. Then she went over to the administration desk, where a major told her that the city was being locked down and all the roads were now closed.

“Well, Major, you’d better open them for me,” Corrine told him. “I’m the president’s counsel, and if I’m not there when Air Force One touches down, you and everybody you know will never get another promotion.”

The major told her she could stuff her threats and turned to walk away.

She grabbed his shirtsleeve. “Look, I was out of line and I apologize. But I need to be there.”

He still wasn’t happy, but a few minutes later an AH-6 Little Bird helicopter put down in the parking area outside the building.

“Airport,” Corrine yelled as she got inside.

“I know,” yelled the pilot.

Corrine held on as the helo picked up its tail and skittered toward the airport. Two Black hawk helicopters skimmed over the roadway nearby, running a patrol. An AC-130 Spectre gunship orbited over the outskirts of the airport, its black hulk prominent against the blue sky.

From the air, it looked as if there were a full division of American soldiers on the ground at and around the facility. Vehicles of all descriptions guarded the perimeters and surrounding roads. Even though their aircraft had been cleared in, and even though everyone on the field knew who its passenger was, a pair of armed guards met Corrine and escorted her to an area on the infield where her ID was checked. Corrine knew the Secret Service agent supervising the checkpoint, but the woman searched her anyway.

As she started to walk toward the terminal, one of the soldiers nearby craned his head up. The president’s plane had just appeared overhead. The earlier reports that said it was behind schedule were part of a disinformation campaign to keep potential enemies off guard. The blue-and-white 747 turned tightly and nearly dropped straight down on the runway, the pilot using all of his skills as well as every ounce of the aircraft’s aerodynamic qualities to lessen the chance of a surface-to-air strike. The plane raced to the end of the concrete before stopping. Then, rather than taking the ramp, it turned at the very edge of the runway and taxied back toward the middle of the strip. A military honor guard double-timed out of the terminal, and Corrine headed toward the reception area, where the ambassador was already waiting.

He did a double take when he saw her. “You all right?”

“I am now.”

Four men rolled a ladder out to the plane. It was a bare metal model, not because of economy but because the Secret Service wanted to be absolutely sure there was no possibility of unseen explosives being planted on it.

Two helicopters hovered overhead as a Secret Serviceman popped his head out of the hatchway. President McCarthy emerged a moment later, strolling down the steps as casually as if they were back in Washington. Ambassador Bellows and several members of the CentCom command in Iraq stepped forward to meet him. Corrine felt her shoulders sag. She wanted to relax, but she knew it was far too early for that.

“Miss Alston, there you are,” he told Corrine when he spotted her. “You lead an interesting life, young lady. Very interesting.” He took her hand, squeezed it, and leaned close. “I am glad to see that you are all right.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Now tell me all about it,” he said a little louder. “Stay at my side, deah. I must say, there is nothing that makes an ol’ Georgia stallion look more handsome than to have a fresh young filly by his side.”

Ambassador Bellows beamed at her from behind the president, then stepped up to introduce members of his staff. A Secret Service agent came up and gave Corrine a cap and pin similar to the president’s and the chief of staff’s so they’d know her at a glance. When the president finally finished shaking everyone’s hand, they were shown to a line of limos that had just come up. The president, Corrine, and chief of staff got into the lead limo. The cars drove across the complex toward a hangar for a ceremony with the troops. As they approached, the president’s limo turned off into a building next to the one where the ceremony was planned. Rather than walking there, the trio and the Secret Service bodyguards hopped into a pair of SUVs and drove to a second hangar. McCarthy strolled to the back of the building, where an AH-6 similar to the aircraft Corrine had taken here was wailing.

“We’re getting into that?” Corrine asked.

“Don’t fret, Miss Alston. These are fine aircraft,” said McCarthy. “I flew one of these when I was in the National Guard and you were nothing but a gleam in your daddy’s eye.”

“I’m not fretting. I don’t want you to fall out.”

McCarthy gave her one of his best down-home grins and climbed into the bird. “If it’ll make you feel any better. I’ll set myself back here. Someone else can drive.”

Within a minute, the helicopter took off, joining a formation flanking two larger, slower aircraft over Baghdad. Five minutes later, they set down outside the new Parliament building.

The Secret Service people tried to hurry McCarthy inside, but the president was not one to be rushed. He greeted the servicemen nearby, shaking each man’s hand as calmly as if he were on a campaign swing back home.

“Now, Miss Alston,” he said, taking her by the arm as they entered the building. “Y’all have been here and I’d appreciate a nice homey tour. First hand, as it were.”

“Anything you say, sir.”

When they were in the hall, the president stopped her and leaned his lanky frame toward her. “We won’t get another chance to talk, so tell me, deah: Is Peter the man to carry water for me between the Israelis and the Palestinians, or should I find another horse for that plow?”

“You told me it wasn’t up to me.”

“It is not, Counselor. I am looking, however, for an unvarnished opinion. Yea or nay.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” she protested.

“Would you trust him?”

Corrine took a breath. Her responsibility was to the president, not to Bellows, and the answer to his question was clear.

