Bloodline

1

June 30, 11:44 A.M. EST

Takoma Park, Maryland

Gray Pierce pulled into the driveway with a coughing growl of the 1960 Thunderbird’s V-8 engine.

He felt like growling himself.

“I thought the plan was to sell this place?” Kenny asked.

Gray’s younger brother sat in the passenger seat, his head half out the window, staring up at the craftsman bungalow with the wraparound wooden porch and overhanging gable. It was their family home.

“Not any longer,” Gray answered. “And don’t mention any of that to Dad. His dementia makes him paranoid enough.”

“How is that different from any other day…?” Kenny mumbled sourly under his breath.

Gray glowered at his brother. He’d picked Kenny up at Dulles after a cross-country flight from Northern California. His brother’s eyes were red-rimmed from jet lag-or maybe from too many small bottles of gin in first class. At this moment, Kenny reminded Gray of their father, especially with the pall of alcohol on his breath.

He caught his own reflection in the rearview mirror as he pulled the vintage Thunderbird into the family garage. While the two brothers both shared the same ruddy Welsh complexion and dark hair as their father, Gray kept his hair cropped short; Kenny had his tied in a short ponytail that looked too young even for someone still in his late twenties. To make matters worse, he also wore cargo shorts and a loose T-shirt with the logo of a surfing company. Kenny was a software engineer for a company in Palo Alto, and apparently this was his version of business attire.

Gray climbed out of the car, trying his best to push back his irritation with his brother. On the ride here, Kenny had spent the entire time on his cell phone, dealing with business on the other coast. He’d barely shared a word, relegating Gray to the role of chauffeur.

It’s not like I don’t have my own business to attend, too.

For the past month, Gray had put his life on hold, dealing with the aftermath of the death of their mother and the continuing mental decline of their father. Kenny had come out for the funeral, promising to spend a week helping to get their affairs in order, but after two days, a business emergency drew him back across the country, and everything got dumped back on Gray’s shoulders. In some ways, it would have been easier if Kenny had not bothered coming out at all. In his wake, he’d left a disheveled mess of insurance forms and probate paperwork for Gray to clean up.

That changed today.

After a long, heated call, Kenny had agreed to come out at this critical juncture. With their father suffering from advancing Alzheimer’s, the sudden death of his wife sent him into a downward spiral. He’d spent the past three weeks in a memory-care unit, but he’d come home last night. And during this transition, Gray needed an extra pair of hands. Kenny had accumulated enough vacation time to be able to come out for a full two weeks. Gray intended to hold him to it this time.

Gray had taken a month off from work himself and was due back at Sigma headquarters in a week. Before that, he needed a few days of downtime to get his own house in order. That’s where Kenny came in.

His brother hauled his luggage out of the convertible’s trunk, slammed the lid, but kept his palm on the chrome bumper. “And what about Dad’s car? We might as well sell it. It’s not like he can drive it.”

Gray pocketed the keys. The classic Thunderbird-raven black with a red leather interior-was his father’s pride and joy. The man had gone to painstaking ends to restore it: tricking it out with a new Holly carburetor, a flame-thrower coil, and an electric choke.

“It stays,” he said. “According to Dad’s neurologist, it’s important to keep his environment as stable and consistent as possible, to maintain a familiar routine. Besides, even if he can’t drive it, it’ll give him something to tinker with.”

Before Kenny could figure out what else to sell of his father’s belongings, Gray headed toward the door. He didn’t bother to offer to carry his brother’s luggage. He’d had enough baggage to deal with lately.

But Kenny wasn’t done. “If we’re supposed to keep everything the same-to pretend nothing’s changed-then what am I doing here?”

Gray swung toward him, balling a fist and tempted to use it. “Because you’re still his son-and it’s high time you acted like it.”

Kenny stared him down. Anger burned in his brother’s eyes, further reminding Gray of their father. He’d seen that fury all too often in his dad, especially of late, a belligerence born of dementia and fear. Not that such anger was new. His father had always been a hard man, a former oil worker out of Texas until an industrial accident took most of his left leg and all of his pride, turning an oilman into a housewife. Raising two boys while his spouse went to work had been hard on him. To compensate, he had run the household like a boot camp. And Gray, as stubborn as his father, had always pushed the envelope, a born rebel. Until at last, at eighteen years of age, he had simply packed his bags and joined the army.

It was his mother who finally drew them all back together, the proverbial glue of the family.

And now she was gone.

What were they to do without her?

Kenny finally hauled up his bag, shouldered past Gray, and mumbled words he knew would cut like rusted barbed wire: “At least I didn’t get mom killed.”

A month ago, that gut-punch would have dropped Gray to his knees. But after mandatory psychiatric sessions-not that he hadn’t missed a few-his brother’s accusation only left him iron-hard, momentarily rooted in place. A booby trap meant for Gray had taken out his mother. Collateral damage was the phrase the psychiatrist had used, seeking to blunt the guilt.

But the funeral had been a closed casket.

Even now, he could not face that pain head-on. The only thing that kept him putting one foot in front of the other was the determination to expose and destroy the shadowy organization behind that cold-blooded murder.

And that’s what he did: he turned and took one step, then another.

It was all he could do for now.

10:58 P.M. SCT

Off the Seychelles archipelago

Something woke her in the night aboard the anchored yacht.

Instinctively, Amanda slid a hand over her swollen belly, taking immediate personal inventory. Had it been a cramp? In her third trimester, that was always her first worry, a maternal reflex to protect her unborn child. But she felt nothing painful in her abdomen, just the usual pressure on her bladder.

Still, after two miscarriages, the panicky flutter in her heart refused to calm. She tried to reassure herself that the other two babies-a boy and a girl-had been lost during her first trimester.

I’m crossing my thirty-sixth week. Everything is fine.

She lifted up an elbow. Her husband snored softly beside her on the queen-size bed in the yacht’s main stateroom, his dark skin so stark against the white satin pillow. She took comfort in Mack’s muscular presence, in the masculine bruise of black stubble across his cheek and chin. He was her Michelangelo David chiseled out of black granite. Yet, she could not escape the twinge of unease as her finger hovered over his bare shoulder, hesitant to wake him but wanting those strong arms around her.

Her parents-whose aristocratic family went back generations in the Old South-had only approved the marriage with the strained graciousness of modern sensibilities. But in the end, the union served the family. She was blond and blue-eyed, raised in the world of cotillions and privilege; he was black-haired and dark of skin and eye, hardened by a rough childhood on the streets of Atlanta. The unlikely couple became a poster for familial tolerance, trotted out when needed. But that poster of a happy family was missing one key element: a child.

After a year of failing to conceive-due to an issue with her husband’s fertility-they’d resorted to in vitro fertilization with donor sperm. On the third try, after two miscarriages, they’d finally had success.

Her palm found her belly again, protective.

A boy.

And that’s when the trouble had begun. A week ago, she had received a cryptic note, warning her to flee, not to tell anyone in her family. The letter hinted at why, but offered only a few details, yet it was enough to convince her to run.

A loud thump echoed down from the deck overhead. She sat upright, ears straining.

Her husband rolled onto his back, rubbing an eye blearily. “What is it, babe?”

She shook her head and held up a palm to quiet him. They’d taken such precautions, covering every step. They’d chartered a series of private aircraft under a chain of falsified papers and itineraries, landing a week ago on the other side of the world, at an airstrip on the tiny island of assumption, part of the archipelago of the Seychelles. Hours after landing, they’d immediately set out in a private yacht, sailing amid the chain of islands that spread out in an emerald arc across the azure seas. She had wanted to be isolated, far from prying eyes-yet close enough to the Seychelles’ capital city of Victoria in case there was any trouble with the pregnancy.

Since arriving, only the captain and his two crew members had ever seen their faces, and none of them knew their true names.

It seemed the perfect plan.

Muffled voices reached her. She could not make out any words, but heard the harsh threat-then a gunshot, as bright and loud as the strike of a cymbal.

It set her heart to pounding.

Not now. Not when we’re this close.

Mack burst out of the sheets, wearing only his boxers. “Amanda, stay here!” He pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table and hauled out a large black automatic pistol, his service weapon from his years as a Charleston police officer. He pointed to the rear of the stateroom. “Hide in the bathroom.”

Amanda gained her feet, bloodless and weak with terror, wobbling under the weight of her gravid belly.

Mack dashed to the door, checked the peephole. Satisfied, he opened the door enough to slip out and closed it silently behind him-but not before giving one last command. “Lock it.”

Amanda obeyed, then searched the room for any weapon at all. She settled for a small knife used to carve the fresh fruit placed in their cabin each morning. The handle was still sticky from papaya juice. With blade in hand, she retreated to the bathroom but stopped at the threshold. She could not go inside. She refused to be trapped inside such a tight space. The tiny stateroom’s head could not contain the enormity of her fear.

More gun blasts rang out-amid shouts and curses.

She sank to her knees, clutching the knife with one hand, supporting her belly with the other. Her anxiety reached the child inside. She felt a small kick.

“I won’t let them hurt you,” she whispered to her boy.

Overhead, footsteps pounded back and forth.

She stared upward, trying to pierce through the floors to the starlit deck. What was happening? How many were up there?

Then a furtive scrabbling sounded at her door-followed by a faint knock.

She hurried forward and placed an eye to the peephole. Mack nodded back at her, then glanced quickly back up the passageway. Had he found a way off the yacht-or out of desperation simply come back to defend her?

With numb fingers, she fumbled the lock open and began to pull the door, only to have it kicked wide. She stumbled back in shock. A tall, bare-chested black man stalked into the room-but it wasn’t Mack.

He held Mack’s head in his right hand, gripping it by the throat. Shiny blood poured down his forearm from the severed neck. In his other hand, he clutched an equally bloody machete. He smiled widely, showing white teeth like a shark, plainly amused by his joke.

She retreated in horror, forgetting her tiny blade.

Another figure stepped around the monster. A pale man in a perfectly tailored white suit. The only color to him was his black hair and a thin mustache above even thinner lips. He was tall enough that he had to bow himself into the room. He also smiled, but apologetically, as if embarrassed by the exuberance of his companion.

He spoke a few sharp words in some African dialect, clearly chastising his companion.

With a shrug, the other tossed her husband’s head upon the bed.

“It’s time to go,” the suited man ordered her in a genteel British accent, as if inviting her to a party.

She refused to move-couldn’t move.

The Brit sighed and motioned to his companion.

He came forward, roughly grabbed her elbow, and dragged her out the door. The Brit followed them across the short passageway and up the ladder to the stern deck.

There, she found only more horror and chaos.

The captain and his two crewmates, along with a pair of the assailants, lay sprawled in pools of blood. The attackers had been shot; the yacht’s crew hacked, dismembered by the sheer force of the brutality.

The surviving assailants gathered atop the deck or off in a scarred boat tied to the starboard rail. A handful scoured the yacht, hauling out cases of wine, bagfuls of supplies, stripping anything of value. They were all black-skinned, some bearing tribal scarring, many no older than boys. Weapons bristled among them: rusty machetes, antique-looking automatic rifles, and countless pistols.

Pirates.

Under the moonlight, freshened by the evening’s southeasterly trade winds, her mind cleared enough to allow despair and bitter guilt to creep in. Out here in the Seychelles, she had thought they were far enough away from the Horn of Africa to be safe from the modern-day pirates who hunted those waters.

A dreadful mistake.

She was shoved toward the moored boat, accompanied by the Brit. She had read somewhere in her father’s briefings about how a few European expatriates had taken to aiding and financing the profitable new industry of piracy.

She stared at the British man, wondering how he had managed to avoid getting a single drop of blood on his pristine suit amid all this carnage.

He must have noted her attention and turned to her as they reached the starboard rail.

“What do you want with me?” she asked, fixing him with a hard stare, suddenly glad that all the papers aboard hid her true identity. “I’m nobody.”

The Brit’s gaze lowered from her steely resolve-but not out of shame or remorse. “It is not you we want.” He stared at her belly. “It’s your baby.”

7:00 P.M. EST

Takoma Park, Maryland

Balancing a bag of groceries on his hip, Gray pulled open the screened back door to his family’s home. The smell of a baking pie, rich in cinnamon, struck him first. On his way back from the gym, he got a text from Kenny to fetch some French vanilla ice cream and a few other odds and ends needed for tonight’s dinner-the first family dinner since the tragic loss of their mother.

A glance at the stove revealed a large pot of bubbling Bolognese sauce; by the sink, a drying bowl of spaghetti in a strainer. A hissing pop drew his gaze back to the pot. Only now did he note the vigorous boil to the sauce. Unattended and forgotten, red sauce roiled over the lip, dribbled down the sides, and sizzled into the gas burner.

Something was wrong.

That was confirmed when a loud bellow erupted from the next room: “WHERE’S MY KEYS!”

Gray dropped the groceries on the counter, turned off the stovetop, and headed to the living room.

“SOMEONE’S STEALING MY CAR!”

Passing through the dining room, Gray joined the fracas in the living room. Overstuffed furniture was positioned around a central stone hearth, cold and dark at the moment. His father looked skeletal in the recliner by the picture window. He’d once filled that same seat, commanding the room. Now he was a frail shadow of his former self.

Still, he remained strong. He attempted to push out of the chair, but Kenny held down his shoulders. He was assisted by a petite woman with a brownish-gray bob, dressed in blue scrubs. Down on one knee, she held his father’s hand and urged him to be calm.

Mary Benning was an R.N. at the hospital’s memory-care unit. During his stay there, his father had taken a shine to her. Gray was able to hire her away, to serve as a night nurse here at the house, to be on hand when his father had the most trouble. The plan had been for Kenny to keep an eye on Dad during the day, until Gray and Mary could interview and hire a day nurse to cover a full twenty-four-hour shift. It would be expensive, but Director Crowe had arranged adequate compensation, a death benefit, to help cover the costs and keep Gray’s father in his own house.

“Harriet! let me go!” His father yanked his hand free of Mary’s, coming close to elbowing Kenny in the nose.

The nurse kept a hand on his knee and gave it a squeeze of reassurance. “Jack, it’s me. Mary.”

His eyes found hers, a confused look passed over his face, then he sagged as memory washed back over him.

Mary glanced at Gray. “Your father caught you pulling up with the groceries. Saw the Thunderbird. Just got a little panicked and confused. He’ll be fine.”

Kenny straightened, a stricken look on his face. He’d not really seen Dad get like this before. Shook up, he stumbled away.

The motion drew his father’s attention. His eyes got huge. “Kenny, what’re you doing here?”

Kenny didn’t know what to say, still stunned by the Swiss cheese that was his father’s memory.

Mary covered for him, not hiding the truth, only patting his knee. “Jack, he’s been here all day.”

His father searched their faces, then leaned back in his chair. “Oh, yeah, that’s right… I remember…”

But did he? Or was he only acquiescing in an attempt to feign normalcy?

Kenny shared a glance with Gray, glassy with shock.

Welcome to my world.

“I’d better get back to finishing your dinner,” Mary said, standing and dusting off her knee.

“And I’d better finish unpacking,” Kenny said, seeking a hasty retreat.

“Good idea and wash up,” his father ordered with an echo of his former bluster. “Your room’s up-”

“I haven’t forgotten where it is,” Kenny cut him off, blind to the callousness of such a remark to someone suffering from Alzheimer’s.

But his dad merely nodded, satisfied.

As Kenny stepped away, his father finally seemed to notice Gray standing there. The confusion on his face faded, but a stab of old anger took its place. It had taken his father almost two weeks to finally acknowledge and ultimately remember the death of his wife, so, to his mind, the wound was still raw. He also knew the source of that loss. That he always remembered. There had been many bad days in the intervening weeks, but what could either of them do? No words could bring her back.

A knock at the door startled them all. Gray tensed, expecting the worst.

Kenny, already headed to the front stairs, opened the door.

A lithe figure stood out on the porch, dressed in black leather and a loose motorcycle jacket over a maroon blouse. She carried a helmet under one arm.

The gloominess of the day lifted at the sight of her as Gray headed to the door. “Seichan, what are you doing here?”

His father interrupted. “Don’t leave the lady standing on the stoop, Kenny!” He waved the visitor inside. He might be losing his memory, but he knew a handsome woman when one landed on his doorstep.

“Thank you, Mr. Pierce.” Seichan entered, slipping inside, moving with the leonine grace of a jungle cat, all sinew, muscles, and long curves. She cast an appraising glance toward Kenny as she stepped past him-whatever she saw there, she found lacking.

Her eyes found Gray’s face next and visibly hardened-not in anger, more like protection. They’d barely spoken since they’d shared a kiss and a promise three weeks ago. The pledge was not a romantic one, only the assurance that she’d work alongside him to expose those who had a hand in his mother’s murder.

Still, Gray remembered the softening of those lips.

Was there more to that promise, something yet unspoken?

Before he could dwell on it further, his father pointed to the table. “We’re just about to sit down to dinner. Why don’t you join us?”

“That’s very kind,” Seichan said stiffly, “but I won’t be staying long. I just need a word with your son.”

Those almond-shaped eyes-marking her Eurasian heritage-fixed on Gray with plain intent.

Something was up.

Seichan was a former assassin for the same shadowy group responsible for his mother’s death, an international criminal organization called the Guild. Its real identity and purpose remained unknown, even to its own agents. The organization operated through individual cells around the world, each running independently, none having the complete picture. Seichan had eventually turned against it, recruited by Director Crowe to serve as a double agent until her subterfuge was exposed. Now-hunted both by her former employers and by foreign intelligence agencies for her past crimes-she was Gray’s partner and his responsibility.

And maybe something more.

Gray stepped close to her. “What’s up?”

She kept her voice low. “I got a call from Director Crowe. Came straight here. There’s been a kidnapping off the Seychelles by Somali pirates. A high-value American target. Painter wanted to know if you were up for a mission.”

Gray frowned. Why was Sigma involved with a simple kidnapping? There were plenty of policing and maritime agencies that could attend to such a crime. Sigma Force-made up of Special Forces soldiers who had been retrained in various scientific disciplines-was a covert wing for DARPA, the Defense advanced Research Projects agency. Sigma teams were sent out into the world to protect against global threats, not to address the kidnapping of a single American.

Seichan must have read the suspicion in his face. Her eyes bore into his. She plainly knew more but was unable to speak freely in front of the others. Something big was happening. The realization set his heart to beating harder.

“The matter is time sensitive,” she added. “If you’re coming, there’s a jet already fueling, and Kowalski is on his way to pick us up. We can swing by your apartment on the way out. Otherwise, we’ll be briefed en route.”

Gray glanced at the chair by the cold hearth. His father overheard their talk, his gaze fixed to his son’s face.

“Go,” his father said. “Do your job. I’ve got enough help here.”

Gray took comfort in that gruff permission, praying it represented some small measure of forgiveness by his father. But his next words, spoken with a harsh bitterness, dashed such hope.

“Besides, the less I see of your face right now… the better.”

Gray backed a step. Seichan took his elbow, as if ready to catch him. But it was the heat of her palm, more than anything, that steadied him, the reassurance of human contact-like that kiss weeks ago.

Mary had stepped into the room, drying her hands on a towel. She’d also heard those harsh words and gave Gray a sympathetic look. “I’ve got things covered here. You take some time for yourself.”

He silently thanked her and allowed Seichan to guide him toward the door. Gray felt the need to share some parting farewell with his father. The desire burned painfully in his chest, but he had no words to voice it.

Before he knew it, he found himself out on the front porch. He halted at the top step and took in a deep, shuddering breath.

“Are you okay?” Seichan asked.

He ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ll have to be.”

Still, she continued to search his face, as if seeking a truer answer.

Before she could find it, the squeal of rubber on the pavement announced the arrival of his transportation. They both turned as a black SUV came to a hard stop. The window rolled down, allowing a pall of cigar smoke to waft out. The shaved head of a gorilla followed, chewing on a stump of a stogie.

“You coming or what?” Kowalski called hoarsely.

As much as the man aggravated him, Gray had never been happier to see his brutish teammate. He headed down the steps, only to have Kenny come rushing out after him, blocking his way.

“You can’t leave now. What am I supposed to do?”

Gray pointed back at the house. “It’s your turn. What do you think I’ve been doing all this time?”

He shoved past his sputtering brother and crossed toward the waiting SUV and Seichan’s parked motorcycle.

She kept beside him, slipping on her helmet.

“Who else has been assigned to us?” he asked.

“We’ve been ordered to pick up another two teammates, local assets already in the region, with unique skills to help us on this mission.”

“Who are they?”

She offered a ghost of a smile as she snapped down her helmet’s visor. Her words echoed out from inside, darkly amused.

“I hope you’ve had your rabies shots.”

2

July 1, 6:32 P.M. East Africa Time

Republic of Tanzania

The low growl warned him.

Already on edge, Tucker Wayne flattened against the brick wall of the narrow street and slid into the deeper shadows of a doorway. An hour ago, he noticed someone following him, watching from afar. He had managed to lose the tail quickly in the labyrinth of alleyways and crooked streets that made up this crumbling section of Zanzibar.

Who had found him?

He pressed his back against a carved wooden door. He intended to stay lost, undiscoverable. He had been adrift in the world for the past three years, now one year shy of his thirtieth birthday. Two weeks ago, he had reached the archipelago of Zanzibar, a string of sun-baked islands off the eastern coast of Africa. The name alone-Zanzibar-conjured up another time, a land of mystery and mythology. It was a place to disappear, to live unseen, and where few questions were asked.

People knew better than to be curious.

Still, he often drew second glances here, not because he was white. The ancient port of Zanzibar remained the crossroads for people of every race and color. And after a full year traveling through Africa, his skin was burned as dark as that of any of the local merchants hawking wares in the spice markets of old Stone Town. And he certainly struck a tall figure, muscular-more quarterback than linebacker-though there remained a hardness to his eyes that made any curious glance toward him skirt quickly away.

Instead, what attracted the most attention to him was something else, someone else. Kane brushed up against his thigh-silent now, with hackles still raised. Tucker rested a hand on his dog’s side, not to calm him but ready to signal his partner if necessary. And that’s what they were. Partners. Kane was an extension of himself, a disembodied limb.

While the dog looked like a hard-bodied, compact German shepherd, he was actually a Belgian shepherd dog, called a Malinois. His fur was black and tan, but mostly black, a match to his dark eyes. Under his palm, Tucker felt Kane’s muscles tense.

Half a block away, a thin shape burst around the next corner, careening in a panic. In his haste, he collided off the far wall and rebounded down the street, glancing frequently over his shoulder. Tucker sized him up in a breath and weighed any danger.

Early twenties, maybe late teens, a mix of Asian and Indian, his eyes wide with terror, his limbs and face sickly gaunt-from addiction, from malnourishment?

The runner clutched his right side, failing to stanch a crimson bloom from seeping through his white shift. The scent of fresh blood must have alerted Kane, along with the panicked tread of those bare feet.

Tucker prepared to step out of the shadowed doorway, to go to the young man’s aid-but the pressure against his legs increased, pinning him in place.

A heartbeat later, the reason became clear. Around the same corner stalked a trio of large men, African, with tribal tattoos across their faces. They carried machetes and spread to either side of the empty street with the clear skill of experienced hunters.

Their target also noted their arrival-igniting his already frightened flight into a full rout-but blood loss and exhaustion had taken their toll. Within a few steps, the victim tripped and sprawled headlong across the street. Though he struck the cobbles hard, he didn’t make a sound, not a whimper or a cry, simply defeated.

That, more than anything, drew Tucker out of hiding.

That, and something his grandfather had drilled into him: In the face of inhumanity, a good man reacts-but a great one acts.

Tucker tapped three fingers against his dog’s side, the signal plain.

Defend.

Kane leaped over the prone body of the young man and landed in a crouch on the far side, tail high, teeth bared, growling. The shepherd’s sudden appearance caused all three attackers to stop in shock, as if some demon djinn had materialized before them.

Tucker used the distraction to fold out of the shadows and close upon the nearest of the three men. In a swift capture of wrist, followed by an elbow strike to the chin, the machete ended up in Tucker’s grip. He flat-handed the man away as the second assailant wielded his blade in a roundhouse swing. Rather than leaping clear, Tucker lunged forward, entering the man’s guard. He caught the deadly arm under his own and snaked his hand fully around the limb and immobilized it. With his other arm, he slammed the butt-end of the steel machete into the man’s nose.

Bone cracked; blood spurted.

The man went limp, but Tucker held him upright by his trapped arm.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the third and largest opponent back away two steps and free a pistol. Tucker swung around, using his captured assailant’s body as a shield as shots rang out. It proved a meager defense at such close range. One of the rounds blasted through his captive’s neck, grazing Tucker’s shoulder.

Then a scream bellowed.

Tucker shoved the body aside and saw Kane latched onto the shooter’s wrist, the dog’s fangs digging deep. The pistol clattered to the street. The man’s eyes were round with panic as he tried to shake the shepherd loose. Blood and slather flew.

Only then did the huge African remember the machete in his other hand. He lifted it high, ready to hack at the dog.

“Release!” Tucker cried out.

The command was barely off his lips when Kane obeyed, letting go and dropping back on the street. But the man continued his downward swing at the dog’s neck with a savage bellow. Kane could not get out of the way in time.

Tucker was already moving.

Heart pounding, he dove for the abandoned pistol and scooped it up. He shoulder-rolled to bring the weapon up-but he was too slow.

The machete flashed in the sunlight.

A gunshot cracked loudly.

The man crumpled backward, half his skull shattering away. The blade flew away harmlessly. Tucker stared at his pistol. The shot had not come from his weapon.

Up the street, a new trio appeared. Two men and a woman. Though dressed in street clothes, they all had the stamp of military about them. The leader in the center held a smoking SIG Sauer.

“See to him.” He pointed to the bleeding young man on the ground. His voice had a slight Texas accent. “Get him to a local hospital and we’ll rendezvous back at the evac point.”

Despite the concern about the injured man, the leader’s gaze never unlocked from Tucker’s eyes. From the hard contours of his face, the close-cropped black hair that had gone a bit lanky, and the stony edge to his storm-gray eyes, he was definitely military.

Likely ex-military.

Not good.

The leader crossed over to him, ignoring Kane’s wary growl. He offered a hand to help Tucker up.

“You’re a difficult man to find, Captain Wayne.”

Tucker bit back any surprise and ignored the offered hand. He stood on his own. “You were the ones following me. Earlier this morning.”

“And you lost us.” A hard twinkle of amusement brightened the man’s eyes. “Not an easy thing to do. That alone proves you’re the man we need.”

“Not interested.”

He turned, but the man stepped in front of him and blocked the way. A finger pointed at his chest, which only managed to irritate him further.

“Listen for one minute,” the man said, “then you’re free to go.”

Tucker stared down at the finger. The only reason he didn’t reach out and break it was that the man had saved Kane’s life a moment ago. He Owed him that much-and perhaps even a minute of his time.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The offending finger turned into an open palm, inviting a handshake. “Commander Gray Pierce. I work for an organization called sigma.”

Tucker scowled. “Never heard of it. That makes you what? Defense contractors, mercenaries?” He made his disdain for that last word plain.

That dark twinkle grew brighter as the other lowered his arm. “No. We work under the auspices of DARPA.”

Tucker frowned, but curiosity kept him listening. DARPA was the Defense Department’s research-and-development administration. What the hell was going on here?

“Perhaps we can discuss this in a quieter location,” the commander said.

