Final Winter

CHAPTER ONE

The meeting took place at a time when the wreckage of the World Trade Center was still being doused with water, portions of the Pentagon’s south wall were still collapsing, and bits of metal from what had once been a Boeing 767 passenger jet were being dug out of the ground in a rural area of Pennsylvania. It was held in a small, carpeted room with wood paneling, a badly polished conference-room table, and framed Audubon Society bird prints on the wall. The dull-colored furniture and decorations announced that the room had last been serviced during the Johnson Administration; the smell and general dampness in its interior also announced that, despite its looks, the room was in a concrete cube, one hundred feet beneath the ground. The air smelled of soot and sweat and defeat.

Three men were at the meeting. In front of each of them was a fresh yellow legal pad, sharpened pencils, and uncapped black-ink Bic pens. The CIA man who had called the meeting looked at the other two participants: a heavyset man from the FBI who had not shaved in at least two days, and a taller, thinner man, whose blue Oxford shirt had one collar flap unbuttoned and who worked for the National Security Agency. Both men’s eyes were red-rimmed and watery, unfocused a bit with exhaustion and fear, and the CIA man knew he looked just as distressed.

He said, ‘There’s going to be lots of time later for investigations, for recriminations. This isn’t going to be that time.’

The NSA man said, ‘Then why the hell are we here? Look, none of us have the time to fuck around with—’

The FBI man held up a hand. ‘There’s a point. Always has to be a point. Let him finish.’

He nodded in appreciation. ‘We all know what’s going to happen. After the initial shock, in a week, maybe a month, the headhunters will be out there, hunting for us. And we all know that we’re going to have the information and the evidence they need to bloody us and our people.’

The other two men sat silently. Not one of them had picked up a pencil or a pen. The CIA man said, ‘Let’s be honest. Once we start walking back the dog, once we start going through all those terabytes of information and e-mail intercepts and cellphone recordings, we’re going to find the bits and pieces of what had been going on during the past year or so. Something this elaborate, this well planned, didn’t happen without us getting the hints that something was up. And that will come out, and we’re going to take major grief before it’s over.’

The FBI man opened his hands in apparent despair. ‘You know what we’re up against. We didn’t have the people, the resources, hell, we don’t even have enough Arabic translators on hand to…’

The voice dribbled off, like he knew he had been preaching to the converted. The FBI man wiped at his eyes. ‘Go on.’

The CIA man said, ‘There will be changes ahead. Shifts in agencies, budgets. Rumsfeld will get everything he wants and more. We’ll probably get what we want, though we’ll have to sacrifice some bodies to make Capitol Hill and the Post and the Times happy. Everybody will think that an intelligence failure this huge has been corrected. There’s even talk about setting up some damn homeland-security department. But it’s not going to work. You know it, I know it. It’s not going to work. We’re just too damn big and complex. Things get missed all the goddam time.’

The NSA man said, ‘NASA.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘NASA,’ he repeated, his fingers wiggling slightly, from energy fueled by lots of caffeine and not much sleep. ‘In the late 1950s is when it was organized. We were getting our asses kicked by the Soviets in the space program. Our rockets kept on blowing up. So the brightest young pups were hired, were stuck in a swamp in Florida, and were told to get the job done. They built their rockets, their capsules, and you know what they did if they found out they needed a special wrench or tool? They drove to the nearest fucking hardware store and bought it, that’s what. No contract bidding. No purchase orders. No reviews of parts-procurement that could eat up six or eight months. No required diversity training for their contractors. No, they bought the tools they needed and got the job done. And less than ten years later, we were walking on the moon.’

The CIA man could see he was making progress. He pressed on. ‘Yeah, they got the job done. And then they got fat, slow, cautious. They became experts on filling out paperwork. Not experts on buying the right wrenches. We should have the stars-and-stripes flying on Mars right now. And we’re not going to do that, not in our lifetimes.’

The FBI man said, ‘What are you suggesting?’

The CIA man shifted in the seat, felt the ache in his hips. ‘We have a chance now, with everybody in shock, to set up what has to be set up. We’re going to need something new, something hungry, something that’s not going to fuck around with paperwork and procedures and making sure the right asses get kissed. We put something together tonight, the three of us, guaranteed, we’ll have the necessary Presidential and Congressional approvals, with the funding and mandate we need, within forty-eight hours. We wait another week or so, another month, and we’ll be screwed. They’ll reshuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic, that’s what’s going to be done, and we can’t afford it.’

The other two men nodded. The CIA man knew that he should have felt pleased at their reaction, but he was still too damn tired, too damn wired. ‘I’m thinking of setting up Tiger Teams. Know the phrase?’

‘Sure,’ the NSA man said. ‘Specialty teams, brought in from the outside, to review and attack a problem and present a solution. Military to industry to almost everything else. Sure. Tiger Teams.’

The CIA man said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do. Tiger Teams, recruited from our agencies, from outside, from colleges and media and think tanks and law enforcement. People who can think on their feet, poke and probe and not be satisfied with the ready answer. Tiger Teams for border control, bio-warfare, intelligence analysis, nuclear proliferation, everything and anything. We’ll draw up a list, get something on paper and over to Sixteen Hundred by morning.’

‘Think they’ll be receptive?’ asked the FBI man.

‘The other night the President and his wife were asked to sleep on a pull-out couch in a White House bomb shelter. He’ll be receptive. And both sides of the aisle in Congress, we can get them on board, too. The leaders in both parties, they were evacuated from the Capitol last week in helicopters and armored vehicles. That tends to focus one’s mind.’

‘What’s the oversight going to be?’ asked the NSA man.

‘Not sure yet,’ the CIA man admitted. ‘But it’ll be minimal. They’ll have the mandate to get the job done. Performance will be what counts.’

The NSA man grimaced. ‘I can see the Congressional hearings, decades down the road, where we’ll be brought before the panel in wheelchairs, testifying on why the hell we set up a rogue intelligence group like this. Green light for almost everything, no oversight. A hell of a thing.’

‘Sure is,’ the CIA man said. ‘And this is what we’ll show them.’

From inside his suitcoat pocket, he pulled out a thin metal object, tossed it down on the conference-room table, where it clattered to a stop. The other two men looked on. He said, ‘That’s all it took. Some box cutters and knives, nineteen airline tickets, and nineteen assholes ready to kill themselves. That’s all. And we lost several thousand people, four jet aircraft, the World Trade Center, part of the Pentagon, and billions of dollars in our economy. For any other asshole out there thinking to do us harm, that sounds like a hell of a bargain.’

The two other men stared at the box cutter, and then looked up at the CIA man. He said, ‘And we’ll tell those investigators, that’s what we were up against. And why we had to do everything to make sure that the next nineteen guys from the Middle East who didn’t like us or Barbie or Coca-Cola didn’t come here carrying suitcase nukes.’

There was a pause. He said, ‘You on board?’

The FBI man looked at the NSA man and said. ‘Yeah.’

His companion nodded. ‘Yeah. Let’s get the fuckers.’

‘Sure,’ the CIA man said. ‘But first, we’ve got work to do.’

CHAPTER TWO

In Lahore, Pakistan, the wind was blowing down from the Hindu Kush, bringing with it the smell of dust, cooking fires and burning coal. Nineteen year-old Amil Zahrain paused in his quest for a moment, letting his left foot — the crippled one — rest some as it ached. He looked about the crowded sidewalks with wide brown eyes. This was the busiest place he had ever seen in his life, and he was quite scared, and quite lost.

A hand went into his thin cotton shirt, into the pocket his sister had secretly sewed for him, not more than a week ago. There, wrapped in paper, was his midday meal, a piece of flat bread, wrapping goat cheese and cabbage, and nestled next to his meal was a small fortune: one hundred Pakistani rupees, and an American twenty-dollar bill. And, between both of them, a thin piece of black plastic that was his weapon this day, to help kill the Jews and the infidels.

But he was lost!

Amil looked around the crowded streets again, looking vainly for a street sign or any other symbol that would help him reach his destination. He sighed, shifted his weight, winced again at the pain in his left foot. He had gotten up this morning before sunrise in his small village, about fifty kilometers to the east of Lahore. With other day workers there, he had scrambled aboard a wheezing bus that rode the bumpy Route A-2 that led into Lahore, and he had stood for most of the trip, taking in the kilometers after kilometers of crowded shacks and buildings that had been erected up against the old walls of the city. All along the way to the city, he had murmured to himself, repeating the holy prayers that he had memorized in the few short years he had spent in the local madrassa, asking for God’s help and God’s strength to do what had to be done.

The ride had been uneventful, except for one brief moment, along a place called Killorney Boulevard, when he had spotted a small fortress of a building, flying that hated red-white-blue flag, and he had stared at it with such contempt for a moment, until he’d remembered his instructions. Be quiet, do not bring notice to yourself, just do what you’ve been told to do.

God be praised.

But now, he was lost.

In Amil’s hand was a dirty piece of lined schoolbook paper, with instructions and directions carefully written out in his scrawl that he was ashamed to show his sister, for her writing was much better than his. It was not fair, for his schooling had been the memorization and the glorification of the word of God, while their mother had insisted that his sister take part in some education and work program, administered by a women’s council (as if such a thing could be believed!) that was getting money from some infidel bank from Europe. He had complained bitterly to his mother about the influence this was passing on to his younger sister, and she had snapped at him one night that with his empty head and God’s words and a clubfoot, if he wished to do better, then by all means do better.

Amil looked up again and around, desperately seeking a sign. The instructions that had been dictated to him had been clear — he had been forced to read them back twice to the stranger who had first met him at the village mosque -and only then had he received the money.

The stranger — a tall Sudanese man — had said as they sat on a stone bench near the center of the village, under a willow tree, ‘I am looking for a pious young man, a man who wants to perform jihad. Are you that man, Amil?’

And he had replied, his hands trembling with excitement, yes, yes I am.

‘You’ve wanted to perform jihad for some time now, haven’t you.’

Yes, that I have, sir, he had said.

‘You’ve wanted to take up weapons against God’s enemies, to go to distant lands, but this has not occurred. Why?’

Amil had looked down at his feet in shame and sorrow, not able to answer.

The Sudanese had nodded. ‘But your crippled foot… it has prevented you from traveling to Afghanistan or Yemen or Iraq, am I right? You cannot walk for long distances. So you have stayed here, in your home, with your mother and your sister. Instead of being a warrior for God.’

Amil had almost whispered, it is God’s will. What else can I do?

The Sudanese had leaned in, his tobacco breath near Amil’s ear, and said, ‘There are other weapons to use against the Jews and the infidels, other ways to perform jihad without traveling too far or carrying a weapon. Are you interested?’

And Amil had said, his voice now strong, I am at your command.

The older man had smiled. ‘You are at God’s command, this is true. And this is what you shall do.’

And so Amil had learned and had written down the directions and the orders, and so it came to pass that he was now here, near where he had to go to do his jihad, to perform his holy struggle, and—

Lost!

The utter shame.

Two men made their way through the crowds and now eyed Amil, and he shivered. They wore uniforms of some sort, some type of policeman with large, fierce mustaches, and they carried long wooden staves in their weathered hands, and Amil started walking again, passing them, knowing instinctively that to stay in one place was to invite questions, and that was one thing that the Sudanese had taught him, over and over again, not to invite questions.

He walked up the street and thought for a moment, and then came back. Vendors and shopkeepers and buyers moved around in a chattering, bright flood, but he ignored the directions now for a moment, recalled what he was looking for, the bright sign the Sudanese said would be out there. The street sign was missing…how and where it went missing was not his worry. But the other sign that he sought… well, it must be someplace near. He could ask directions from one of the vendors, but no, with God’s will and God’s help, he would find it by himself.

And he did!

The sun had crawled higher up into the dusty yellow sky when in one of the narrow, unmarked side streets there had been the sign, in bright letters on a square piece of plastic. He looked down at the words laboriously written out in English on the paper, and matched them, letter for letter, with the overhead sign.

He murmured a prayer, thanks to be God, there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet, and he went to the place.

The glass and metal door closed behind him, and Amil started shivering, both in fear and from the intense cold inside the place. He had never seen anything like it in his life. There were tables and booths and chairs, and while tea and coffee and pastries and other items were being consumed, at each table there were computers and computer screens, lined up, row after row. He took in the sight, jaw agape, at the men (and women!) sitting before the computers. A young man came over to him, frowning, wearing the foreign costume of a white shirt and necktie, and blue jeans, and said in a sharp voice, ‘Yes?’

‘I… I wish to rent a computer.’

The man sneered at him. ‘You have the money?’

Amil fumbled in his robe, took out the American money, which he passed over to the man who grunted, held it up to the light, felt it with his fingers, and nodded, walking back to a counter. Amil followed and the man, with some papers and a small black object in his hand, said, ‘All right, then, you can—’

Amil blushed with shame, remembered his instructions. ‘I… must have a computer with a drive… a disk drive.’

The man shook his head. ‘Very well. Come with me.’

Amil followed the man to one end of the place — a cafe, such an odd name — and he felt himself recoil as he saw two Western women — dressed like whores in T-shirts and shorts, their knapsacks resting against their booted feet — giggling and whispering to each other as they examined a shared computer screen.

They came to an empty booth in the corner, and Amil saw crumpled-up papers and napkins littering the floor and the table where the computer was, but the man made no attempt to clean it up. Amil sat down and the man presented a paper to him and said some long sentences that he had a hard time understanding, but even this had been part of his training. He just nodded and scrawled his signature at the bottom of the paper. The man took the paper away and put the small black object on top of the computer. It was a timer, with blood-red numerals, and it was set at 60, and as Amil watched it switched to 59.

The manager sneered again. ‘Do you need any help, boy? If so, that will cost you more.’

Amil shook his head, now feeling anger at how the man was humiliating him. ‘No, I do not need your help. I am quite able to do what must be done.’

The manager laughed. ‘Maybe so, but it will be your fault if you do something wrong over the next hour. Not mine. The time is paid for. Not anything else.’

Amil watched as the man walked away, and when Amil felt like he was no longer being observed he went to work.

From his inside pocket again, Amil took out his directions, put the paper down next to the keyboard, smoothed it out. With fingers now seeming as thick as tree, trunks, he started tapping at the keyboard, following the directions, feeling the twisted feeling in his guts ease away as the Sudanese’s directions worked with no difficulty, as he set up the computer to do what had to be done. He remembered, during one of the sessions, asking the Sudanese why he was being sent to do what seemed to be a simple task, and the Sudanese had replied, ‘Some of us are well known. We need to stay in the villages, in the forests, in the mountains. A young man such as yourself… with no history, no record, he can do much.’