“I’m afraid he won’t tell you what’s really going on,” she said. “I don’t know that he would even realize he was lying. You said you wanted someone who would tell you what you didn’t want to hear. If that’s your criterion, I would say absolutely not.”

McCarthy’s eye narrowed ever so slightly. Then he smiled and continued walking.

31

The machine gun seemed to drain the air around him, as if it were a vacuum trying to suck all the life away. Rankin hugged the ground, the bullets so close he didn’t even dare squeeze his hand beneath his body for one of his two grenades.

Whoever was working the gun began walking the bullets toward the railroad track. Rankin squirreled around, reaching for one of the grenades. He reared back and tossed it, but felt it go off his fingers awkwardly, flying to the left of where he intended. He cursed loudly and hit the dirt as the machine-gunner began firing in his direction again; the grenade exploded harmlessly behind a pile of cement bags.

Guns wasn’t under direct fire and managed to move forward on his elbows and knees, trying to find an angle where he could see what was going on. He reached the end of the row and saw the machine gun in the distance, but not the gunman, who had found a spot between two large stacks of cement blocks. He pulled out one of the two small grenades he had and tossed it in a high arc; the grenade hit the ground a yard behind the man and exploded.

By then Guns had pulled out his sat phone. “Corrigan. We’re in the lumberyard. We’re taking heavy fire. This has to be the place.”

“There’s an AC-130 gunship en route, no more than ten minutes away,” said the desk man. “Van’s right behind them. Get out of there now!”

“Tell the president not to land.”

“He’s on the ground already and in the city. Get out of there!”

“Rankin!” yelled Guns. “We have to stall them. AC-130’s on the way.”

“Let’s circle. You go wide right. Once that gunship shows up, get the hell away.”

“No shit,” mumbled Guns. He dashed between the rows of wood, expecting bullets to start spraying again. He could hear machinery working in the direction of the building and a truck or something headed in his direction. It was a forklift with a load of cement bricks at the front and four or five men behind it.

Guns ducked as they began to fire. He took his last grenade and threw it in their direction. As it blew up he dove across the open alley, rolling behind a pile of sand. He ran to the side, hoping to flank anyone who’d survived his grenade.

Meanwhile, Rankin worked his way to the fence on the opposite side of the yard. The building sat about fifty yards away, beyond a hodgepodge of lumber and building materials. He caught sight of three or four Iraqis bunkering down, going in Guns’s direction. He hesitated but let them go; his first responsibility was preventing a launch before the gunship arrived.

Moving mostly on his hands and knees, he managed to work parallel to the rear of the building, where he could see through the open wall. The tractor of a large truck sat at the edge there, its motor running.

The missile sat on a trailer with a girderlike gantry, fully erect, behind it. The cylindrical finger sat below the blue tarp of the roof, a simple but effective menace.

He was fifty yards away. Two spotlights sat across from him inside the building, facing the ground beyond the rocket. Their beams were overpowered by the daylight. Rankin realized that they must have been turned on hours before; the Scud must be ready to fire.

Rankin rose to throw his grenade. As he did, a burst of gunfire caught his side and leg, sending him pirouetting to the ground. The grenade, its pin gone, flew up from his hand. He watched it hover there, unsure where it would go. He couldn’t move.

He’d been paralyzed two years ago as well, but then not by a bullet but by fear. More than fear: by the certainty that he was going to die.

They all saw it. And they all felt the same thing, except James.

James, the guy who was just there to write about them, just along for the ride. He jumped up, bounded onto it, saved them all.

And it didn’t explode.

This one did, but it fell on the other side of a huge pile of sand Rankin had fallen behind. As dirt flew everywhere, Rankin pulled up the Uzi and fired back in the direction of the man who’d shot at him. The man tumbled to the ground.

Rankin struggled to get up. His vest had protected him against the bullets that hit his side, but two bullets had hit his leg, both in his calf, and it collapsed under him. He rolled against the dirt, off balance and dazed.

On the other side of the yard, Guns worked to get behind the forklift. The driver was slumped against the wheel, and there were other bodies on the ground near it. Two Iraqis turned the corner behind it, moving cautiously forward, unaware that he was behind them. He waited until he had good shots on both, then fired, cutting them down. The marine climbed up on a stack of bricks, peering around to make sure no one was hiding in ambush. Not seeing anyone, he jumped and ran to it, throwing the dead driver to the side and jumping on. Climbing in behind the wheel he accidentally got his foot on the accelerator and the truck jerked forward. He let it go, steadying his speed — the engine didn’t move very quickly — and wheeled down the next aisle. The wall of cement blocks on the front provided good cover, but it was impossible to see without peering to the side. He turned again, heading in the direction of the sideless building where the missile was being readied.

The front of the vehicle began to shake. Guns realized he was being fired at and jumped off the back as the fusillade intensified. A machine gun — an M60 set on a bipod — joined the four Iraqis firing M16s from near the building, chewing the bricks into dust.