By now, the man’s partners had gathered up the wounded young man, shouldered him between them, and were headed down the street. Faces had begun to peer out of windows or to peek from behind cracked-open doors. Other figures hovered at the corners. Zanzibar often turned a blind eye to most offenses, but the gunfire and bloodshed would not be ignored for long. As soon as they left, the bodies would be looted of anything of value, and any inquiries would be met with blank stares.

“I know a place,” Tucker said and led the way.

6:44 P.M.

Gray sipped a hot tea spiced with cardamom. He sat with Tucker Wayne on a rooftop deck overlooking the Indian Ocean. Across the waters, the triangular sails of old wooden dhows mixed with cargo ships and a smattering of tourist yachts. For the moment, they had the hotel’s tiny restaurant to themselves.

At the foot of the building, a small spice market rang and bustled, wafting up with a mélange of nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, cloves, and countless other spices that had once lured sultans to this island and had fueled an active slave-trading industry. The island had exchanged hands many times, which was evident in its unique blend of Moorish, Middle Eastern, Indian, and African traditions. Around every corner, the city changed faces and remained impossible to categorize.

The same could be said for the stranger who was seated across the narrow table from him. Gray placed his cup of tea onto a cracked saucer. A heavy-bodied fly, drawn by the sweet tea, came lumbering down and landed on the table. It crawled toward his cup.

Gray swatted at it-but before his palm could strike the table, fingers caught his wrist, stopping him.

“Don’t,” Tucker said, then gently waved the fly off before returning to his thousand-yard stare out to sea.

Gray rubbed his wrist and watched the fly, oblivious to its salvation, buzz lazily away.

Tucker finally cleared his throat. “What do you want with me?”

Gray focused back on the matter at hand. He had read the former army ranger’s dossier en route to the Horn of Africa. Tucker was a superb dog handler, testing through the roof in regards to emotional empathy, which helped him bond with his subjects, sometimes too deeply. A psych evaluation attributed such a response to early-childhood trauma. Raised in North Dakota, he had been orphaned when his parents had been killed by a drunk driver when he was a toddler, leaving him in the care of his grandfather, who had a heart attack when Tucker was thirteen. From there, he’d been dumped into foster care until he petitioned for early emancipation at seventeen and joined the armed services. With such a chaotic, unstable upbringing, he seemed to have developed an affinity for animals more than humans.

Still, Gray sensed there was more to the man than just psychiatric evaluations and test scores. At his core, he remained a mystery. Like why he had abruptly left the service, disappearing immediately after being discharged, leaving behind a uniform full of medals, including a Purple Heart, earned after one of the nastiest firefights in Afghanistan-Operation anaconda at Takur Ghar.

Gray cut to the chase as time was running out. “Captain Wayne, during your military career, your expertise was extraction and rescue. Your commanding officer claimed there was none better.”

The man shrugged.

“You and your dog-”

“Kane,” Tucker interrupted. “His name’s Kane.”

A furry left ear pricked at his master’s voice. The small shepherd lay sprawled on the floor, looking drowsy, inattentive, but Gray knew better. His muzzle rested against the toe of Tucker’s boot, ready for any signal from his partner. Gray had read Kane’s dossier, too. The military war dog had a vocabulary of a thousand words, along with the knowledge of a hundred hand gestures. The two were bound together more intimately than any husband and wife-and together, with the dog’s heightened senses and ability to maneuver in places where men could not, the two were frighteningly efficient in the field.

Gray needed that expertise.

“There’s a mission,” he said. “You would be well paid.”

“Sorry. There’s not enough gold in Fort Knox.”

Gray had prepared for this attitude, readied for this eventuality. “Perhaps not, but when you left the service, you stole government property.”

Tucker faced him, his eyes going diamond-hard. In that gaze, Gray read the necessity to speak warily, to play the one card he had with great care.

Gray continued, “It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless man-hours to train a war-service dog.” He dared not even glance toward Kane; he kept his gaze fixed on Tucker.

“Those were my man-hours,” Tucker answered darkly. “I trained both Kane and Abel. And look what happened to Abel. This time around, it wasn’t Kane who killed Abel.”

Gray had read the brutal details in the files and avoided that minefield. “Still, Kane is government property, military hardware, a skilled combat tracker. Complete this mission and he is yours to keep, free and clear.”

Disgust curled a corner of Tucker’s lip. “No one owns Kane, commander. Not the U.S. government. Not Special Forces. Not even me.”

“Understood, but that’s our offer.”

Tucker glared at him for a long breath-then abruptly leaned back, crossing his arms, his posture plain. He was not agreeing, only willing to listen. “Again. What do you need me for?”

“An extraction. A rescue.”

“Where?”

“In Somalia.”

“Who?”

Gray sized up his opponent. The detail he was about to reveal was known only to a handful of people high in the government. It had shocked him when he’d first learned the truth. If word should somehow reach her captors-

“Who?” Tucker pressed.

Kane must have sensed his partner’s growing agitation and let out a low rumble, voicing his own complaint.

Gray answered them both. “We need your help in rescuing the president’s daughter.”

3

July 1, 11:55 A.M. EST

Washington, DC

Now the real work could start.

On the lowest level of the West Wing, Director Painter Crowe waited for the Situation Room to clear. The whole process was a carefully orchestrated dance of power: who left first, who acknowledged whom, who exited together or alone.

It made his head spin.

Painter had spent the entire three-hour-long strategy session seated outside the inner circle of the White House. The top-tier officials took posts in the upholstered leather chairs clustered around the main conference table; that included the White House chief of staff, the national security advisor, the head of Homeland Security, the secretary of defense, along with a handful of others. It was a closed meeting: no assistants, no deputies, no secretaries, only the top brass. Not even the Situation Room’s around-the-clock watch team was allowed admittance.

The secrets discussed here were restricted to as few ears as possible.

At the start of the meeting, Painter had been introduced as a representative of DARPA, which raised a few eyebrows, especially the gray ones of the defense secretary. Dressed in a conservative suit, Painter was a decade younger than anyone here, his dark hair blemished only by a single lock of white hair, tucked like a feather behind one ear, heightening his mixed Native American heritage.

No one questioned why the president had summoned Painter to this closed-door meeting. Few of them even knew about sigma’s existence, let alone its involvement here.

And that was the way the president wanted it.

So, Painter had sat silently in one of the lower-tier chairs away from the main table, observing, taking a few notes, both mental and typed into his laptop.

President James T. Gant had called everyone into the morning’s briefing to get an update on the status of his kidnapped twenty-five-year-old daughter, Amanda Gant-Bennett. It had been twenty hours since the midnight attack on her yacht. The boat’s captain had managed to get out an S.O.S. on his marine radio, even disabled the engines, before the raiders boarded the boat, slaying all on board, including the woman’s husband. Gruesome pictures of the aftermath had been shown on several of the video panels on the walls.

Painter had studied the president’s expressions as those images flashed past: the pained pinch at the corners of his eyes, the hardening of his jaw muscles, the pale cast to his face. It all seemed genuine, marking the terror of a father for a lost child.

But certain details made no sense.

Like why his daughter had been traveling under a fake passport.

That mystery alone cost them critical hours in the search for the missing girl. Responding to the S.O.S., the Seychelles Coast Guard had immediately reported the pirate attack, detailing that American citizens had been involved, but it was only after fingerprints had been lifted from the yacht’s stateroom that a red flag had been raised in the States, identifying the victims as the president’s daughter and her husband.

They’d lost precious hours because of the confusion.

And it could cost the girl her life.

James Gant stood at the door to the Situation Room and shook the hand of the last man to leave. It was a two-handed shake, as intimate as a hug. “Thanks, Bobby, for twisting the NRO’s arm to get that satellite moved so fast.”

Bobby was the secretary of state, Robert Lee Gant, the president’s older brother. He was clean-shaven, white-haired, with hazel-green eyes, a distinguished elder statesman, sixty-six years of age. No one questioned that he’d properly earned his position-even pundits from the other party wouldn’t raise the charge of nepotism for this cabinet-post assignment. Robert Gant had served three administrations, on both sides of the political divide. He’d been an ambassador to Laos in the late eighties and was considered instrumental in reopening diplomatic ties with both Cambodia and Vietnam in the nineties.

And now he served his younger brother with equal aplomb.

“Don’t worry, Jimmy. The NRO will have a satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the Somali coastline within the hour. I’ll make sure no stone is left unturned. We’ll find her.”

The president nodded, but he seemed unconvinced by his brother’s promise.

As the secretary of state exited, Painter found himself alone with the leader of the free world. The president ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, then rubbed the palm over the rough stubble on his chin. The man hadn’t slept since word had reached him. He still wore the same clothes, only shedding the jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He stood for a moment, straight-backed, lost in his own thoughts-then he finally sagged and pointed to another door.

“Let’s get out of this damned woodshed,” he said, using the nickname for the Situation Room. With the departure of his executive team, his Carolina drawl grew thicker. “My briefing room’s right next door.”

Painter followed him into a more intimate chamber. Another conference table filled the room, but it was smaller, abutting against a wall with two video screens.

The president dropped into one of the seats with a heavy sigh, as if the weight of the entire world rested on his shoulders. And, Painter imagined, sometimes it did. Only this day was worse.

“Take a seat, director.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Call me Jimmy. All my friends do. And as of this moment, you’re my best friend, because you have the best chance of finding my girl and grandson.”

Painter sat down, slowly, warily, feeling some of that weight of the world settle on his own shoulders. That was the other concern. Amanda was pregnant, in her third trimester.

So what was she doing in the Seychelles, traveling under false papers?

The president’s ice-blue eyes bore into him. The force of his charisma was like a stiff wind in the face. “In the past, Sigma saved my life.”

And they had. It was one of the reasons Painter had been summoned by the president to participate in this search.

“I need another miracle, director.”

At least the man understood the gravity of the situation. For now, the Somali pirates had no idea whom they’d kidnapped. As far as they knew, Amanda was just another American hostage. But if they should ever learn her true identity, they could panic and kill her, dump her body in the closest crocodile-infested river, and wash their hands of the situation. Or they’d hide her so well, bury her in some godforsaken hole, that any hope of rescue would be impossible until their demands were met-and even then she might be murdered. The head of Homeland had offered a third, chilling possibility this morning: that she’d be sold to some hostile government, used as a pawn to leverage some concession from the U.S. government.

So, the goal was clear: Find Amanda before the kidnappers learned the truth.

“What’s your take on this morning’s briefing?” the president asked.

“Your team has the larger picture covered. I wouldn’t do anything differently. Move a fast-response team into the region, be ready to strike at a moment’s notice. Coordinate with CIA assets across the Horn of Africa. But until we get a new satellite feed of the Somali coast, we’re operating blind.”

In cross-referencing the time of the attack with the logs of satellites passing over the Indian Ocean, they’d managed to download a fleeting view of the actual kidnapping. The resolution had been poor, but they could make out the yacht and the raiding vessel. It had fled east after the attack, heading for the African coast. But unfortunately, within an hour, the ship had passed out of satellite range, so the exact location where it made landfall was unknown. It could be anywhere along the East Africa coast, but Somalia-notorious for its rampant piracy-was the most probable base of operations. A new National Reconnaissance office satellite was being commandeered and shifted to help search for the missing ship along that rocky coastline.

But that wasn’t their best hope.

Painter continued, “Sir, we need boots on the ground there. Our highest probability for a success lies in a surgical extraction, to drop in a small search-and-rescue team under the radar.”

“Got it. If we go in all shock-and-awe on their asses, they’ll know their captive is important.”

“And they’ll bury her.” Painter regretted his choice of words as soon as they passed his lips.

James Gant’s face went ashen, but as a mark of the man’s fortitude, he waved for Painter to go on.

“The team I told you about is already in the area. I’ll continue to coordinate with NSA, NRO, and my superiors at DARPA. If the pirates’ location is discovered, my team is under strict instructions to attempt a rescue only if success is guaranteed. Otherwise, we’ll pass on the coordinates and summon in the navy’s fast-response SEAL team for extraction.”

A worried nod acknowledged his plan.

Painter continued, “The kidnappers will move your daughter somewhere safe, then interrogate her. They’ll need to obtain a phone number, a contact here in the States where they can forward a ransom demand. If your daughter is smart-”

“She is.”

“Then she’ll keep her identity a secret. Hopefully she’ll give them some number outside the presidential circle. Perhaps a relative or a close friend. We have to be ready for that. Make sure that recipient stays quiet, doesn’t go to the police or the press.”

“I’ll pass the word.”

Painter asked a pointed question: “Can you trust all of your relatives to remain silent?”

“They won’t say a word. The Gant clan knows how to keep secrets.”

That’s certainly true.

For the past month, Painter had been conducting a quiet investigation into the Gant family. Information had come to light during a recent Sigma mission that cast suspicions upon the family. Not that there weren’t already rumors surrounding such a high-profile dynasty. They were nicknamed the Kennedys of the South, with generational ties going back to the founding of America. And as America grew, so did this family, rooting and entwining into multiple industries, corporations, the halls of statehouses, and now a second-term presidency.

But last month, a disturbing bit of information about this Southern dynasty had come to light. Documented centuries ago, this same clan appeared to be connected to a shadowy cabal of old aristocratic families. They went by many names: the Guild, Echelon, les familles de l’étoile, the star families. All that was truly known about this group was that they moved throughout history, manipulating events, gathering power, wealth, and knowledge, often achieving this by enfolding themselves within a series of secret organizations, brotherhoods, and fraternal lodges.

They were said to be the secret within all secret societies.

But the passing centuries had not been kind to them, winnowing the lineage down to a single bloodline: the Gant clan.

Still, that did not mean the president-or his immediate kin-had any knowledge of this organization. The Gant family tree had roots and branches that spread far and wide, on this shore and others. It was impossible to say which family members were involved with the modern-day incarnation of this criminal organization-that is, if any of them were involved.

All of it might end up being a wild-goose chase as the true leaders of the Guild-for lack of a better name for them-remained as elusive as ever. But what was known for sure was that the group was deadly, resourceful, and responsible for countless acts of terrorism, global atrocities, and an inestimable number of international crimes. To consider that the president-this man seated across from him, heartsick and terrified for his daughter-was a part of that same organization seemed impossible.

The lack of solid proof was one of the reasons Painter kept his suspicions about the Gant family to himself, trusting no one with this information, not even his fellow Sigma operatives. Especially Commander Gray Pierce, whose mother had been killed recently by a rogue Guild agent. If the man learned the president had any hand in that cold-blooded murder, there was no telling what he would do. As angry as he was, he’d shoot first and ask questions later.

So the questions were left for Painter to ask. He stared back at James Gant. “Not to be indelicate,” he started, “but I still don’t understand what your pregnant daughter was doing out among the outer islands of the Seychelles. Why was she traveling under false papers?”

There was something wrong about this whole situation.

Painter pressed, knowing this matter might offer his best chance to wheedle more information about the family-and, more specifically, about the First Family. “Is there anything you’re not telling me, Mr. President? Anything you’re holding back? Any detail could make a difference between success or failure.”

This time, he purposefully avoided saying life or death.

James Gant stared down at his hands, as if trying to find meaning in the lines of his palms. “Amanda was always a wild child.” He offered Painter a wan, wistful smile. “Much like her father. She was nineteen when I first stepped into the White House, even younger when I was running for my first term. She hated the limelight, chafed against being a president’s daughter.”

“I remember she once punched a Secret Service agent.”

Gant laughed, leaning back and half covering his mouth as if surprised he could still laugh. “That was Amanda. During my second run for office, she was twenty-three, fresh out of college, and off on her own. She flourished out of my shadow, I have to say. Then she met Mack Bennett, a Charleston police officer. After they married, I thought that would settle her down.”

Painter gently directed him back to the mystery at hand. “And this trip out to the Seychelles.”

Gant lifted his empty hands and shook his head. “Not even the Secret Service knew about this unscheduled trip. Damned if she didn’t slip out from under all our noses. My only guess is she wanted some time alone with her husband, away from the paparazzi and tabloids, before the birth of my grandson. After that, the two would be lucky for a moment’s privacy.”

Painter studied the president’s face, looking for any micro-expression that would indicate deceit. But all he found was a man dissolving into grief and fear.

“If that’s all…” Gant said.

Painter stood up. “I’ve got what I need. My team should be flying into Somalia as we speak, and I must get back to Sigma command.”

“Very good.” Gant pushed out of his seat. Ever the Southern gentleman. “Let me walk you out.”

The pair left the president’s personal briefing room, pausing only long enough for Painter to retrieve his BlackBerry from a lead-lined box outside the Situation Room. As he straightened and pocketed his phone, a familiar figure appeared at the end of the hall, flanked by Secret Service.

She was dressed in a sapphire-blue twill dress, over which she tied a lace cardigan tightly around her belly. Painter noted her balled fists, the scared cast to her eyes as she found her husband.

The First Lady, Teresa Gant, hurried toward him, balanced between attempting to maintain a professional decorum and raw panic. “Jimmy… I heard from your secretary that the meeting was over. I waited for as long as I-”

“Terry, I’m sorry.” The president caught his wife, hugged her, and brushed a few loose blond hairs from her cheek. “I had a few more details to attend to. I was going to you next.”

She stared up at his face, searching for any news there, plainly afraid to question him in front of her bodyguards. No one could know about Amanda’s plight.

“Come, let’s return to the residence.” The president looked ready to scoop her into his arms and carry her to safety. “I’ll tell you everything there.”

Gant glanced at Painter.

He understood. Teresa needed her husband. At this moment, they were not the First Lady and the president. They were simply two parents terrified for their child, seeking comfort in each other’s arms.

Painter left them to their grief, more determined than ever to find their daughter. But as he headed down the hall, he could not escape the feeling that the events in the Horn of Africa were masking something far greater-and far more dangerous.

He checked his watch. Gray and his team would be landing in Somalia in the next hour. If anyone could ferret out the true intent behind the kidnapping of the young woman, it was Commander Pierce. Still, Painter felt a stab of misgiving for having sent Gray in blind, for failing to mention his suspicions about the president’s family.

He prayed that silence didn’t cost lives.

Especially the president’s daughter and her unborn child.

4

July 1, 8:02 P.M. East Africa Time

Cal Madow Mountains, Somalia

The truck continued its slow crawl through the mist-shrouded forest.

Amanda Gant-Bennett rode in the back of the older-model Land Rover. Modified with an open top, it must have once served as a safari-touring vehicle. A massive grille protected the front end, and four large driving lights were mounted on the roof rack. She’d also noted the two winches-front and back-along with a shovel and ax secured to the fender, ready to help free the vehicle if it became bogged down or stuck.

From the terrain they traveled, she understood the necessity for such modifications. The road was little more than a muddy track through the dark jungle. Somalia suffered from an arid climate, but the rainy season-called gu, she’d overheard-had just ended. These highlands, bordering the Gulf of Aden, received most of that rain. And what didn’t fall here as precipitation remained as thick fog.

A jarring bump threw her high. Only her seat belt kept her from flying out of the truck. She had initially thought of doing just that, of leaping free and taking her chances out in the dark jungle. But seated beside her was a heavyset guard, armed and sweating, chewing khat, a local stimulant used by nearly everyone. A second, larger truck followed at their heels, making any chance of escape impossible.

And she ultimately knew that any attempt would put more than her own life at risk.

She pushed the lap strap of the seat belt lower, below the bulge of her belly and above her hip bones. She had to protect her child. The baby boy growing in her womb was more important than her own well-being. He was the reason she and her husband had risked this flight halfway around the world.

To keep you safe…

And now her baby had fallen into another set of hands, becoming a tool to generate a larger ransom by the pirates. She remembered the Brit’s hungry eyes on her belly as she was taken off the yacht. Here, life was a commodity to buy and sell, even the new life growing in her belly.

Oh, Mack, I need you.

She closed her eyes, her heart constricting with the last memory of her husband, the fear and love shining in Mack’s eyes. She shied away from the horror that followed, his severed head tossed upon the bed where they’d made such careful love only hours earlier. But she had no time to grieve for her husband.

She drew a long, steadying breath, taking in the damp and redolent smell of junipers and wild lavender of the dense forest. Though numb with grief and terror, she had to stay strong. In the South, it was unseemly to be caught sweating in public. On the campaign trail with her father, she had learned to maintain a placid and friendly exterior-even when screaming on the inside. Instead, it was all smiles, handshakes, and warm pats on the back. Even with your enemies… especially with your enemies.

So, she continued to cooperate with her captors. Jumping when they said jump, remaining always pliant and obedient. Still, all the while she watched. It was another lesson from her father, his words echoing in her head, explaining the best way to gain the upper hand.

Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.

And that’s what she intended to do. So far, the pirates gave no indication they knew she was the president’s daughter. They’d not even questioned her yet. In fact, they’d barely said a word. A grunt here or there, a pantomimed instruction, a few terse orders. Mostly about drinking water.

We don’t want anything to happen to your baby.

The warning had come from the man seated in the passenger seat up front, the Brit with his thin mustache and impeccable attire. He remained the only consistent presence around her-though he’d ignored her most of the day, bent over a laptop computer attached to a satellite phone and GPS navigation unit.

She studied the back of his head, trying to figure him out, searching for a weakness. He tapped at his laptop and the screen changed to a topographic map. She feigned a kink in her back to stretch forward, trying to peek at the screen, to discern some idea of where she was and where they were going. But her guard yanked her back, his hand lingering over her left breast, which was tender and swollen. She slapped his fingers away, which only earned her a lascivious leer.

Defeated, she stared sullenly out at the misty forest.

Exhaustion and fear had stretched the day’s journey into a blur. At dawn, they’d made landfall at a small coastal town, a booming shantytown of bars, hotels, restaurants, and whorehouses, all serving the pirate trade. And from the number of expensive cars lining newly paved streets and half-constructed villas along the coast, it was plainly a lucrative and thriving business. To protect that industry, militiamen swerved through the streets in Mercedes SUVs, weapons bristling from rolled-down windows, making sure no one attempted to rescue any of their hostages.

And there must have been others like her.

As their boat had entered into port, she’d spotted numerous captured vessels: fishing trawlers, sailboats, a sleek yacht, and, anchored out in the deeper waters, an oil tanker. They’d only remained in town for less than an hour. There, she was handed over to another pirate gang and put on a hot, poorly ventilated Volkswagen bus out of town.

They drove half a day through lands hammered dry and flat by the merciless sun, the featureless landscape only broken by the occasional village of dry huts. They’d stopped only long enough for her to urinate, which was often, and humiliating each time. In the distance, mountains had loomed, seeming to grow higher with each passing mile.

Soon it became clear that the broken spine of rocky peaks was their destination. Upon reaching a village nestled in the scrubby foothills, the gang changed yet again, but not before a heated argument ensued, accompanied by a machismo display of shaken weapons and hurled threats. Finally, the Brit had facilitated the exchange of additional funds, bills banded in thick bundles, and Amanda found herself transferred into this old safari vehicle headed into the misty highlands.

A metallic snap drew her attention forward as the Brit closed his laptop with an air of finality. The reason became clear. A fiery glow appeared in the forest ahead, turning the wisps of fog into crimson trails threaded through the dark-green jungle. She smelled roasting meat and woodsmoke.

With a final haul of fifty yards, the Land Rover broke into an open glade in the jungle. Overhead, camouflage netting masked the camp below, giving the space a cavernous feel. A trio of small bonfires illuminated the hidden glade, along with a few electric lamps on poles.

The Land Rover pulled to the side and parked beside a handful of other vehicles. Additionally, a trio of camels, settled for the night, raised their heads to study the newcomers.

Likewise, Amanda, her eyes huge, tried to make sense of the camp. A neat circle of military-style tents surrounded a larger structure that looked like a picturesque gabled house, raised on pilings a yard off the ground. Across the front, a quaint wooden porch held a pair of deck chairs draped with mosquito netting. It looked like the jungle home of some African missionary. Furthering that impression, a large bloodred cross decorated one side of the building.

But as the Land Rover drew to a halt, the charming illusion evaporated. The house was actually a makeshift tent-cabin, with white tarpaulin stretched over a wooden pole-frame. And the crimson cross was less religious in appearance and more medical, like something borrowed from the American Red Cross. Only this cross had strange markings along its lengths, a twisting and coiling pattern that looked vaguely familiar.

Before she could understand what nagged her, the Brit pulled open her door and held out his hand to assist her.

“Home sweet home,” he said without any sarcasm in his voice.

She climbed out, unsteady, supporting her belly, and searched around. The steady chug of a diesel generator mocked the wild beating of her heart.

Men and women climbed out of tents to eye the new arrivals. Most of those faces were black, African, but they didn’t have the starved and desperate look of the pirates. Even the weapons in view looked modern and well-kept.

What is going on here?

The other faces matched the Brit’s: white, European, professional. This last assessment came from the number of them wearing blue scrubs, like they’d freshly stepped out of a modern hospital for a smoke break.

The Brit led her through the circle of tents and toward the makeshift cabin, trailed by her guard. She climbed the steps to the small porch.

A spring-loaded door opened as they reached the cabin. A tall woman joined them, her blond hair trimmed into a short, athletic bob. She was young and fresh-faced, as if she just slipped out of a swimsuit ad and into surgical scrubs. Belying that image was the severity of her expression, especially her narrowed eyes. She took in everyone with a single steel-blue glance, barely noting Amanda. Her gaze settled on the Brit.

“Everything is ready, Dr. Blake.”

Amanda swung toward the Brit, surprised.

Doctor…?

The man noted her consternation. “I’m sorry. I never did properly introduce myself.” He held out his hand. “Dr. Edward Blake. Ob/gyn.”

She didn’t take his hand. Instead, she stared beyond the blonde’s shoulder and into the cabin. A hospital bed rested against the far wall. Beside it stood an IV pole and a bank of monitoring equipment. On the other side, a technician lubricated the transvaginal probe of an ultrasound unit.

Dr. Blake seemed to take no offense that Amanda had refused his hand. Instead, he rubbed his palms together.

“Okay, then, Mrs. Gant-Bennett. Why don’t we step inside?”

Amanda bit back her shock at the mention of her name.

He knows who I am…

Dr. Blake motioned with his arm. “We should check on how your baby boy is doing after the long journey. We can’t let anything happen to him, can we? He’s much too important.”

Amanda backed away in horror, her worst nightmare coming true.

Not only did they know who she was, they knew what she carried.

“No…”

Hands gripped her shoulders from behind and shoved her toward the open door.

Please, she prayed. Please someone help me.

5

July 1, 8:34 P.M. East Africa Time

Boosaaso, Somalia

“They’ll take good care of her,” Amur Mahdi promised. “At least for now.”

“Why do you say that?” Gray asked.

Seichan looked equally doubtful. She was dressed handsomely in jeans and a local guntiino, a bright length of crimson cloth, knotted at the shoulder and draped to the waist. The look must have worked, because Amur kept casting sidelong glances in her direction.

Next to her, Kowalski, outfitted in regular street clothes, simply swirled his tea, looking inattentive.

The four of them shared a table at a seaside restaurant overlooking the Somali port of Boosaaso. The open-air patio looked out onto the Gulf of Aden, the moonlit harbor crowded with massive ships bearing flags of various Arab states, along with the triangular sails of hundreds of smaller, wooden-keeled dhows.

Gray’s team had arrived at the Bender Qassim International Airport outside of Boosaaso forty minutes ago, traveling under the cover of UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. The relief group maintained a presence here in Puntland, the northeastern state of Somalia, where most of the country’s lawless pirates operated. Boosaaso was the main crossroads for this region and the best base of operations to begin gathering intelligence.