And of course, that had made much sense.

There. It was time.

He took out the black rectangular piece of plastic, remembered what the Sudanese had called it. A disk. But weren’t disks round? And this one was square! And was it true what the Sudanese had said, that so much information, so many words — and even pictures! — could be stored on such a thing?

He looked around the computer, found the slot that the disk went in, and inserted it. And as the Sudanese had predicted, there was a humming and a clicking noise, and when that noise ended, Amil continued, his fingers no longer seeming so thick and awkward.

On the screen something was now displayed and, reading with some difficulty, he saw that, again, the Sudanese was telling the truth. There were little cartoons on the screen, each with a number, from one to twenty, and the Sudanese had said that each little cartoon meant a photograph. And Amil had said, what kind of photographs? And the Sudanese had said, ‘Of flowers. Trees. Mountains.’

Amil had been disappointed. Pictures? That was all he had to do? Send pictures to some other computer in some other part of the world?

And the Sudanese had laughed with delight. ‘Not to worry, my son. You see, there is an infidel trick we have learned. Like a game or a puzzle. Even in a photo of a flower, an innocent-looking flower, there can be an important message hidden.’

In a picture? he had asked. How?

The Sudanese had shaken his head. ‘Not for you to worry. It is enough that you know that these pictures are much more than pictures. They are messages to our brethren, important messages that must be sent.’

Now Amil went to work again, setting up e-mail messages, with an address that meant nothing to him — a string of numbers and letters — and he laboriously went through the instructions, somehow setting up a way where a message sent across the computer lines or wires or whatever they were would also carry the pictures that were represented by the little cartoons. The Sudanese had earlier led him through this process, over and over again, and it reminded him of the long days at the madrassa, sitting cross-legged on the floor, chanting the verses from the Koran. Amil was not sure of how the Prophet, God bless His Name, would think of these complicated machines, but Amil hoped that his work today would find favor.

There. One message sent out. One of twenty.

Nineteen more to go.

He flexed his fingers, surprised at how tired they seemed, for the work was not physical yet was hard enough. Strange how that would be.

Time for another message.

He went back to work.

And later Amil looked up at the timer. Eight minutes to go, and only three messages left. It had gone smoothly and there was plenty of time left to do the last messages, and as he bent over the keyboard — his fingers now quite stiff — he heard some raised voices and the opening of the door. He looked up at the cafe’s entrance.

Two uniformed policemen were there.

He stopped, hands frozen over the keyboard.

And he could not believe it, but they were the two same policemen he had seen earlier, with the fierce mustaches and the wooden staves. He felt something gurgling at the back of his throat. Caught! But how? Did the policemen follow him here, did they know what he had been doing, how he had been contacted by the Sudanese?

And was his work here a failure? Before he could even finish it?

The policemen were now looking in his direction, talking to the cafe manager who was frowning. Amil tried to swallow, found his tongue was as dry as the dust outside his home. He forced himself to look away, to get back to what he was doing.

He looked up at the clock.

Just six minutes left.

Back to the keyboard, don’t look up at the clock. Send out the e-mail message.

Two left.

The voices of the policemen seemed louder. They seemed to be walking towards him.

Time. Four minutes left.

God is great, he said over and over again to himself, God is great, God is great, God is great.

The policemen’s voices were louder, there was no doubt.

They were coming closer to him.

Another e-mail successfully sent.

One left.

A glance up at the clock.

One minute.

His fingers typed out the e-mail address, and he cursed himself.

A mistake.

Erase and try again.

There. Complete.

Put the blinking little arrow over the send button and—

Click.

He looked up at the clock.

All four numerals read zero.

He looked up and saw the two policemen. Saw that they were standing only a meter or so away, and they were ignoring Amil.

Yes, they were ignoring Amil. They were talking and smiling to the two young blonde European women, the whores whose nipples were showing stiffly through their thin shirts. Hand shaking, Amil pushed the button on the side of the computer that released the disk, and he placed it back into his robe. He got up, swaying just a bit, for his legs seemed weak, and his clubfoot even more sore.

He limped his way past the policemen, smelling either their cologne or the scent of the European whores, and he went to the manager, who just nodded.

‘I am done.’

The man shrugged. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘No,’ Amil said.

‘Then that’s it.’ And the man turned away, and for a moment Amil was tempted to grab the man’s shoulder and wheel him around and speak to his face, saying, don’t treat me like that, you scum. Don’t you know what has just happened here, in your little place, a place that is obscene and should be burnt to the ground? A holy warrior came here, on jihad, and all you do is turn around and—

No, he thought. Remember what the wise Sudanese said. Do not bring attention to yourself. Leave as quickly as possible.

Which is what he did, and he gasped again, going out into the hot day, back to the noise and dust and people out in the street, just a few more things to do, and then he would be done.

Amil walked along the crowded sidewalk until he found a grated opening at the side, for drainage, and he bent down as if to adjust a sandal, and he let the black plastic square fall into the stench-filled sewage. There. He stood up and kept walking, and as he walked he carefully tore up the piece of paper with his instructions until the little pieces were thick in his hand, and when he came to a series of trash bins, he scattered the pieces of paper amongst the piles of smelly trash, fat flies buzzing in and around.

Amil kept walking, his heart light, even his clubfoot not aching as much, and as he repeated, over and over again, Allah akbar — God is great — he remembered the last thing he had said to the Sudanese, two days ago, when he had asked if what he would do this day in that strange place, that Internet cafe, would make a difference, would strike a blow against the infidels.

And the Sudanese had squeezed his shoulders.

‘Yes,’ the Sudanese had said. ‘You will have struck a mighty blow against the Jews and infidels in America.’

And will some die, he meekly asked, after this task is done?

‘Many will die,’ the Sudanese had said.

And, shyly, he had asked, sir, could you tell me how many? Hundreds? Thousands?

And Amil had thrilled to the answer of the Sudanese, who had grasped his young hand.

‘Millions, my warrior,’ he had said in a fierce voice. ‘Millions.’

CHAPTER THREE

Just outside Greenbelt, Maryland, there are a series of office parks that stretch out like a series of glass and steel veins from the mighty concrete and asphalt arteries of I-95, traveling from Maine to Florida. One office park, called Lee Estates — for which the developer had received vicious criticism when the project was first constructed, from civil rights activists who were sure the place was honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee — boasted a number of buildings, home to software developers, medical imaging companies, a temporary employment agency and, in one smaller building set off from the rest, an outfit called Callaghan Consulting. The building looked like a converted New England colonial-style home, complete with black shutters and narrow windows, and on this May morning Brian Doyle strode up to the quiet structure, yawning. It had been a late night the night before, and it looked like a long day was ahead, and he was not in a good mood. Thirty-five years old, a native of Queens, Brian was a detective first grade in the NYPD and still wondered how he had pissed God off so much that he had ended up here in Maryland.

A minute earlier he had parked his rental car in a parking lot set fifty yards away from the small building, and then made his way up a narrow sidewalk that led to the front entrance of Callaghan Consulting whose premises had been built underneath a number of tall oak trees. There were circular concrete planters around the perimeter of the house, and the sidewalk was flanked with odd-shaped recessed lighting with grillwork, and before entering the house one passed through an arch-shaped white trellis that boasted fake red roses and vinery. An uneducated observer would think that this small building had been set up by someone with an odd and kitschy taste in architecture and landscaping.

An educated observer — like himself, Brian thought grumpily — would know something else: the concrete planters prevented a truck bomb from being driven through the front entrance, the isolated parking lot prevented a car bomb from taking out the building, the way the building had been built under trees, was to prevent hijacked aircraft from getting a good read of the building’s location, and the sniffing devices hidden in the lighting determined if visitors were bearing any explosives, and the metal detectors in the trellis announced what those visitors might be carrying before they came through the front door.

Which Brian now did, meeting the next line of defense, a twenty-something woman named Stacy Luiz, who sat behind a wide wooden desk set on thin legs. She gave him a big smile as he came through the door and he smiled back. A nice way to start one’s day, even if it was on a Sunday morning.

‘Good morning, detective,’ she said. She wore a tiny microphone headset that looked out of place in her thick auburn hair, and held a small redialing device in her left hand. She had on a yellow dress that showed a nice expanse of cleavage, and because of the way her legs were placed under the desktop the dress displayed a lot of leg as well. There were no chairs or coffee tables stacked with Time and Newsweek and Adweek, for Callaghan Consulting discouraged visitors, and Stacy — dressed as she was — was also part of the discouragement process. The way she was positioned, the way she was dressed, was to stop men — even dangerous men, men who were on a mission — just for a precious second or two as they came through the door, and give her enough time to use her other hand, her carefully manicured right hand, which Brian knew right at this instant was wrapped around a Colt Model 1911 .45 semi-automatic pistol in a middle drawer of the desk.

Earlier on during his assignment with this oddball group, Brian had made clear his interest in seeing Stacy in a more relaxed, out-of-work setting, and she had eagerly taken him up on it, only insisting that she would pick the day and place. The day had been a Saturday, the place had been the indoor shooting range at the Berwyn Rod & Gun Club in nearby Bowie, and in the space of a half-hour she had out-shot him in every type of target and environment. That had been their first and last away-from-work encounter.

‘Still carrying that nine-millimeter piece of junk?’ Stacy called out as he walked past her desk to the short hallway behind her. Office doors lined each side of the hallway where some of the support staff worked.

‘It’s a lightweight piece of junk, compared with the cannon you’re carrying,’ Brian said, smiling back at her, seeing the carefully hidden consoles on the other side of the desk that gave immediate readouts from the explosives and metal detectors outside.

Stacy laughed. ‘I know how to carry it, and how to use it, and that’s all that counts.’

He yawned again. Up to the door at the end of the hallway, a door that looked like wood, which it partially was: wood covering metal. At the lock near the doorknob, he punched in the number combination and let himself in. The door opened to reveal a small wood-paneled room housing an elevator with exactly one button. Brian got in, pressed the button, and felt that little surge in his stomach as the elevator went down into the Maryland soil.

The door slid open. Brian went out and through another door, along a short hallway, and into a small conference room. There were six chairs around the table, and three were already occupied. He nodded at the other people in the room and sat down, sprawling out his legs. One of the two remaining empty chairs awaited whatever guest might be attending this morning, and the other, at the head of the conference room table, was reserved for their team leader. Who was always late, and who had an office out at the other end of the underground complex, along with the other team members. Coffee and juice and pastries and doughnuts were set in the middle of the table. On the far wall was a thin plasma screen, displaying nothing save a pale blue light. Laptops were set up in front of the other three participants, and Brian didn’t feel guilty that his own laptop was locked up safely in his own little cubicle.

At his left was Montgomery Zane, a black guy about his own age who was about the same height as Brian but who easily had fifteen pounds on him, all of it muscle around his neck and shoulders. He had on a dark blue polo shirt and grunted a greeting as Brian sat down, the good side of his face toward him. The other side — the left side — of Monty’s face had ripples of burn-scar tissue running down to his thick neck. Brian sneaked a peek at Monty’s laptop screen, saw that he was playing some sort of Tetris-like game, which immediately made him feel better about being laptop-less. At his right was Darren Coover, who was about ten years his junior and so slight and blond he looked like a stiff breeze would knock him over. Darren didn’t even seem to notice as Brian sprawled out, and a quick glance at Darren’s laptop screen showed streams of numbers and letters, nothing that seemed to make sense.

Across from Brian was Victor Palmer — or, as he preferred to be known, Doctor Palmer. Like Brian, he was on loan and was hating almost every minute of it. Brian quickly realized that he didn’t like the look on the doc’s face. Usually the doc had this air of superiority, like the rest of the group weren’t fit to wipe his ass after he’d taken a dump, but not this morning. He was looking around the room and nervously licking his thin lips, eyes blinking behind his round, horn-rimmed glasses. That look made him seem scared, scared for the first time in a long time, and Brian said loudly, ‘Anybody know when the princess is showing up?’

That brought a smile from Monty. But Darren continued to ignore everybody, while the good doctor still looked like he was trying to retain an enema in his bowels. Brian looked around at his fellow members of Federal Operations and Intelligence Liaison Team Seven, a/k/a Tiger Team Seven, and he remembered how it had all begun.

Months earlier there’d been a note on Brian’s cluttered desk, at the First Precinct on Ericsson Place at the southern tip of Manhattan. ‘See me soonest. L.’

L. Officially known as Lieutenant Lawrence Lancaster, known to everyone in the squad as Ellie but who was never called that to his face. Brian crumpled up the note, tossed it in a nearby wastebasket, and thought about going outside for a nice second cup of coffee. But he decided that wasn’t going to solve anything. There. A detective joke — not going to solve anything — and he hadn’t even tried. He looked at his cluttered desk, at the sparse collection of family photographs there, his ex-wife Marcy and their boy Thomas, and another one, showing a much younger Brian Doyle, a rookie in his fresh NYPD uniform, standing next to his dad Curt, wearing a NYPD sergeant’s uniform, and a goddam proud look on his face. Across from his desk was another desk, just a shade cleaner, but empty. His partner, Jimmy Carr, coming in late from the dentist or something.

Brian got up from his desk, went over to the small office on the east side of the building. The lieutenant was sitting behind his own messy desk — Brian almost smiled at the memory of the biting memo that the Chief of Detectives had sent out last month, about how cluttered desks led to cluttered cases and court dismissals — and he rapped his hand on the side of the door.

‘Looking for me?’

The lieutenant looked up, gazing at Brian over his half-rim glasses, which were kind of sissified for a squad lieutenant. But those nearly bloodless blue eyes behind the lenses never let anybody call the lieutenant sissy, even though his nickname was Ellie. He was squat, like a man whose intended weight and girth had been shoved into a frame built six inches too short. He waved a thick hand up at Brian and said, ‘Yeah, Bri. Come in and close the door.’

Brian nodded, still hating the nickname Bri, wondering what in hell had gotten into the lieutenant that he needed an office visit. He sat down, noted the filing cabinets filling the office — at least those were neat, like they were part of the goddam wall system or something — and the lieutenant picked up a thin file folder, opened it up as he sat back. Brian kept quiet, kept his mouth shut. Better not to offer anything before knowing what the hell was going on.