Guns got to the next aisle, ducking behind a pile of bagged stone. As the gunfire continued, he climbed up and burned a box of bullets before the machine gunner managed to return fire. As he slid down to the ground he heard a rumble and thought it was the AC-130 approaching.

It wasn’t: the missile had been ignited and was building pressure to launch.

32

Thera took a swig from the water bottle, letting the cold liquid run down the sides of her mouth. The heat was already building; it was going to be a hot, muggy day.

“How much farther?” she asked Ferguson. He was up at the how, listening over the phone as an aide hack in the Cube told him what they saw on the new satellite photos.

“Ten more minutes,” he told her, taking his glasses and studying the horizon.

They’d passed two medium-sized oil tankers and a host of small dhows. The interpreter had spotted a boat that looked somewhat like the Sharia; he couldn’t tell because it had a tarp covering the rear deck.

Not a good sign.

Ferguson was just about to put his phone back in his pocket when it began to ring. He saw an odd string of numbers on the face and opened it carefully, as if it might explode.

“Ferguson.”

“Hey, Ferg.”

“Michael. How’d you get the number?”

“I persuaded an old friend that it was important.”

“OK.” The only old friend it could be, Ferguson knew, was the general. “What’s up?”

“Aaron Ravid’s wife and son were killed by Islamic extremists eighteen months ago by a suicide bomber. He was taken out of service, but for some reason they called him back.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid that you would have to take that up with someone else.”

Ferg could guess: it must have had to do with Meles. The Israelis didn’t have too many agents with good access in Syria. New faces were one thing; a deeply planted, well-experienced agent was something else. They’d weighed the risks and called him back.

“Michael, thank you,” said Ferg, ending the transmission.

33

Rankin began shooting at the building, pouring the rest of the Uzi’s 9mm slugs at the steaming cylinder. He fired until the magazine was empty, fired even as the missile began to lift off the pad.

Then a sharp crack split the air, and he heard the sound of metal being torn apart. A ball of flames shot across the ground to his left. Before Rankin could do or think anything else, he felt himself being pushed backward as the building exploded. A fireball shot up from the truck that had been used as a launcher, the flames catching the tail of the modified Scud. Even as the missile pulled away from the ground through the hole in the roof, it had begun to veer off course.

Lying on his back, Rankin saw it twist to the right. A black finger curled around the side and then it keeled over, moving sideways through the air like a kid’s balloon that had just gotten a pin it. The warhead exploded with a tremendous thunderclap. The framework of the building was on fire, ignited by the same flame that had run up the fuel line from the train car. Thick black smoke furled out across the yard.

“Guns! Guns!” yelled Rankin. “That was a great idea. Guns!”

“Over here,” said Guns, opposite where Rankin expected him to be. The marine fired a fresh burst at the spot where the machine gun had been, but the Iraqis had retreated as soon as the missile launched and were now running to escape. The AC-130 droned in the distance, an angry bee late to the picnic.

“Guns?” Rankin, hobbled by his wounds, pushed in his direction.

“Down!” yelled Guns, spotting a figure with a pistol. He fired his M4 too late; the other man ducked as he fired.

Rankin went down. The bullet had missed, but the jerk to his knee was too much and he lost his balance. He dropped his gun as he fell. Before he could roll onto his stomach and retrieve it, the other man kicked it away.

It was Vassenka. The Russian extended his pistol slowly. “I hate Americans,” he said, taking aim, “but I love watching them die. Slowly. With great pain. I do this for free.”

A shot rang out from behind Rankin, then another. The bullets hit Vassenka in his chest. Staggering, he looked up, surprised.

James fired twice more. Vassenka sunk to his knees, then fired his own gun, striking James in the chest before collapsing.

Guns ran over and kicked the pistol from Vassenka’s hand. All four of James’s bullets had struck the Russian, but they were.32 caliber, small slugs in a big body. One had hit him close to the neck, and blood pumped steadily from the wound.

There was a chance he might live if someone stopped it from bleeding quickly. Guns took his weapons, stuffed them in his belt, then left him to die.

Rankin crawled over and cradled his friend’s head in his arms. “James?”

“Hey, Stephen. I got tired of waiting, man. I hope you don’t mind that I set the thing on fire. I figured you guys were in trouble.”

Unlike James’s gun, Vassenka’s pistol fired a large, thick slug. Blood was surging from the wound into James’s lungs and chest cavity.

“You saved my life,” Rankin told him.

“You should have thought of that, Stephen. Just set the damn thing on fire. You’re a bright guy. You should’ve thought of it. Not me.”

“I should have thought of it, James. You’re right.”

“I thought it was going to explode.”

“The rocket? It went off course.”

“The grenade,” said James, remembering. “I really thought it would go off.”

“So’d we all.”

“I wanted to die, man. That’s why I went with you guys. I just wanted to be gone. And since that time, so many times, I might have done something worthwhile, but what am I?”

James began coughing.

“You’re a hero. You saved my life,” Rankin told him. “You saved a lot of people’s lives.”

James closed his eyes, slipping away. “I really thought the grenade was going to explode.”