This introductory meeting was with Amur Mahdi-a former pirate turned CIA asset. He was an older man dressed in regional attire, which included loose trousers and a sarong-like kilt, known as a macawiis. He also wore a traditional embroidered cap atop his grizzled hair. The man had lost one leg at the knee several years back, an injury that sidelined him from his former profession as a pirate.

The sight of the prosthetic limb reminded Gray of his father, who’d been similarly disabled. A twinge of guilt flared at being half a world away from him, but he fought it down and concentrated on the conversation.

The meeting had been arranged by Director Crowe, channeled through various intelligence agencies. The goal of this meeting was to evaluate the current situation in Somalia. While word was still pending on the search for the raiders’ ship via satellite, Painter wanted eyes on the ground.

Meanwhile, a pair of Black Hawks idled at a U.S. Base to the north, in the neighboring tiny East African nation of Djibouti. SEAL Team Six, under the operational orders of Joint Special Operations Command, waited to be summoned once Amanda’s location was determined.

But where was the First Daughter?

Amur explained his lack of concern for the hostage’s safety. He didn’t know about the victim being the president’s daughter, only that she was an American woman. “For the most part, Somali pirates make decent hosts. Beatings are rare, but they do occur. Otherwise, they keep their guests protected and well-fed. It does no one any good if a hostage dies. In fact, the feeding and housing of captured crews help maintain the economy of Puntland.”

Gray knew how lucrative the piracy trade was. Last year alone, Somali pirates collected $160 million in ransom. And that was only the tip of the true cost of piracy in the region. The shipping industry and governments spent $7 billion during that same time, accruing additional expenses from insurance premiums, from heightened security, even rescue missions, like the recent one that secured the safe return of an American and a Danish citizen.

“And what about the Somali government?” Seichan asked. “What are they doing about the rampant piracy?”

Amur leaned back in his chair and lifted his arms hopelessly in the air. “What Somali government? The central government fell back in 1991, throwing the country into chaos. Without anyone patrolling our territorial waters, the tuna-rich seas around here were plundered and stripped by foreign fishing fleets, stealing the food and livelihood from our local people. Is it any wonder our fishermen armed themselves, becoming their own militia, and confronted the illegal boats and crews?”

Gray had read the briefings on the flight out here. “And those confrontations eventually led to the fishermen confiscating ships and personnel and demanding ransoms-”

“More like a toll,” Amur corrected, earning a scoffing grunt from Kowalski. Their informant’s face reddened, his back stiffening with pride. Though the man had turned informant, Gray was reminded of the old adage: Once a pirate, always a pirate. Or maybe Amur’s justifications were merely a reflection of national pride.

“We deserved some compensation for our plundered seas,” he continued. “Who else is looking after us? Look at the port here.” He nodded to the bustling harbor. “This place used to be a hellhole, with no infrastructure, no hope, everything crumbling apart.”

Kowalski raised a skeptical eyebrow toward the dusty city, seeming to think the description of hellhole still fit it.

“After the government fell,” Amur continued, “we took care of each other. A local businessman started our phone system. Teachers worked for free. The police are all volunteers, too. Now we’re one of the busiest ports in the region. A boomtown, as you say. We export tens of thousands of goats, sheep, and camels across the Arab world.”

Kowalski’s skeptical eyebrow refused to lower. Gray understood as he looked out at all the new construction going on across the nighttime city, at the palatial mansions rising behind high walls. He suspected not all of that largesse came from Boosaaso’s import/export industry.

Gray had read how this city was still ranked as one of the most likely places to get kidnapped. Not exactly a high honor. Though the local government was attempting to change that. Its jails were full of pirates-but how much was that for international show? Piracy continued to be the main industry running the Puntland economy.

How were they going to make any headway in finding the president’s daughter against those economic odds? Money could free tongues-as it had with Amur Mahdi-but it also bought silence.

“And now the fishes return to our waters,” Amur said with a note of vindication and finality. “With the foreign fleets afraid to come near, our seas once again teem with tuna and our people are no longer hungry.”

Gray had to admit that much was true. Somali piracy had a positive impact on reversing the overfishing of its territorial waters. But at what price?

Amur stood up. “The night grows late. I will see what I can discover about this missing American woman. But as you know, rescue attempts over the past year have resulted in pirate deaths. It will not be easy getting information.”

Gray stood and shook the man’s hand. He read between the lines. To break that silence would require additional funds. But Gray feared if too much money was thrown into the search, it could raise the suspicions of Amanda’s captors. A delicate balance had to be struck here-but for now they had no choice.

“I understand. Do what you must,” Gray said. He shook the man’s hand and wished him good night, using his native tongue, which earned an appreciative smile from Amur. “Haben wanaagsan.”

Gray waited for Amur to leave the restaurant before motioning the others up. “We should get back to the hotel.”

They headed out as a group. Even at this hour, the streets were clogged with trucks, people, and carts. Sizzling food stands, tiny tea stalls, and makeshift shops packed both sides of the street. All around, Boosaaso bustled, hammered, rang, and shouted.

They kept to a tight knot as they traversed the crowded streets on their way toward their hotel.

Seichan spoke at his ear, her breath hot on his cheek. “You were right. We’ve picked up a tail.”

Gray stopped at a fruit stand, studying the exotic fare while searching the street behind them. He noted two figures in street clothes who ducked out of sight as he had stopped. “Two of them?”

“Three,” Seichan corrected. “The woman in the green sarong by the door of that internet café.”

Gray didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary in her appearance, but he trusted Seichan’s assessment.

Kowalski remained oblivious. He picked up a banana and sniffed at it. “Are we buying something or not?”

Gray headed away, continuing toward their hotel, drawing the tail in his wake.

“So Amur is not as loyal as the CIA claimed,” Seichan whispered.

She leaned toward him like a lover. Physical contact between men and women was frowned upon in this country, but there was a strange, heightened intimacy in being this close without touching.

“Painter suspected as much,” Gray mumbled.

The director had reviewed the various potential contacts here and selected Amur specifically because of discrepancies in his behavior in the past. It seemed the man was not above playing one side against the other, especially with big money involved.

Once a pirate, always a pirate.

Gray sauntered down the road with his teammates, not bothering to try to shake the tail. He wanted the others following his team. Amur was playing a dangerous game, but one that suited their purpose.

Because two could play that same game.

9:01 P.M.

Tucker Wayne maintained a safe distance behind Amur Mahdi, keeping a city block between them.

The radio embedded in his ear buzzed. “Do you have him?”

It was Commander Pierce. Tucker touched his throat mike and subvocalized his answer. “Affirmative.”

To blend in with the locals, he had pulled a loose plaid macawiis tunic over a thin Kevlar jacket and donned a regional turban to hide his hair and further shadow his features. Not that there weren’t white faces here. It seemed the city drew opportunists from around the globe. He heard German, spanish, and French spoken alongside the continuous dialects of African languages.

Still, he kept almost entirely out of sight of his target, trusting another’s eyes more than his own.

Several meters ahead, Kane kept to the shadows, ghosting along, sticking to the crumbling wall of a palatial estate, gliding around and over obstacles. Few eyes glanced at the shepherd’s passage. Plenty of dogs-half-starved waifs, showing ribs and bony legs-roamed the streets.

A block away, Amur turned a corner and angled away from the busier zone of newer hotels and larger estates. He moved with determination into a bulldozed section of the city, occupied by cranes, piles of rubble, and metal trailers, all in readiness for the expansion of the neighboring business district.

Tucker radioed the change in direction. “He’s heading out of New Boosaaso, aiming for a rougher part of town. Definitely not going home.”

Tucker had memorized everything he could about his target, mapping out the man’s life in his head: where he lived, where he met friends for drinks, where his mistress was holed up. Amur wasn’t heading toward any of his usual haunts.

“Keep following, but maintain your distance,” Gray warned. “We don’t want him spooked.”

I know how to do my job, Tucker thought sourly as he reached the corner. This is what you hired me for-or, rather, hired us.

Kane had already stopped at the corner and glanced back. Tucker signaled an open palm.

Stay.

Tucker surveyed the terrain ahead. Tall security fencing, screened by barrier fabric, lined both sides of the road, keeping pedestrians out of the construction zones. At this hour, no one else was in view. He had no choice but to wait.

If I follow, I’ll be immediately spotted, my cover blown.

For now, they had a small advantage. Gray had gone to painstaking ends to keep knowledge of Tucker’s involvement in this mission secret. They’d even traveled from Tanzania to Somalia by different planes. Gray wanted all eyes diverted and focused on his team and away from Tucker, freeing him to move independently.

At the end of the street, Amur stopped at a locked gate in the security fencing. A lounging guard with an AK-47 greeted him. They leaned their heads together, then the guard nodded and unlatched the gate. Amur vanished inside, drawing the guard with him.

What is he up to?

Tucker headed down a few meters until he discovered a gap between the fence and the sandy ground. A tall metal Dumpster helped hide the spot. He drew Kane there, then pointed to the gap, circled a finger, and touched his nose.

Crawl through, search for the target’s scent.

Tucker knew this was a task Kane could handle. Humans had 6 million olfactory receptors in their nose; hunting dogs had 300 million, which heightened their sense of smell a thousandfold, allowing them to scent a target from two football fields away.

At the end of the instructions, Tucker lowered his palm facedown, signaling Kane to stay hidden if the target was found.

Finished, Tucker slipped a hand to the shepherd’s flank, running his fingers over the black jacket that blended perfectly with his fur. It was a K9 storm tactical vest, waterproof and Kevlar-reinforced. He checked Kane’s earpiece, which allowed them to communicate in the field-then flipped up an eraser-size lens of a night-vision video camera secured near the collar and positioned it between the dog’s pricked ears.

The team needed eyes and ears in there.

Tucker pulled out a cell phone, tapped in a code, and a grainy, dog’s-eye view of himself appeared on the small screen. He leaned down and gave his partner’s nape a fast ruffle. He also shook the vest to make sure nothing rattled to betray Kane’s position in the field.

Satisfied, he knelt and cradled the dog’s head in his palms. A muscular tremble betrayed Kane’s excitement. His tongue lolled as he silently panted. Dark eyes met Tucker’s. It was one of the unique features of domesticated dogs-they studied us as much as we studied them.

“Who’s a good boy?” he whispered to his friend, a ritual of theirs.

Kane’s nose shoved forward, touching his, acknowledging their bond.

Tucker finally stood and flicked his wrist toward the gap in the fence.

Go.

Kane swung and lunged smoothly through the hole, his tail vanishing away in seconds. Tucker checked his phone. A juggling view of parked bulldozers and piles of rebar-ribbed broken slabs of concrete appeared on the small screen. The image bobbled and swung like some badly directed horror movie.

Tucker touched his throat mike. “Video’s up, commander. In case you want to watch the show.”

As he waited for a response, Tucker slipped a Bluetooth earbud into his free ear. Through it, he heard the soft whisper of Kane’s panting breath.

In his other ear, Gray responded, “Got it. Let’s see what our friend Amur is up to.”

Tucker kept to the shadows of the Dumpster and watched his partner’s progress. Fear prickled over his skin.

Be careful out there, buddy.

Kane races low to the ground, senses stretching outward, hunting for his prey. Around him, night brightens into shades of gray, frosted by muted hues. Piles of stone grow high on either side, offering sheltered pathways forward. The stir of a breeze shifts a crumpled paper cup, the movement twitching for attention but ultimately ignored.

When sight fails him, scent fills in, layer upon layer, marking time backward and forward, building a framework of old trails around him.

Bitter musk of spoor…

Acrid sting of a urine marker…

Burned oil from silent machines…

He moves through the maze, taking in more smells, drawing them upon his moist tongue, deep into the back of his throat and sinuses. His ears swivel at every hushed whisper of sand: from breezes, from the pad of his paws.

On… always onward…

He holds his nose high at a turn, tracking.

Then… familiar sweat, spicy and pungent, drifts to him, basking outward in the wake of the prey.

His legs slow.

He lowers his body, keeping to the shadowed trails.

He forces his panting to grow quiet.

Ahead, the prey approaches others. They are out of sight, but their musk betrays them. They are hidden behind a pile of metal, smelling of rust and burrowed through with the scent of scurrying things. The odor of man wafts past it all, impossible to ignore, stinking and strong.

His prey walks forward, trailed by another with a gun.

Kane knows guns-by scent, sight, and sound, he knows guns.

The hidden others show themselves at last, stepping into the open. The prey falls back, the scent of his fear spiking sharper-then it quickly fades, snuffing out again.

Among the four, lips are pulled back, showing teeth, but not in threat. They speak, making noise.

Kane creeps closer, finding a spot to watch unseen. He lies still, on his belly, but his haunches remain tense, ready to flee or charge.

For now, he stays.

Staring, obedient.

Because he asked.

Kane continues to draw in the night, ever vigilant, painting the world around him in scents and sounds. He smells his own trail, going back, buried among so many others. But through it all, one trail shines like the sun in the night around him, connecting him to another, both bound together forever by blood and trust.

He knows that name, too.

By scent, by sound, by sight.

He knows that name.

9:12 P.M.

Tucker spied on the meeting between Amur and his trio of compatriots, fellow pirates judging by their tribal scars and harsh manners. They gathered near a rusted stack of old iron H-beams and broken cement bricks. In his ear, he heard their harsh laughter and words spoken in a local Somali dialect. A translation program converted the conversation into a tinny computerized version.

“How long can you draw them out?” one asked.

“How much money can you get?” another added.

“Hassan, Habib, trust me.” Amur smiled, lifting his arms. “There is more going on than they tell me. For that, I can make them dance on a string at my whim.”

“So you say,” the third said doubtfully.

As proof of his word, Amur removed a wad of bills and stripped out several for each. “But first,” he said, “I must give these Americans something to chew on, to keep them hanging on my words, yes?”

The others ignored him, counting their bills and stuffing them away.

“What have you heard about this American woman?” Amur asked, drawing back their attention.

“Only rumors, Amur.” These words earned nods among the three.

Another voice spoke in Tucker’s other ear: “At this point, I’ll take rumors.”

That assessment came from Commander Pierce. It seemed the team leader was listening into the feed with as much interest as he was.

“Then what is the word?” Amur pressed.

“A friend of my brother’s uncle, up near Eil, he says a white woman came through his village. He says they were moving her into the mountains.”

“The Cal Madow mountains?”

A shrug answered him.

“That is much territory to cover,” Amur said, but he didn’t seem disappointed. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If she is among those mountains, she will never be found. I can easily give that information to the Americans without truly telling them anything. And with Allah shining upon us, I should be able to tease out our relationship for several profitable days.”

“And after that?”

“Then I will no longer have a use for the three Americans. It would be unfortunate if something happened to them-unfortunate but not unusual in these treacherous lands, yes?”

Grins followed, shared all around.

“So it seems Amur is not the hospitable host he pretends to be,” Gray said in his ear. “I think we’ll have to-”

The commander’s words were cut off by a low growl.

The view on the small screen shifted as his partner retreated, clearly sensing something.

“What’s your dog doing?” Gray asked, also noting the sudden movement.

“Hold on. Something’s spooked him.”

The grainy image leaped and joggled as the shepherd bounded and circled around a steep pile of concrete debris. It looked like the dog was trying to outflank Amur and his group.

Then the view settled again.

Farther out in the construction zone, a team of six men descended toward Amur’s group. They were outfitted in black body armor and wore helmets equipped with night-vision goggles. At their shoulders, they carried assault rifles. These newcomers were no rough pirates; they clearly had military training. Their intent seemed anything but friendly.

Amur’s inquiries must have reached the wrong ears.

Not good. Not now.

Tucker watched as hand signals from the squad’s leader split the group. They spread out to either side, a pincer move intended to trap Amur’s group between them.

Unfortunately, the former pirate was not the only one caught in the trap. Tucker’s heart thudded in his throat.

6

July 1, 9:15 P.M. East Africa Time

Boosaaso, Somalia

“Stay put!” Gray ordered.

Seichan stood at his shoulder; Kowalski at the other. They had stopped at the mouth of an alleyway, a few blocks from their hotel, observing the feed from the shepherd’s camera. The armored commando team had swept wide, circling Amur’s group, clearly intending to let no one escape.

“Can’t do that, commander,” Captain Wayne responded. “Not until Kane’s out of harm’s way.”

Gray knew there was nothing he could say to stop Tucker. He had no authority over him, and if the man was spotted-or worse, caught-he’d jeopardize the entire mission.

“Then at least wait until I get there,” Gray pressed. “We’ll do this together.”

A long pause followed, long enough for him to worry that the man had already gone.

Then an answer came. “I’ll wait,” Tucker said. “For the moment. But no promises.”

That was as much concession as Gray would get from him.

“I’m on my way,” Gray radioed-then faced the others and pointed down the street. “You two, head to the hotel. Keep the tail chasing after you. Convince them we’ve retired for the night.”

Seichan stepped closer. “You shouldn’t be going alone. You barely know the city.”

He tapped up a street-view map of Boosaaso on his phone. “I’ll manage. Besides, we have no choice. Amur surely has other friends in the city. We need an alibi if he comes to a bad end in that construction yard. We don’t want his murder pinned on us.”

“What’re you going to do?” Seichan asked.

From the corner of an eye, he caught sight of the three-man team sent to tail them. The trio had gathered near a cloth stand, feigning interest in the stacked fabric rolls.

“At the next corner ahead, when we’re momentarily out of sight, I’ll head down a side street. You two rush to the front of the hotel. Let them see you going inside, cause some commotion. Hopefully they’ll believe I’ve already entered.”

From the furrow between Seichan’s eyebrows, she had little confidence in his plan.

He reached for her hand and gave her fingers a quick squeeze. It was a reflex move, more intimate than he intended. “I’ll be fine,” he mumbled.

If nothing else, the brief and surprising contact left her speechless.

“Let’s go,” Gray said before any further discussion could start.

They headed together down the street, sauntering at a leisurely pace. Once Gray passed around the next corner, he hurried to the mouth of another alleyway ahead. If the map was correct, he should be able to circle back and join up with Captain Wayne.

As he turned away, Seichan’s last glance remained unreadable.

Kowalski was more blunt. “Watch your ass out there.”

He planned on doing just that. Behind him, Seichan and Kowalski rushed headlong, aiming for the broad steps to Hotel Jubba at the end of the block.

At least they knew how to take orders. He prayed Tucker Wayne would do the same. But with each step, Gray hurried faster, knowing that was not likely. Tucker was as much a creature of instinct as his furry partner. The man would react before thinking.

Especially if his dog was in danger.

Kane huddles in the shadows under a protruding slab of broken concrete. Beyond his hiding place, the night around him is a complex weave of scent trails, echoing sounds, and movement. He stares unblinking at it all, allowing the landscape to build before him, as much a map of the present as the past.

The whispery crunch of a stone under boot…

The leathery tap of a rifle strap on cloth…

The heavy pant of excitement of a predator closing in on prey…

His original prey remains clustered with his pack, deaf to the danger approaching. Kane tracks the newcomers as they cut through old scent trails, even his own, creating a new one, stinking of man. It fully circles the others now.

Then draws tighter as they move in on their prey.

Kane stays in his hiding place, unmoving, placing his trust in shadows.

And one other.

9:22 P.M.

Tucker crouched outside the fence, hidden behind a Dumpster, his attention fixed to the feed from Kane’s camera. Still following his original instructions, the dog remained focused on Amur’s group, who continued to discuss where to spend the money in hand, where to eat a late dinner, and how to get more payments out of Commander Pierce.

All the while, a deadly noose tightened around them all.

Even Kane.

Tucker dared not risk calling his partner back to him. The movement would draw the commandos’ attention.

As if the dog had heard his silent worry, the view on the screen shifted as Kane glanced backward, over his shoulder. The angle turned enough to reveal a commando in black body armor closing toward Kane’s position. The shepherd remained at his post, as Tucker had ordered.

Kane thinks he’s hidden well enough, Tucker realized.

But the dog was wrong.

Night-vision goggles hid the approaching commando’s eyes. Kane’s shadowy shelter offered no protection from such technology. In a moment, the shepherd would easily be spotted, along with the foreign vest-then all hell would break loose.

Tucker glanced up and down the street. Commander Pierce was nowhere in sight, and he had to do something.

Now.

Twisting around, he dove for the fence, to the gap along the bottom where Kane had crawled through. It was too small for him, but coils of razor wire blocked the way over the top. With no other choice, he placed his phone on the ground and dug with both hands into the hard-packed sand.

All the while, he stared at the phone beside him, watching the commando draw closer to Kane. He dug faster, scooping out sand, deepening the hole, bloodying his fingers.

Finally, unable to wait any longer, he squirmed his way through the gap. The loose tunic ripped on the fangs of the fence’s lower end, exposing his Kevlar vest beneath.

He reached back and grabbed his phone.

The view of the video feed stopped his heart.

On the screen, the grainy image of the commando jerked to a stop, plainly startled. And the reason was obvious. The soldier shifted his rifle and pointed it directly toward the camera.

Directly at Kane.

9:23 P.M .

Damn that fool…

Seichan moved briskly, angrily, into the tiled lobby of the Hotel Jubba.

Kowalski followed at her heels. She hated abandoning Gray and hated that it bothered her so much, but in the end, she also recognized the necessity. The pair had succeeded in drawing their tail to the steps of the building, hopefully leaving them unaware of Gray’s disappearance.

Still, she could not relax the tense knot between her shoulder blades. Gray shouldn’t have gone out there alone. If they’d taken an extra few moments to plan, some other ruse could have been calculated to fool the ones tailing them. Instead, his action had been unusually rash, even reckless. And not just here. They’d come close to losing Tucker Wayne and his dog back in Zanzibar. Not a mistake Gray would normally make.

And she could guess the cause. A deep current of fury and frustration still flowed through his core. She recognized it in the storm-gray of his eyes, in the hard set to his jaw, in the clipped edge to his conversations. There was a manic edge to Gray that she’d never seen before, and it made her nervous. Not for herself, but for him.

Maybe it was too soon for him to be out in the field.

But they were committed, and there was no retreating from here.

Kowalski slipped out a cigar and set about lighting it. A thick pall of smoke already filled the lobby, making her eyes sting. A soccer match played on a large-screen television in the hotel restaurant, drawing in a boisterous crowd that spilled into the lobby and obstructed the way toward the stairs.

Her partner nodded back toward the hotel’s entrance. “Looks like our friends are setting up camp out there. Making sure we don’t leave.”

Seichan glanced over at the trio who had followed them. They sat at a coffeehouse that offered a view of the hotel’s front steps. Clearly Amur intended to protect his investment, ensuring no other informant intruded on his territory.

A loud cheer drew her attention back to the restaurant. The match between Brazil and Germany was heating up. A group of German patrons began singing their national anthem.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, intending to return to their rooms.

Kowalski lingered, puffing on his cigar, adding to the pollution in the lobby. His eyes had drifted to the soccer match on the television. His legs drew him toward the machismo camaraderie of the live sportscast.

At least that should keep him out of trouble for the night.

She was wrong.

Within a few steps, he bumped into a harried waiter holding aloft a huge tray full of teacups and pots of steaming water. The tray went flying, crashing into the mass of men crowded at the entrance to the restaurant. Shouts and curses erupted as scalding water splashed over those closest.

Then a push became a shove, and a fist struck a nose. In a matter of seconds, bedlam broke out. The restaurant emptied into the lobby, escalating into a full brawl.

Kowalski backed Seichan in a corner as a bottle flew past his nose and shattered against the wall.

“What did you do?” Seichan scolded.

Kowalski grinned back at her, keeping the stogie crushed between his teeth as he spoke. “There’s a rear exit through the kitchen. Let me get this party going full swing, and you can duck back into the streets unseen.”

He locked eyes with her. She read the sharp glimmer buried within that dim exterior. So she wasn’t the only one worried about their partner.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She nodded, which made his grin spread wider, a terrifying sight.

With a roar, he turned and leaped into the raucous fray, a veritable bull let loose among the others. In moments, the fighting rolled like a tide toward the hotel’s front doors and spilled out into the streets, spreading the commotion and chaos.

Seichan twisted in the opposite direction, slipping out a scarf and wrapping her head and most of her face. Kowalski bellowed behind her-sounding disturbingly happy, finally in his true element.

Now to find Gray.

She had Tucker Wayne’s call sign and last position noted on her own phone’s navigation system. That’s where Gray would be headed.

She burst out the rear door, leaving behind the clatter of pots and pans from the kitchen, and into the dark silence of the back alley.

Before she could take a step, a bright light speared her, blinding her.

A harsh voice with a thick British accent accosted her, punctuated by the cocking of a pistol. “Take another step, and I’ll put a bullet through your pretty skull.”

7

July 1, 9:24 P.M. East Africa Time

Boosaaso, Somalia

Standing by the fence, Tucker watched the rifle lower toward Kane. The grainy image on the phone set his heart to pounding. He’d never reach his partner in time.

Reacting instinctively, he yanked out his pistol, a black SIG Sauer, pointed it into the air, and fired two rounds. The gun blasts stung his ears and echoed across the empty construction site.

On the screen, the soldier’s aim shifted away as he dropped low, startled by the gunfire.

Tucker was already moving, heading toward Kane’s hiding place. On his phone, he pressed a green icon in the shape of a small ear and lifted the phone to his lips. He spoke two commands, transmitting them to the receiver behind Kane’s left ear.

“TAKEDOWN! DISARM!”

The image on the screen blurred into chaos.

Tucker continued to sprint, staying low.

I’m coming, buddy.

Kane tastes blood, feels the crack of bone under the power of his jaws. He holds tight as a pained cry pierces the night. Then a booted blow to his ribs finally knocks him loose.

The night spins, but rights itself as he rolls his legs under him.

His prey crouches, holding his limb to his chest, wrist crushed, gun on the ground. Both hunters face each other-but only for a breath.

Kane dives low, snatching cloth at the ankle and throwing his body to the side, yanking the prey’s limb from under him. The other falls, head striking broken stone. Goggles knock away, revealing narrowed eyes. Kane smells his fear, still tastes the blood on the back of his tongue.

But the other is a hunter, too.

A flash of a blade in the other hand. It stabs down-but Kane is already gone, spinning away, running low into the night.

But not without a hard-won prize clutched in his jaws.

9:25 P.M .

Gray sprinted along the barrier fencing as fresh gunfire erupted from the construction zone: the chugging coughs of automatic weapons along with the sharper blasts of smaller arms.

A moment ago, as he reached the street, he’d heard the initial pistol cracks.

Two shots.

They had risen from a different part of the site, well away from the current firefight.

Had to be Captain Wayne.

This was confirmed when Gray heard Tucker’s radioed command to his partner. There was no sign of the man on the street, so Gray rushed toward a gate at the next corner. He found it unguarded and pushed inside, his gun already in hand.

A bulldozed road led straight toward the fighting.

He spotted bodies on the ground.

Amur’s men.

Gray ducked to the side, into the shadows of a pile of broken concrete. A commando stepped into view and kicked one of the bodies. An arm lifted off the ground, a pleading gesture. The soldier’s pistol pointed down. A single crack, and the arm fell limply.

They were killing everyone.

As quickly as the firefight had started, it ended. The last few sputters of automatic gunfire died away.

Gray subvocalized into his throat mike. “Tucker, respond?”

The answer didn’t come from his radio.

A fresh flurry of gunfire erupted to the left, away from the pile of dead bodies. The commando in view dashed in that direction.

Biting back a curse, Gray rolled around the pile of concrete and headed that way, too. Gunplay spattered out, as Tucker played cat and mouse with the hunters.