The lieutenant was no longer looking at the file folder. He said, ‘Last December.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘There was a test we all took. Remember?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘It was an intelligence test, that’s what most of us thought. Odd questions. Puzzles. Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb. Crap like that.’

Brian nodded. ‘Yeah, I remember now.’

The lieutenant tossed the folder on his desk. ‘Okay, Bri, we’re now in confidential land, got it? Confidential such you don’t tell your partner, you don’t tell the ex, don’t tell nobody. Understood?’

‘Sure, boss,’ Brian said, feeling better that the meeting wasn’t for something he had screwed up on but was for some-thing else.

‘Okay. Deal is, we all thought the test was just another pysch bureau bullshit project, but it wasn’t. Maybe it was bullshit after all, but it wasn’t ours. It’s the Feds.’

‘What do they want?’ Brian asked.

‘You.’

‘Huh?’

The lieutenant grimaced. ‘Don’t like it at all, and you’re gonna like it even less. The Feds are looking for people, on temporary duty. Six months, maybe a year, maybe longer. You’ll be detached from the precinct, full pay and benefits and seniority accruing, plus you’ll get a twenty percent pay bonus to make up for whatever OT you lose. Plus the usual travel and per diem goodies.’

‘Lieutenant, I got cases to close, court appearances set for the next month, and—’

‘It’s all been taken care of.’

Brian heard his voice get heated. ‘It has, has it? Excuse me, lieutenant, but what the fuck, okay? Don’t I get a say in this? Don’t I?’

The lieutenant seemed to choose his words. ‘Apparently not. Because I’ve been raising a shit storm, too, losing a guy like you, but I’ve gotten the word, inscribed in granite letters ten feet tall from One Police Plaza, that it’s a go. For some reason the Feds like the answers you gave on the test and what they saw in your personnel jacket. And don’t take this the wrong way or the hard way, and you can be a royal Irish pain in the ass, Bri, but I’m gonna hate losing you.’

Brian clasped his hands together. ‘Shit, boss, what the hell do they want me for, anyway?’

Lancaster opened up the thin folder, bent his head down and said, ‘Something called Federal Operations and Intelligence Liaison. FOIL. Duties and responsibilities to be announced once you report in and sign a standard non-disclosure form, yadda yadda yadda.’

The lieutenant closed the folder. ‘That’s the official. Unofficial line, you want to hear it?’

‘Christ, yes.’

‘Unofficial, the Feds are cherrypicking people with different skills, putting them together in these teams. Thing is, Bri, you’re going hunting.’

‘Hunting? For who?’

The lieutenant made a gesture with his head, like he was pointing out something outside, and Brian looked out the window and knew what the lieutenant was pointing at. That near and terribly empty spot on the horizon, where the two buildings had once stood.

Brian said, ‘Okay, I get it now. Shit.’

The lieutenant offered him a slight smile. ‘Go and do well, Bri. And maybe the Feds, looking at your record and all, decided that with your dad it makes sense that you—’

Brian interrupted, saying, ‘So. When do I go? Next week? Next month?’

The lieutenant shook his head. ‘Guess I wasn’t clear, Bri. They want you now.’

‘Now? Like what?’

His boss reached for a phone. ‘Like now I’m calling a squad car, to get your ass to LaGuardia and to DC later this morning. That kind of now.’

And through the open door of the conference room, the princess came in, the leader of Tiger Team Seven, Adrianna Scott. Brian eyed her carefully as she came into the room. Unlike Stacy out in the front entrance, Adrianna didn’t dress flashy, though there was something about the way she dressed and carried herself that Brian found interesting. Of course, if his ex-wife Marcy had been around, she’d laugh in that braying tone of hers (and why had he ever found that laugh attractive? He blamed Jameson’s Irish Whiskey and Marcy’s impressive chest) and say, sure, interesting. Another way of saying you’re just a horny jerk, can’t keep your eyes off the girls.

Adrianna looked tired, her long dark hair drawn back in a simple ponytail, with a tiny red ribbon. She had on a charcoal-gray skirt that reached mid-calf and a black pullover sweater. She carried her laptop under one arm and opened it up after she’d sat down. Brian looked around at the collection of characters, gathered here in this so-called undisclosed location, thinking of what weird shit had to have happened to have brought them all together. Himself, a New York City cop. Darren, the thin blond kid. Something to do with the National Security Agency. The doc, from Atlanta and the Centers for Disease Control. Monty, an active-duty military officer — who for some reason kept his branch of service secret — with a quiet smile and the sharp confidence that if he had to, he could kill everybody in this room and leave while munching a doughnut, not even having broken out in a sweat. And the princess Herself, with brown eyes and mocha-colored skin, an officer with the Central Intelligence Agency.

She smiled and said, ‘So sorry to have gotten you all here on a Sunday, but it could not be avoided.’

By now Darren and Monty had torn their gazes away from the computer screen, and Brian kept his hands folded on his stomach. On the far wall the plasma screen flickered into life as Adrianna started tapping away on her keyboard. Letters appeared, spelling out an Arab phrase.

Brian looked up and then glanced over at Adrianna, who — surprisingly enough — now had her elbows on the table and was slowly rubbing her temples with her long fingers. She said, ‘The phrase shown here is the Arabic for May 29. That’s a very special day for some fundamental Islamists, May 29. The day Istanbul — known back then as Constantinople — fell to the Muslim forces in 1453. A day celebrated in many parts of the Islamic world, a day in which the infidels suffered a defeat that shook the very foundations of the Christian rulers in Europe.’

Adrianna raised her head, no longer smiling. ‘A special day, indeed. Its anniversary is coming up in less than four weeks, gentlemen.’

Brian felt something cold start to crawl its way through his stomach, like being on a stakeout and realizing that your radio batteries have drained away in silence, just as four or five assholes with guns are walking your way.

‘And on that day, gentlemen, we are going to get hit.’

Monty spoke up, his voice lilting lightly with a Southern accent. ‘Hit? Really?’

A sad nod.

‘Hit, gentlemen — and hit hard.’

CHAPTER FOUR

On the island of Bali, in the tourist resort town of Kuta, twenty-year-old Ranon Degun stood before the blackened and twisted wreckage of the Sari nightclub in the light rain. Wilted and faded plastic flowers were scattered as offerings on the nearest pile of debris. Ranon kept his face impassive as he looked at what had once been a gathering place for foreigners, mostly Australians, loud and drunk Australians, swaggering through, acting like they were the rulers of this place. But some time ago holy warriors had attacked this nightclub, had killed more than two hundred infidels, and for that Ranon was pleased indeed.

But he kept his face still. Even now, it was still not seen as right in some quarters on this island to gloat over what had happened, even though a blow had been struck for righteousness. For ever since the bombing, the tourists had not returned in the numbers that Bali had become accustomed to. The Australians and the New Zealanders and the backpackers from Europe had stayed away from Bali, and those who lived from the tourists, including Ranon’s own uncle and aunt, who had served as a houseboy and a chambermaid for one of the beach hotels had suffered. Seeing his aunt and uncle depart each day, clothed in some Western dress for the hotel, had caused resentment to bum inside him, as they scraped and bowed to the infidels. And he had mentioned that one night to his uncle, who had surprised him by standing up and striking him on the face. ‘These “infidels” as you call them,’ his uncle had cried out, ‘these infidels pay good money, money that pays for your clothes and your food and this home. So shut up about the infidels, unless you wish to live someplace else.’

And living someplace else was not possible, for Ranon was a cripple, and he was dependent on the charity of his aunt and uncle. Years earlier, soldiers had camped near their village, soldiers fighting bandits in the hills, and he had snuck into their campsite one night, to watch, to observe, and, well, of course, to steal. Even though it humiliated him to think about it, he recalled stealing a slumbering soldier’s belt, hoping that there was a wallet or something valuable hanging from it, and going home, the belt in his hands, a branch tugged at something hanging there, a small metal object that exploded in a flash and ruined his hands forever.

Ranon looked down at the pink stumps of his fingers that always made the young girls turn away, that made everything so hard to do, and the thought came to him that his own land of Bali was now a cripple, crippled by the foreigners. For Bali had long ago lost its own native way, of living off the land and the sea, and now she was nothing more than a whore for the foreigners, opening her legs for the chance of getting dollars or euros or yen.

Which was why the bombing had to happen. The infidels had to be expelled, from here and all other holy lands, and if sometimes people lost their jobs and innocents had to die, well, that was God’s will. For had not God Himself said that there would be struggles and difficulties before going to Paradise?

Ranon wiped at his face with one hand, the other hand barely holding on to a small plastic bag with a firm object inside. The warm drizzle still fell from the gray skies, and in the wreckage of the nightclub there were those faded plastic flowers, left behind by relatives or friends, he imagined. He looked around, saw that nobody was gazing at his direction, and he placed his hand up to his face to hide the wide smile that he allowed himself. For here was a monument to what could happen when holy warriors did their work for God, and very soon, in a very simple way, he was sure that he would be allowed to join those holy ranks.

Ranon turned and started walking away, his feet splashing through the puddles.

Some blocks away, Ranon came to a store — really not much more than a shack tacked onto the end of a narrow alley — that sold wood carvings. A sullen-faced man in a soiled tank-top T-shirt sat inside, smoking a cigarette. Ranon went in, nodded in his direction, and said, ‘I am here for a pickup.’

‘Yes?’

‘A pickup for a Mister Wilson. At the Amandari Hotel. If you please.’

The man stared at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke, reached underneath the counter and removed a small package fastened with string. Hands trembling, Ranon took the package from the man’s hands and ignored the pitying look he gave Ranon’s twisted finger stumps.

And Ranon remembered.

Weeks ago, at the small mosque that served his village, just north of Ubud, a stranger had come to him. A tall Sudanese who had called him by name, and led him away to a cafe where they had shared small glasses of sweetened tea, and where the Sudanese had peppered him with questions. About his young life. His struggle with his crippled fingers. His devotion to God. His thoughts for the future, even on an island such as Bali, polluted with so much corruption and with strange religions like Christianity or Hinduism. And had Ranon ever made the hajj, to the holy place of Mecca? And Ranon had said, no, he had not — though, of course, like any good Muslim, he hoped to make the hajj before he died. The Sudanese, his eyes bright with certainty and strength, had said that, indeed, Mecca was a holy place, and except during those times when he had been in the Sudan and Afghanistan, he himself had made the hajj many times.

Other questions had followed in the cool interior of the cafe. The Sudanese had nodded at Ranon’s answers, and had said, ‘Ranon, would you be willing to do a holy task for me, a task that will strike fear in the infidels?’

And Ranon had hesitated, only for a moment, and the Sudanese, smart and holy man that he was, had said, ‘You are reluctant.’

Ranon had nodded and had said, I am willing to do whatever you ask, but… would it take place here, in Bali?

The Sudanese had smiled. ‘You are concerned, perhaps, with the well-being of your family? Of your aunt and uncle?’

They are not very devout, Ranon had said, but they are good-hearted people. What happened at the Sari had hurt them terribly, and so many others. The tourists had left and the jobs were lost, and the money dried up, and children went hungry, and—

The Sudanese had interrupted him. ‘But what about the Palestinian children, who are shot and bulldozed by the Zionists? And what of the Iraqi children, poisoned by the uranium-tipped weapons of the Americans and the British? And what of the Chechen children, burned in their homes by the thrice-damned Russians? The children here, they may go hungry and they may go thirsty, but at least they live.’

Ranon had been embarrassed. The righteous Sudanese had set him straight, had made him look at things more clearly. He had nodded and said, I will do whatever you require.

The Sudanese had smiled again, had gently tapped Ranon on his shoulder. ‘Not to worry, my young warrior. What I will have you do, it will take place here, in Bali. But no one will die. No Hindu. No Christian. And especially no Muslim. No, the task I have for you, it will be simple, but in what it shall accomplish, it shall be deadly indeed.’

The Sudanese had looked around the cafe, seen that they were alone in this part of the building, and had leaned forward and spoken softly. ‘It will be something so deadly that years from now, what happened at the whorehouse, the place where the men and the women danced together, that will be forgotten.’

The memory made Ranon shiver. He walked a while until he was sure that he wasn’t being watched, or being followed, for the Sudanese had been quite specific in his directions. He sat on the wet concrete steps of a shuttered clothing store -whorish clothes for Europeans to display their bodies in on the sands of Bali — and clumsily unwrapped the package that he had received. The small plastic bag he had carried was now at his side. Unwrapping the rough paper revealed a carving of a kangaroo. A souvenir for some Australian. But what Australian would ever come here again after seeing what had happened to his or her countrymen? He put it aside and smoothed out the paper across his lap. There. A string of numbers and a collection of words.

His heart thumped harder as he looked at the simple scrawl. Something so simple, yet so simple a weapon would do so much harm.

The light rain had stopped. Ranon looked around him again, saw the empty taxicabs trundle by, the drivers looking bored and angry. He picked up the cheap plastic bag, took out the object. A bright green cellphone. He had bought it last week with one hundred Australian dollars that the Sudanese had given him. Again, the Sudanese had been specific on where to buy the phone, and how to buy it. Purchase it just before the store closes, so that the clerk is hurried and pays little attention to who you are or how you look. Pay with cash. Leave no record of who you are.

Which was what Ranon had done. Now he picked up the phone and switched it on, and then punched in the number scrawled on the packaging, being slow and careful, knowing how hard it was to do this with his injured hands. A man’s voice answered.

‘Yes?’

Ranon read off the first phrase. ‘I am calling for our mother.’

The voice replied. ‘Go on.’

‘She is well.’

‘Yes.’

‘But her ankles still hurt her.’

‘Yes.’

‘She would like a visit from you soon.’

‘Yes.’

‘The south end of her roof is leaking.’

‘Yes.’

‘She sends her love, very much.’

‘Yes.’

There. The last phrase. The Sudanese had been clear. Hang up immediately after the last phrase. Do not hesitate. Do not say anything more. But the man on the other end of the phone… who knew where he was. Perhaps he was in Bali. Perhaps he was in Hamburg or Paris. Perhaps even New York City itself! Ranon felt the shiver of excitement, sensing that this man was a part of something greater, a wonderful web of connections and phone messages and planners, all working towards jihad. This man… he could not just hang up.

‘Sir?’

‘Eh?’

‘God is great.’

The man exhaled softly and said, ‘Yes. He is.’