Gray struggled through the maze, straining to track the gunfire, while keeping a watch around him. At last, he spotted Tucker. The man, pistol in hand, ran along a row of parked dump trucks at the edge of the rubble field, trying to stay out of sight.

Gray headed toward him-but before he could take more than three steps, a shadowy figure appeared a few yards ahead, his back to Gray, blocking the view. It was the same commando who had been slaughtering the last of Amur’s men. The soldier spotted Tucker and fired a flurry of rounds at his target.

Ricochets pinged off the dump truck.

Exposed, Tucker tried to twist away. But a round struck him square in the chest, knocking him against the bed of the dump truck with a loud clang. He fell hard to the ground, his pistol flying from his grip.

Gray raised his own weapon, strode two fast paces, and shot the commando through the back of the neck. The soldier collapsed to his knees, then to his face, gurgling harshly as he died.

Gray stepped past him, kicking the assault rifle away from his fingertips.

Ahead, Tucker struggled to stand up, a palm on his chest.

Damned lucky the man had been wearing a Kevlar vest.

But luck only lasted for so long.

A fresh crack of a pistol came from the right, from out of Gray’s field of view. Tucker ducked as a round buzzed his ear and struck the dump truck’s huge tire. More shots rang out, blasting sand from between Tucker’s legs and by his left hand. Tucker scrabbled away, disappearing from view.

Gray hurried forward, but the shooter was still out of sight.

Where-?

Then the commando burst into the open, running low, heading toward where Tucker had vanished, pistol raised forward. His other arm was clutched to his chest, his wrist held at an impossible angle, dripping blood. Judging by the wild blasts, fury fueled this attack.

Gray struggled to fix the attacker in his sights, but the target was moving too fast and heavily armored. Gray fired anyway, emptying his weapon. But the soldier was so focused he didn’t even flinch from the rounds pinging off the truck’s side, even at a shot that glanced off his helmet.

Then his target was out of sight again, pursuing Tucker.

Gray ran forward, ejecting his spent magazine and slapping in another. In a few more steps, he spotted the gunman leaning over Tucker. His teammate, one shoulder bloodied, was sprawled on his back by the truck’s cab. The armored commando held his pistol at Tucker’s face, ready to shoot point-blank.

Gray could not stop him-then a miracle happened.

9:26 P.M.

The smoking barrel of the pistol lowered and pointed between Tucker’s eyes. His shoulder burned, but not as much as his blood. He stared past the gun to the eyes of the assassin. He recognized the fury there.

It matched his own.

As the gunman ran up, Tucker had spotted his broken wrist, the ripped bloodied flesh. He recognized Kane’s handiwork. This was the commando who had threatened his partner.

In the other’s eyes, he read the satisfaction of the kill to come.

It matched his own.

And another’s.

A fierce growl erupted from the shadows, drawing the gunman’s attention. His pistol jerked in that direction.

Using the distraction, Tucker yanked out the rifle hidden under the truck-the commando’s own weapon. He twisted the barrel forward and fired at the gunman’s face, blowing him backward.

As his body fell away, Gray appeared behind him, racing forward-then skidding back in surprise. “How… where did you get…?”

Tucker, still on his back, turned to the shadows under the dump truck. Kane crouched there, panting, his eyes glowing brightly out of the darkness. As commanded, his partner had not only taken down his opponent but also disarmed him. Tucker pictured his partner dragging the rifle by its leather strap in his teeth, ever obedient, obeying down to the word.

“Good boy,” Tucker said, staring back into those clever eyes. “Good boy.”

9:35 P.M .

Gray headed down the street toward Hotel Jubba. After he found Tucker, the pair had quickly retreated out of the construction area. They found no further resistance. With the mission completed, the remaining commandos-likely hired mercenaries-had pulled out and vanished into the night.

Whoever had employed those assassins plainly wanted Amur silenced. His inquiries must have alerted the pirates involved in Amanda’s kidnapping and triggered this swift reaction.

Now Gray and Tucker were back among the street throngs in the new section of the city, stopping only long enough to bandage Tucker’s shoulder. Luckily the bullet had only grazed his upper arm.

Tucker finished explaining what happened. “From the video feed, I saw that Kane had retreated somewhere among these dump trucks and went looking for him.”

“And you got ambushed.”

Tucker scowled and glanced down at the dog at his side. He’d stripped off the dog’s vest and held it bundled under his good arm. “I wasn’t leaving him in harm’s way, commander. And I never will. Kane looks after me with equal diligence. I wouldn’t be alive now if it wasn’t for him.”

And you wouldn’t have been in danger if you’d obeyed orders.

But Gray let that lie for now.

Tucker continued. “Once at the trucks, Kane must have tracked me down, keeping hidden, closing in on my scent.”

“And he brought you that rifle.” Gray could not keep the tinge of respect out of his voice.

“I’d ordered him to disarm his opponent. He’d been trained well.”

Gray suspected such coordination went beyond training, that it had more to do with an inexplicable bond between dog and handler, tying them together by something deeper than just hand signals and spoken commands.

Whatever the reason, they’d all made it out with only a few scrapes and scratches. Amur’s group might have been killed-silenced by the hired assassination team-but because of Kane’s help, they now knew the president’s daughter was being held somewhere in the Cal Madow mountains to the west.

Before Gray could formulate a plan of action from here, he noted the tumult outside of Hotel Jubba. Tables were overturned, stalls broken, windows shattered. Men sat in the street, nursing injuries. It looked like the aftermath of a small riot.

“What happened?” Tucker asked.

“I don’t know.”

Gray hurried to the steps of the hotel. He found the lobby equally ransacked. A televised soccer game played in the neighboring restaurant. A few men stood idly, sipping tea, amid the carnage of tables and chairs, as if nothing had happened.

Gray touched his throat mike and radioed both Kowalski and Seichan.

No response.

Tucker shared a worried look with him.

Together they mounted the stairs. Their room-a two-bedroom suite-was on the second floor. Gray led the way down a tiled hallway, softened by a threadbare Persian runner. He kept his tread quiet as he approached the door. From inside, the cheers of an audience echoed out, coming from a television, likely broadcasting the same soccer match.

Gray pulled out his pistol and grabbed the door handle.

Tucker held a palm toward Kane, readying his partner.

Gray burst into the room-only to find Kowalski sprawled in his boxers on the sofa in the suite’s common room, a washcloth full of ice held to his right eye.

Kowalski barely acknowledged them, still focused on the game.

Gray searched around the room. Nothing seemed amiss.

“Why didn’t you respond to my radio call?” Gray asked.

Kowalski stared sheepishly toward the table. His radio and earpiece rested there. He ran a hand through his wet hair. “I took a shower and forgot to-”

Gray cut him off. “Never mind. What happened downstairs?”

Kowalski heaved his legs to the floor with a pained groan. “You said to cause a commotion when we got here.”

“I meant a diversion, not World War Three.”

Kowalski shrugged. “So things got a little out of hand. I gotta say, these Muslim guys-no sex, no alcohol-they sure needed to blow off some steam.”

Gray relaxed, holstering his weapon. “Where’s Seichan?”

Kowalski lowered the ice from his face, revealing a swollen bloodred eye. “I thought she was with you guys.”

“Us? Why?” Gray’s chest tightened painfully. Kowalski’s next words only made it worse.

“She left to go find you.”

8

July 1, 10:22 P.M. East Africa Time

Boosaaso, Somalia

Seichan sat in a windowless cement-block basement. A single bare bulb hung above her head. The space stank of bleach and had a drain in the middle of the floor.

Never a good sign.

Her left hand throbbed from where she’d sliced the meat of her thumb on a piece of broken glass when she was forced to drop on her stomach in the back alley. They’d immediately stripped her of all communications equipment and dragged a hood over her head. Forced at gunpoint, she traveled a few blocks by foot, stumbling along-then by open truck, judging by the wind, the sound of the engine, and the jolting of the suspension. She had to cling to the door frame to keep her seat, her cut hand stinging with every bump. The gun shoved in her rib cage discouraged any attempt at escape. They’d gone no more than ten minutes before stopping, so she couldn’t be far from the hotel, but in the jumbled maze of the city, they might as well have taken her to another planet.

Once here, the hood had been removed, and she’d been ordered to strip down to bra and panties and been thoroughly searched again. Afterward, her wounded hand had been tended to, though blood still seeped down her fingertips and dripped to the floor. They’d allowed her to slip her clothes back on, but she still felt half-naked.

She tugged at the plastic slip ties that bound her to a metal chair. She tried rocking, but her seat was bolted to the concrete floor.

Resigned, she silently cursed her carelessness-placing an equal amount of the blame on Gray.

If the bastard hadn’t gone off so recklessly on his own…

But she knew she bore as much guilt. She had acted no less rashly than Gray. And that troubled her, especially since she knew the cause. She remembered that kiss in the hospital, both needing each other but for very different reasons. Her carelessness this night was born out of that kiss. Fear for his safety, worry that she’d lose him, blinded her and made her sloppy.

She should have known better than to run headlong into a back alley. Hadn’t their premission briefing warned of the rash of kidnappings in the city? The only balm to her ego was that her captors hadn’t been pirates.

The single door to the room finally opened. Two figures stepped inside. One carried a thick file folder; the other, a chair identical to her own. The seat was placed in front of her, and the man who had ambushed her in the alley sat down, resting a file on his knee. He had short sandy-blond hair, balding at the top, ruggedly handsome in his own way.

His companion-a slender Indian woman with mocha skin and smoky eyes-took a post behind the chair, stiff-backed, one hand resting on a holstered sidearm. Like the man, she was dressed in khaki pants and a buttoned blue blouse, all crisply creased, giving the casual clothes the look of a uniform.

Seichan locked eyes with her. “You were one of the three following us this evening, wearing the green sarong.”

The woman gave no reaction.

Seichan glanced between the two. She spotted an older photo of her, grainy but unmistakable, clipped to the folder. “Let me guess, you all have nothing to do with Amur Mahdi at all.”

The man answered, his British accent polite but firm. “I think I’ll be the one asking questions.” He flipped open the folder and glanced through the first few pages. “Considering your number of aliases, I don’t even know what to call you.”

“How about your worst enemy,” she said sourly.

This earned the smallest uptick of the woman’s lip-not out of amusement, but disdain.

The man ignored her comment. “Your employer committed an act of terrorism on our soil, a few years back at the British museum, orchestrated by a terrorist named-” He sifted through some papers. “-Cassandra Sanchez. A nasty piece of work, that one.”

A chill iced over Seichan. Cassandra had been a Guild operative, like herself, planted beside Painter Crowe before he was director of sigma. Seichan knew little else about that operation except the woman was dead.

Since her capture, Seichan had been struggling to determine who had ambushed her, running various possibilities through her head. She was on the watch list of multiple foreign intelligence services for her past activities with the Guild. From the man’s accent, she narrowed down the possibilities. They could be SIS-the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes referred to as MI6-but she caught the whiff of military about them.

“You’re SRR,” Seichan concluded.

The man straightened, staring back at her. “Impressive.”

The Special Reconnaissance Regiment was a newer division of the British Special Forces, established recently to engage in covert surveillance operations, specifically to conduct counterterrorism actions. They were also the most selective and most secretive-and the only British Special Forces unit to recruit women.

She stared at the Indian woman.

Few knew anything substantial about SRR activities. But it made sense they’d employ field operatives in Somalia. Pirates had kidnapped several British nationals over the past decade, and the lawless rural areas of this country were the training grounds for a handful of Islamic terrorist factions.

Unfortunately, she must have been swept up by their surveillance net by accident.

The man confirmed this. “We have facial recognition software hacked into the security cameras at the airport here. You were lucky it was us who found you. As I understand, the Mossad have a shoot-on-sight order regarding you.”

Seichan continued to put the pieces together in her head. “Your tail on us… it had been purposefully sloppy. You wanted us to know we were being followed.”

“And we expected you’d try to shake it, escaping out a back door-and right into our hands.” The man leaned forward. “But who are you traveling with? The two men? We’ve identified them both as former U.S. armed forces-but nothing after that. Their records are clean, spotless, suspiciously so. Are they Guild operatives, or merely mercenaries for hire, or were you using them in some manner?”

Seichan hesitated, unsure how to respond. No one knew she’d turned traitor against the Guild and now worked for sigma. Only a handful of people in the U.S. government even knew about her involvement. Her past crimes precluded her from being officially sanctioned. So if she were ever caught-like now-she would be denied. She was on her own, certain to vanish forever down some black-ops hole.

“If you continue to refuse to cooperate,” the man began-when the door exploded behind him, ripped off its hinges.

A silver object bounced into the room.

Seichan closed her eyes, wishing she could cover her ears.

The flash-bang exploded in the confined space, searing through her eyelids and deafening to the point of nausea. She gasped out as it faded, and opened her eyes. Blearily, she saw a small shape dash into the room, running low to the ground. She felt the brush of fur against her bare calf, and the cold nose exploring her bloody fingers.

“About time you got here,” she croaked out, deaf to her own words.

Gray and Tucker swept into the room, pistols in hand. The two SRR operatives were down on the floor, in postures of agony, having taken the full brunt of the flash-bang’s impact. Still, the female had enough wherewithal to aim her weapon at Seichan. Though sightless at the moment, she kept enough of her senses to free her weapon and blindly shoot in the direction of Seichan’s chair.

The muzzle flashed, and the shot sparked off the concrete floor, stinging her toes with stone chips. The shepherd leaped away from her chair, startled.

Gray swung his weapon toward the shooter.

Seichan yelled, “Stop! Don’t shoot!”

Tucker, closer, pistol-whipped the woman and dropped her to the floor, then collected her weapon.

“They’re British Special Forces!” Seichan shouted, finally beginning to hear her own words as the effect wore off.

Gray pointed to the pair. “Keep them down,” he ordered Tucker. “Until we can sort this all out.”

He turned next to Seichan, a small military dagger appearing in his hand. He rushed to her side and sliced her bonds free, careful of her bloody hand. As he crouched, he rested his palm on her bare knee, his fingers electric on her inner thigh.

“Are you okay?”

With her ears ringing, she still understood enough to nod. “I’m fine. I cut myself on purpose. Made sure I kept the wound open as I clung to the truck’s door frame on the way here. Figured it was time for that damned dog to earn his kibble.”

Tucker heard. “Leaving a blood trail for Kane to follow. Smart.”

It wasn’t smart. It was planning.

On the flight to Africa, she had studied up on their potential new teammate, ascertaining the dog’s strengths and weaknesses, as she would any partner in the field. A report she read stated that a trained dog could distinguish a single drop of blood in an Olympic-size swimming pool. She hadn’t planned on testing that sensitivity, but she was more than happy to prove it true now.

She gained her feet, still unsteady from the auditory assault, but at least she could hear. “What about the other SRR personnel?”

“We took down one outside the hotel,” Gray said with a worried look. “He’s still tied up in the back alley, out cold. Kowalski has the other secured upstairs. Took him down like a battering ram when we burst inside, might’ve broken his leg.”

“Definitely broken,” a gruff voice answered at the door. Kowalski stepped to the threshold and pointed his thumb toward the stairs leading out of the basement. “Got him gagged and tied up there. So how much trouble are we in for kicking some British soldiers’ asses?”

The answer came from the floor. The man had also regained enough of his senses to glare, teary-eyed, at them. “I think your American colloquialism is a shitload.” He stared at the assemblage in the room. “Who the bloody hell are you all?”

Gray holstered his weapon and offered out an arm to get him back on his feet. “Someone who needs your help.”

The man took Gray’s hand suspiciously, but he allowed himself to be pulled back to his feet. “This is a fine way to ask for it.”

Kowalski offered the only possible explanation. “We’re Americans. It’s how we do things.”

11:34 P.M.

An hour later, Gray had everyone gathered back at their suite at the Hotel Jubba. They sat in the common room. A call to Director Crowe, followed by a flurry of communiqués between the two countries’ intelligence agencies, facilitated some candid conversation.

“The kidnapped woman out of the Seychelles,” Captain Trevor Alden said, holding a steaming teacup in the palm of his hand. “She’s the president’s daughter?”

“That’s right,” Gray said. “Amanda Gant-Bennett.”

The two groups sat on opposite couches, Americans on one side, Brits on the other. A tea service tray rested on the table between them. Kane kept near his handler as Tucker balanced on the arm of the sofa, but his nose kept drifting toward a stack of tea biscuits.

Captain Alden’s eyes shifted to Seichan, seated next to Gray. “And she works for you chaps now.”

Gray simply nodded, not bothering to go into the complicated details of their professional relationship.

Alden leaned back. “Someone could’ve informed us all of this before you got here. Would’ve saved Major Patel a great deal of hardship.”

Kowalski paced behind the sofa, near the balcony doors, where the smoke from his cigar was less offensive. “Sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have sacked him so hard, but he got in my way.” He shrugged, showing little remorse. “But aren’t you guys supposed to wear special berets or something?”

“Not on a mission. We’re a covert team,” Alden explained. “Just the four of us-or three now, I guess.”

Patel had been shot up with morphine and was sleeping in the next room, awaiting evacuation due to his broken leg. On the sofa, the captain was flanked by his two other associates: the Indian woman-Major Bela Jain-and a black, wiry soldier, Major Stuart Butler.

Gray redirected the conversation to the problem at hand. “Captain Alden, any local intelligence you can supply us, to help figure out where the president’s daughter might have been taken, would be most appreciated.”

“No appreciation necessary. We’ve been ordered to offer our services.” Alden winced, then gently placed his teacup on the tray. “My apologies. That came out less sincerely than I intended. I have a young daughter of my own. If she’d been kidnapped…”

Alden leaned forward and offered his hand.

Gray took it and found the man’s grip firm and dry.

“You have our full cooperation,” Alden promised.

Gray found himself warming to the man. Once past the stiff British reserve, he seemed likable enough. And he had captured Seichan, not an easy thing to do.

However, from the way Seichan sat with her arms folded over her chest, fingering the tiny silver dragon pendant at her throat with her bandaged hand, she didn’t share Gray’s opinion of the SRR captain. Likewise, Major Jain barely said a word, her features hard and unreadable, her posture rigid. Gray imagined the woman’s head still ached from the effects of the flash-bang, not to mention being pistol-whipped by Tucker.

Not the most opportune way for allies to meet.

Still, they’d all have to find a way to work together.

“Do you have any clues at all to the whereabouts of the young woman?” Alden asked, getting down to business. “Where she made landfall? Who took her?”

“Not much.”

Gray had briefly related their encounter with Amur Mahdi and the attack by an assassination squad in the construction yard. The captain was unaware of any of it, so Gray got him up to speed.

Next, he reached to the table and unfolded a topographic map of the country. Alden leaned closer as Gray ran a finger along the mountain range to the west of the city. It cut clear across northern Somalia.

“All we know,” Gray said, “is that she was likely taken somewhere up in these mountains.”

“That’s a lot of rough territory. Jungles, chasms, caves. You could spend years searching up there and only scour a tenth of those peaks. Do you have any other intel?”

“We’re still waiting for an NRO satellite to search the coastline for the raiders’ ship.”

“Needle in a haystack,” Alden pronounced grimly with a shake of his head. “And they move those ships regularly. Even if you found it, that doesn’t mean that’s where the boat made landfall.”

Gray couldn’t disagree. He closed his eyes and replayed the conversation between Amur and his men. The man’s group had been silenced for a reason. There had to be a clue there, something useful.

Then he remembered and straightened. One line of that conversation played out in his head.

A friend of my brother’s uncle, up near Eil, he says a white woman came through his village. He says they were moving her into the mountains.

Gray opened his eyes and stared at the map. “Do you know some town named eil?”

Alden nodded, studying the coastline. “It’s a small place, a tough town, pirate run.” He finally tapped the map. “Right here, by this deepwater cove.”

“One of Amur’s men said they’d heard of a white woman, a hostage, who had been through that village. If we went to that town-”

Alden cut him off. “You’d be shot on sight. And even if you did somehow survive, they’d tell you nothing. Anyone squeals there, and it’s an instant death sentence.”

Gray pictured the last of Amur’s men being shot.

Still, Alden did not seem despondent. “If they went directly from Eil to the mountains, that could narrow your search.” He ran a finger inland. “I’d suggest you call your director and ask him to have the NRO give up the satellite search for the ship and concentrate on this section of the mountains.”

He marked off a box with his fingertip.

“That’s still hundreds of square miles,” Gray said.

“True.”

“What about an infrared sweep?” Tucker offered. “If the satellite can pick out heat signatures, narrow the search parameters…?”

“Maybe. But as hot as it gets here in summer, those rocky peaks retain plenty of heat throughout the night.” Alden leaned closer to the map. “But I may have a better idea.”

“What?”

Alden smiled and glanced at the closed bedroom door. “I think I just found a good use for our poor Major Patel.”

9

July 1, 4:55 P.M. EST

Washington, DC

Painter sat in his office, struggling with a puzzle that set his teeth to aching. Since this morning’s briefing with the president, he’d been ensconced in his windowless office at Sigma headquarters, buried several floors beneath the Smithsonian Castle, yet steps away from the halls of power and many of the country’s best scientific institutions and think tanks.

Earlier, he’d reviewed the video feed from Somalia, listened to the audio recordings. Without a doubt, Amur Mahdi had been executed in order to silence him. The CIA was already squawking about the murder of one of its local assets, even though Amur was clearly playing one side against the other. And in this case, the turncoat had gotten crushed between them.

Still, the assassination of Amur offered further support to the idea that there was more to the kidnapping of Amanda Gant-Bennett than simple piracy.

Painter was sure of it.

But what?

So far, no ransom demand had been made. There continued to be no chatter among the various regional terrorist groups, no one claiming responsibility. If they had the president’s daughter, they’d be crowing from the rooftops about it.

So what game were they playing out there?

Painter could not shake the feeling that Amanda’s kidnapping was somehow tied to the Guild. Perhaps she was being used as a pawn by a competing criminal organization to put pressure on the Gants-that is, if the Gants were indeed the true puppet masters behind the shadowy Guild.

He had a hard time balancing that with the raw fear he’d seen in the president’s eyes, the anguish and grief in the First Lady’s embrace of her husband in the hallway. Even Gant’s older brother, the secretary of state, had seemed openly sincere about finding Amanda.

But that didn’t mean other family members were not involved.

He returned his attention to the large LCD monitor on his desk. Using a mouse, he scrolled through the long list of names glowing on the screen, each of them connected by branching and crisscrossing lines marking family ties: marriages and births, even infidelities and children born out of wedlock. It mapped out the genealogy of the Gant family clan, stretching back two centuries. It was less a family tree than an interlacing matrix, so complicated it required being diagrammed out in three dimensions.

Clicking and dragging, he spun the matrix in a slow turn, a spiral galaxy of power and influence going back to before the founding of this country. And it was still incomplete. He had historians and genealogists from around the globe working piecemeal on the puzzle, to keep the project secret, building a picture of the true breadth and extent of this ancient clan. He doubted anyone had ever performed such a comprehensive analysis of the Gant clan.

He also noted lines that crossed into and out of the matrix, distant cousins marrying back into the family-not an unheard-of situation in such a powerful, aristocratic family. It seemed, generation after generation, no one wanted to drift too far from that wellspring of power and wealth.

And what a wellspring it was…

Painter had lost count of the number of inventors, scholars, statesmen, and leaders of industry that shone like stars amid the lineage. Not to mention rogues and several persons of ill repute.

But every family had its bad apples.

He frowned at the screen, seeing his faint reflection superimposed over the matrix. Was the truth of the Guild hidden here or was it all a wild-goose chase?

To remind himself of the true nature of his adversaries, Painter clicked on an image file and brought up a symbol onto the screen-or rather a nested set of symbols.

It represented the Guild.

At the center stood a tiny crescent moon and star. It was one of the oldest symbols in the world, going back to an esoteric order out of ancient Egypt. Enclosed around that, the more familiar square and compass, representing another secret fraternity: the Freemasons. And at last, circling them all, the shield of the Knights Templar, a medieval order infamous for its hidden mysteries.

“‘The secret in all secret societies,’” he whispered, repeating the dying words of a Guild associate. That was the significance of the nested symbols. It was said to represent the Guild’s path, tracing its treacherous footsteps deep into the past.

The same dying man also suspected there were more levels and tiers-other secret societies-beyond those revealed in the old symbol, secrets continuing into modern times, leading at last to what he called the True Bloodline, the ultimate masters of the shadowy Guild.

“One family,” Painter mumbled, staring at the vast lineage of the Gant clan.

To survive the scrutiny of time, the Guild had hid itself within one secret society after another. Was he staring at the same subterfuge here? Was the true heart of this shadowy organization buried within the breadth and majesty of this family dynasty?

If so, how many were involved?

He studied the three-dimensional map, sensing he was missing something, that it stared him square in the face. But whatever nagged him refused to come to light.

A knock at his door interrupted him. A tall, auburn-haired woman in dress blues stood at the threshold. Painter tapped his keyboard and wiped the Gant genealogy off the screen.

It was meant for his eyes only.

“Kat,” he said and waved the woman inside.

Captain Kathryn Bryant was his second-in-command, specializing in intelligence-gathering services for sigma.

Painter pulled his attention fully to the present, to the matters in Somalia. “Have the Brits settled down after the mess in Boosaaso?”

“Barely. But the SRR has agreed to keep things under wraps and to offer their assistance out there.”

“Very good.”

“But that’s not the only reason I stopped by,” Kat said. “I brought someone to see you.”

She stepped aside and a familiar face, draped by blond hair, peered coyly around the corner.

“Lisa!” he said, delight filling his voice. He stood up and crossed around his desk. “I thought you weren’t getting back until tonight.”

Dr. Lisa Cummings slipped inside, dressed in jeans and a loose pale-blue blouse. She tapped her wrist. “What time do you think it is?”

As usual, he’d let the day escape him-but he wasn’t going to do the same with his girlfriend. He pulled her into a warm hug, kissing her cheek, appreciating how right this felt.

She sagged into him, expressing a similar thought. “It’s good to be home.”

They lingered in each other’s arms for another breath until finally falling away, leaving only their hands clasped together. Lisa had been gone a week at a medical symposium. He had not realized how much he missed her until this moment.

He guided her to one of the chairs and settled her there before letting go of her hand.

“I heard about the president’s daughter,” Lisa said dourly. “I remember her from one of those black-tie affairs at the White House several months ago. She had just found out she was pregnant.”

“Speaking of which…” Kat took the other seat. “Director, you asked me to gather information about Amanda’s pregnancy.”

Painter leaned back against his desk. He had a full dossier on the president’s daughter, but almost nothing regarding the baby she carried. He wanted every base covered. Something was odd about this entire affair-from the false papers to the trip to the Seychelles, and now this kidnapping.

He dared leave no stone unturned.

“First of all, her unborn child is not her husband’s,” Kat began.

Painter’s brows rose in surprise. This was news to him.

Kat explained, “Apparently Mack Bennett had fertility issues that required the use of a sperm donor and in vitro fertilization.”

“Interesting.” Painter folded this new knowledge into the case, testing various permutations, different possibilities.

Could there be some motive here? A custody issue?

“Where was this done?” he finally asked.

“A fertility clinic in South Carolina, outside of Charleston. I looked it up. Very cutting-edge. Using the latest technology. With a client list from around the world.”

“And the donor for the child?”

Kat shook her head. “Confidential.”

Painter hated loose ends-they had the tendency to unravel into a mess.

Kat read his expression. “I can make some calls, but without a court order-”

Painter shook his head. “A legal action would raise too many red flags, get others inquiring about Amanda’s whereabouts. We can’t risk that exposure.”

“Not to mention it would be a significant invasion of her privacy,” Lisa reminded him.

“And in the end, the child might have nothing to do with this,” Kat added.

Painter crossed his arms, unconvinced. “Amanda fled to the Seychelles just a couple of weeks before she was due to deliver. Traveling under false papers, like she was running from someone-or protecting someone.”

“You’re thinking it’s about the baby,” Kat said. “But why?”

“I don’t know. But some answers might be found at that clinic.”

“I could send a team to investigate.”

“Or I can go,” Lisa offered. “I’m an M.D. Simple professional courtesy could open doors easier than a commando raid.”

Painter’s lips hardened. Lisa had helped Sigma multiple times in the past. Her medical expertise, especially in regards to Amanda’s pregnancy, could prove useful-and likely why Kat had involved her today. And Painter had to admit that Lisa’s suggestion made sense, risked less exposure, but he hated to put her in danger.

“I can accompany her,” Kat offered. “Possibly posing as a potential new client.”

“But you’ve got a newborn and a toddler at home.”

“And I’ve also got a husband with too much time on his hands,” she argued. “Monk can keep an eye on Harriet and Penelope for a couple of days.”

Monk Kokkalis, her spouse, was a former Sigma operative who had opted to retire so he could spend more time with his wife and family. He’d also had one too many close calls during prior missions and called it quits.

“I don’t think your husband would want you out in the field,” Painter warned.

“It’s not like I’m traveling halfway around the world. It’s barely a day trip.”

Kat’s face betrayed her. Her eyes danced at the thought of getting her hands dirty again. After two back-to-back pregnancies, she clearly needed some fresh air, to stretch her legs with a little fieldwork. As proficient as she was in her role at Sigma headquarters, she was still a soldier at heart. She had not graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and gained the rank of captain in order to be stuck in an office all day.

He sometimes forgot that about her.

He nodded. “I can get you a flight out first thing in the morning.”

She smiled, glancing over at Lisa, who wore a similar grin.

Painter realized the truth at that moment. The two women had played him from the outset, intending this result all along. Rather than calling them on it, he simply resigned himself to the inevitable.

“We should return to my office,” Kat said to Lisa. “Get everything in order before our morning flight.”

Lisa stood, gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and headed after Kat-but not before hanging back in the doorway with a smile that held infinite promise. “I’ll see you tonight.”

Painter watched them head down the hall. It was not an unpleasant sight. As they disappeared around a corner, the worries settled back over his shoulders.

He reached to a file on his desk and slipped out the top photo inside. It was the last picture taken of Amanda, smiling next to her husband, one hand supporting her belly, protective, proud.

Painter stared harder at the picture, noticing for the first time the edge of fear in her eyes, the way she leaned close to her husband, almost sheltering herself. Even the arm clutched around her partner’s waist clung a bit too tightly.

What were you so scared of, Amanda?

11:59 P.M. East Africa Time

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

The needle sank into Amanda’s belly, delivering a burning sting of anesthetic. Her fingers dug into the thin sheets of the hospital bed. She watched it all, refusing to look away.

Her hospital gown had been pulled up over her stomach, exposing her swollen belly and protruding navel. A privacy sheet covered her from the waist down-not that they’d spared her from any indignities up to now.

“That should numb her well enough, Dr. Blake,” the tall blond woman said, disposing of the used syringe in a red sharps container. She had a slight German accent, maybe Swiss.

“Thank you, Petra.”

The British doctor patted Amanda’s arm. Like his nurse, he wore scrubs-but rather than the typical blue, his were old-fashioned, solid white. “We’ll be done in a few minutes, and you can get some rest for the night. I know it’s been a long day.”

The pair left to finish final preparations for the procedure.

Amanda had no choice but to wait in the bed. She kneaded her belly, reassuring herself and the child inside. She noted the leather restraints hanging from the rails. It frightened her that they hadn’t bothered to tie her down. It demonstrated their unflagging confidence in the security surrounding the cabin.

She stared at the ultrasound’s monitor, dark at the moment but waiting to be used in the procedure to come. They’d already performed a scan of her abdomen when she arrived here, recording her baby’s position, measuring the dimensions of his skull and approximate body length. She hadn’t resisted that first ultrasound. At the time, she had wanted to know the status of her child as fiercely as the doctor had.

In the end, it had brought her great relief to see the flutter of his heartbeat, his tiny curled fists, his small, sleepy movements. After a close examination of the sonogram, the doctor pronounced her boy wonderfully healthy.

But it seemed the medical team was not done with her.

Dr. Blake returned. Petra carried a tray holding a large syringe equipped with a five-inch-long needle. Amanda had already had an amniocentesis when she was eighteen weeks along, so she knew what to expect.

Petra swabbed her stomach with fresh antiseptic, then powered up the ultrasound and handed the lubed probe to Dr. Blake. With an eye on the monitor, the doctor guided the needle deep into her belly. The pain was minimal, like a mild menstrual cramp.

She looked away from the monitor as the tip of the needle approached her sleeping child. It was too disconcerting to watch. One slip and she could only imagine the damage that might be done.

In the end, all went well.

Fluid was drawn skillfully from the amniotic sac around her boy, and the needle withdrawn. She finally let out the breath she had been holding. Tears suddenly blurred her vision.

“Monitor her for fever,” the doctor ordered Petra. “Watch for any vaginal bleeding.”

Petra nodded.

Dr. Blake turned to Amanda. “There’s no need for tears. At least not now. We won’t have the genetic test results until the morning.”

Her first amniocentesis had been routine, done to rule out various chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome or genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis. But she knew that wasn’t all the doctors had been searching for-not then, not now.

The note that sent her running from the States had warned of something genetically different about her baby, something others wanted to possess. She didn’t understand much else, only enough to run before they came for her child.

Blake continued, “If the genetics are stable, your child will live-the very first of his kind. If not… well, we’ll worry about such matters then, won’t we?”

Again that paternal pat on her arm.

Even if the results were stable, she knew awful consequences would be in store for her baby boy. And if they weren’t, the medical team here would likely perform a late-term abortion.

She turned her head to the side, not knowing which result to hope for in the morning. Tears welled again as her hands found her belly-but she was certain of one thing. With the last breath in her body, she would die defending her baby.

I won’t let them harm you.

A bonfire in the outer camp glowed through the canvas wall, highlighting the crimson cross she’d noted earlier. Again she saw the odd, almost fanciful decorations along its spans, a twisting and coiling pattern that traversed both crosspieces. Only now-after the amniocentesis, after the worries about chromosomal abnormalities-did she recognize the structures.

They were helices of DNA.

Genetic code.

She stared, disbelieving. Coldness crept through her body. Though she’d never seen this cross before, she had heard whispers about this symbol, marking an ancient mystery that traced back to the founding of her family, to a secret buried at its heart.

She had thought its existence a myth, a story meant to scare children.

But now she could no longer deny the horrible truth. It was what that cryptic note had warned her about, what had sent her running to the Seychelles in terror.

The Bloodline.

They’ve found me.

10

July 2, 10:12 A.M. East Africa Time

Airborne over Somalia

Gray adjusted the bulky earphones, muffled against the roar of the helicopter’s twin engines. He stared out the cabin window as Captain Alden pointed.

“There it is!” the British SRR officer yelled.

The aircraft swept low over a sun-blasted rolling landscape of parched fields, broken red rock, and occasional patches of scraggly trees. Herds of goats scattered from under the pummeling wash of the blades. In the distance, a mountain range thrust into the morning sky, breaking the horizon into jagged lines. But the medical transport chopper would not be flying that far.

Alden pointed to a large camp of tents and huts sprawled at the intersection of two gravel roads. The top of many of the tents bore red crosses. Parked vehicles-civilian cars and United Nations trucks-dotted the surrounding fields, along with many camels.

It was a relief camp run by UNICEF and operated by the French organization Médecins sans Frontières, known in the States as Doctors Without Borders. It lay sheltered in the foothills, halfway between the mountains and the ocean, acting as a way station for those living both inland and at the coast.

A groan drew Gray’s attention back to the rear cabin of the helicopter. Major Patel remained strapped in a stretcher on the floor, his morphine wearing off from the hour-long flight from Boosaaso’s airport to this medical enclave. The French doctors here would have no trouble casting his broken tibia and stabilizing him enough for travel back to Europe.

But that was not why they’d really come.

Patel’s condition was merely a cover to explain this inland journey.

Alden leaned closer, but used the radio built into the headphones to communicate. “I have a contact who should be waiting for us after we land. If any word of the kidnapped woman passed through the camp, he’ll ferret it out.”

Gray nodded and glanced over at Tucker and Seichan. Kowalski was up front with Major Butler, who was flying the helicopter.

It wasn’t a bad plan. The camp lay within the shadow of the Cal Madow mountains. As the only relief facility for hundreds of miles, the site was the major crossroads for the entire region, as Somalis from all walks of life, travelers, and nomads, came seeking medical help, continually flowing into and out of the place. Because of that, the camp was also a strategic and important clearinghouse for information. It was no wonder the SRR had someone posted on the inside here.

With care, Gray’s team might learn something vital about Amanda’s whereabouts-or at least, narrow the search parameters. Back in DC, Painter was coordinating a satellite scan of the neighboring mountains. Between boots on the ground and eyes in the skies, the hope was to pinpoint Amanda’s location before nightfall.

Sand suddenly swirled beyond the windows, kicked up as the chopper descended. With a final, stomach-lifting drop, the skids finally kissed the ground.

Alden hauled the cabin doors open. Sand and heat pounded inside as the roar of the engines whined away. They all exited the helicopter and were met by a medical team of four, who rushed forward to help offload Major Patel. His stretcher was carried away to an idling Jeep. Major Butler accompanied his injured partner, to make sure he was properly attended to and to spread the cover story that their group were foreign aid workers.

Tucker patted his dog’s side, reassuring the shepherd after the long, noisy ride.

Kowalski merely scowled at the grim surroundings. “Once… just once… why can’t we end up at some beach where women are in bikinis and where drinks come in coconuts?”

Seichan ignored him and stood at Gray’s shoulder. “What now?”

“This way!” Alden answered, heading off, accompanied by the last member of the British SRR team, Major Bela Jain. The captain pointed toward a cluster of thatched-roof huts.

As a group, they crossed through a parking lot of rusted trucks, skeletal sand-rail buggies, and beat-up motorcycles. Guarding them all stood an older Daimler Ferret scout car, painted United Nations white and emblazoned with their blue symbol. It looked like a minitank with a fully enclosed armored cabin and mounted with a Belgian L7 machine-gun turret. A United Nations peacekeeper leaned against the vehicle, eyeing them suspiciously as they passed.

Alden noted Gray’s attention. “Camps like this need to be protected. Raids are common, for drugs, even for water. Drought has devastated much of this region, contributing to famine and death, driving the people to the coasts or up into the mountains.”

They reached the circle of huts to find a French doctor kneeling beside a long line of Somali children. A nurse prepped a syringe and handed it to the doctor, who jabbed it into the bony arm of the first boy in line.

Gray had read how the civil war going on in the southern part of the country had displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians and their children, leading to outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, and hepatitis. But a vaccination program against measles and polio, along with the administration of simple deworming tablets and vitamins, was saving countless young lives.

“Here’s the contact I was telling you about,” Alden said, pointing to the doctor. “He hears everything going around the camp, misses nothing. He’s a great asset.”

Gray studied the French M.D., a middle-aged man with bulky glasses and sunburned nose and ears. But Gray was wrong about the focus of attention.

“Baashi!” Alden called out and waved an arm, stepping forward.

The spy at the camp winced as he was injected in the arm. The young dark-skinned boy thanked the doctor in French. “Merci.”

Pulling his tunic sleeve down, the child headed over. “Ah, Mr. Trevor. You come!”

“This is your contact?” Kowalski mumbled under his breath, plainly not pleased. “What is he, fourteen?”

“Thirteen actually,” Major Jain said softly. She stared at her superior with raw admiration. “Captain Alden rescued the boy from a group of Muslim insurgents outside mogadishu. A child soldier. Only eleven at the time, hyped on bloody amphetamines, brutalized and bearing scars from cigarette burns.”

Gray’s heart ached at the sight of the boy’s mile-wide smile as he rushed forward and hugged Captain Alden, who had dropped to one knee. It seemed impossible to balance such simple joy with the horrors Major Jain described.

Alden hooked an arm around the boy’s thin shoulders and led him back to the gathered group.

“Here are the people I wanted you to meet, Baashi.”

The boy smiled, staring around, but Gray saw the hint of fear in his eyes, a wariness of strangers. He leaned more tightly against Alden. Here were the cracks that exposed the past trauma.

Tucker’s dog squirmed forward, sniffing, wanting to get the scent of the newest addition to their pack.

Baashi’s eyes got huge. A small squeal of terror stretched out of him. “Ayiiii…”

“Kane, come here,” Tucker ordered, at the sound of the boy’s distress.

The shepherd returned to his handler’s side.

“Down.” Tucker reinforced the command with a flat-handed gesture. He sank to a knee next to his dog, but his words were for the boy. “He won’t hurt you. I promise. He’s a good dog.”

Tucker held out a hand, asking the boy to come forward.

Baashi remained frozen at Captain Alden’s side.

“Just let the boy be,” Seichan warned. “He’s clearly afraid of dogs.”

Kowalski made a grunt of agreement, even Jain’s eyes pinched with concern.

Tucker ignored them all and kept his arm up.

Seichan looked to Gray for help. He simply shook his head, remembering the man’s empathy scores. They had been through the roof. Tucker had a preternatural ability to interpret another’s emotional core. And maybe it wasn’t just with animals.

Clearly bonded to the child, knowing the boy, Alden also seemed to share Tucker’s understanding. “It’s okay, Baashi. If you want…”

The boy stared at the dog for a long breath, cocking his head, perhaps searching inside himself for that lost bond children have for all things furry and warm. Finally, he stepped clear of Alden’s legs, trembling a bit.

His gaze never shifted from Kane. “He good dog?” Baashi asked.

Tucker nodded once.

Baashi crept forward, approaching as if toward a perilous cliff.

Kane remained alert, only the tip of his tail twitching with excitement. Baashi reached out the back of his hand toward the dog. Kane stretched his nose, nostrils flaring, snuffling.

Baashi moved an inch closer-it was far enough.

A long pink tongue slipped out and licked the boy’s fingertips. The tail twitch turned into a big wag.

“He likes you,” Tucker said softly.

Baashi’s smile returned, shyly at first, then stronger. He moved near enough to touch Kane on the top of his head. The dog’s nose sniffed along the length of his arm.

Baashi giggled and said something in a Somali dialect.

“Tickles,” Alden translated.

Moments later, the boy was sitting on the ground, ruffling the dog’s fur and trying to avoid an onslaught of licks. Gray stared at them both, remembering Kane’s savage attack on the commando yesterday. Likewise, he tried to picture the boy with a rifle at his shoulder. In different ways, the two-boy and dog-were both warriors, and maybe Tucker had recognized that such harshness needed an outlet of innocence and play-and also trust.

Alden joined Gray. “Baashi is slowly coming around. The base here works with such children. They try to rehabilitate them, to bring out the scared child still trapped within the nightmares of those past horrors.” He eyed Baashi and the dog-then Tucker. “You’ve got a good man there.”

Gray had to agree.

Tucker stood off to the side, studying the distant mountains. After seeing how the handler and his dog had operated back in Boosaaso, how the shepherd had tracked Seichan’s blood trail through the myriad scents and smells of the city, Gray wondered if it wouldn’t be better to simply drop the pair into the mountains, let them hunt Amanda down by themselves, and radio back her location.

But that could take days… days he felt sure the president’s daughter didn’t have.

10:34 A.M.

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

From the shouts and calls beyond the tent-cabin, Amanda knew something was happening. She heard the coughing choke of several truck engines, accompanied by the barking of orders.

One of the African soldiers burst into the cabin, talked to Dr. Blake, then turned on a heel and dashed back out again. Blake crossed the medical ward and disappeared behind a privacy screen that hid another bed. The outline of his nurse shadowed the screen. They bent their heads together, talking softly.

Amanda strained to hear. If she could’ve slipped quietly out of the bed to eavesdrop, she would have attempted it. But stealthy was not a word that best described her current state. Still, another reason also fired that desire. The outline of the other hospital bed clearly showed someone occupied it.

She had no idea who it was. An injured soldier? Another of the medical staff who had fallen ill? Whoever they were, they’d been slipped into the tent in the middle of the night when she’d been sleeping. She woke to find the privacy screen up and the doctor and nurse going back and forth to attend the new patient.

All she knew was that it was a woman, hearing at one point a small cry rising from beyond the screen, definitely feminine. But the new patient had been silent ever since. Likely sedated.

At last, Blake appeared again and headed over to Amanda with a chart in his hands. He must have read her worry. “Nothing to concern yourself with, my dear.” He waved an arm toward the commotion going on outside. “It seems someone has been making inquiries as to your whereabouts. Practically knocking at our doors.”

Hope surged in Amanda at his words, stirring the child enough to kick. “Shhh,” she whispered, rubbing her belly.

Having traveled under false papers, she feared that no one knew she was the true target of the midnight raid in the Seychelles. She avoided glancing at the cross symbol with the genetic markings, knowing the truth. The high-seas kidnapping had not been random bad luck. It had been purposefully planned and executed.

But now… could someone be trying to rescue me?

Icy water quickly doused that momentary hope as Blake continued, “But they’ll be dealt with swiftly enough.” His eyes settled on hers. “We wouldn’t want to be interrupted. Especially with such good news in hand.”

She understood, looking at the chart he held. “You got back the amniocentesis results.”

Blake flipped through a couple pages. “Your baby tested perfectly. The genetics remain stable. Better than we hoped.” He smiled at her. “You’re about to give birth to a miracle.”

11:42 A.M.

UNICEF camp, Somalia

Seichan huddled with Gray inside one of the huts at the edge of the hospital encampment. Kowalski and Major Jain kept guard outside, making sure no one overheard their conversation-and considering how loud they were arguing, that wouldn’t be a problem.

“Because beef is murder!” Jain said. “Hindus believe that God-”

“And if God didn’t want us to eat cows, he wouldn’t have made them so damn tasty-especially smothered in barbecue sauce!”

“That’s not an argument. You’d probably eat your own shoe if it had barbecue sauce poured on it. I mean look at your ass.”

“What about my butt?”

“I’ve seen cows with smaller rear ends.”

A sputtering sound followed, then, “Quit looking at my ass!”

Tucker stared toward the door. “Diplomacy at its finest,” he mumbled. “Your friend out there sure knows how to mend fences.”

Tucker had been included in the meeting inside the hut-not because his expertise was needed. It was because of the skinny black arm around his dog’s neck. Baashi had taken a real shine to Kane and what had started as terror now seemed a source of strength.

“No, I tell you again,” the boy stressed. “I heard no one speak of a white woman in the mountains. Not here. Not at all.”

A map had been spread out on the dirt floor.

Captain Alden crouched on the far side of it, next to the boy. “Okay, Baashi.” He leaned back and sighed. “I’m sorry, commander. I may have sent you miles out of your way for nothing. Word may have never reached here.”

Gray stared at the map. “It was a gamble,” he conceded.

Seichan heard the tick in Gray’s voice. Without even seeing his eyes, she could imagine the gears turning. He wasn’t giving up, not yet.

And it wasn’t just him.

“I can go out again,” Baashi offered. “Into the camp. Ask questions. Not just listen.”

“No,” Seichan snapped. The vehemence of her response surprised her.

Still, Gray backed her up. “Seichan’s right. It’s one thing just to eavesdrop and pass on what he’s heard, but to actively ask questions will put him in the crosshairs of our enemy. Remember what happened to Amur Mahdi back at Boosaaso.”

“And it’s not just the risk to the boy,” Seichan started. “It’s more than that.”

Gray gave her a concerned look, perhaps hearing the sudden stress in her voice. She gave a small shake of her hand, not wanting to continue, not trusting herself. The boy had already been used and brutalized as a child soldier. How would they be any different if they turned the boy into their spy? It was bad enough that the British SRR was using the kid as an informant.

Seichan stared at her hands and found her fingers tightly bound together. She knew how easy it was to twist such innocence to foul purposes as the strong preyed on the weak, twisting children into monsters, turning them into soldiers or scouts, or even sending them ahead of an advancing army as living mine detectors.

She forced her hands apart. Her fingers found the silver dragon at her neck. She recognized why the boy’s situation struck her so deeply, so personally. The realization made her both angry and ashamed.

She remembered little of her own childhood in Vietnam. Bits and pieces, none that included her father. And what she remembered of her mother she wished she could forget: of being ripped from her arms, of her mother being dragged out a door, bloody-faced and screaming, by men in military uniforms. Afterward, Seichan spent her childhood in a series of squalid orphanages across Southeast Asia, half-starved most of the time, maltreated the rest-until finally she’d taken to the streets and back alleys. It was there, when she was little older than Baashi, that the Guild found and recruited her. Over the course of the next year, the trainers stripped away not only her remaining childhood but also much of her humanity, leaving behind only an assassin.

I was this boy, she thought, abused and tortured into bloody servitude.

But she also knew there was one distinct difference between them. She pictured Baashi playing with the dog, carefree and happy. Unlike her, he was still young, malleable enough to rediscover his humanity.

She let her fingers drop from the dragon pendant, the memory of her mother dissolving away into faded whispers in the night and soft kisses on her cheek-but even then there had been tears, as if her mother knew she was about to lose her child.

The memory sparked a sudden insight regarding their current mission. “She’s a mother, too,” Seichan said, drawing Gray’s attention. “The president’s daughter…”

His eyes narrowed on hers-then widened with understanding. His fingers found her hand and squeezed his thanks, then remained there.

She stared down, wanting to feel more, but at this moment, all she felt was loss-for her childhood, her mother, even Gray. How could she ask more of his heart when she wasn’t sure what was left of her own?

“Amanda’s not only unusual because she’s white,” Gray explained to the others, “but also because she’s pregnant.”

Alden nodded. “Such a condition is rare in a kidnap victim. Someone might have made note of it.”

“And hopefully talked about it.” Gray turned to Baashi. “Have you heard anything about a pregnant woman being moved into the mountains near here? Someone with a large belly?”

To emphasize, Gray pantomimed a swollen stomach.

Baashi twisted his lips in thought and sat quietly for a moment, then slowly sagged. “No. I hear nothing about a big-belly woman with the pirates.”

Seichan studied the boy. He stared too hard at the map, kept his attention diverted away. Even his arm fell from around Kane’s neck.

“He knows something,” Seichan said. Tucker wasn’t the only one capable of reading emotions buried under the surface.

Especially this boy.

I was this boy.

“He wouldn’t lie to me,” Alden said.

“He’s not lying,” Seichan agreed, but angrily. “We’re just not asking the right question.”

Baashi’s gaze met hers. Fear shone there-and resistance.

How many times had the same emotions warred inside her?

Tucker came and sat next to the boy. “It’s okay, Baashi. Kane and I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

A silent hand signal followed: a flick of fingers, a digit pointed at the boy’s lap. Baashi didn’t see it, but Kane obeyed. The dog came forward and rested his muzzle on the boy’s knee.

Baashi placed his palm on the dog’s shoulders, drawing strength there.

“It’s okay to tell us,” Alden said softly. “No one’s mad.”

Baashi glanced sheepishly up at his father figure. “I no lie. I hear no stories about big-belly woman.”

“I never thought you did, my boy. But what is scaring you? What are you so afraid to tell us?”

He finally broke down. “I hear other stories. Of a demon man in the mountains. He make a place like this.” Baashi waved his other arm in a circle.

“Like the hospital here.”

Baashi nodded. “But he only look after the big bellies on the woman.”

“He takes care of pregnant women?” Alden asked, repeating Gray’s pantomime of a swollen stomach.

“Yes, but they say bad things. Mothers go there. Never come back. A very bad place.”

Tucker patted the boy on the shoulder. “You did good, Baashi.”

The boy refused to look up, showing no relief.

Gray shifted to the map. “Do the stories say where in the mountains this doctor works?”

“Yes,” Baashi said, but he still wouldn’t look at the map.

“Can you show Kane?” Tucker said.

The boy glanced from soldier to dog-then slowly nodded. “I show you. But it’s a bad place.”

As the boy reached for the map, Kowalski burst into the room. “We’ve got a chopper inbound.”

Alden seemed unconcerned. “They have medical drops all the time. Could be another patient, supplies, or-”

Major Jain shoved past Kowalski and dove inside. “Incoming! Get down!”

Gray rolled Seichan to the floor. Tucker and Alden sheltered the boy, pinning him under their bodies. Baashi clung tightly to Kane.

A sharp whistling screamed across the roof of the hut-followed by a massive explosion that shook thatch from the roof.

Jain returned to the door.

Another sharp scream of a rocket erupted.

She leaped back with even worse news. “This one’s coming straight at us!”

11

July 2, 5:04 A.M. EST

Washington, DC

Painter woke to the ringing of his cell phone, a crescendo of escalating notes that set his heart to thudding hard in his chest. He lay in bed next to Lisa, their naked limbs tangled together, his hand resting on the curve of her backside.

She sat up with him, going instantly alert, trained from years of being on-call at a hospital. The sheets shed from her breasts; her eyes shone in the predawn darkness. She also knew that particular ringtone, set for extreme emergencies.

Painter grabbed his cell phone from the nightstand and answered it.

“Director, we’ve got a problem.” It was Kat Bryant, calling from Sigma headquarters. He glanced at the clock. It was barely after five in the morning.

When he’d left last night with Lisa, Kat had still been in the bunker, running logistics for Gray’s operation and coordinating the various intelligence branches. Had she ever left?

“What’s happened?” he asked.

“I’m fielding some frantic S.O.S.’s out of that UNICEF camp in Somalia, where Gray was headed. Reports of rocket fire. Some sort of attack.”

“Do we have eyes on it?”

“Not yet. I’m already working with NRO. I tried to raise Gray, but so far there’s been no response.”

Likely a tad busy.

“What about support? We have the navy SEAL team cooling its heels in neighboring Djibouti.”

“I can get them airborne, but it’ll still be forty to fifty minutes for them to reach that inland camp.”

Painter closed his eyes, his mind racing through various parameters and scenarios. If he called in the SEAL team, it could threaten the entire mission, expose his hand too early. SEAL Team six had been assigned here specifically to extract the president’s daughter-not to play Un peacekeepers.

“Do we have any idea who is attacking?” Painter asked.

“The camp has been raided twice in the last ninety days. Both drug runs. And two months ago, a doctor got kidnapped by one of the local warlords. This attack may have nothing to do with Gray or the search for Amanda.”

Painter wasn’t buying it. He pictured the assassination of Amur Mahdi. The enemy seemed to know their every move. With all of the various intelligence agencies engaged in this mission-and now the British SRR-something was leaking out.

Painter trusted his own organization, but there were too many cooks in this international kitchen-not to mention the president’s family. The leak could be coming from anywhere.

Painter had to make a tough decision. He could not lose focus. He had to preserve the SEAL team and its operational readiness for a possible fast extraction.

“Director?” Kat asked.

He kept his voice firm. “Get me eyes in the field as soon as you can, but for now, Gray’s team is on their own.”

A short pause followed, then Kat responded, “Understood.”

Lisa’s hand slipped into his. She didn’t say a word, offering only her warmth.

“Should I delay the mission to South Carolina?” Kat asked.