And there was a faint click as the man from far away, his comrade and friend, broke the connection. Ranon held the phone tightly in his hands, closed his eyes, thinking of what had just happened. Something easy, something simple, the Sudanese had said. And Ranon knew what he had just done. An important message had been transmitted, something important indeed, and when the news came out over the next days or weeks or months he would wave the newspaper at his aunt and uncle and proudly tell them of what he had done. For he had no doubt that something enormous was in the works, for that was what the Sudanese had said. What had happened at the nightclub would soon be forgotten. Let his aunt and uncle cry and worry about the infidels then.

Ranon got up and put the phone back in the bag, and then he took the piece of paper. From another pocket he took out a small book of matches, and under the overhang from the shuttered store he lit the paper and watched it quickly burn down to ashes. Then he started walking away again until he came to a bridge arching over a narrow brown stream. Again, to make sure that no one was observing him, he stood on the bridge for a while, not moving even as a bus came by and sprayed him when the fat wheels went through a puddle. He heard laughter from inside the bus but didn’t care. He was doing God’s work, and when the bridge was empty, just for a moment, he turned the plastic bag upside down and let the cellphone tumble into the stream.

A pity, really, that such an expensive device had to be thrown away like that. But the Sudanese had been adamant. No trace, no evidence. Nothing.

Ranon looked down at his other hand. The silly wooden kangaroo had a carved smile on its face and seemed to be mocking him. He thought of tossing the carving into the stream, but no, that wouldn’t destroy it. The wood would only float and it would still survive, perhaps, by washing up on a bank somewhere or on a sandbar.

Then he had a thought.

Ranon went back the way he’d come, enjoying the walk, heading back to where he had started, back to Haikon Street. And there the wreckage of the nightclub lay before him, unchanged. He looked at the faded flowers and even scraps of cloth — flags representing the infidel countries who had sent their crusaders here — and held the kangaroo in his hand. He leaned over and gently placed the carved kangaroo next to the red-white-blue flag of Australia, and just as he did that the morning sun broke through the clouds, warming his arms and his back.

A good sign.

A sign from God, no doubt.

And though he had been impassive on his earlier visit to the nightclub, Ranon had to let himself be free now. He couldn’t help it. He started smiling and almost started laughing as he walked away from the place that had been a funeral pyre for so many unbelievers.

God was indeed great, he thought.

CHAPTER FIVE

In Maryland, Adrianna Scott took a breath to calm herself as she looked over the members of her team. She took a guess at what they were thinking. After Afghanistan and Iraq, there had been a feeling, no doubt a wrong feeling, but it was there, that the war on terrorism was being won. Not won in a flashy series of set-piece battles, like World War Two, but won in a steady series of bomb plots foiled, terrorist cells raided, and rogue bank accounts seized.

Now she had made it clear. Bad things were coming. The war was a hell of a long way from being over.

Adrianna looked over at the team again, nodded to her NSA man, and said, ‘Darren?’

Darren’s slightly bug eyes widened some more as he looked up from the screen. ‘Yes?’

‘Your report, please.’

Darren cleared his throat. ‘Latest we have from our Level One intercepts show increased chatter from suspected cells in Pakistan, Bali, and Great Britain. All have referenced the upcoming May 29 date, and the fall of Constantinople. At first we thought that what we were seeing was idle chatter, talking up the past glories of Islam and the Caliphate, but it’s clear that the talk is referring to the actual upcoming date.’

Monty spoke up. ‘How do we know it’s going to be big? Maybe it’s just another spoof, something to scare us, get the threat color notched up another level, piss off the flying and traveling public.’

Darren said, ‘There’s a foundation to the increased chatter, a rhythm. After months of recording, you can determine pretty much the usual level of traffic. It’s when you see a spike, especially within a certain range, that we feel we’re onto something. Plus…there’s a tone to the voices we’re hearing. They’re excited, they’re thrilled that something’s coming.’

Brian yawned and said, ‘Could be bullshit that’s coming, that’s all.’

Darren was still looking in Adrianna’s direction but his words were directed to his seatmate. ‘And how’s that, detective?’

Brian smiled now and said, ‘Have to agree with my man Monty — maybe it is just a spoof, something to keep us all on edge. Their way of saying, “Hey, we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” They want to pretend that they’re still bad asses out there, ready to kill us all, get us all worked up.’

Adrianna nodded, keeping her gaze on Brian, and recalled the first time they had met.

The lobby of the Hilton hotel on Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia. Adrianna Scott strode in and spotted Brian Doyle right away. He was sitting stiffly in a chair, watching everybody go past him without hardly moving his eyes. He was fit, with close-cropped black hair that was streaked with gray along the sides, and a clean-shaven face that looked hard indeed. She knew his age, knew his educational and professional background, knew of his recent divorce and monetary problems and what kind of car he drove and what his favorite drink was. But even with the NYPD-supplied photographs of him she noticed something right away that wasn’t apparent from the briefing and the photos. Even sitting down he had this nervous, restless energy about him, like a herd animal out on the African savannah, tasked with protecting the group but desperately afraid of not doing the job well enough to save everyone.

He spotted her, stood up. She held out her hand and they shook briefly and then she sat down across from him, watching again how his eyes worked, knowing that he was using his own private male checklist to determine whether she was beddable material or not. She was surprised at how she wondered how she’d just rated.

Adrianna spoke first. ‘Detective Doyle.’

‘Miss Scott. Or should it be Mizz Scott?’

She laughed. ‘Adrianna will be fine. How are you doing?’

Brian shrugged. ‘All right, I guess. Still trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing here.’

‘That should have been explained in your orientation.’

His hard eyes were still staring at her. ‘The orientation was the usual crap of filling out forms, fifteen-minute coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon, and lots of Powerpoint presentations. How about you tell me, no bullshit, why the CIA wants a New York City detective to tag along.’

‘It’s not just the Central Intelligence Agency,’ she said carefully. ‘It’s a number of—’

‘Yeah, I know all that,’ he said. ‘Liaison teams, set up with representatives from Fed agencies, including the military and intelligence groups. Fine, that makes sense, as far as it goes. Still doesn’t tell me why you’ve pulled me out of my precinct to spend time out here in the boonies.’

Adrianna folded her hands over a knee. ‘It’s simple, Brian. We need you.’

‘Why?’ he shot back.

She looked around at the lobby, knowing the type of people who were streaming in and out of here, day after day, setting up shop for the inevitable visits to departments and agencies sprawling out from DC, all within easy driving distance. Lobbyists. Software salesmen. Retired intelligence officers. All still filled with righteous indignation, even years later, for what had happened to their country on 9/11. All filled with a desire to wreak revenge. All filled with another desire, of course, to make some money while doing it.

And all doomed to failure.

Adrianna said, ‘There are numerous reasons why we got hit on 9/11. I’m sure you can come up with a few yourself. But let me give you an important one, one that might have been overlooked.’

For the first time since she had met him, Brian smiled, just a bit. It was a nice sight. ‘Go on. Sure you’re not revealing any secrets?’ he asked.

‘You’ve already signed the necessary paperwork.’

‘There might be eavesdroppers.’

‘They can eavesdrop away. The real secrets can wait. Here’s the deal, Brian. We got hit because we’ve lost our edge.’

‘That’s nothing new. Listen to those mad mullahs out there — all they preach about is the decadent West.’

Adrianna shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think you understand. I’m not talking about the West or our society losing our edge. I’m talking about my agency, other agencies. With very, very few exceptions, Brian, we’ve gotten fat, lazy, and complacent. Oh, we do a magnificent job intercepting and interpreting electronic intelligence, and our surveillance satellites do amazing things from orbit. There’s no nation or organization on earth that can match our technical prowess in recording or intercepting electronic intelligence. But that’s been our problem. Most everything’s been done from here in the USA itself or in orbit. For example, let’s say you’re an intelligence officer, newly assigned to Langley. What kind of career path are you going to choose? One that puts you in a comfortable cubicle during the day and home by six p.m. every night with wifey and the kids, and Little League games and ballet recitals on the weekend? Or a career path that sends you to some Third World country with little electricity, no hot water, food that gives you the runs every other day, and unfriendly types who might walk up to you in a crowded marketplace and put a nine-millimeter round through the back of your head. What choice would you make?’

‘I see your point,’ Brian said. ‘But I’m not one to choose living in a Third World hellhole, either. Just so you know.’

‘And we don’t intend to send you anywhere like that.’ She leaned closer toward him, wondered briefly why she found that pleasant, and said, ‘What we need from you are your skills, detective. Your street smarts, as they say. For the most part, our little group will be made up of people who are quite skilled in examining and interpreting intelligence, and presenting recommendations. What we’re weak on are people with the smarts to ask the tough and embarrassing questions, not to put up with any bullshit, and to go with their hunches. Your service record is admirable, Brian.’

He looked uncomfortable with the praise. ‘There are others who’ve done better. I’ve been lucky a couple of times.’

‘Perhaps. But you have the combination we need. And luck is always a wonderful commodity. Which is why you’re here.’

Brian stayed silent.

Adrianna said, ‘And what happened to your father, well, we also thought that—’

She was surprised at his response. He said quickly, ‘Please leave my father out of this, all right? This is my job, that’s what it’s going to be. It’s not going to be personal. Understand?’

She nodded and he said, ‘Thing I learned, right out of the Academy, you start to take things personally out on the street, your thinking gets fucked up, you don’t see what’s there, you make the wrong decisions. You’re thinking with your heart or your balls, and not your head. And that’ll get your ass in a sling, soon enough.’

Adrianna allowed herself a small smile. This tough guy was going to work out just fine. She said, ‘Thanks for the anatomy lesson, Brian. Any other questions?’

‘I’m sure I’ll have a shitload, once we get going.’

‘So. You’re aboard?’

He nodded. ‘Oh, yeah. Like I had a choice. But still…’

‘Yes?’

Brian looked around again, like he was afraid that he was being listened to by the constant stream of guests and hotel workers walking through the lobby. ‘It’s just that I couldn’t believe what I was hearing during those orientation sessions. About the level of authority you have. And the oversight…’

Adrianna’s hands were moistening up as she remembered the very first time her responsibilities had been outlined. Jesus Christ, she had said to herself, how can I possibly do this? How can I?

Because you have to, the answer had come back to her. There are no other options.

‘We can talk about it in more detail later, Brian. When we’re not in a hotel lobby. But what we’ll be doing will be perfectly legitimate, perfectly legal. The proper findings have been reviewed and signed by the President and Congressional leaders from both parties. The oversight will be kept at a minimum. There’s going to be a lot of trust put in us and our abilities, and with that trust comes responsibility. Responsibility to protect our people.’

Brian’s look seemed to have hardened again. ‘Especially when it comes to killing terrorists, suspected or otherwise, without benefit of arrest or trial?’

‘We protect our people, Brian. Whatever it takes. Do you have a problem with that?’

There was a pause, and then he sat back in a comfortable chair in a comfortable hotel lobby in the most comfortable nation on earth.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a problem with that.’

And with that, Adrianna kept her emotions in check. He was on board. He would do his job well. And that was the best news she’d had this day.

Adrianna observed the questioning look from Brian and knew he was doing his job, poking and prying, and she was glad that he was still performing well, months after his hiring. She turned to Victor and said, ‘Doctor? If you please? The medical report from that gentleman in Vancouver.’

Victor coughed, wiped at his face, and started tapping on his laptop’s keyboard. The plasma screen flickered into life and a man’s face appeared, apparently a passport photo. He appeared young, with large brown eyes, thin face, long nose and scraggly beard.

‘This is John Muhammad Akim. Originally from Brighton, in Great Britain. Twenty-four years old. Some records of juvenile crime when he was younger. Breaking and entering. Stolen cars. Entered Her Majesty’s Prison at Maidstone more than two years ago. When he was there, converted to Islam. That’s where he and his fellow pilgrims picked up their new middle names.’

Darren said, ‘Unfortunately for all concerned, it looks like he didn’t convert to the peace, love and understanding branch of Islam.’

If it had been an attempt at humor, the attempt failed. Nobody laughed.

‘Late last year,’ Victor continued, stammering a bit, ‘he came to Montreal on a tourist visa. Was supposed to stay six months and depart. Never did. Dropped out of sight.’

Monty said, ‘And Canadian immigration? Domestic intelligence? They just let him slip out?’

Adrianna said, ‘He wasn’t on any watch list. If anything, he was just a minor player. Oh, they did a day or two of surveillance on him in Montreal, just to say that they did something. But you know the pressures our northern neighbors are under. Can’t afford to be seen offending anyone. Victor, go on.’

He coughed, punched a few more keys, and the passport photo was replaced by another. It depicted a slightly older, more fleshed-out John Muhammad Akim. The face was nearly chalk-white, and the man was lying on a slab of metal. A white sheet was pulled up to his neck, and near his throat a rubber-gloved hand was holding a slip of paper that showed Akim’s name and a string of numbers.

Victor said, ‘John Muhammad Akim. Now deceased. And at the Vancouver General Hospital in Vancouver, BC.’

Brian said, ‘How did he get there?’

Now it was Darren’s turn. ‘We don’t know. We have a theory, but we just don’t know.’

‘Well, shit,’ Brian said, ‘how about letting us in on the theory?’

Darren refused to rise to the bait, kept his voice calm and focused, and Adrianna was pleased to see that performance, as well. Despite everything out there, her team was still sharp, was still on the job, and would still do what was necessary. The NSA officer said, ‘Traffic analysis showed a cell operating in Ontario for a number of months. Not much in the way of information. Just low-key chatter, but we were able to determine that one of the cell members had a distinctive Syrian accent. Then, for two weeks, silence. Nothing. Then the cell chatter started up again. In Vancouver, on the western side of Canada, and the same guy was talking, the one with the Syrian accent. During that two-week period Mister Akim was deposited at the Vancouver General Hospital. The theory is that the cell was traveling west when Mister Akim took ill.’

Brian said, ‘Deposited? What does that mean?’

The doctor said, ‘Exactly what he said, detective. Hospital records show that Akim was brought into the emergency room two weeks ago and dropped off by another man. No description or name of the other man, nothing on any local surveillance cameras. Nothing. It was like they picked this hospital on purpose, to be able to slide in and out without being recorded.’

Monty asked, ‘And what was Mister Akim’s problem?’

Victor returned to looking at his laptop screen. ‘He was admitted with a high fever, shortness of breath. Usual and customary treatments were started, along with blood-culture testing and screening of his sputum and other bodily fluids. This testing was continuing right up to the point when Akim coded and died, not less than twelve hours after being admitted.’

Brian said, ‘Damn it, stop dancing, will you?’

The doctor looked up. ‘Excuse me? Dancing?’

‘You know what I mean. Stop pretending like we’re some hospital committee. Get to the point, doc. What killed this character?’

Victor looked in the team leader’s direction. ‘Adrianna?’

She took the ball, took the responsibility. ‘Certainly. Brian, Akim died of acute respiratory failure, brought on by exposure to bacillus anthracis.’

‘Bacillus what?’

Except for Brian, it seemed like the other members of the group, especially the good doctor, knew exactly what Adrianna was talking about.

She cleared her throat. ‘Anthrax, Brian. Anthrax is what killed him. And that’s what’s going to hit us in less than a month’.

CHAPTER SIX

The Brixton section of London is as far away from the London of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace as the tenement rows of Anacostia are from the Mall and the Washington Monument in the District of Columbia. Scarred occasionally by race riots and violent clashes between local gangs, it was also a place that Henry Muhammad Dolan proudly called home. In the cluttered basement of the flat he rented from the local council, he sat in front of a Dell computer, laboriously downloading files from an e-mail account, copying them to a diskette. He had no idea what he was copying or why he was copying; all he had been told was that it was important that it was done, and done quickly.

The basement was filled with cardboard boxes, unpacked from his family’s last move, and some of the toys that he no longer allowed the children to play with, especially the Barbie dolls, which he has getting ready to toss out. His twin daughters had pleaded and wept and argued to have them back, but Henry had been stern: no such dolls, would be allowed in his home.

He looked at the computer screen in satisfaction as he proceeded with his work, the light playing a bit of a trick on him so that he could make out his reflection in the screen. Before him was the ghostly image of a bearded man in his early thirties, a man with a shameful past and a very proud future. Only in his quiet brown eyes could he see the youth he once was, a drunken, ganja-using lout who had roamed the streets of Brixton at night, breaking into shops or parked trucks, stealing and drinking and whoring and drugging, showing no respect for himself, his family, or his neighbors.

A shameful past, for sure, but one that really didn’t bring him to shame. That moment had come after his first arrest as an adult, when instead of going to the usual juvenile facility, he ended up at H.M. Prison at Maidstone, where—

Henry paused in his typing, swallowed hard. Even now, it was difficult to recall what had happened there. Slight in build, he had still thought he knew how to handle himself, how to defend himself… but after just a few weeks he had been a broken boy (not a man — would a man have allowed that to happen?) who would cower in a corner, shivering, his asshole plugged with toilet paper to stop the bleeding.

Until…until deliverance came, in the form of a dark-skinned man, originally from the Sudan, who had offered him protection. His name was some indecipherable series of African syllables that Henry could not understand, so he called him Jack. At first he had turned Jack away, thinking that he was exchanging one tormentor for another, but no, the Sudanese had no interest in his body. Just his soul, and after one hairy tattooed thug had his testicles razored open in the shower Henry had been left alone. The Sudanese had begun teaching him, teaching him the prayers and history of the Prophet, and by the time he had been released from prison he had converted and changed his name — and, of course, his life.

He had owed the Sudanese everything, and in exchange for saving his life and his soul Jack had asked for only a few favors: for Henry to return to Brixton upon his release from prison, to begin a holy life, and, of course, to be available to perform a service or two. And Henry, still waking up at night shivering from the memories of his first few weeks in prison, had readily agreed to help.

The requests had always been minor. Gather up some of his new brethren from the local mosque and join a demonstration in front of the Israeli embassy. Help distribute copies of an Islamist newspaper in the district. And, once, report to two hard-faced men the names of those young men in the area, unbelievers, who were troublemakers. That particular task had worried him just a bit, especially when two of the troublemakers were found in trash cans, their arms broken. But a night of reflection and prayer, and memories of how the Sudanese had protected him in prison, had washed away any remnants of guilt.

Now this latest task was easier still. Set up an e-mail account with a particular password and address. Check the e-mail account three times a day for a specific message. And when that message arrived — as it had, just an hour ago — carefully copy the attached photo files to a diskette, and deliver the diskette to an officer at the local mosque.

Simple, quite simple, and Henry cared not for what was in the message, only that he was helping repay that terrible debt from his time in prison. He had met with Jack — out on his own now for over a year — at a local coffee shop where the talk had ranged loosely from their shared time in prison to gossip about neighbors attending the mosque to the current struggle. And at the mention of the struggle, the Sudanese had looked around himself for a moment, and then had leaned over to Henry.

‘May I give you advice, brother — confidential advice?’

But of course, Henry had said.

‘It must be kept completely confidential. I cannot impress on you how important this is.’

Henry had nodded in quiet excitement, thinking that he was being told something important, something no doubt to repay him for the small favors he had done over the years.

Yes, I understand the importance, Henry had said. You can always rely on me.

The Sudanese had smiled, his big teeth white and even. ‘We have relied on you for many things, my brother. So listen, and listen well. It’s true, is it not, that you have family in the United States?’

My wife does, Henry had said cautiously, not sure where the Sudanese was going with his questioning.

‘We thought so.’

And Henry had thought that he did not recall ever, in prison, telling the Sudanese any details about his wife’s family. The thought made him swallow hard. What was the Sudanese driving at?

Henry had told the Sudanese, Yes, my wife has a sister who lives in Detroit. Near Dearborn.

Jack nodded in understanding. ‘Very good. So I tell you this, brother. Do not travel to the United States anytime in the next few months. Do you hear me?’

A little shiver of something had made its way to his chest at the words the Sudanese had said. Truly? he had asked.

‘Truly.’ The Sudanese had nodded emphatically. ‘And that is all I will say about that.’

So that had been it. And now Henry was here, in the basement, fulfilling the latest request from the tall African. He remembered that chill, that—

Footsteps.

Coming down the stairs.

Working quickly, he worked a series of keys until the screen he had been working on was replaced with another. The sacred words of the Prophet.

He looked up. His wife Mariah was now there, plump and smiling hesitantly, black headscarf over her hair.

‘Yes?’ he asked.

‘Sorry to disturb you, husband. It’s just that… well, I have wonderful news.’

‘You do?’

Her hands were clasping an envelope with American stamps on it. She said, ‘It’s from Azannah. Her husband’s car dealership has had a wonderful spring. She wants to fly me and the girls to see her next month, and I—’

‘No.’

Mariah stopped, looked at him, and lowered her voice. ‘Henry, please, it’s been so long since I’ve seen my sister and my nephews and—’

He shook his head. ‘No. I will not allow it.’

‘But Henry, it’s—’

Another shake of his head. ‘The discussion is finished. You and the girls are not to travel to the United States. Ever. Understood?’

Her face colored and she nodded. ‘Understood.’

Mariah turned and went back up the stairs, her footsteps heavier this time, and Henry sighed as he resumed his work. No doubt there would be a week of cold meals and even colder words, but it had to be done. Others would have laughed off what Jack had told him, but not Henry. Not since that day in the prison shower when that tattooed tor-mentor of his had started bellowing like a bull, his hands clasped at his bleeding crotch. If Jack said something was going to happen, then Henry was going to believe it.

There. Finished. He shut down the computer and ejected the diskette, slipped it into a padded envelope. His work for now was done and he recalled that feeling he had experienced, that little shiver when Jack told him not to travel to the United States, that hated place, that cesspool of infidels…

The first time he noticed it, he had wondered: what was causing that shiver? And, of course, he had remembered that wonderful day, that September when he had watched with smiles and outright laughter those twin towers of Babylon burning and crumpling to the ground. The shiver was one of happiness, excitement, at seeing hammer blows struck against the unholy, and at the knowledge that somehow, with his work with Jack, he was helping to strike another hammer blow.

How wonderful.

Yet… Mariah’s sister and family. Could there not be a way of warning them?

Henry stood up, thinking. A puzzle, a quandary, that he would have to think and pray over for the rest of the day.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Brian Doyle was now fully awake, the little fog of exhaustion that had clouded his thinking having been dispersed with that one shocking word: anthrax. He recalled the mailings, right after 9/11, and how it had seemed as though a reeling country was coming in for another blow, with newspeople taking Cipro and postal workers wearing rubber gloves and face masks. After a while, the panic had ebbed away — what the hell else could you do? — but now the boogeyman was back.

He said, ‘Anthrax. All right. What else do you have?’

Adrianna said, ‘Observe the screen, please.’

Brian turned, saw the flickering image of the dead Brit fade out, replaced by a burst of static. Then something snapped into focus, and the rest of the group turned as well, looking at the image. It was a moving image, with numbers and letters streaming across the bottom of the screen. An overhead shot, showing a city scene. Narrow streets, a hell of a lot of traffic, carts, vendors and shops. There was a flickering motion as the camera seemed to focus on one particular vehicle: a white four-door, maybe a Toyota, with rust stains along the roof. The vehicle was moving slowly through the crowded street.

Adrianna said, ‘Aerial record, last month, from a Predator III drone.’

The doctor turned to Adrianna. ‘I thought the Predator drones only went up two generations. Not three.’

She smiled thinly. ‘Publicly, you’re right.’

Monty asked, ‘Where are we?’

‘Western part of Damascus, Syria. Keep on watching, please.’

Brian watched the video, unease creeping around in his gut. He wasn’t sure why but he remembered one of the last good times he had had with Marcy, before things had started crumbling between them. They had rented a cottage up in the Adirondacks, at some chilly lake whose name escaped him. Late one night, after a good meal and a bottle of wine, they had gone skinny-dipping in the cool waters of the lake, and in the moonless night they had made frantic love on the sands of their little beach. Marcy at first had been reluctant — ‘Suppose someone sees us?’ — but she had given in to his logical reply: ‘Who the hell’s gonna see us tonight?’.

And the answer now, of course, would be that anybody and everybody with the right gear and the necessary curiosity could see you if they wanted to. And he remembered an event, during his first month, working for the team.

At first Brian had done the usual investigative grunt work, which had been fine, considering what they were paying him and how the burden of worrying about court appearances and getting one’s story straight with whatever youngster assistant DA was assigned to your squad was no longer on his shoulders. The only thing was that he missed the reassurance of having backup. Back on the job, help was just a hurried radio call away: 10-13, officer needs assistance. But on this whacked assignment, he was on his own, which took a bit getting used to. He had flown alone out to Michigan, to interview some woman about her wayward nephew. The woman had emigrated from Yemen nearly twenty years earlier, and she had welcomed him into her living room with the quiet resignation of one who knew that her last name and ethnic background now meant that the giant searchlight of the government was glaring on her every move. Her house was sparsely furnished, with only one couch and two chairs and a tiny television set in the living room. She was worn and old, wearing a black dress and a headscarf. Brian felt like a fool, sitting in her room, asking a series of questions that he was sure had been tossed her way before, over and over again, from people as diverse as the INS and the Michigan State Police.

He went over the woman’s childhood, her coming of age, her marriage to a man who had worked for the American embassy in Aden and who had managed to emigrate to the United States. Her two sons and daughter, all grown, all married and with lots of grandchildren. Her husband’s unfortunate death five years ago. How difficult it was, making do in this community, even with a little money coming in every now and then from family members. How humiliated she had been, the first time she had received food from Meals on Wheels. So forth and so on, and the only time the conversation got heated was when she talked about her nephew — ‘that accursed young man’ — and she had said, with emphasis by pointing a gnarled finger at him, that she had not heard from the boy for years and years.

Then, tears in her eyes, she had lowered her head and apologized for raising her voice. ‘You’re just doing your job. That’s all. I understand.’

And as Brian made to leave, his interview over, she had pointed proudly to a photo of a young man in an Army uniform, posed stiffly in front of an American flag.

‘My son,’ she had said. ‘Halim. Serving as a translator in Iraq. With the Third Infantry Division.’

So Brian had gone out to his car, thinking the trip had been a bust — just low-level practice work for the team, he guessed — and as he was about to start up his rental car and head back to the budget motel that unfortunately was the closest lodging to this neighborhood, he had stopped. Car keys in hand.

Just stopped.

Something wasn’t right.

He paused, listened to his gut tell him something was up. It wasn’t something that was taught in the Academy or even in the few months on the street on the job. It was something you picked up along the way, absorbing it until it became part of who you were. And right now it was telling him that something wasn’t right.

Okay. Take a breath, take in the surroundings. A fairly desolate area outside Detroit, tiny one-family homes, butted up right against each other. Waist-high chain-link fences separated each tiny lot from its neighbor. The poorer homes had no garages of any kind, those doing a little better had open carports, and the real up-and-corners had proper garages.

The woman’s home just had a driveway. No garage.

Brian looked around some more. Most of the lots had the usual residential debris scattered around the small front yards: wagons, tricycles, bicycles, baseball bats and gloves, a skateboard or two, bright plastic toy furniture.

The woman’s lawn was empty. Of course it was empty. She lived alone, it would only be strange, would only be out of the ordinary, if there were toys or kids’ belongings on her front lawn, with the close-cropped grass and—

Grass.

Okay, then.

He checked out the other lawns. Most of them were just packed squares of dirt. Maybe two or three were struggling with crab grass, dandelions and brown grass, trying to make do in solid urban dirt.

But not this woman’s lawn.

Her lawn was lush, green, well groomed and well maintained. There were ornamental plants placed along the foundation line of the small house. Brian recalled how painfully the woman had walked from the kitchen to the living room, limping heavily, saying she needed hip-replacement surgery and if God was kind her children would band together to help pay for it. He couldn’t see her out in the yard, sowing fertilizer and weedkiller, or walking along the edge of the driveway, weed-whacker in her gnarled hands, trimming away.

Little money, he thought. Look at the rest of the house. The shingles curling up along the edge of the roof. The oil-stained and cracked driveway. The broken pane of glass in one of the small basement windows, plugged up with a piece of cardboard.

So how come she had a jewel of a lawn?

Brian shook his head, started up the car, and left.

He went one block, where he was sure that he would not be seen by the woman, parked the car, stepped out, and went back to work.