Painter remembered the scheduled investigation into the clinic where Amanda had her in vitro fertilization performed. He could not escape the feeling that Amanda’s sudden flight to the Seychelles had something to do with her child. First, the assassination of Amur, and now this new attack on the hospital camp-somebody intended for Amanda never to be found.

“No,” he said, glancing at Lisa. “We’ll head over to Sigma command right now. I want you both out on that first flight to Charleston.”

A longer delay followed. Painter wondered if he’d lost Kat-then she came back on the line. “Director, I’ve got a few captured still shots of the camp. From a French weather satellite. They’re not the best, but I’m sending them to your phone.”

Painter pulled the device from his ear and switched to speaker as he waited for the image to fill the small screen. Line by line, the horror of the situation in Somalia revealed itself.

The image offered a high aerial view. Few details were discernible, especially with the thick pall of smoke obscuring most of the camp. Tiny dots represented people and vehicles trying to escape the attack. Overhead, the blurring image of a helicopter hovered above the chaos, like some predatory bird, waiting to pick off the weak.

Kat’s small voice emerged over the speaker. “Did you get the sat-photo?”

“Got it.”

Lisa peered over his shoulder, covering her mouth with a hand.

Painter struggled to keep to his original plan. It was easier to abandon Gray’s team to a bad situation when it wasn’t staring him in the face. But no matter how tough or callous, he knew his original decision was the correct one.

With a few final instructions, he signed off with Kat and lowered the phone. He stared out into the darkness.

Someone desperately wanted to stop Amanda from being found.

But who?

12:12 P.M. East Africa Time

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

Dr. Edward Blake held the radio handset to his ear. He stood in the communications tent, crammed with gear and festooned with satellite dishes. The swelter of the day drew beads of perspiration down his forehead.

But he knew all of that sweat was not from the heat alone.

He even held his white safari hat in his other hand-not because he was indoors, but because of the presence at the other end of the line. Few personages ever intimidated him. He had been raised in an aristocratic family in Leeds, whose lineage included earls and dukes, all distantly related to the royal family. At estate dinners throughout the ages, their home had hosted famous figures of past and present, from the wartime leader General George Patton to entertainers who had been knighted by the queen. In Oxford, his roommate had been a billionaire’s son, a prince out of Saudi Arabia, a deadly man who would eventually head a Muslim fundamentalist group until he’d been caught and hung.

Still, none of that affected him or impressed him-not like now.

Edward’s fingers tightened on the handset.

The voice on the other end was computerized, masking the identity of the speaker. Edward had no idea to whom he spoke-but he knew the power behind that cloaked voice. It was somehow appropriate the voice was computerized, because he knew he was speaking to a vast machine, a powerhouse that had moved throughout the ages, destroying all in its wake and retooling the chaos to suit its ends.

And Edward wanted to be more than a cog in that vast machine; he intended to drive that massive engine. It had been luck that landed Amanda on his doorstep-his egg-harvesting clinic, one of many in this region, had been chosen to facilitate this matter-but it would take his skill to turn that good fortune into an opportunity to move up the ladder.

To achieve that, he needed success.

“The problem is being addressed,” Edward promised. “The Americans will never reach the mountains in time.”

“AND THE FETUS?” the voice asked.

“The DNA is stable. As we all hoped.”

He dabbed the sweat from his brow with the back of a sleeve. At least that was good news. Plans could move forward-behind schedule, yes, but still salvageable.

Edward continued, “As to that other matter, I can perform the C-section immediately. Get things ready.”

“VERY GOOD.” Though the voice was flat and affectless, Edward imagined the satisfaction behind those inhuman inflections.

“And what of the mother?” Edward asked, suspecting this was a touchy matter.

The answer came without hesitation. “SHE’S NO LONGER OF USE. HER DEATH WILL SERVE A GREATER PURPOSE.”

“Understood.”

The voice moved on to exacting detail about how preparations and procedures would continue from here. One last item concerning the mother was addressed.

“BURN HER BODY. IT SHOULD BE UNRECOGNIZABLE.”

The sweat down his back went cold. The pure callousness both appalled and excited him. What would it be like to move through the world with such utter disregard for morality-driven only by purpose?

The call finally ended.

Lost in preparations, he vacated the communications tent, strode through the sun-speckled glade of the camp, and up the steps to the makeshift medical ward. He tried his best to wear such a mantle of amoral drive as he stepped through the door and let it clap shut behind him.

Petra glanced up, shifting a fall of blond hair, her face open and questioning.

Edward looked beyond her to the hospital bed at the back of the ward. Amanda stared at him. He must have failed to fully don that cold mantle; something must have still shone in his face. The patient pulled her legs up, an instinctive desire to protect her child.

But it’s not your child that needs protecting at the moment…

Edward turned to Petra. “Get everything ready. We’re doing this now.”

12

July 2, 12:15 P.M. East Africa Time

UNICEF Camp, Somalia

With the blast still ringing in his head, Tucker pulled the dazed boy to his feet. Kane shook off dust and pieces of thatch. Smoke and sand floated in the air. The air reeked of burned flesh and flaming fuel.

The rocket had hit outside the hut, collapsing a corner of the clay-brick structure. A large blackened crater opened a few yards away. Bodies lay strewn at the edge, tossed and torn like so many rag dolls.

Tucker found his breathing growing heavier, flashing back to prior firefights in Afghanistan. He pulled the boy’s face into his chest, not wanting him to see. Baashi didn’t resist. Though deafened, he still felt the boy crying in terror, felt his wracking sobs.

Captain Alden groaned and rolled onto his rear end. Blood covered half his face, but it appeared to be only from a scalp wound. He must have caught a piece of the blast debris.

“Get him out of here!” Alden yelled, flopping his arm weakly toward the door.

Others rose out of the smoke, shedding rubble, bearing cuts and abrasions. Gray stumbled forward with Seichan.

Kowalski helped Major Jain to her feet. She wobbled slightly but found her footing. “You okay?” he asked

She shook free of him-teetered sideways, then grabbed his arm again. “Maybe not.”

When the Indian woman spotted her captain, she still tried to go to him, concern on her face. Alden waved her off. “Go with them, Jain. Help get them clear.”

“What about you?” Gray grabbed the map from the floor and passed it to Baashi. They still needed the boy to pinpoint the secret medical encampment rumored to be up in the mountains. Even rattled, the commander never lost sight of the mission objective. “Captain, you need medical attention.”

Alden grinned through the gore. “Then I guess I’m bloody well at the right place, aren’t I, commander?” He teetered back to his feet. “Besides, I’ve got two men here. I’m not leaving them until I know they’re safe.”

Or dead, Tucker added silently.

Punctuating that dour thought, another blast rocked deeper into the camp. Kane flinched, ducking lower.

Gray grabbed the captain by the upper arm. “You’ll do your men no good on your own.” He dragged the Brit out the door. “Come with me.”

Alden looked ready to argue, but Major Jain backed Gray up.

“Commander Pierce is right, sir.”

“Maybe we can argue later!” Kowalski shouted at them by the door. “Chopper’s swinging back this way!”

“Out of here! now!” Gray ordered.

The captain reluctantly followed. They rounded the hut and moved out among the field of parked vehicles.

Tucker guessed where the commander was taking them. He would’ve done the same, to utilize every resource to survive.

Gray led them straight to the minitank, painted white and emblazoned with the Un world logo. The Daimler Ferret armored car still sat where they’d seen it earlier. The peacekeeper posted beside it had climbed into the turret, manning the machine gun. The weapon smoked from prior shots, but the helicopter was currently beyond range on the other side of the camp, although it wouldn’t take long for the chopper to circle back around.

Gray called to the peacekeeper as a handful of refugees fled to either side of them. “You’re a sitting duck up there, soldier! You need to get this vehicle moving, help defend the camp.”

The man, dark-skinned and helmeted, yelled back in a French accent. He was young, likely not even twenty. Fear frosted his words. “I am alone! I cannot shoot and drive, monsieur.”

Gray turned to Alden. “Here is how you can best help your men. Put this tank in motion. Draw the chopper’s attention and take that bastard down.”

Alden understood. “I’ll do what I can to cover your escape.” The captain pointed to a pair of sand-rail buggies fifty yards away. The skeletal dune runners looked perfectly suited for this rough terrain. “If there are no keys, they’re easy to hotwire. Just jam something sharp into the ignition and twist to get them started.”

The captain’s next words were for his fellow soldier. “Stay with them, Jain. Get them all clear, and I’ll see what I can do from here.”

The major looked exasperated, but she knew how to take orders and nodded.

Gray shook Alden’s hand as they parted ways. “Be safe.”

“You do the same.” The captain stopped long enough to give Baashi a fast hug. “Do what they say!”

“I… I will, Mr. Trevor.”

The captain nodded and climbed into the armored car.

Gray hurried them forward, ordering them to secure their radio earpieces in place.

Ahead, the sand-rail cars were little more than engines strapped to roll cages with some seats bolted in place. They had no windows, fenders, or doors. But Tucker had played with them back in the dunes near Camp Pendleton. Their advantage was a low center of gravity and high flotation tires perfect for skimming over sand and hopping over obstacles.

Kowalski must have had a similar experience and rubbed his palms together as they reached the vehicles. “Which one’s mine?”

Machine-gun fire erupted behind them. They all leaped forward and split on the run, dividing between a smaller two-seater, which Gray and Seichan commandeered, and a larger four-seater with a bench in the rear.

Jain reached the driver’s seat first, but Kowalski wasn’t having any of it.

“I’ll drive!” he yelled.

“Listen, boyo, I’ve had plenty of tactical driving-”

“And I didn’t just get a concussion. So move it, sister!”

She looked ready to bite his head off, but she was still wobbly on her feet. She finally relented and abandoned the driver’s seat to Kowalski. He discovered a screwdriver already jammed in place in the steering column, serving as a key. Judging by the roar next to them, Gray started his vehicle with no more difficulty.

Jain took the passenger seat up front, leaving the rear bench to Tucker and the boy. Kane crouched between them, panting, flinging a bit of drool in his adrenaline-fired excitement.

“Hang on!” Kowalski yelled, grinning way too big.

The buggy leaped forward like a bee-stung horse-just as an ear-shattering explosion flung a nearby truck into the air.

Another rocket blast.

Tucker twisted around. Behind them, the helicopter roared out of the camp and aimed toward them. An M230 chain-gun on the chopper’s undercarriage chewed across the sand-chasing after them.

But they weren’t defenseless.

The Ferret armored car raced into view, as fleet-footed on its large tires as its nimble namesake. It crossed into the path of the attack helicopter. From the minitank’s turret, the machine gun chattered, firing up at the bird in the sky.

Captain Alden manned the weapon himself, shrouded in gun smoke and swirls of dusty sand. The minitank skidded around to face the diving helicopter head-on. Rounds cracked into the chopper’s windshield, driving the bird to the side as the pilot panicked.

The armored car spun a full circle and took off, driving wildly through the parked vehicles. The chopper twisted in midair and took off after them, like a hawk after a fleeing rabbit-or, in this case, a fleeing ferret.

Tucker settled back around, looking forward. Kowalski hit a ridge at full speed and jumped the buggy into the air. The driver hollered his joy. Tucker and Baashi flew into the aluminum half-roof over the bench seat. Tucker managed to get hold of Kane’s leather collar as they crashed back down.

The dog growled angrily, ready to bite someone.

Tucker couldn’t blame him. He glared at the back of Kowalski’s stubbly head, suddenly wishing he were back with the rockets and chain guns. It would be safer than this backseat.

No wonder Gray had fled to the other buggy.

He was no fool.

12:48 P.M.

Maybe this wasn’t so smart.

Gray’s buggy twisted sideways down a steep hill, made treacherous by loose shale and slippery scree. He broadsided a patch of brittle bushes at the bottom of the slope and crashed through them.

Seichan ducked away as thorns and broken branches exploded through the open roll cage.

Once clear, she yelled at him, “Make for the gravel road we saw from the air!”

“That’s what I’m trying to do!”

He had set off overland initially, thinking the road would be too obvious an escape route if the helicopter decided to give chase. He’d already spotted other cars, trucks, even camels fleeing up that road, driven all in the same direction by the attack. He didn’t want to be trapped in that traffic jam if there was a firefight.

His original plan was to travel as far as they could, then cut back to the road. But the hilly terrain proved tougher than it looked, broken up into rocky hummocks, sudden cliffs, and thick patches of bushes and trees. Ahead, it looked even worse as the land pushed up toward the mountains.

Risky or not, the road had to be safer than this.

With that in mind, he drove the car up the next rise to get a better view and gain his bearings. In the rearview mirror, he spotted Kowalski following him. And farther behind him, an ominous column of oily black smoke marked the horizon.

Let’s hope that’s the helicopter.

“There!” Seichan pointed.

He turned his attention forward. A quarter mile away, the road looked little better than a dry riverbed winding across the bitter terrain. It disappeared into the higher hills and scraggly lower forests.

Kowalski skidded up next to him.

Gray touched his throat mike as he nosed his vehicle down the far side of the rise. “Kowalski, we’re heading back to the road. We’ll make better time there.”

“Too bad,” his partner responded in his ear. “It was just getting fun.”

From the white-knuckled grips of his passengers, Gray doubted they’d describe his driving in such a positive light.

Though the dune runners were made for spinning, jumping, and turning-all necessary skills to traverse this torturous terrain-it still felt like riding a jackhammer on top of a cement mixer. And the last quarter-mile journey back to the road was no gentler on his kidneys.

At last, he fishtailed his buggy onto the gravel, which, after the off-road trek, felt as smooth as a freshly paved highway.

He sped gratefully down the road, which climbed in sweeping switchbacks up into the mountains. Over the next hour, he kept a hard pace, passing the occasional slower truck.

The forest slowly grew thicker and taller as they gained elevation. Rounding a sharp turn, he came close to a head-on collision with a camel. The creature dodged around the buggy with a bleating complaint. Gray noted the empty saddle and the bundle of gear tied to it as the beast continued downhill.

Worried, he slowed his buggy to a stop.

Kowalski flew around the corner with a rumble of his engine and a throaty grind of gears. He came close to rear-ending Gray, but swerved to a halt in time.

Gray cut his engines and signaled Kowalski to do the same.

In the silence, Gray strained-then heard a distinct pop-pop-pop.

Rifle fire.

He pictured the empty saddle.

“Ambush,” he said.

Seichan immediately understood, too. “Someone set up a roadblock ahead. They’re sweeping up after the helicopter.”

Gray nodded. Any refugees who attempted to flee into the mountains were being gunned down ahead. But another cold certainty settled in his belly. It had been nagging him since the first rocket blast. He had hoped the air attack had been orchestrated by local insurgents or warlords. Drugs and medical supplies were as good as gold here, especially in the war-torn south. But this ambush on the road into the mountains removed any uncertainty.

This was about Amanda Gant-Bennett.

And worse…

“This is too bold a move for pirates,” he said. “The chopper attack, now this roadblock. They’re not trying to hide their actions any longer. They’re pulling out the big guns and making a final stand.”

“What are you getting at?” Seichan asked.

“This isn’t defense. This is an endgame.” He turned to Seichan. “They wouldn’t move so openly, so brazenly, unless they saw no further need to keep their mountain enclave secret.”

Realization dawned in Seichan’s eyes.

“Either they’ve moved Amanda already-” she started.

Gray finished, “Or she’s dead.”

1:48 P.M.

Amanda tugged against the padded leather cuffs tying her to the hospital bed. Minutes ago, they’d placed an IV catheter in her right arm and given her an injection that fogged the edges of her mind. A saline bag slowly dripped next to her.

She wanted to panic but couldn’t.

More than the drugs, what kept her calm was the steady beeping of a fetal heart monitor. The nurse had strapped a sensor belt around her belly. It communicated wirelessly to the bedside device.

My baby’s fine… my baby’s fine…

It was her mantra to keep her sanity.

Especially with all the commotion in the room. Blue-smocked medical personnel came and went, busy behind the privacy screen of the other bed. Elsewhere, soldiers hauled out equipment under the direction of Dr. Blake.

Movement to the side drew her muddled attention to Petra. The nurse hauled a portable anesthetic machine to her bedside.

At the sight of the clear mask hanging from the hoses, Amanda fought against her cuffs, but she was already too weak.

Dr. Blake came over and touched her wrist. He raised a syringe filled with a milky fluid. “Don’t worry. We won’t let any harm come to your baby.”

She was unable to stop him as he inserted the syringe needle into her IV line and slowly pushed the plunger.

Petra lowered a mask toward her face.

She twisted her head away. Across the room, she watched one of the medical staff push aside the privacy screen. At long last, she saw who shared the ward with her, who lay in the other bed.

Horror swelled through her.

She screamed as Petra grabbed her head and forced the mask down over her nose and mouth.

“Now, now, it’ll be all over in a few seconds,” Blake promised her. “Three, two…”

Darkness closed around her, narrowing her view of the world to a pinpoint.

“One…”

Then it was gone.

13

July 2, 1:55 P.M. East Africa Time

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

Gray paced the shoulder of the road while the sun baked the gravel into a shimmering mirage. He and the others kept to the shadows of the neighboring forest. It sang with the buzz of cicadas and the calls of songbirds. Farther up into the highlands, green forests beckoned, draped in mists, like a sliver of Eden. Emphasizing this, the occasional breeze carried down the scent of wild-growing jasmine.

He clutched a satellite phone in his hand and weighed the risks of opening an encrypted communication channel to Sigma command. From the series of attacks-both in Boosaaso and here-intelligence was clearly leaking to the enemy.

And right now, his team had a thin advantage.

No one knows we’re still alive.

Gray wanted to keep it that way. But more than that, what would be gained in the end if he reached out to sigma? What support could they offer? To mobilize an adequate response would risk exposing both their survival and their location. Even SEAL Team six, awaiting word in neighboring Djibouti, could not be activated. Such an overt force had a limited window to get in and get out safely. It was up to Gray’s team to first pin down the whereabouts of the president’s daughter.

If Gray attempted to call the States and if word should reach her captors that his team was closing in on her position, the enemy would be more apt to act rashly, to kill her on the spot.

Knowing what he had to do, Gray shoved the satellite phone back into his pack.

We’re on our own until we find her.

With that settled, he waved Seichan over to him. She approached with Baashi, a hand resting on his shoulder. Gray noticed how protective she was with the boy. He had never seen her bond so quickly to another person.

Gray knelt in front of Baashi. “Can you show us on the map where the other hospital camp is hidden? The one with the bad doctor?”

The boy looked down at his toes and shook his head. “I no can’t.”

Baashi looked scared. Gray imagined the gunfire must have spooked him, likely triggering memories of other firefights he had been in as a child soldier. Kane could probably help soothe those rattled nerves, but Tucker knelt with his dog at the edge of the forest, suiting his partner up in a Kevlar vest. The pair readied themselves for a reconnaissance mission, to get some eyes on the ambush ahead and ascertain what sort of force lay between them and the mountains.

Farther away, Kowalski and the SRR woman, Major Jain, had returned to the last switchback, blocked the road with their two buggies, and turned away any vehicles trying to use the road to get into the mountains. Jain knew the native dialects well enough to persuade them to take a different route, though Gray suspected Jain’s pistol and Kowalski’s rifle did most of the persuading for them.

Gray had to admit the British major was an asset and, considering how she handled Kowalski, matching him toe-to-toe, she was one tough soldier.

They would need that ahead.

Gray returned his attention forward. The best chance for Gray’s small team was to slip past that enemy line unseen. They didn’t have the manpower for a full frontal assault.

But once past that roadblock, Gray needed to know where to go-and fast. The clock was ticking down for Amanda. He was sure of it.

He leaned closer to Baashi and coaxed those large dark eyes to face him again. “We won’t let anyone harm you, I promise.”

The boy’s face hardened, offended. “I no afraid.”

“Of course you’re not. I know Captain Alden is very proud of you. So then why don’t you show me on the map where the secret camp is located?”

Baashi sagged, crestfallen, and admitted the reason for his reluctance. “I no have the map.”

Gray hid his shock, not wanting to scare the boy. He had given Baashi the topographic map back in the hut, so he could study it. “Where is it?”

Baashi’s eyes looked wet with pending tears. He waved toward the way they’d come. “I no have it. Blow away.”

Gray realized the boy must have lost it during the rough trek here.

“It’s not his fault,” Seichan said. “If the rattling had gotten any worse, I might’ve lost a filling or two myself.”

She was right, and Gray knew where the true blame lay. He’d not been thinking when he’d trusted the map to the boy. Baashi looked so much older than his few years, aged by his rough treatment. But Gray also knew this wasn’t his first mistake during this mission.

The hard glint to Seichan’s icy eyes suggested those errors hadn’t gone unnoted.

“But I show you,” Baashi said, brightening. He tapped a thumb against his skinny breastbone. “No map-but I map. I take you there.”

Seichan fixed Gray with a resolute stare. “We can’t put the boy in such danger. We don’t even know what lies ahead.”

He nodded and glanced to Tucker and Kane. “We’ll wait to see what they discover. We’ll only move forward if there’s a safe path around this ambush.”

2:02 P.M.

Tucker knelt in front of Kane. He pointed into the forest and touched a finger to his lips. From here, they needed the utmost stealth.

He roughed up the fur of the shepherd’s neck and stared Kane in the eyes. “Who’s a good boy?”

The dog touched his nose to Tucker’s.

That’s right-you are.

Tucker felt the others’ eyes upon him. He didn’t care, unabashed by the display of affection.

“Let’s go,” Tucker commanded and held up five fingers, instructing Kane to keep five meters ahead of him.

Together, they moved into the deeper shadows of the forest. Kane slipped away, vanishing with the barest rustle of leaf. Tucker followed, stepping carefully, letting his dog take the lead, becoming an extension of his senses.

In his earpiece, he heard Kane’s quiet breath, along with the whisper of birdsong and creak of branches. He kept one eye on the shielded screen of his phone that gave him a survey of the upcoming terrain from a dog’s point of view.

They slowly but steadily paralleled the road through the forest.

Kane’s night-vision camera stripped away shadows, making sure they didn’t stumble upon any sentries hidden in the forest. But more than the night vision, Tucker trusted his partner’s nose.

When Kane slowed, so did Tucker. When the dog circled wide, Tucker kept the same wide berth. Though separated by several yards, they moved in tandem, like a choreographed ballet.

All the while, Tucker radioed soft instructions via Kane’s earpiece, keeping the dog following the rough turn of the gravel road.

Through the sensitive microphone on Kane’s camera, harsh voices suddenly reached Tucker’s ear.

“Slow,” he subvocalized to his partner. “Creep. Left.”

The view through the camera dropped low; forward movement became a step-by-step approach back to the road.

The trees grew thinner.

Three trucks-all Land Rovers-appeared ahead, blocking a choke point where the roadway had been blasted through a steep ridgeline. Soldiers paced in front; more stood on the hoods. Other men rolled vehicles to the side of the road or dragged bodies, leaving bloody trails.

The entire force wore black vests, helmets, and carried assault rifles.

Same as the crew who had assassinated Amur Mahdi.

Tucker counted at least fifteen men.

“Down,” he instructed Kane. “Stay.”

He touched his throat mike and reported to Gray. “Commander, do you see this?”

“Affirmative. We aren’t getting through that logjam without a major firefight. Can you find another path around them?”

“Do my best.”

He left Kane to guard his back, to maintain his post by the road. Earlier, while en route here, he had heard the faint tinkling of water through his dog’s microphone. He crept through the woods slowly, heading away from the road, searching for the source. It did not take long to discover a thin stream of water trailing along a sandy gully.

It flowed only a foot wide and a few inches deep, runoff from the highlands, the last vestiges of the rainy season trickling away, so small it would never reach the arid plains below.

Still, he dipped his finger into it, remembering an old adage of his survival-training instructor: Where there’s water, there’s a way.

He headed upstream, hoping for that to be true.

Within fifty yards, the feeble wash reached the steep ridgeline that blocked the way forward. There he bore witness to the power of water, even a flow as anemic as this one. Centuries of wet seasons had slowly eroded a cut through the sandy rock. It was narrow, dropping through a series of short falls, and easily climbable, giving them ready access to the highlands above.

Focused upward, he failed to note the figure kneeling by the pool at the base of the cataracts, filling a canteen, a rifle resting beside him.

Tucker had forgotten his other survival-training instruction.

Never let your guard down.

2:13 P.M .

The heat of the day, even in the shade, wore on Gray. He kept a watch on the phone screen, viewing the feed from Kane’s camera. The assault team remained a quarter mile up the road. He watched them mill, heard their harsh laughter. But at any time, they might send a scout or one of the trucks down this way.

They needed to be gone before that happened.

He checked the clock on the corner of the small screen. Tucker had been gone for ten minutes. No word. That was long enough. He raised his fingers to activate the radio mike at his throat.

Before he could speak, a rustle drew his attention back to the woods.

Seichan raised her pistol.

Tucker shoved through some bushes and into the open. His eyes had a wounded, tired look. “Found a way,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Gray quickly gathered the others. He and Seichan flanked Tucker as they hurried into the forest. Kowalski and Jain followed with Baashi between them. The woman had an arm around the boy, intending to keep him safe.

“Any problems?” Gray asked Tucker, sensing something troubled the man.

“Only a small one,” he said sourly.

They reached a tiny creek and followed it uphill, moving as quietly as possible. The waterway led to a steep ridge, eroded throughout by a series of cataracts.

“Who is that?” Jain asked, pointing the muzzle of her rifle at a soldier gagged and hog-tied-out cold-sprawled beside a small pond at the base of the falls.

Seichan moved warily closer, searching the remaining woods.

“He’s alone,” Tucker said dully. “Came for water. But someone could come looking.”

“Why didn’t you just kill him?” Kowalski asked. “Hide his body?”

Tucker mumbled. “Almost did kill him. Caught me by surprise.”

Seichan dropped to a knee and examined the soldier, then glanced at Baashi. Her voice held a sharp edge. “He’s only a boy.”

Gray got a better look at the soldier’s face. He looked even younger than Baashi.

“I jumped him,” Tucker said, breathing harder. “I moved fast, barely thinking. Didn’t want him to alert the others. Had my arm around his neck, ready to snap it like a twig-only then saw he was a child. Still, I squeezed him until he passed out.”

Tucker stared down at his arms in disbelief and shame.

Gray remembered the fly Tucker had spared back in Tanzania, blocking his hand from swatting at it. The man clearly had enough of killing, any killing-unless it was in self-defense or to protect others.

To the side, Baashi stared at the boy on the ground, unblinking.

Did he see himself lying there?

Baashi looked at Tucker-and took a step away, scared.

That fear, more than anything, wounded the man.

“C’mon,” Gray said. “He’ll be fine. Someone will find him, but we don’t want to be anywhere near here when that happens.”

Tucker radioed his dog as the others climbed the steplike cataracts through the ravine. Gray waited beside him.

“You had no choice,” Gray said.

“We always have a choice,” Tucker answered bitterly.

Kane came silently into view, rushing forward, not gleefully but subdued. He sidled next to his handler, rubbing against his legs, as if sensing Tucker’s dark mood. Tucker patted him, reassured him.

Gray suspected some of that went both ways.

He had worked with military handlers and their dogs in the past. They had a saying-It runs down the lead-describing how the emotions of the pair became shared over time, binding them together as firmly as any leash.

Watching Tucker and Kane, he believed that now.

The two consoled each other, supported each other, found reserves of strength that could only be forged by such a deep connection.

Finally, Tucker stared over at Gray; so did Kane.

He nodded back at the pair.

They were ready.

They were soldiers.