A couple of weeks passed. Brian had learned from the woman’s neighbors about the landscaping company that came every other week to service her yard. Using his spanking brand-new Federal identification and credentials, he learned that a trust fund paid for the yard’s maintenance. More digging showed that the financing for the trust fund came from an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. By then he had alerted Adrianna to what he had found, and he had briefed Darren, the young man from the NSA. And eventually, late one evening, he had been in the very same meeting room, watching the plasma screen, as Adrianna gently squeezed his shoulder and then played a few buttons on the keyboard of her laptop that was set up on the conference-room table.

‘You did good, Brian,’ she had said. ‘That little ball of string you started unwinding has brought us to a very good place.’

‘What was the deal?’ he had asked.

‘The woman grew up in a desert. All her life, all she ever wanted was a lush green yard, with grass and plants and shrubs, and the cool, moist feeling of a bit of paradise.’

‘Near Detroit?’

‘Paradise is where you can find it, and this particular patch of paradise was being fed, watered and groomed from afar by her favorite little nephew. We were able to trace that offshore account to another account in Khartoum, and then from there we just kept on tracing and tracing and tracing. Nicely done, Brian.’

‘The hell you say.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The hell I say.’ Adrianna glanced at a wristwatch, gold and shiny on her slight olive wrist. ‘Take a look, then.’

Up on the plasma screen, an overhead shot from a Predator, showing flat desert. There was a plume of dust in the distance. The dust cloud grew larger, and the picture flickered some, as the Predator changed position. The dust cloud then revealed itself to be a dark blue Mercedes-Benz sedan, speeding along. Brian opened his mouth to say something when—

Flash of light. No sound from the screen but Brian could imagine what it must have been like. The flash of light merged into a black greasy cloud, and the Mercedes-Benz emerged through the cloud, rolling over and over and over. It came to a halt on its side, smoke and steam rising up and—

Men were there. Rising up from the desert floor, it looked like, where they had lain hidden in holes. Men in tan desert-camouflage gear with automatic weapons in their hands. They went to work, quickly enough, and five men were pulled from the wrecked car, stretched out on the desert floor, and then the helicopters came and the men were bundled in and—

Bodies. Taken from another helicopter. Brought over to the Mercedes-Benz. Awkwardly stuffed into the open doors of the sedan, and then the soldiers trotted back to their helicopters.

‘Decoys?’ Brian asked.

‘Very good,’ Adrianna said. ‘Fedayeen who martyred themselves outside Kabul last year, by driving their pickup trucks into Bradley fighting vehicles. Score, Bradley fighting vehicle one, fedayeen pickup trucks nil. And we appreciated their martyrdom valor so much that we froze their bodies for later and decided to honor them by setting up a return engagement.’

The helicopters lifted off. Brian knew that he wouldn’t have to wait long, and he didn’t.

Another, larger flare of light. When the wind finally cleared away the smoke there was a crater in the desert floor, and scraps of blackened metal and what had once been bodies.

Adrianna reached over to her laptop, pressed a button. The plasma screen went blank.

‘Yemen?’ he asked.

‘Doing well today, Brian. Yes, Yemen.’

‘And when whatever Yemeni authorities get to the wreck-age, all they’re going to find are some scraps of metal and charred bits of flesh. They’ll eventually figure out whose Mercedes-Benz that is, and they’ll count up the body parts and make an educated guess as to what happened. They won’t be in a position to do a DNA analysis of whatever’s left.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And the evil nephew and his cohorts…their comrades will think that they’re up in heaven, sipping strawberry smoothies and banging seventy-two virgins, when in fact they’ll be in Gitmo, getting sweated out, offering up leads and other intelligence.’

Adrianna nodded. ‘Exactly again, Brian.’ She gave him a large smile and Brian had felt good, having made that cool and composed woman smile. He suddenly decided that he needed to see her smile again.

Then he had a thought. ‘The old woman. His aunt. Is she Gitmo-bound?’

Adrianna closed the laptop cover, shook her head. ‘Why pick on an old Yemeni woman? No, we’ll leave her be. But she will have to pay the price for her actions.’

‘And what price is that?’

Adrianna looked at him, her gaze fixed and composed. ‘Her lawn will probably die in the near future. You got a problem with that?’

‘Not a bit,’ he said.

‘I thought you’d say that. Brian, welcome to the team.’

That comment nailed him, and he clenched his hands, just for a moment.

‘A setup? A test?’

‘No, no,’ Adrianna said quickly. ‘Not a setup. We just knew something wasn’t right with that woman. Scores of interviewers had gone in and out of there without anything substantial. But you did, my friend. Went in there with your detective’s eyes and detective’s suspicions, and because of that five bad guys have been taken off the board. Permanently.’

Brian thought about that for a moment, and said, ‘Okay. Not a setup. But a test.’

She shrugged. ‘It could be said like that.’

‘Any other tests out there for me?’

There, again, that damnable smile that seemed to light up something inside him.

‘Brian, every day is a test. Every goddamn day.’

So now, on this testing day, the Predator was following the white Toyota with rust stains on its roof in Damascus traffic. Adrianna said, ‘Darren?’

Darren said, ‘A couple of months ago, somebody in Damascus made a mistake. One phone call. That’s all it took.’

Monty laughed. ‘Man, one phone call sure can fry your ass. What happened?’

‘It was from a satellite phone that we’ve been monitoring in a neighborhood near Suq Hamadiya in Damascus. It was one of a parcel purchased by al-Qaeda members or supporters. The phone had not been used much, and when it was used the chatter was brief and low-key.’

Monty said, ‘What’s the mistake? Somebody use it to order some couscous?’

Darren managed a smile. ‘Close. Somebody used it to call a local garage. Said he was tired of waiting for the transmission to be fixed. Wanted it fixed that afternoon or the mechanic’s head would be on a pike, and his children would be forced to beg from the streets. So that was the break we got. Easy enough from there to find out who the car belonged to, and what it looked like. Put a tracking device in one of the tires. Easy enough again to put the car in the daily tasking orders for the Predators deployed in that area. And then…well, Adrianna?’

‘Just watch,’ she said. ‘Just watch.’

Brian rubbed at his eyes, looked at the car, inching its way through traffic. Then it stopped at an intersection. A cop or traffic guy, standing on a little concrete island, tried his best to direct traffic, and it looked like he was being ignored. Then, strangely enough, vehicles in front of the Toyota moved, but it stayed still, just for a second. Then a hand appeared from the front passenger window, just for a moment, as it dropped something onto the sidewalk.

The car moved. Brian said, ‘Can you freeze that, right there?’

Frozen. The car, the traffic, the frantic white-gloved hands of the traffic cop. Not moving.

Brian said, ‘Play it back, slow.’

Like some comedy newsreel from the 1930s, the traffic moved backwards, and Brian stood up, leaned into the plasma screen, tried to see what was happening. Something flew up into the outstretched hand, and—

‘Reverse it, right now.’

And the object was dropped.

Brian sat down. ‘Okay. You can keep playing it.’

The tape ran for another thirty minutes, and twice more the white Toyota stopped at an intersection, and the passenger’s hand reached out to drop something on the sidewalk. The bustling lines of people, pressed up against the walls of the buildings or the edge of the crumbling sidewalk, seemed to pay no mind for what was being dropped at their feet.

The plasma screen went blank. Brian turned and was surprised to see the team members looking at him, especially Adrianna. She said, ‘There was something there you noticed, Brian.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What was it?’

He paused for a moment, wondered if he was being tested again. If so, what the hell. ‘The guy in the passenger side of the Toyota. Looked like he was dropping something off.’

‘What was it?’

He rubbed at his face, realized he had missed a spot on his chin while hurriedly shaving that morning. ‘If this was in the States, and if there was a radio car on its ass, lights flashing and siren sounding, then I’d guess it’d be a couple of drug perps. And that they’d be dropping off little baggies of whatever it is they were selling that day, to dump the evidence. But these clowns weren’t being chased, near as I could tell.’

A pause. The group still looked at him. Made him still feel like he was trying to prove something to them, that even a non-Fed like himself could do the job, and he pressed on. ‘Another thing, too. Perps in a situation like that, they’re panicking. They’re tossing out their merchandise, tossing it far, hoping that the cops on their ass won’t find it. These guys weren’t doing this. It was deliberate. It was—’

There. It came to him.

Brian looked over to Adrianna, now feeling slightly nauseous, wishing he hadn’t had those two cups of coffee this Sunday morning on an empty stomach, and he said, ‘They’re deliberately dropping these plastic baggies. At intersections. Knowing that traffic and people walking will move over the baggies, rip open the plastic, distribute what’s in there.’

Monty whispered, ’Holy shit.’

Victor said in a shaky voice, ‘The perfect delivery system.’

Now everyone was looking at the doctor, whose face seemed even more pale. Victor went to his laptop and said, ‘You get weaponized anthrax. You have a lot of weaponized anthrax. All right. What’s the delivery system? The US Post Office? Good if you want to create panic like the fall of ‘01, not good if you’re looking for mass casualties. Crop dusters over cities? Not good enough. Too much of a wide distribution, too much dispersal. A few people get sick and that’s it. A bit of a panic but life goes on…Good Christ.’

Victor waited, and then bulled on, his voice coming quick now, syllables rolling over each other, as he looked up at the blank plasma screen, as if recalling what had just been viewed up there. ‘That’s how you do it. You have a crew, ten, thirty, forty guys. Whatever number you need. You immunize them before they go in. They each get twenty or thirty baggies of anthrax. Respiratory kind. Anthrax spores weaponized so it’s finely milled. Drive out to the middle of cities, Manhattan, Boston, LA, maybe three or four teams per city. Christ. Drop off the baggies at crowded intersections, during lunch. Baggies get broken, clouds of anthrax spores rise up, get spread around the streets. Infect scores -shit, no — hundreds, maybe even thousands. In a single day. The perfect delivery system. Time it right and you get respiratory-anthrax outbreaks in a dozen major cities, tens of thousands of causalities within a week. Maybe more. Holy fucking Christ.’

Now the silence was thick, still, just the hum of the laptops working merrily along. Brian had a sudden thought, the four of them clustered around this table, wheezing themselves to death, while the laptops merrily went on with their powered lives, outliving their owners by years.

Adrianna said, ‘Monty?’

‘Yeah,’ he grunted. Brian thought the man looked ill.

‘Seems to be a likely scenario, doesn’t it? Question is, how can we defend against it?’

Monty looked at all of them and then shook his head.

‘Bottom line, we can’t.’

‘Come on, there has to be something that we can do,’ Brian said. ‘I mean, look at it—’

Monty turned to him, glaring. ‘Don’t lecture me on my job, ‘kay? Here’s the deal, and you all know it, even if I have to spell it out for you. You heard what the good doctor said, what we’re up against. Okay. Maybe ten, fifteen teams out there. Ready to hit us in less than a month. What do we do? Close down the borders? Do person-by-person, vehicle-by-vehicle searches for everything coming up through Mexico and down through Canada? Is that it? Clog up the airports? Or the seaports? And that’s assuming these assholes aren’t here already. Maybe they came here last year. Maybe they all got jobs at 7-Eleven and the local gas stations and they’ve blended in so well, they’re acting like good citizens. What do you do then?’

Adrianna said quietly, ‘At about four a.m. this morning, I left a department meeting of the Tiger Team director. There’s a full-court press to pick up those Syrians, start interrogating them, start looking at what other intercepts and records might be out there. We even got the Canadians on board. One working theory is that the gentleman dumped at the Vancouver hospital was exposed to the respiratory anthrax before being fully immunized. But even if we do get some breaks, there’s a good chance that we’ll miss a number of these teams. It just stands to reason.’

Darren shook his head. ‘Dark Winter.’

Brian said, ‘Excuse me?’

‘Dark Winter,’ Darren said, and Brian noticed that Adrianna seemed to flinch. ‘Terrorism scenario, run by the National Security Council, the summer of 2001. Before September eleventh.’

Brian said, ‘Talk about timing.’

‘Yeah, talk about it,’ Darren said, now bent over his laptop, fingers moving rapidly along the keyboard. ‘Scenario was held at Andrews Air Force Base in Virginia and was hosted by the John Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. Reps from most federal agencies and three hospitals were in attendance. Former Senator Sam Nunn played the role of the president. Even had the governor of Oklahoma there. Scenario started with the usual Middle East bullshit. Rising tensions, threats here and there. And one fine day, smallpox outbreak in three areas: Oklahoma, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Started off small and then spread quickly. Didn’t have enough vaccine for the population at large. There was conflict over who’d get the vaccine. People living near the outbreak areas, or National Guard and health-care workers? Casualties started to mount. Schools were closed and public gatherings were banned. Tens of thousands were infected within a month. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Shit.’

Brian’s mouth was dry and he suddenly felt thirsty, but nothing before him was appealing. He had the feeling that if he drank another cup of coffee, water or orange juice, he’d puke up his guts under the conference-room table.

Darren stopped for a moment, as if not wanting to read any more from his laptop screen. Then he sighed and went on. ‘The scenario got worse. Not enough smallpox vaccine could be produced in time. Canada and Mexico sealed their borders. So did some of the states. Governors declared martial law, the stock market collapsed, and there were food shortages in some of the larger cities. By the time the war game was completed, there were nearly a million deaths. A million.’

The silence returned, and it was like no one in the team could bear to look at each other’s eyes. Brian rubbed at his face again and looked at Adrianna, who seemed to be thinking of something. A thought came to him and Brian said, ‘There was another scenario, wasn’t there?’

‘What?’ Adrianna asked.

‘Another scenario. This one involved smallpox. I’m sure there was one involving a nationwide anthrax attack. What was it like? What are we facing?’

Now the mood in the room had changed, as Brian and the three others looked to Adrianna, as though waiting for her to confirm their worst fears. She coughed and said, ‘Yes, Brian. You’re right. There was an anthrax scenario held last winter. Similar to Dark Winter.’

She stopped. Monty said, ‘Go on. Tell us more.’

Adrianna rubbed her hands together for a moment. ‘Started off like Dark Winter. Simultaneous and multiple outbreaks of anthrax. Same challenges, same problems. Vaccine stock small, and what vaccine there was had to be administered in three doses over a period of a week. All the states’ borders sealed, economic collapse…’

Another pause. It had to be said. Brian spoke up and said, ‘Worse than the smallpox scenario, wasn’t it?’

Adrianna pursed her lips. ‘Much worse. Respiratory anthrax is a magnitude more contagious than smallpox. The scenario… it didn’t end well.’

Victor said nothing, as if he knew what was ahead of them. Darren looked around, like a high school student suddenly thrust into a jury for a murder trial, deciding a man’s fate. He said, ‘How did it end, then?’

A slight shake of the head. ‘Major cities depopulated. Refugees spreading out into the suburbs and countryside. Vigilantes setting up roadblocks. Casualties in the millions. Effective collapse of all governing authority, from national levels to state levels, including military. UN peacekeepers sent in to administer what was left alive and functioning. Other UN members setting up relief mandates, seizing oil, grain and other resources.’

Adrianna stopped for just a moment. ‘Dark Winter was the name for the smallpox scenario, because it imagined that as dire as it would be to suffer a smallpox attack, there was room for eventual recovery, that the country and its government and its people could survive.’

She looked at each of them in turn. ‘The anthrax scenario had no such assurance. Hence its name.’

The room was deathly quiet. ‘It was called Final Winter,’ she said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Aliyah Fulenz was sixteen years old and knew that she was lovely and educated and lucky. Yet with all these good things, she still felt a terrible guilt over keeping a secret from her papa and mama, especially now, with another war being waged in the air above her home in Baghdad.

This was the second war she had lived through, but she’d been just a little girl during the first one. All she recalled from that war were the nights spent in the basement of their home, cuddled up with papa and mama, listening to the ghastly shriek of air-raid sirens and the far-off explosions from the enemy bombs and missiles. She had been too young to know who was fighting or why, and her most vivid memories were just the faces of papa and mama looking up with fear at the ceiling, like they were waiting for some warhead to burst through and kill them all. Even with the loud noises and the way her mama held her close and tight, she hadn’t been that scared. It had been like an adventure, an adventure like that of some princess she had read about in her picture books, and if mama and papa were there, how scared could she be?

Plenty scared, she would learn later, plenty scared indeed.

Now she was sixteen, and a war had come back, and she was older and wiser and oh, so much lovelier, and the fear that came each night with the wail of the sirens and the thudding noises of the bombs was now outweighed by guilt, for she had never kept secrets from her papa and mama, and the secret she had now was one that she wasn’t sure she could keep.

For Aliyah was in love.

His name was Hassan, and he was a nineteen-year-old militiaman who had volunteered as an air-raid warden for their neighborhood, and he was tall and dark and had brown eyes and a wide grin and a mustache that tickled her whenever he kissed her, for he had kissed her exactly twice, and she sometimes daydreamed, wondering what the third kiss would be like. And on this winter evening, mama had noticed her absent-mindedness, scolding her for not drying the supper dishes properly. Not complaining, like the good daughter she was, Aliyah had rewashed and redried each plate and fork and spoon, washing each item mechanically, trying to remember that firm touch of Hassan, the softness of his lips, and the way his sweetness stayed on her lips, minutes later after each kiss.

She closed the cabinet doors, went out to the main room of their house, where papa and mama were resting, sitting on a couch, the television on but the sound off. On the screen a man in a western suit was sitting behind a desk, reading what passed for news these days. She ached for a moment, looking at her parents, knowing she was lucky indeed to have such a man and a woman to raise her. Papa was a doctor and worked in the Ministry of Health, in an office concerned with pediatrics, and he would bring home piles of papers and folders in an old, scuffed leather briefcase. Lately he had been grumbling and examining these papers, late into the night, trying to work with French and German pharmaceutical companies, trying to find some way of importing medicines for the city’s hospitals during the war.

Mama taught French at Baghdad University and had promised Aliyah that this summer, once the war was finally -over, the two of them would fly to Paris and mama would be her own personal tour guide to that magnificent and civilized city. Paris! Aliyah had gotten books from her school library that showed the monuments and museums and the Eiffel Tower, and mama had laughed, gently brushing Aliyah’s hair one night, saying, ‘Paris is a beautiful city, my daughter, but remember this. Your own Baghdad was a center of culture and civilization, for the entire known world, when Paris was nothing more than mud and wattle huts, with peasants who still prayed to the gods of thunder and lightning. Never forget your heritage, Aliyha, never.’

Now she looked at them both, sitting there, her father with the papers in his lap, mama knitting a pair of gloves for her father, who suffered so much in the cold of winter. Mama looked up at her. ‘Are the dishes now done properly, Aliyah?’

‘Yes, they are,’ she said, her chest tightening with the ache of what she was trying to do.

‘Very good,’ her mother said.

Aliyah remained standing. Her mother returned to her knitting and looked up again. ‘Yes, what is it?’

‘I…I’m going for a walk. Is that all right?’

Her father looked up. ‘Now? At dusk? It’s not safe!’

‘Only to the end of the block! Papa, I promise I will be careful!’

He shook his head. ‘Suppose the bombing starts up? Eh? What then?’

‘When the sirens sound, I will run right home.’

Her mother stopped her knitting. ‘No, you will not run home. You will run to the shelter, that’s where you will run.’

Father grumbled and said, ‘I forbid it, wife. It’s too dangerous to go out. Just one bomb, one missile…’

Mama smiled at Aliyah and reached up with a hand, gently rubbed father’s bald spot. ‘Not to worry. Our daughter needs to get some fresh air. That’s all. And I know she will promise to run to the shelter and meet us there, if the sirens sound. Am I right?’

Aliyah nodded, though she hadn’t liked the shelter that had opened up in their neighborhood. It was crowded and dark and children inside the shelter screamed and wept all night long, and she couldn’t sleep. She had much preferred to take shelter here in her own home, in their basement, but her father had forbidden that, and for once her mother had let him have his way. He insisted that the new shelter was strong — ‘built by the Finns and the Swedes, they know their engineering, and living next to the Russians for so long, they know how to build bomb shelters’ — and that was where they had gone, night after night during the past week, when the shelter had been opened up to the neighboring residents.

‘Yes, mama, you are right. When the sirens sound, I will run as quick as the wind, to the shelter. And I will find you there.’

Father grumbled some more and went back to his papers. Mama smiled sweetly up at her daughter and the ache of guilt returned, that she had not told them about Hassan. But perhaps she would tell them tomorrow. Yes, perhaps tomorrow. She came over and kissed papa on the head and mama on her cheek, and mama said, ‘Wait, daughter, just for a moment.’

Mama’s strong fingers went to Aliyah’s neck, pulling at a thin chain that hung there. Mama smiled widely as she pulled the chain free and the crucifix was exposed. She tugged again and Aliyah lowered herself, allowing her mother to kiss the form of Jesus upon the cross.

‘There. I feel better. God and His Son will protect you. Now. Go and have your fun, daughter. But if the sirens sound…’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Aliyah called out, racing to the door. ‘I will run right to the shelter!’

Then papa said something else, which she did not hear, and to which she paid little attention.

There would always be another time.

Out on the streets, a scarf about her head, Aliyah walked quickly down the block, sniffing in distaste at the smell of burning garbage. Ever since the war had come to Baghdad, the trash services had faltered and failed, and electricity was spotty some days and nights. But she and her family were lucky, at least, that the water was still running. There was a rumor that a cousin of Himself lived just two blocks away, and that there would be no way that he would allow the water to be stopped.

She passed parked cars and there, up on the left and on the other side of the street, was a three-story apartment building with its windows blown out, the concrete scarred by shrapnel, the large extended family who had lived in there either dead or wounded. The newspapers had said that the place had been struck by an American bomb, by a terror pilot who only wanted to strike fear into the hearts of the Baghdad civilians, and Aliyah last week had asked papa if that was true, that it had been an American bomb. Papa had shaken his head and said, ‘Daughter, you see how much artillery and missiles our brave forces fire up into the sky, do you not? Have you forgotten that old rhyme, what goes up, must come down?’ And mama had shushed him and that had been that.

Aliyah reached into her blouse, touched the comforting pendant of Jesus on the cross. She and her family were Christians, and mama and papa were proud that here, in Baghdad, still the most civilized city in the Arab world, they were allowed to worship freely. Not like the barbarians in Egypt, who murdered their Coptic Christians, or the desert barbarians in Saudi Arabia, who allowed no other religion into their kingdom. ‘We have many problems, Aliyah,’ her father had once said, ‘but being able to worship our own way is not one of them. Even Himself has a Christian as his foreign minister!’

Which was true, though it concerned Aliyah not one bit. Some foreign minister, to allow such a war to go on…but she kept such thoughts to herself. The only thought she had right now was to ensure that Hassan was going to be where he’d said he would be.

She approached the corner of the street, hesitated for a moment. She had told papa and mama that her walk would only take her to the end of the block. But it was such a cool, beautiful evening, and Hassan was only two more blocks away — what difference would it make? She hesitated again, thinking of papa and mama back home, and how easy it would be to turn around, walk back home, and stay in the living room with mama and papa, and perhaps mama would play some of her French music records, the women with such low and smooth voices, perhaps she should go back, back to where she belonged…

But the streets ahead beckoned to her. Hassan and his smile and his long fingers and his lips waited for her. Just a short stroll, that’s all, she told herself. Just a short stroll.

Aliyah walked across the street, looked back, wondering if she could see her home, but all she could make out were the low buildings of the other homes and the jagged concrete of the destroyed apartment building.

The walk went fast, and up ahead there was a small pyramid of sandbags. Men in uniforms were standing around, talking and joking, automatic rifles slung across their young backs. Aliyah slowed her walk, not wanting to look too eager, but still, she was noticed. There was laughter from two of the men, who grabbed a taller man and thrust him forward. More laughter.

She stopped in front of him, smiling widely. Hassan nodded, smiling as well.

‘Aliyah,’ he said.

‘Hassan.’

He said in a louder voice, probably for the benefit of his comrades: ‘It’s not safe to come out at night, you know that.’

‘I know…but still, I had to go for a walk. It’s so nice and cool.’

‘So it is.’

The other young men — boys, really — laughed. Hassan looked at them, smiling, and he took her hand — how strong his own hand felt — and they walked away from the pile of sandbags. They sat on a bench and watched the traffic go by, listened to the sounds of the birds, even in this part of the city, and talked about school and soccer and other gossip and, here and there, just brief comments about the war. Aliyah felt such love for Hassan, sitting there next to her in his green uniform, his assault rifle held lightly across his lap, a young boy ready to protect her and her family from the invaders. She thought about how she would tell papa and mama about Hassan, maybe tomorrow, and a thought came to her, a thought so exciting that she could feel something racing through her: Paris. Mama had said earlier that if the war was over soon enough and the sanctions were lifted, there would be enough money that when they went to Paris, she could take a friend, and mama hadn’t said whether the friend had to be a girl, and why not a boy like Hassan, from such a nice family and—

Hassan grabbed her hand, hard, as a siren began to wail.

Aliyah looked up, amazed at how dark the sky had gotten.

Oh, mama, papa, she thought, I am in so much trouble. She got up, ready to run back to their neighborhood, to the shelter, and Hassan said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘To the shelter. With my parents.’

He held on to her arm as other sirens began to wail. ‘No, it’s too dangerous. You have to stay here.’

‘Hassan, no, I—’

Hassan’s voice changed from that of a smiling young man, flirting with a beautiful young girl, to that of an armed militiaman, charged with a duty. ‘No! It’s too far! You’ll come here with us.’

He started dragging her away as his two companions joined him. They went through a narrow alleyway, past a squealing cat, and down one set of concrete steps, then another. The sirens seemed louder, and then there were two loud thuds as the evening’s bombing began. A metal door was unlatched and lights were switched on. Another, longer flight of concrete steps led to a further metal door, which was open. Hassan led the way, followed by Aliyah and the two other men. Electric lights in the shelter flickered and glowed. There was a family there, father and mother and four children, bundled together, their eyes really wide, and Aliyah wondered if she had looked so scared and innocent during the last war.

She sat next to Hassan on a metal bench and said, ‘My parents. They will be so cross with me, they told me to go to the shelter and—’

Hassan interrupted her, his voice so brave. ‘Then I will take the blame. I will say that I was on patrol when the sirens sounded, that I brought you here to keep you safe. That is what I will do.’

Aliyah slipped her hand into Hassan’s and squeezed it tight, thinking that yes, this would work so beautifully. She would present Hassan to mama and papa as a hero, a man who bravely took her in and comforted her. Surely mama and papa would see what a wonderful young man he was!

The lights flickered. More thudding. The children started whimpering.

Hassan raised his voice. ‘It will be fine, just you wait and see. It will be fine. Our air defenses are the mightiest in the world. All will be fine.’

Aliyah squeezed his hand again. There was another thud in the distance, and the lights went out.

More whimpering from the children. It was so dark that she couldn’t see anything, nothing at all.

But she could feel just fine, and in the darkness she felt the tentative touch of Hassan’s hand upon her face. She kissed his fingers and then his lips were upon her again, and in the darkness of the bomb shelter, despite the whimpering of the children and the thudding noises still coming in regular waves, she had never felt such pleasure, such joy, as Hassan kissed her, again and again, and then… his hand was upon her breast, gently squeezing, and her breathing quickened, as she felt a man’s hand upon her for the very first time, my God, how pleasurable and how wickedly naughty, to be touched and kissed and loved in darkness and—

WHAM!

WHAM!

WHAM!

There was screaming, loud screaming, and Aliyah realized it was her. She closed her mouth, found that she was on the concrete floor of the bunker. The floor was…something was wrong. It was tilted. It was still dark and there was a flare of light, as the father in the corner lit a cigarette lighter. Hassan was standing over her, his face a mix of concern and fear, and she got up. ‘I have to go, I have to go now!’

‘It’s not safe!’

‘I don’t care! I want my mama and papa, and I want them now!’

Aliyah staggered over to the door, tried to get it open. It seemed jammed. She pulled and pulled, and something wrenched free. The sirens were still screaming. She ran up the stairs, knowing that Hassan was following her, not caring.

Up and up she went, crying now, the sirens louder as she got closer to the surface. She broke free, out into the alley. Other sirens were sounding as well, ambulances and fire engines. She went out to the street, kept on running. The shelter. She would go to the shelter and find mama and papa and bury herself in their arms, and promise to be a good daughter, never again to leave their side, if only the sirens and shrieking would stop, if only it would be quiet and the war would stop and papa would work at saving sick children and mama would teach her French, and all would be safe and quiet and beautiful…

The shelter. Where was the shelter?

She ran up one block, and then took a left. More sirens from the distance, and then an ambulance shrieked by, and then another. She took another corner and—

Smoke. Chaos. Aliyah brought both fists up to her head and beat at her ears.