All three of them.

And they had their mission.

14

July 2, 8:01 A.M. EST

Washington, DC

Painter found himself back in the Situation Room. His boss, the head of DARPA, General Gregory Metcalf, had summoned him to this early-morning meeting. The other attendees gathered in the president’s private conference room.

General Metcalf was already seated. He was African-American, a graduate of West Point, and though in his midfifties, he was as sturdy as a linebacker. The general leaned his head toward his superior, the secretary of defense, Warren W. Duncan, who wore a crisp suit and whose stark gray hair looked oiled and combed into rigid submission.

The three remaining members of this intimate summit were all of one family. Two were seated opposite the military men. The First Lady, Teresa Gant, looked like a faded lily in a beige twill dress. Her dark blond hair had been piled neatly atop her head, but strands had come loose and hung along the sides of her face, framing eyes that held a haunted look. Next to her, resting a large hand on hers, was her brother-in-law, the secretary of state, Robert Gant, sitting stiffly, defensive. His steely gaze upon Painter hid daggers.

And the greeting from the final member of the group was no friendlier.

President James T. Gant stalked the far side of the table. With his usual crisp directness, honed from his prior years as the CEO of various Gant family enterprises, he laid into Painter.

“What is this about an attack on some hospital camp in Somalia? Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?”

Painter had suspected this was the reason for this sudden call to the White House. The intelligence communities were already abuzz in regards to this attack, further complicated by the involvement of British Special Forces. Painter had hoped to keep a lid on this smoking powder keg for at least another couple of hours, to keep its connection to Amanda’s kidnapping secret.

That wasn’t to be.

Warren Duncan put a nail in the coffin. “I heard from the British Special Reconnaissance Regiment. They said they had men in the field there, that they were assisting some covert American team.”

James Gant pointed a finger at Painter. “Your team.” He swung around, unable to hide his disgust. “Show him, Bobby.”

The president’s brother tapped a video remote and brought up a live satellite feed from the UNICEF hospital. The camp was a smoky ruin, pocked by mortar craters. Survivors rushed about, seeking to aid the injured, or kneeling over bodies, or trying to put out fires.

President Gant shoved an arm toward the screen. “You said to avoid shock-and-awe, to keep Amanda’s kidnappers from knowing they’d acquired a high-value target-my daughter!” This last boomed out of his barrel chest, making him sound like a Confederate general rallying his troops to a fight.

And, plainly, this was going to be a brawl.

With Painter as the punching bag.

“That looks like shock to me, director,” Gant said. “And I’m certainly not awed by such a ham-fisted operation as you’re running. Not when my daughter and unborn grandson are at risk.”

Painter bore the brunt of this tirade without breaking eye contact with the president. The man needed to vent, to lash out. He waited for the fire to die back, enough to let reason slip past the panic of a frightened parent.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Gant finished, running fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair. His voice cracked on the last couple of words.

That was his opening. He kept his response just as blunt and direct. “Mr. President, the kidnappers know they have your daughter. I suspect they’ve known from the very beginning. For some unknown reason, she had been targeted for abduction.”

His statement both deflated the president and flared the fear brighter in his eyes.

“From this attack,” Painter continued with a nod to the wall, “and other incidents, it’s clear Amanda’s kidnappers have forgone hiding their knowledge. The boldness of this assault suggests two things.”

He ticked them off on his fingers. “One. The enemy must be spooked to act so brazenly, which suggests my men are closing in on her true location. Two. Amanda’s best hope for recovery lies with that same team.”

Support came from a surprising source. Painter’s boss cleared his throat. “I agree with the director, Mr. President,” Metcalf said. “We have no other assets available. Even the fast-response SEAL team in Djibouti needs a hard target-something we don’t have. As much as this operation has blown up in our collective faces, we have no other viable options for securing your daughter.”

Okay, it was lukewarm support, but Painter would take that from his boss. After bumping heads, the two of them had a professionally respectful but uneasy relationship. And Metcalf was savvy enough in Washington politics not to stick his neck out-at least, not out too far.

“But how do we know your team is still out there?” Gant asked, getting a nod from his brother at the table. “They might all be dead.”

Painter shook his head. “They’re not.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“From this.”

Painter stepped forward, took the remote, and tapped in an encrypted code. He’d preestablished the feed with one of the Situation Room’s watch team. On the wall-mounted monitor, a grainy video appeared, stuttering, full of digital noise.

“I apologize for the reception. I collected this feed via an ISR plane cruising at thirty-eight thousand feet above Somalia.”

Teresa Gant stirred enough to ask, “ISR?”

Her brother-in-law answered, “Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Basically, ears in the sky.”

“From there, I patched through the NRO satellite in geosynchronous orbit.”

Warren Duncan sat straighter. “This is live?”

“Maybe a six-second delay. I acquired the feed only half an hour ago.”

The president squinted a bit. “What are we seeing?”

The view was low to the ground, racing along a dirt track. Fleeting images of trees and leafy bushes flashed past at the edges.

“From the GPS coordinates transmitted, we’re seeing a road through the highland forests of the Cal Madow mountains.”

On the screen, the view zoomed up to a pair of legs, then the face of a small black boy. Audio was even worse, cutting in and out.

“… here… over by… hurry…”

The boy fled from the camera, racing away with the exuberance of youth.

“Who’s filming this?” the defense secretary asked.

Painter allowed a moment of self-satisfaction. “One of my newest recruits.”

3:08 P.M. East Africa Time

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

Kane chased after Baashi.

“Come see!” the boy exclaimed and skittered to a stop. His arm pointed toward the jungle, to a rutted track that cut off the main road.

If you could call it a road, Gray thought.

His team had been hiking into the highlands for the past forty-five minutes, leaving the ambush miles behind. They had returned to the gravel road after giving the murderous choke point a wide berth.

Gray kept a continual ear out for the growl of truck engines behind him as he set a hard pace into the heart of the mountains. Slowly over time, the gravel under his boots gave way to dirt, then, once into the misty highlands, to nothing more than tire tracks worn into the sandy silt.

Soon, the arid lowlands were a forgotten world. Here, verdant high meadows rolled down into valleys filled with misty forests of junipers and frankincense trees. And all around them, like broken dragon’s teeth, jagged peaks thrust toward the sky.

“That Shimbaris,” Baashi said, pointing to the highest peak in that direction. It looked like a toppled skyscraper covered in emerald forest. “They say the bad doctor in Karkoor valley. That way.”

He thrust his arm again toward the rutted track off the main road.

Tucker crouched at the turnoff, picking up clods of freshly turned dirt. “Been recent traffic through here. Mud tires.”

“The Land Rovers at the roadblock,” Gray said, meeting his eye.

They were on the right path.

Gray turned to the boy. “I want you to stay here, Baashi, off the road, hidden entirely out of sight. You don’t come out until you see one of us.”

“But I help!” he said.

“You’ve helped enough. I told Captain Alden I’d protect you.”

Seichan pointed a finger at the boy’s nose. “And you promised him you’d listen to us, right?”

The two of them sounded like scolding parents-and got the usual sullen teenager response. Baashi sighed heavily, crossed his arms, expressing his disappointment with every fiber of his being.

With the matter settled, the boy went into hiding, out of harm’s way, while Gray and the others headed down the shadowy turnoff, a tunnel made by a canopy of woven branches. They’d not taken more than a few steps when Major Jain called from the rear.

“Hold!”

Gray turned; the British soldier still stood at the edge of the main road in the sunlight. She held a hand up, then pointed it toward her ear.

Gray cocked his head, listening. He first heard Kane, rumbling deep in his throat, sensing something, too. Then in the distance, echoing off the surrounding peaks, the deeper groan of truck engines.

“Company coming,” Kowalski said.

Jain ducked off the road and into the shadows to join them.

Tucker grimaced. “Must’ve found the boy I tied up.”

“Or they’ve had enough killing for one day,” Kowalski said.

“Or they’re looking for more,” Jain added.

Kowalski grimaced. “You had to say that, didn’t you?”

She shrugged. “No matter how you cut it, boyo, we’re bloody screwed.”

Gray couldn’t argue with her, but they had no choice. They had to forge ahead, find Amanda, and do their best to survive.

“Let’s go.” Gray pointed his arm forward. “Tucker, I want Kane’s eyes and ears ahead of us. I’ve had enough surprises for one day.”

Tucker gave a curt nod and went to his dog.

They hurried down the road, staying at the periphery. The forest to either side offered better protection, but the dense growth would slow their progress, make too much noise.

Right now, he needed to put some distance between them and the approaching trucks.

“We can’t do this on our own,” Seichan said, striding fast next to him. “A guarded camp ahead of us, mercenary soldiers behind us-not great odds.”

Gray had already come to the same conclusion. He had to trust his gut that Amanda was here, that there was a reason for such lethal and overt reaction to their presence in the mountains. He shifted his shoulder pack and removed his satellite phone.

It was time to call in the cavalry.

That meant reaching Washington.

Gray dialed up Sigma command, hoping the quantum encryption built into the phone would keep the call from reaching the wrong ears. After a long moment and a series of passwords, he heard a familiar voice.

“Commander Pierce.”

Gray let out a hard breath of relief. “Director, I believe we’ve found where Amanda was taken. I’m not sure she’s still here, but as a precaution, we should mobilize SEAL Team six to my coordinates, so they’re ready when-”

“Already done,” Painter said, cutting him off. “I got approval from the defense secretary a few minutes ago. The SEAL team is en route to your position with orders to engage only if the president’s daughter is positively identified. They’re about forty minutes out.”

Forty minutes? That may be too late.

Confirming this, the roar of engines in the distance grew steadily louder. Amanda didn’t have forty minutes.

A disconcerting question rose in Gray’s mind. “Director, how do you know our position?”

“We’ve been monitoring your progress for the past half-hour.”

How?

Gray searched around him, then saw Tucker send his shepherd running ahead, hugging the forest’s edge.

Kane…

Tucker must have left his dog’s camera running since the roadblock.

“It was Kat’s idea,” Painter explained.

Of course it was. If anyone had the brains to find them without raising an alarm, it was Kat Bryant. She had proved countless times to be an elusive and crafty spider when it came to the intelligence web.

“Kat set up a passive search algorithm, set to the wireless frequency of the dog’s camera. Nothing that would trigger any alarm bells. We could watch over your shoulders without giving away your location.”

Gray was grateful for the covert support, but it also made him vaguely uneasy. In the future, he’d have to make sure to circumvent that ability if he wanted total privacy.

“Audio is bad, though,” Painter finished. “Cuts in and out, so keep that in mind. We can see you, but not always hear you.”

“Got it.”

Ahead, Tucker came running back toward him.

That had to mean trouble.

“Have to sign off,” Gray said.

Painter’s voice went hard. “I can see why. Go. But be-”

Gray cut him off before he could warn him to be careful.

It didn’t need to be said-shouldn’t be said. It was like wishing an actor good luck instead of break a leg.

Tucker came up, breathing hard. “Another Land Rover is blocking the road ahead, counted six men around it. Another handful in the camp.” A worried frown creased his face. “Look at this.”

Tucker held up his phone, displaying a dog’s-eye view of the facility.

A large tent-cabin, raised on pilings, stood in the middle of a cold camp. Around it, ash pits marked old bonfires. Garbage, rusted stakes, oil stains, along with a few collapsed tents, abandoned in haste, were all that was left of a large campsite. A few shreds of camouflage netting still draped from the trees at the forest’s edge, but that was it.

“Looks like most of the camp bugged out already,” Tucker said. “I’d say no longer than an hour ago.”

Gray felt the pit of his stomach opening to despair.

Were they already too late?

“But I did see shadows moving inside that cabin,” Tucker offered. “Someone’s still there.”

Seichan overheard. “Maybe they left their victim here, fearing reprisals, and scattered.”

Gray grasped at this thin hope.

Kowalski joined them. “So, what are we doing?”

Jain stood at his shoulder, bearing the same question on her face.

They needed a plan from here.

He ran various scenarios in his head. “We can’t risk panicking the remaining soldiers. We also don’t want to needlessly expose ourselves to the enemy combatants if Amanda has already been moved. We’ll do her no good dead.”

“Then what?” Kowalski asked.

Gray turned his focus upon Tucker. “We need to see inside that cabin.”

15

July 2, 3:24 P.M. East Africa Time

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

Tucker lay on his belly with Kane at the edge of the forest. Forty yards of open space stretched between his position and the cabin. With men milling at the entry road and three more soldiers scavenging the grounds ahead for anything of value, any attempt to cross here would be readily spotted.

Even a dog on the run.

Tucker stared through his rifle’s scope, studying the terrain. A lone soldier pushed a dented wheelbarrow past his field of view, stopping occasionally to pick something out of the discarded debris.

The radio scratched in his ear. It was Kowalski, reporting in from his post down the road, acting as rear lookout. “Company has arrived. Trucks-three of ’em-are reaching the turnoff.”

Gray responded on all channels. “Kowalski, rally back to our position.”

The rest of the team-Gray and the two women-had crept forward through the forest and lay in wait several meters from the lone Land Rover that guarded the ruins of the camp. They all waited for Tucker’s signal. If Amanda was in the tent, they’d ambush the vehicle, trusting the element of surprise and the cover of the jungle to overcome the enemy’s superior odds. If Amanda wasn’t here, they’d all retreat into the woods and regroup.

Gray spoke with a note of urgency. “Tucker, now or never.”

“Still, not clear,” Tucker whispered under his breath.

Thirty yards away, the man with the wheelbarrow picked up a sleeveless DVD, judged it, then flung it away with a flip of his wrist.

It seemed everyone was a critic.

Keep moving, asshole.

“Tucker,” Gray pressed, “the other trucks are turning and heading this way. You’ve got two minutes, or we have to start shooting and hope for the best.”

Tucker stared at the AK-47 slung over the soldier’s shoulder as the man continued sifting through the debris.

I’m not going to send Kane out just to be killed.

Tucker flashed back to that painful moment in Afghanistan. He again felt the pop of his ears as the rescue helicopter lifted off, felt the rush of hot air. He had been clinging to Kane, both bloodied by the firefight, by the exploded ordnance. But Tucker had never taken his eyes off Abel, his partner’s littermate, who’d knocked them both clear before the buried IED detonated. If Kane had been Tucker’s right arm, Abel was his left. He’d trained them both-but he’d never readied himself for this moment.

Abel raced below, limping on three legs, searching for an escape. Taliban forces closed in from all directions. Tucker strained for the door, ready to fling himself out, to go to his friend’s aid. But two soldiers pinned him, restraining him.

Tucker yelled for Abel.

He was heard. Abel stopped, staring up, panting, his eyes sharp and bright, seeing him. They shared that last moment, locked together.

Until a flurry of gunfire severed that bond forever.

Tucker’s grip tightened on his rifle now, refusing to forget that lesson. He had a small black paw print tattooed on his upper left shoulder, a permanent reminder of Abel, of his sacrifice. He would never waste another life like that, to send another dog to certain slaughter.

“I need a distraction,” he radioed back fiercely to Gray. “Something to pull attention away from here. Kane’ll get shot before he can get halfway to the cabin.”

The answer to his desperate plea came from an unexpected location-from directly behind Tucker.

“I do it,” said a squeaky voice with the strain of forced bravery. “No want Kane shot.”

Tucker rolled around in time to see Baashi dart away into the forest. Cursing under his breath, he radioed Gray. “Baashi followed us. Heard me. I think he’s going to do something stupid.”

Kowalski responded, “See him. I’ll grab him.” Then, seconds later, defeat tinged his voice. “Kid’s a friggin’ jackrabbit.”

A shout cracked across the forest, coming from the direction of the narrow road. “ISKA WARAN!” Baashi called out. “HA RIDIN!”

Tucker pictured him approaching the Land Rover, hands in the air.

A rapid exchange followed in Somali.

Jain translated via the radio. “He’s telling them his mother is sick. He came a long way from his village to see the doctor here.”

Tucker’s fingers tightened on the stock of his rifle. The three soldiers adrift in the camp moved toward the gate, drawn by the commotion. For better or worse, Tucker got his distraction.

He reached and gave Kane a warm squeeze on his ear. They didn’t have time for their usual good-bye ritual.

With a twinge of foreboding, he flicked his wrist, leaving a finger pointing toward the cabin.

Kane took off like a shot, dashing low across the open field.

“DAAWO!” Baashi called out.

“He’s asking for medicine,” Jain said.

He got something else.

A savage spat of gunfire burst forth.

3:26 P.M.

Seichan watched Baashi dance backward, dirt exploding in front of his toes. Laughter followed from the soldiers gathered in front of the Land Rover, enjoying their sport.

A hard man with a jagged scar splitting his chin and turning his lower lip into a perpetual scowl waved the others to silence and sauntered with the haughtiness of a reigning conqueror. He had his helmet tilted back, his flak jacket open. He rested a palm on a holstered pistol as he approached Baashi, who cowered, half-bowed under the other’s gaze.

“Jiifso!” he commanded. “Maxbuus baad tahay!”

Major Jain hid on the other side of the road with Kowalski. The British soldier translated, softly subvocalizing into her radio. “He’s telling Baashi to lie down, that he’s his prisoner.”

Baashi obeyed, dropping to one knee, placing a hand on the ground, groveling in submission.

The soldier grinned, made meaner by his scarred lower lip. He pulled his pistol out.

He’s going to execute the kid-but not before terrorizing him.

Seichan remembered another man, another weapon. He had held a knife at her naked throat, his breath on her neck, twice her weight, thick with hard muscle. They sent him against her when she was seventeen, a training exercise. A sadist of the darkest ilk, a perverse predator, he wouldn’t just kill her; he intended to degrade and savage her before taking her life. To survive, she had to submit, to tolerate his touch-only long enough to secure his knife when he let his guard drop for a hot breath. She had gutted him in the end-but she still remembered the ruin of that day, the utter degradation of the powerful over the weak, and, worst of all, what was destroyed forever in her.

She wouldn’t let that happen to another.

Seichan shifted her SIG Sauer pistol toward the soldier. Gray crouched at her side where they hid, meters into the forest, shielded by a thicket of bushes. He touched a finger to her shoulder, warning her not to shoot, not yet.

Metal glinted as Baashi’s other hand, half-hidden by his thin body, slipped a military dagger out of the back of his pants. It looked as long as the boy’s forearm.

The sight shocked her, proving her earlier assessment. She and the boy were the same.

I was this boy.

But Baashi was going to get himself killed.

Seichan steadied her aim, feeling Gray’s fingers tighten on her shoulder, ordering her not to act. She obeyed, but it left her body trembling with rage-and not a small amount of shame.

What is taking Tucker so long?

They needed confirmation from him-or, more precisely, from his partner.

Kane abandons bright sunlight for darkness as he ducks through heavy posts and under the raised wooden structure. It is cooler here. For a breath, he is blind as his pupils dilate and adjust to the darkness. Still, his ears prick, stretching senses deep into the shadows. He takes it all in, to fill the darkness with meaning and substance.

The creak of wood above…

The beat of boot heels on planks…

The drip-drip-dripping farther back…

He tastes the shadows with tongue and nose. Waste and spoor, oil and sludge. Farther back, a sharper taint that sets his hackles to rising. Fetid, with the promise of meat. He follows the trickling sound, sniffs where it falls in fat droplets from above.

Blood.

But that is not why he’s come.

He has been given a scent, trapped in a wad of cloth, smelling of sweat, and salt, and oil, and a feminine musk. He was sent on the hunt for it. He lifts his nose toward the planks above, where the blood seeps. He sniffs, drawing in the richness there, expanding trails in all directions, so many.

But through it all, a single thread matches, connecting here to that wad of cloth. He has found what he hunted.

He points his nose to the scent and voices his success-not the howl of wildness buried in his bones. That is not his way. He lets flow a soft whine, deep in his throat, proclaiming his victory.

He hears words in one ear that melt through him. “Good dog.”

He breathes in his satisfaction and lowers to his haunches; only now do his eyes fill in the spaces left bare by scent and sound.

Out of the darkness, a pair of red lights shines back at him, tiny and sharp. They come from devices attached to large barrels, reeking of rusted metal and bitter oil.

His hackles shiver, sensing danger.

At the edge of the forest, Tucker lived half in his skin, half in another.

He had heard what Kane heard: creaking and boot steps. And he saw what Kane saw: fluid seeping through the planks from above. But was it blood, oil, water? He couldn’t say for sure.

Then Kane pointed his nose, followed by a soft whine.

Success.

He radioed it to Gray. “Kane found Amanda’s scent at the cabin. She was there.”

And maybe still is.

“Understood,” came the response, tense. “Clear a path and get in there. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

As Gray finished, the image on the small screen swung to the side. The gritty night vision of Kane’s camera revealed two large barrels, spaced at equal distance in the crawlspace under the tent-cabin. He read the word kerosene stenciled on one of them. Worst of all, attached to their sides, two glowing transmitters illuminated explosive charges.

Panicked, he touched his throat mike. “Commander-”

Gunfire cut off the rest of his warning.

3:27 P.M.

Seichan fired, clipping the scarred man in the left knee. He toppled with a scream of surprise. Gray strafed the soldiers gathered on their side of the Land Rover. Kowalski and Jain did the same on the other.

Seichan dashed out of hiding to protect the boy, who had dropped flat as the firefight commenced. She strode to the downed soldier, while firing two rounds at another commando sheltered behind one of the Land Rover’s open doors. The scarred monster on the ground swung his pistol at her, but she put a bullet through his throat, collected his weapon, and fired both guns at the truck, pistols now blazing in both fists.

“Get off the road!” she hollered at Baashi.

He leaped like a frightened doe into the sheltering forest.

A commando got behind the wheel of the Land Rover, cranked the engine, and hit the accelerator. The truck barreled toward her.

She stood her ground, aimed both guns, and fired a single round from each.

Left, to shatter the windshield.

Right, to put a round through the driver’s eye.

She stepped aside as the truck’s momentum carried it toward her, veering drunkenly at the last second and crashing into the woods.

The firefight lasted another ten seconds-and ended as abruptly as it started. Soldiers sprawled, limp and unmoving on the road.

Gray cleared the forest, holding a hand over his left ear, listening, likely to Tucker. He glanced toward the tent-cabin with a grimace of worry. He pointed his other arm down the road.

The loud rumble of trucks drew her attention around. Brakes squealed. Those coming had heard the gunplay.

“Keep them off our backs for as long as possible,” he ordered-then took off into the campsite on foot.

Seichan stared down the forested tunnel. Her group had the element of surprise before. That was no longer the case. And the enemy had three times their force, vastly outnumbering and outgunning them.

Kowalski and Jain joined her, sharing concerned but determined looks.

Seichan glanced over her shoulder as Gray disappeared from view. She hoped the president’s daughter was still here, still alive. Either way, they were committed now. She waved the others back into hiding.

“You heard Gray,” she said. “We hold our ground here.”

It had better be worth it.

3:28 P.M .

Tucker dropped the last of the three soldiers in the camp, the one with the wheelbarrow. The kills felt cowardly, but he had no time for delicacy; all he could do was grant them clean head shots.

But he knew there was at least one other enemy, remembering the creak of boards from inside the cabin. Whoever was holed up there had surely heard the attack-but what would they do?

Gray appeared to his left, pistol in hand, running for the lone structure. Tucker had managed to get word to him as the firefight ended, warning of the fiery bomb hidden under the tent.

Tucker took a fast glance at his phone’s screen. A bobbling image showed Kane still struggling to yank away the first glowing transceiver from the explosive charge. Tucker had lost precious seconds trying to get his dog to understand, directing Kane via radioed commands. Even as close as they were, there were limits to their communication.

Tucker had to do something. He burst out of hiding and sprinted toward the cabin, too. He was closer, but Gray had a head start. They should reach the door at the same time.

He lifted his phone. On the screen, Kane yanked his head and the bright glow of the transceiver died.

Good boy.

Kane turned to the other charge, shining brightly in the dark. He took a step toward it-when the light began to blink rapidly.

Illuminated digits flared into existence on the device.

00:30

00:29

Cursing, Tucker skidded to a stop. The bastard inside had activated the charge, set to a timer. Rifle blasts drew Tucker’s attention from the screen. The last soldier slammed out of the cabin door, weapon at his hip, firing wildly, trying to make a break before those seconds ran out.

Gray dropped flat, sliding on his belly, pistol pointed forward, gripped in both hands. He fired three fast rounds.

The gunman tumbled headlong down the steps from the raised porch. He landed hard, but from the placement of Gray’s rounds, all to the face, he was surely dead before he even hit the ground.

Tucker stared at the tiny screen as Kane closed in on the second barrel.

00:23

The dog would never be able to work the transceiver free in time, and with the device activated, any attempt to remove it could set it off prematurely.

“Kane!” he yelled, not bothering with the radio. “To me!”

Gray scrambled to his feet and looked over at him.

Tucker pointed toward the crawlspace between the pilings. “It’s set to blow! Twenty seconds.”

The two men sped toward the tent.

Kane flew into view, tail high, and ran to Tucker’s side. The group reached the porch steps together, pounded up, and shoved through the spring-loaded door.

The makeshift medical ward looked as stripped and vacated as the rest of the camp: upended boxes, stray pieces of hospital gear, a toppled privacy screen. The place had been abandoned in a hurry. They must have suspected time was running out for them.

But the ward had not been entirely emptied.

At the rear, a hospital bed rested against the back wall. It was not vacant. A blond woman lay under a thin blanket, an oxygen mask over her face, her limbs secured with leather straps. The bedding over the mound of her belly was stained red, soaked through. More blood ran from under the blanket and pooled on the plank floor.

Gray rushed forward, yanked away the mask, then ripped back the covers. He exposed what had been so chastely hidden.

Tucker fell to his knees in horror.

They were too late.

16

July 2, 8:30 A.M. EST

Washington, DC

“No!”

The anguish in that single word, that long, sustained note of pain and grief, echoed off the walls of the small conference room. The First Lady swung away from the screen, covering her face as if to make the sight go away.

Her husband stood stiff, frozen, staring unblinking at the screen.

No one said a word-Teresa’s cry encompassed everything.

The last image remained fixed in Painter’s eye, when Gray pulled back the bedsheets. Someone had operated on Amanda, sliced her open from rib to pelvis, exposing the ruins of her empty uterus. They’d performed a C-section, stolen the baby, and left Amanda’s dead body behind like an empty husk.

On the screen now, Painter watched Gray swing away, grabbing up Tucker from the floor. The image bobbled wildly as the two men and the dog fled the cabin. He understood their haste. They’d all seen the barrels of kerosene, the glow of the explosive charge, and the timer counting down.

An image of running legs, a distant forest-then a bright blast that sent everyone tumbling forward. A fireball rolled overhead. The second barrel of kerosene rolled off to the side, jettisoned clear by the blast wave, leaving behind a trail of oil before it vanished out of view.

The audio feed frazzled, then went silent.

A moment later, Tucker’s face appeared as he checked on his dog. His mouth moved, but there was no sound. In the background, Gray got up on his hands and knees, hurriedly shrugging free his shoulder pack, which was on fire. He threw it aside and rolled in the dirt to put out the smoldering back of his shirt.

They’d live.

Painter should have felt relief-but he was not there yet.

Teresa burst out of her seat and into her husband’s arms. It was not to seek comfort. Her fists pummeled his body, sobs shook through her, weakening the effort. Tears flowed down her face.

“This is your fault!” she yelled into his chest as James Gant pulled his wife tight to him. “All our fault… they… they cut my baby open!”

She sagged in her husband’s arms, pressing her face into his chest, still shaking her head, trying to dismiss what she saw.

He held her up, looking over the crown of her head at Painter.

Anger burned through the raw grief in his stony eyes, directed at Painter, at sigma.

The president’s brother stood and gently coaxed the grieving parents toward the door. “Go, Jimmy,” Robert urged. “Take care of your wife. We can handle matters from here.”

Gant didn’t resist. The pair, still wrapped together, bonded by unimaginable grief and horror, slipped out of the room, gathering Secret Service men in their wake.

The defense secretary, Warren Duncan, placed a hand on Robert’s shoulder. “Sir, why don’t you go, too? Family should be together during times like this.”

Robert’s normally gentle and even tone turned acerbic. His gaze passed over Painter, scorching him with his bitterness. “Someone in the family should bear witness to the end of this fucked-up mission.”

Painter’s boss closed his eyes and gave the smallest shake of his head, utterly embarrassed and defeated.

On the screen, the dog’s-eye view showed a pair of trucks careening into the campsite, guns silently blazing from their side windows.

Despite the futility of the operation, it wasn’t over.

3:34 P.M. East Africa Time

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

“Go for cover!” Gray hollered.

He ran with Tucker and Kane away from the blasted ruins of the cabin. Black smoke swirled across the camp as flaming debris littered the ground and continued to drift down in flaming bits of tent fabric. The thick pall of smoke offered them enough cover to make a break for the forest as two Land Rovers skidded into the camp from the road.

Automatic fire sprayed from windows, mostly directed back the way they’d come, aiming for the others hidden in the forest. A furious firefight continued back there; likely his team had managed to ambush the third vehicle from the roadblock, but that battle was still far from over.

Before Gray, Tucker, and Kane could reach the shelter of the forest, their retreat was spotted. Gunfire ripped toward them. Kane yelped and sped faster. Tucker gave chase-but not before Gray grabbed the man’s rifle out of his fingers.

He swung it toward the Rovers and fired, cracking one of the side windows and forcing the shooter to duck.

“Go!” Gray yelled to Tucker. “Make for the others!”

Gray ran to the side, drawing fire. One of the Rovers fishtailed in the sandy soil and sped back toward the road, intending to go to the aid of the embattled third truck. The last Rover circled the smoking ruins of the cabin, coming around to face Gray head-on.

Then a new noise cut through the peppering blasts.

The gunplay lulled for a breath as the others heard it, too.

The thump-thump of a helicopter grew louder.

Gray searched the skies, knowing it was too soon for the SEAL team to arrive-and he was right. A familiar military-gray chopper rushed across the treetops, coming from the direction of the main road. It was the same attack helicopter that had laid waste to the UNICEF base.

It seemed all of the hens were returning to roost.

A whistling rocket screamed from the chopper’s undercarriage, blazing a trail of fire and smoke. It streaked down and slammed into the hood of the Rover headed toward the forest. The truck flipped end-over-end-then exploded as it landed.

Gray crouched, stunned.

Overhead, gunfire chattered from the open door of the chopper’s rear cabin as it rushed past. A familiar figure hung out the door, pointing his weapon below.

Captain Trevor Alden.

Gray remembered his last view of the British soldier, manning the turret of the Ferret armored car, guns blazing. He must have somehow forced the chopper down and commandeered it for the British Special Forces. Then he’d come looking for them.

A decision the captain might still regret.

The second Rover, which had braked to a stop with the arrival of the helicopter, believing them allies, gunned its engine and raced across the camp. The chopper had to swing around, twisting in midair to bring its rockets to bear.

A soldier popped out of the Rover’s open sunroof, hauling and balancing the black tube of a grenade launcher on his shoulder. At such close range, the shooter could not miss.

Gray lifted his rifle, but the Rover zigzagged crazily across the fiery camp. He’d never hit the soldier holding the launcher. But he found something that wasn’t moving.

The second barrel of kerosene, blasted free by the explosion, lay on its side in a pool of leaking oil. The Rover, its driver focused above, sped toward it-or at least close enough. Gray couldn’t trust firing into the barrel itself. Despite what had been portrayed in movies, such shots seldom caused an explosion.

Instead, he needed to light the barrel’s wick.

Cocking his eye to the scope, he fired into a neighboring smoking section of floor planking. The wood exploded and rained fiery slivers across the pool of kerosene. Flames flared where they landed and chased across the oil’s surface, aiming for the leaking barrel.

The Rover then sped across and blocked his view.

Had he timed it-?

The explosion blew a fireball into the sky and shoved the truck to the side. Flaming oil blasted through the open windows, setting fire to everything.

Screams rang out.

A door fell open, revealing the hell inside.

Then the stockpile of grenades exploded within the cabin, shattering apart the Rover.

Gray ducked.

The helicopter dove away, churning through the smoke.

Straightening back up, Gray realized-after his ears stopped ringing-that all the gunfire had ended. He turned and saw Kowalski and Seichan enter the camp from the road, shouldering the thin form of Jain between them. The trio must have dispatched the last truck on their own, but not without a cost. The major limped on one leg, the other bled fiercely.

“She’s shot!” Kowalski bellowed.

Jain frowned up at him. “I’m fine. It’s your bloody body odor that might kill me before this little scratch.”

Still, Alden must have witnessed the injury to his teammate.

The chopper tilted to the side and sought a safe place to land.

Tucker also returned from the forest with his dog. Gray noted the eye of the camera facing him. His satellite phone was likely melted to slag inside the ruins of his smoldering shoulder pack.

The sting of the burn along his back flared as he searched the debris. He needed to communicate with Painter. This couldn’t wait. But the director had warned him that the audio pickup was crap on the dog’s video feed. Gray could not let this next message be misconstrued.

He found a piece of tent fabric, burned at the edges, and used the tip of a charred stick to write a short note.

He prayed it reached Painter.

8:44 A.M. EST

Washington, DC

Smoke obscured most of the view of the fiery camp. There was little else to see on the video, especially as the helicopter landed, stirring up a whirlwind of debris.

Painter wasn’t the only one to realize the same.

The defense secretary still stood beside Robert Gant with a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Go,” Duncan said. “This is over, Bobby. Join your family. They need you now more than we do.”

Robert continued to stare at the monitor, but Painter suspected he didn’t see anything, lost in the depths of the tragedy.

Finally, a rattling sigh escaped him. He stared at Painter, but the fire there had snuffed out in his eyes, leaving only a dull grief. He looked a decade older than his sixty-six years. He simply patted Duncan’s side and exited without a word.

But the defense secretary was not done. He pointed at Painter’s boss, his voice stone-cold. “I would have a word with you, General Metcalf. In private.”

“I understand.” Metcalf cast Painter a withering glance.

The two men exited, but not before Duncan poked a finger into Painter’s chest. “I want a report on my desk within the hour.” He waved to the monitor. “And a copy of this feed. I want a full accounting of this tragedy… every detail on how this all went to hell.”

The two men exited, leaving Painter alone in the conference room.

On the monitor, the smoke cleared. Gray’s face swelled into the camera. His lips moved, but the audio was still down. Then Gray stepped back and lifted a bit of burned fabric into view. He had written something on it.

As Painter read the scribbled words, he stumbled forward in disbelief. He caught himself on the edge of the table.

How could this be?

He stared toward the door, ready to run out, to call the others back. He even took a step in that direction-then stopped, his mind working furiously, running various permutations through his head.

He covered his mouth with his hand.

There remained too many variables, too much unknown and unexplained. The truth revealed on the screen was too valuable to release without thought. But it was also a cruelty beyond words to remain silent.

Still, he slowly turned to the table, picked up the remote control, and switched off the monitor. He would have to edit away this last bit of video before he handed it off to Warren Duncan.

He stared at the dark monitor, judging if he was capable of doing this. But his job was to make the hard decisions, no matter who got hurt. And this was one of the hardest.

He pictured Teresa dissolving into despair and grief; he heard again her scream of denial, her railing against what could not be true.

In the end, the First Lady had been right.

Though the monitor was off, Gray’s last message still burned in his mind’s eye.

God, forgive me.

No one must know.

17

July 2, 3:48 P.M. East Africa Time

Airborne

Her senses returned like a bright light that slowly pooled outward, watery at the edges. She felt as if she were a swimmer rising from the depths of a black sea. Faces hovered over her. Voices spoke, muffled and indistinct. Her throat hurt, her tongue was dry, which made it hard to swallow.

“… Coming around,” a familiar voice said in a German-Swiss accent.

She made out the severe blond bob, the icy eyes.

Petra.

The horror of her situation swelled through her again, sharpening her senses as she surfaced into the cold, hard reality of the moment.

Another face leaned over her. A bright light flashed into her eyes, stinging, searing into the back of her skull. She shied away, turning her head.

She lay in a shallow box, cushioned all around. She heard the drone of jet engines, felt the vibration of flight.

“Pupillary response is good,” Dr. Blake said. “She’s tolerating the sedation well. What about the fetus, Petra?”

“Heartbeat and oxygenation continue to remain within normal parameters, doctor. With the wireless transmission from the fetal monitor around her midsection, we’ll be able to assess her condition from a distance after we land.”

“How long is the flight?”

“Another three hours.”

Dr. Blake’s face pulled away. “No need to revive her fully, then. For now, keep her lightly sedated with a propofol drip. We can send her deeper once we’re in final approach to land.”

“We should also allow at least fifteen minutes to secure the royal diplomatic seals around the coffin.”

Coffin?

Amanda turned her watery focus to the pillowed sides of the box. Fear spiked through her.

“You’re right, Petra. Even with all the palms and wheels greased by our benefactors, we don’t want any trouble going through customs with the casket. Luckily everyone now believes she’s dead.”

Dead?

Blake continued, “So no one will be looking for her. With everyone off our backs, we’ll finally have the time to deliver this baby safely. In another couple of hours, it will be good to wash the stink of the jungle off and return to a proper medical lab.” Footsteps retreated. “I’m going to the cabin bar. Can I get you a drink?”

“Water, with a sliver of lime.”

“Always the professional, Petra,” he scolded with an amused tone. “Stop fretting. We’ll have the package delivered by nightfall. Then maybe you’ll relax.”

Petra’s face loomed larger, her breath smelling of cinnamon and cigarette smoke. “I’ll relax once we have her fetus on the vivisection table at the lab.”

“I keep forgetting that’s your specialty, my dear. I thought I was skilled with scalpel and forceps… but you put me to shame with your ability to tease a body into so many perfect anatomical sections.”

“That’s the easy part,” Petra said, straightening up.

“Of course.” A small laugh accompanied his words. “Where you truly shine is how you keep those sections alive.”

Alive?

What did they mean? What were they talking about?

Amanda tried not to picture such a horror, but it filled her head anyway. She wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. She had known her baby was under threat-it was why she had fled the States-but she never imagined anything as horrific as this. It went beyond her worst nightmares.

I don’t want to hear any more.

Her silent plea was answered.

The creak of hinges rasped to the left. A dark shadow rose and fell heavily over her, shutting out all light and sound. The lid of her coffin had been closed.

Amanda shuddered in the blackness, praying that this casket truly became her coffin, that she’d suffocate before they landed. Better that than allowing her baby boy to suffer the atrocities planned for him.

… how you keep those sections alive…

Those dismaying words haunted the darkness-along with an all-consuming question.

Where are they taking me?

4:00 P.M.

Cal Madow mountains, Somalia

“She was definitely being held at the camp here,” Gray said, holding the satellite phone to his ear, reporting in to Sigma command. “Tucker’s dog confirmed Amanda’s scent before all hell broke loose.”

His choice of words was appropriate. He stared at the smoldering wreck of the cabin, at the fiery remains of the two Rovers. His other teammates were making sure no other enemy combatants remained a threat. Captain Alden’s helicopter rested across the way, engine idling, rotors turning slowly. A British medic from Alden’s rescue crew worked on Jain’s leg.

Kowalski looked on, concerned. Despite the differences in size and gender, the pair were two peas out of the same pod. A scary proposition. A female Kowalski.

Gray had retrieved the satellite phone from the big man’s pack. He didn’t know if Painter had received his frantic handwritten note and wanted to follow up as quickly as possible.

“But why do you want to keep Amanda’s survival a secret?” Gray asked, questioning again the need for such a cruel deception. “I understand the fear of an intelligence leak. But to keep the president and his family in the dark… it must be killing them.”

“It is, but the administration-if they suspect she’s still alive-will insist on bringing all forces to bear in finding her. And look how that turned out this time around. For Amanda’s sake, we’ve got to restrict this knowledge to as few ears as possible.”

Gray took a deep breath. It was a ballsy move on the director’s part, but it made brutal sense, especially in light of his own suspicions. He shared them with Painter. “Director, I’m almost certain that events here were purposefully staged to make it look like Amanda was killed.”

“Why do you think that?” Painter asked.

“The woman in the bed. She was blond, the same size and body shape as Amanda. From the distension of the uterus and belly, she was obviously once pregnant, possibly an equal number of weeks along. But more incriminating, when I removed the oxygen mask, I saw her mouth was a bloody ruin. Someone didn’t want Amanda’s dental records pulled to identify the charred remains.”

Painter remained silent, digesting the information.

“Even the rushed C-section suggests the same conclusion,” Gray said. “I think they feared any fetal remains might not match those on record from Amanda’s prenatal exams.”

Painter’s voice grew hushed at the horror of it all. “So they cut out the baby.”

“Exactly. And disposed of it to cover their tracks. I also smelled an accelerant soaked into the bed. I think that’s what the last soldier was doing here, prepping the remains. They wanted to assure the body was burned so thoroughly that no DNA could be extracted. But we caught them off guard before they could complete their task.”

“Why would Amanda’s kidnappers go through such effort?” Painter asked, but it sounded more like he was pondering the question, thinking out loud.

Still, Gray answered. “They obviously wanted to throw off anyone still looking for her. If the world thinks she’s dead, the hunt ends here.”

“True. But I fear our enemy is even smarter than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. They knew you were closing in, forcing their hand. They had to move her, but they turned the situation to their own ends. Staging Amanda’s death-but also achieving another goal.”

Gray’s mind raced alongside the director’s line of reasoning. He knew everything that had befallen Painter at the White House. He suddenly understood. “The enemy was able to blame Amanda’s death on our operation.”

“At least partially.”

As Gray considered who might have such an end goal, his blood went cold. There was only one organization harboring such a vendetta against sigma.

“Director, are you suggesting the Guild is somehow involved in Amanda’s kidnapping?”

Gray felt his vision narrowing, picturing his mother’s casket lowering into the cold dirt.

“Commander Pierce, we don’t know that for certain. But either way, it gives Sigma a black eye-if not a fatal blow.”

Gray knew that had been an ultimate goal of the Guild for years. They had tried multiple times to destroy sigma, once even leading an assault upon their headquarters.

He closed his eyes.

Have I played right into their hands here, done their work for them this time?

“What are we going to do?” Gray asked.

“Your mission objective remains the same. To find Amanda. That’s all that matters at the moment.”

Gray choked down the anger that flared inside him. He forced his fingers through his hair, triggering a twinge of complaint from his blistered back. The director was correct. He had to stay on mission, which meant answering one all-important question concerning Amanda.

Where to begin looking for her?

Painter voiced the same question. “Were you able to get any clue from inside the cabin, anything that might point to where they were taking Amanda?”

Gray stared at the smoking pile of debris. “We didn’t have any time. She could be anywhere.”

Painter let out a long sigh-not in defeat but in renewed determination. “Then we start from scratch. We’re not giving up. I’ll see what I can do at my end. You and Captain Alden canvass any locals in the area. Someone must know something. In the rush to evacuate, something might have fallen through the cracks.”

Gray agreed. The enemy clearly hadn’t expected his team to arrive at the camp so quickly-if at all.

“Pierce!” The call came from Tucker.

He turned and found the man waving to him from the road that exited the camp. Tucker stepped aside to allow a small figure to run into view. It was Baashi. Gray had last seen the boy diving into the forest after almost getting shot.

Seichan had gone out to look for him.

She appeared steps behind him, dragging a prisoner with her, clutching him by the shirt collar as he stumbled alongside her.

Gray spoke into the phone. “Director, I’ll call you back in a few minutes. We may have caught a break.”

Signing off, he strode over to the group. Captain Alden headed over there, too.

Seichan met Gray’s eyes as he reached her. “I found Baashi leading this kid back out of the forest, heading our way.”

Baashi vigorously nodded. “I tell him you all good.”

Tucker looked pale. “It’s the same boy I jumped earlier by the creek.”

Gray saw he was right. It was the child Tucker had strangled and hog-tied. So the bound boy had been discovered by the enemy. No wonder the crew had hightailed it back to camp.

“Kid must’ve fled during our attack on the third truck,” Seichan said. “But Baashi tracked him in the woods and convinced him we were okay.”

From his wide, scared eyes, the new boy must be wondering if he’d made the right decision.

“Mr. Trevor!” Baashi burst out brightly and ran to meet the British captain as he joined them. He patted Alden on the chest and spoke to the other boy. “This the man I tell you about.”

Seeing the confused look on the captive’s face, Baashi repeated what he said in Somali. Then he stepped over like an excited tour guide and patted Kane, too, ending with “He good dog.”

Gray sidled next to Alden during all of this. “See if Baashi could ask the boy if he knows where Amanda was taken.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Gray had to wait while a fervid series of exchanges commenced. It involved a lot of back-and-forth and not a few suspicious glances cast his way. Finally, the boy seemed to relent. Pointing this way and that, he spoke briskly in Somali.

Alden eventually straightened and rejoined Gray.

“It seems, like with Baashi, people are willing to speak more openly around a child. He overheard some of the medical staff at the camp talking, making preparations to move the young woman to an airfield used by drug-runners. He says he heard them speak of flying to Dubai. But I don’t know if that’s just a stopover or a final destination because he also said they’re planning to go to heaven.”

To go to heaven? What did that mean? Was it some sort of suicide pact?

That didn’t sound like the enemy-and certainly not the Guild. Alden must have read his confusion and shrugged. He had no better explanation.

Still, Gray’s mood lightened. “At least, Dubai gives us a solid place to start looking. To hopefully pick up her trail again.”

Alden stared over at Jain, on a stretcher, one pant leg cut away. “Good luck, commander. I’ll see to the boys here.” He motioned to Baashi and the other kid. “In the meantime-”

The thumping of a helicopter cut him off, drawing his attention skyward.

“I believe that’s your SEAL team,” the captain said. “A bit late to the bloody party, but they can help secure the area. I’d suggest you and your team borrow that helo of mine. Clear out before too many questions get asked.”

“Before that,” Gray started, “about Amanda…”

Alden winked at him. “I heard she died here. A real tragedy.” So the good captain had already perceived, as Painter had, that Amanda’s best chance of survival lay in everyone continuing to believe that lie. “That’s what I’ll be reporting to my superiors.”

“Thank you,” Gray said and shook the man’s hand, grasping his forearm with the other.

“No thanks needed, mate. If it wasn’t for your quick thinking, there would’ve been more casualties at that UNICEF camp, including possibly my own men.”

With matters settled, Gray drew his group together and hurried toward the idling chopper. He wanted to be out of here before the SEALs clamped things down. The SEAL team was under orders to retrieve the charred body, to return the supposed remains of the president’s daughter back to the States-not a duty he would wish on anyone.

He called Painter again, reported what he’d learned, and coordinated logistics on their next move.

“We’re pulling up stakes here,” Gray said. “Any intelligence Kat can gather while we’re en route would help us hit the ground running once we’re wheels-down in Dubai City.”

“Understood. I’ll put a team on it. But I’ve got Kat working another angle.”

Gray paused as everyone loaded into the helicopter. Tucker lifted his dog. “What other angle?”

As Painter explained his worry that all of this bloodshed and terror somehow involved Amanda’s unborn child, Gray pictured the brutality of the cesarean performed on the anonymous woman, her body charred beyond recognition.

In his gut, Gray knew the director was correct.

This was all about the baby.

As he signed off and strapped into his seat aboard the chopper, another concern nagged him. It also centered on Amanda and her child. Gray couldn’t escape the sense that Painter had been withholding something from him. The director’s decision to keep Amanda’s survival a secret from her own parents never sat right with him. Painter was certainly a master chess player and could be coldhearted and tough when he had his back against the wall-but never this callous. His explanation felt forced, like there was something he didn’t want to share about Amanda or her family.

But what could it be?

With a roar of its engines, the helicopter slowly rose from the ruins of the camp, stirring smoke and ash, leaving the horrors below.

He might not know what gambit Painter was playing-but he knew one thing for certain.

This was just the beginning.

Much worse was still to come.

11:00 A.M. EST

Washington, DC

Robert Gant stepped through the air lock and entered the Class 1000 clean room, a stark white chamber with glass walls that looked out into the rest of the genomics lab. Staffed only by three researchers, the entire facility lay in an industrial area on the outskirts of Alexandria, virginia, and was listed as a private DNA test lab.

But that was not its purpose.

Its true function had been etched into one of the glass walls of the clean room: a frosted cross, decorated with spirals of DNA along its crosspieces.

“Show me,” he said, using the deep baritone that served him well in the past as a U.S. ambassador and now as secretary of state.

He allowed some of his irritation to ring out. He’d left Jimmy and Teresa to their grief to attend to private family business, but he wanted to keep this visit as short as possible.

The researcher, Dr. Emmet Fielding-decked out in white coveralls, gloves, boots, and hood-drew him to a laboratory table. A sealed crystal cylinder, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, held a murky aquamarine fluid. Beside it on the table rested a titanium sculpture that looked like a clawless crab supported by six articulated legs. Its flat metal carapace measured a foot across, reminding Robert of the land mines that still peppered Southeast Asia, where he’d spent the bulk of his ambassadorship.

Fielding lifted the cylinder from the table and held it in the palm of his hand. “This is the latest generation,” he said proudly. “Half a million neurons harvested from human fetal cortical tissue to form this new brain. And, once implanted, it will communicate via five thousand micro-electrodes. A fourfold improvement from the last generation.”

And a huge advance from where this all started.

This was Robert’s pet project. He had learned of the first tentative steps taken by the University of Reading in England back in 2009. A researcher in neuro-robotics discovered that a handful of neurons, collected from the cortex of lab rats and grown in a culture medium, could be wired into a small wheeled robot, and through electrode stimulation, it could control and operate the tiny vehicle, learning over time as new synapses formed to avoid objects and work through mazes. Shortly thereafter, another scientist, at the University of Florida, upped the ante, wiring twenty-five thousand rat neurons to a flight simulator. Over time that tiny brain learned to fly a jet flawlessly through mountains and thunderstorms.

Years later, utilizing the family’s financial and technological resources, Robert had moved that bar much higher. Initially, the research had been folded into a larger project, one going back decades, investigating the fusion of man and machine as a means of extending life-a goal sought by the Bloodline for centuries.

But this research into cyborg technology proved to be a dead end. It became clear that it would never be a feasible means of sustaining or prolonging life, especially with the more promising advent of stem-cell research. At that point in time, the Bloodline turned its eye in a new direction, forsaking the macro world of robotics for the micro world of genetics.

But even Robert didn’t have full access to that newest venture.

Instead, he’d been left to oversee this older project. Neuro-robotics still showed the potential to be a lucrative new weapons technology for the military. If rat brains could fly jet planes years ago, why not something more ambitious for the battlefield of the future?

“Let me give you a demonstration of the hexapod,” Fielding said.

The researcher opened the titanium carapace of the metal crab, exposing the microelectronics inside. He seated the neural cylinder into the electrode base at the heart of the pod and secured everything in place. Next, he carried the device to a neighboring chamber in the clean room. It had been set up as a test maze-but this was no ordinary flat puzzle. This labyrinth filled the entire ten-by-ten chamber, rising through fifteen levels of tunnels, chutes, and spirals.

“I ran the hexapod through this maze once already today. Now watch.”

Fielding inserted the crab-like machine through a lower slot, sealed the door, and used a Bluetooth device to activate it.

Tiny green lights flared along a groove that ran around the periphery of the hexapod’s carapace. Titanium legs stretched and tapped.

Robert leaned closer, unimpressed. “Why isn’t it-?”

The creature shot away, dancing on its six legs, gaining speed until it was a silvery blur. It sped through the maze with unerring accuracy, no doubling back to correct a wrong turn. It had remembered the complex path through the maze perfectly.

“I’m estimating the new brain’s neural intelligence is about that of your average canine,” Fielding said proudly.

A half-minute later, the hexapod reached the exit platform near the top, skidding to a stop.

Robert grinned. “Impressive.”

Fielding matched that expression, thrilled at the rare praise. He reached to the door and unlatched it. Before he could swing it open, the hexapod rammed forward. It burst out and latched its legs onto the researcher’s forearm. The sharp-pointed legs dug into his flesh. Blood seeped through his white coveralls.

“Motherf-” Fielding yelled and hit the Bluetooth controller, powering down the hexapod.

Still, he had to return to the table and manually pry each leg out of his arm to get it to release.

“The aggression of this newest generation is also through the roof,” Fielding said, wincing and nursing his bloody arm as proof. “I’d say we’ve engineered the equivalent of a limbic region of the mammalian brain, the lizard intelligence buried beneath the cortex, driven by base needs for survival.”

“For a battlefield weapon, that’s not an undesirable trait.”

“True.”

“And speaking of battlefields, you promised a field trial of the latest hexapods. That’s why I came all the way down here in person.”

“Of course. I have a monitor set up over here with live feed from the Lodge. Everything’s ready. They’ve been waiting for the green light.”

Robert followed Fielding to a fifty-two-inch HD monitor. The screen was subdivided into sections, each offering a different bird’s-eye view of a remote and isolated patch of woodland hills hundreds of miles away.

The centermost square showed a small concrete bunker sticking out of a meadow, like a giant anthill. A metal door sealed it shut.

“If you’re ready?” Fielding said.

“Get on with it,” Robert snapped.

Fielding spoke into a cell phone. Moments later, the metal door burst open and a woman was shoved outside. She wore a hospital gown and nothing else. She stumbled to her knees, shielding her eyes against the midday sun. Robert absently wondered how long it had been since the young woman had seen actual sunlight.

From the way she jumped and glanced back to the door, someone must have barked at her.

“They’re telling her to run if she wants to live.”

Robert frowned, not appreciating the sadism. This was an experiment, not a bloody sport, and should be conducted as such.

The subject took off for the forest at a dead run.

“There!” Fielding pointed to movement through the grasses, a dozen arrows, aiming for the fleeing woman. A pair split off, zipping away faster, intending to flank her. “Look how they’re pattern-swarming. I employed a new wireless communications system and linked the individual hexapods to one another, allowing them to function as a group or pack. Look how quickly they’re learning.”

Robert watched-half-aghast, half-excited.

The woman made it to the edge of the woods, but she must have heard the hunters. She looked over a shoulder, and the horror of what she saw tripped her feet. She fell to her knees, her mouth open in a silent scream.

Then the hunters reached her.

It did not take long.

Fielding held his chin in one hand, appraising the trial. “The new battlefield modifications of the pods seem to be working as engineered. The circular blades, the razored leg flanges… all performed flawlessly. I may want to tinker with the digging spades, see if I can get them to burrow better.”

“I’ve seen enough,” Robert said, straightening and stepping away.

Fielding followed him. “With your approval, I’d like to move the testing forward into the larger quadruped line.”

“That would be fine.”

Fielding pressed him. “But I’d need a few more test subjects. Something more challenging.”

Robert pictured the macerated remains of the woman on the screen. “I’m sure we can find them somewhere.”