The shelter was across the street, but she could not get any closer. There were ambulances and fire trucks and masses of people, crowding in and around the structure. There was a barbed-wire fence around the concrete edifice, and people were tearing at it with their bare hands. A large plume of smoke was billowing from the rooftop, rising higher and higher into the night sky as if from a chimney venting the output of some horrible fire going on underneath the concrete and steel and—

A group of men emerged from the crowd, carrying a stretcher. They were chanting and screaming, and each held a fist up in the air as their other hand held the frame. An Iraqi flag was draped over the burnt body, barely concealing it. And another stretcher emerged, and another, and Aliyah was on the ground, prostrate, beating her forehead against the asphalt, praying to her savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, to save her and her mama and papa, and she stayed there all night long, as the hundreds of burnt bodies were dragged out of the destroyed shelter, her mama and papa among them, charred pieces of flesh and bone, and save for a distant aunt she was now all alone in the world, and when she finally stood up and saw the useless fire trucks still there in the morning, pouring water into the shelter, she was still sixteen, but she was no longer a young girl.

Hassan held no interest for her anymore nor did much of anything else. Not even her Lord Jesus Christ, who had permitted the Americans to come here and kill her family.

All that mattered now was revenge.

Revenge to make the Americans pay for what they had done to her and papa and mama.

And eventually that day, Aliyah returned home, and started to think and plan and work very, very hard.

CHAPTER NINE

In the conference room, Adrianna Scott could feel the greasy chill of despair come over her Tiger Team, but she would not allow it to get out of hand. She looked around the room and said, ‘You know the weakness of scenarios. They assume the very best chances for our enemies, the very worst response by our agencies. But Final Winter was a war game. It was horrible. But it was just a game.’

The police detective said, ‘A hell of a game, Adrianna. Jesus Christ, I thought weaponized anthrax was hard to produce, especially in quantity. Where the hell is this stuff coming from?’

Adrianna said, ‘Darren?’

The NSA man said, ‘Before the second Gulf War, the Secretary of State said that Iraq had produced hundreds of pounds of anthrax. Still hasn’t been found yet. Not hard to figure out that the stuff was either sold or given away before the Third Infantry Division plowed into Baghdad.’

‘Shit,’ Brian said.

Adrianna said, ‘Monty, there’s no way to guarantee a one hundred percent success rate in sealing the borders or intercepting the teams. Correct?’

A morose nod of the head. ‘You’ve got it.’

She turned to Victor, determined to keep things moving. In her experience since being chosen to head this Tiger Team, she knew that some teams collapsed in inter-service rivalry, bitter fights over who had said what in a year-old memo between the CIA and the NSA, and some teams were so cautious that nothing happened, except for strategy and long-range planning sessions. But her team and her people were quickly earning a reputation for coming up with solutions and making the solutions work, and that was a reputation she was determined to maintain.

‘Victor, I’m afraid it’s going to be up to you and your folks.’

Victor looked like a young rabbit, suddenly seeing a snake slither toward it. ‘I don’t see how.’

‘The intelligence option and the military option are going to be of limited use,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘That leaves the public-health option.’

‘But I’ve told you already,’ he protested. ‘The typical vaccine regimen is three injections, spaced over a week. That and Cipro. I don’t see what else we can do.’

There was a moment of silence, and then Monty spoke up. ‘What do you mean, typical?’

‘Just what I said. Typical.’

Now Adrianna saw the team members direct their gazes at Victor, who seemed to shrink some from the attention.

Darren said, ‘All right, Victor. That’s the typical approach. What’s not typical?’

Victor looked at each of their faces, and when it came to Adrianna there was a pleading quality in his expression. ‘Adrianna…it’s highly experimental. It hasn’t gone through the usual evaluation process and blind trials. The production line has been set up and there’s been some progress, but it’s at least—’

Brian said, ‘What’s usual about this, pal? Tell me that. C’mon, spill what you’ve got. What’s going on down at the CDC?’

Victor looked down at his screen. ‘All right. I’ll brief you. But I’m not going to be held responsible for anything that—’

Adrianna tried to soothe him. ‘No, you won’t be held responsible, Victor. You know who holds the responsibility. So tell us what you’ve got.’

Victor still looked miserable. His fingers gingerly worked the keyboard of his laptop. He seemed to be struggling against something and Adrianna knew what it was: the desperate horror of screwing up, with the stakes so high.

Finally Victor said, ‘It’s been worked on since the first anthrax attacks, back in ‘01. Operational name is Clear Sky. Challenge was, just like now, goddamn it, how to maximize the immunization process for respiratory anthrax in the minimum amount of time. We had to get around the three-shot process. Wasn’t working. How the hell can you get millions of Americans lined up and processed when it takes three injections to immunize them? The logistics were a nightmare. Even the one-shot process was a hell of a challenge, too. Then the working group for Clear Sky went at it from a different angle. Used a genetically modified version of the respiratory-anthrax virus. Modified it so that when an individual is exposed, he or she runs a slight fever, maybe a bit of nausea, but then they’re immune. Immune up to five years.’

He looked up from his laptop. ‘There you have it.’

‘Have what?’ Brian asked.

Monty said, ‘Yeah. What the hell was the fuss all about?’ Victor had the expression of someone who couldn’t believe the morons he was spending time with. ‘Don’t you see? It’s a variety of the respiratory anthrax. You’re not immunized through injection. You’re immunized by breathing it in.’

Brian said, ‘The hell you say.’

‘The hell I do,’ Victor said.

Adrianna said, ‘Is there enough?’

‘Enough what?’

‘Enough vaccine to do the job.’

Victor shook his head. ‘Maybe. I can find out later today. I know the production has been underway for some time, just in case we…well, just in case. But there’s the biggest problem of all. Delivery. It’s not like we can set up shower stations or breathing tubes on subways or train cars. Only possible delivery system would be airborne.’

Darren said, ‘Hasn’t it been looked at?’

‘Sure,’ Victor said. ‘But the challenge of using an airborne vaccine is—’

Brian said, ‘Oh, right. Like you said earlier. About wide dispersal. Crop dusters and such wouldn’t work.’

Victor shook his head. ‘That problem’s been solved.’

Adrianna said, ‘How?’

‘Vladimir Zhukov.’

‘Zhukov?’ Monty asked. ‘Who the hell is he?’

‘Was he, we think,’ Victor said. ‘Nowadays, he’s gone missing, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Best report is that he got gunned down in Tashkent a couple of years ago for screwing some group out of money who thought they were getting smallpox viruses and ended up getting chickenpox instead. But during the bad old days of the USSR, he was head research scientist for the Kromksy Institute of Infectious Diseases, which was funded one hundred percent by the Red Army. Their own little biowarfare agency. They had the same challenge, too, of trying to weaponize respiratory anthrax because wind and air currents would cause such widespread dispersal that any attack would fail in the first few seconds. But Zhukov came up with a solution. Pretty goddamned elegant if you ask me. Way it works, it’s like cluster bombs. You take—’

Monty said, ‘Now you’re into my playground, doc. I can do the explaining.’

‘Go ahead.’

Adrianna watched the scarred face of her military man as he briefed them, not once looking at his laptop. She hated to admit playing favorites, but Monty was her favorite in her Tiger Team. Quiet, unassuming, smart and tough, with the look of a guy who could help deliver a baby in the morning, and in the afternoon break the neck of someone threatening the same newborn.

‘Munitions,’ Monty said. ‘Always been the challenge of effectively delivering the most potent firepower with the most economic delivery system. You’ve got the problem of having enough munitions slung underneath fighter-bomber wings and in bomb bays to do the job, especially if you’re flying over hundreds of miles of territory and your supply chain is thin. So here’s the deal. You get one big bomb but it’s really just a canister. That’s all. Drop it over your target site. Maybe a staging area for infantry. Or an air base. Anything with nice, exposed targets. The canister is dropped, falls to a predetermined altitude, and pops open. Inside are hundreds of bomblets, packed away in little clusters that spread out. Each cluster about the size of a beer can. And when they get close enough, the little beer cans pop open and a lot of bad guys are having a bad day. One canister is dropped, but you’re delivering munitions over a wide area. Lethal and effective as hell.’

Darren smiled. ‘Sounds like you serve in the Air Force, Monty.’

Monty said, ‘I’ll never tell, and you know it.’

Brian was impatient. ‘All right, you’re saying that this Russian, he came up with a way of using cluster bombs to deliver the anthrax?’

Victor shook his head. ‘Yes, but not in a mechanical sense. You see, Zhukov came up with an approach to cluster the anthrax spores using a membrane, about the thickness of a cell wall. And this membrane would last a number of seconds out in the open air before it decayed, releasing the anthrax spores. So you could have a release of respiratory anthrax from a rocket shell or a spraying device, and it would reach ground level before the spores were actually out in the open. Very elegant, very deadly. And what we did — well, the Clear Sky group, I mean — was to use Zhukov’s approach to come up with a delivery system for the anthrax vaccine. Same method, using the membrane system. Initial tests looked promising. Anyone exposed to the vaccine would generally just need one exposure.’

‘Good,’ Adrianna said. ‘We’ll rely on you to—’

‘But…but, Jesus, Adrianna!’ Victor’s voice raised a notch and she said, ‘Yes?’

His face was mottled white, as though a surge of anger was now raging through him. ‘You… I mean, all right, suppose we do have enough vaccine. That’s a possibility. Considering who we are and the blank check we carry around in our back pockets all the time, we may be able to make it happen. But you haven’t solved the delivery problem, not even close to it!’

‘It’s a problem, it’ll be solved,’ she said.

‘Do you have any idea? Do you? My God, the last mass immunization we had in this country was the swine flu fiasco, back in 1976.’

Nobody said anything. Adrianna paused, hoped someone would pick up the ball, and thankfully, it was her New York detective.

‘Going to need a history lesson there, pal. Most of us were pissing in our diapers back then. Go on.’

Victor wiped at his face with his right hand, ‘In 1976 — February, I think — there was an outbreak of a respiratory illness at Fort Dix in New Jersey. An Army recruit died, and autopsy results showed he died from a variation of swine flu. That got a lot of people’s attention. You see, a form of swine flu was believed to be the strain of influenza that broke out in 1918 and 1919. A lot of people died worldwide from that epidemic.’

Monty said, ‘Define “a lot”, doc.’

Victor’s voice was now calmer, and icier. ‘How does fifty to a hundred million people sound like?’

Brian said, ‘Sick? You mean, fifty to a hundred million people sick?’

‘Shit, no, not sick. Dead. Fifty to a hundred million people dead. Worldwide. In the space of a year.’

Adrianna’s mouth seemed dry. So many dead… She said, ‘Impossible. How could that many people have died without us knowing about it today? Something like that should be in all the history books.’

A sharp nod from Victor. ‘Of course. But something else was crowding out the news about the pandemic. The end of the First World War. Tens of millions had died in the trenches and elsewhere. What was another ten or fifty or a hundred million? Which is why the CDC back in ‘76 freaked, thinking that the swine flu that killed this soldier was just the tip of the iceberg. Old reports I saw, the estimate was that if there was a swine flu outbreak that year, by the end of 1976 there could be a million deaths in the United States alone. A million. So there was a crash program, announced by President Ford, to immunize everybody in the United States against swine flu.’

Brian said, ‘Sorry, doc, you’re gonna have to continue the history lesson here. I don’t remember this shit at all.’

‘Can’t see why you should — because it was a fiasco. It was supposed to be another Manhattan Project style of government management but those type of projects tend not to repeat themselves in terms of success, if you know what I mean. A global war against Nazis and Japanese militarists tends to focus one’s mind and efforts. Not the threat of a possible flu epidemic. Anyway, pharmaceutical companies were pressed into service to develop the vaccine. One company spent all their time developing the wrong vaccine and had to start over. Insurance companies said they wouldn’t pay out any claims against the pharmaceuticals. Congress had to step in to provide protection. The vaccine for children had to be administered in the two-dose system. Paperwork and administration was a nightmare. Then some elderly people started dying, the day they got the vaccine. And then it came out that people receiving the vaccine were at a greater risk of developing Guillain-Barre syndrome, a delightful and occasionally fatal form of paralysis. By the time it went down in flames, only a third of the population had been immunized, and the total cost reached almost a half-billion dollars. And there was no swine flu outbreak that year.’

‘Christ on a crutch,’ Monty said.

‘And another thing,’ Victor said, pressing on, ‘they had nine months to do it, and they still didn’t get it right. How in hell do you expect us to do the same thing in under a month?’

Adrianna was pleased at how calm her voice sounded, and felt a quick burst of pride — quickly suppressed- at how well she was doing. ‘Victor, what other choice do we have? Wait for the outbreaks to start in Chicago or Atlanta or DC? It will be too late by then. You know it.’

‘Another mass-immunization program… it can’t work,’ Victor said. ‘You know it can’t. Not in the space of time we have. Not to mention the media attention. Hell, the news medias’ focus on the program back in ‘76 crippled it. Back when there were only three major networks, no news cable channels. Can you imagine what it would be like now, today? With the cable news channels? The twenty-four/seven coverage? The cameras outside the clinics? The interviews with people who have a bad reaction from the immunization? The chat rooms? The weblogs? It would be a disaster before it even—’

Monty interrupted, ‘Not to mention that it would give the assholes with the anthrax an excuse to hit us now. Not wait until some special date on their fucked-up calendar. Now.’

Another pause in the conversations. It seemed like a moment had been reached, and Adrianna knew what it was. She had prepared for it, had practiced it, but still, it was hard, getting the words out.

‘Then…then what we’re talking about,’ she began, ‘is that perhaps the only option is to proceed with the immunization. But in private.’

There, she thought. It was out. From the looks on the faces of the other Tiger Team members, it was as though she had taken a baseball bat to the back of their heads. Darren, now looking even more pale, turned, stared at the other members, and said, ‘What do you mean, private? You’re talking nearly three hundred million people. How can something this huge be done in private?’

More voices, from Monty and Victor but not, she noted, from Brian. He seemed to be keeping his counsel, and Adrianna raised a hand and the voices quieted down for a moment. She said, ‘Perhaps “private” wasn’t the correct word. Secret, then. An immunization program in secret.’

Another blow to their heads. More silence. And now it was Brian’s turn.

‘You’re looking at hefty prison sentences for all of us, if this goes through,’ he said.

‘Perhaps. And perhaps hefty prison sentences will be a worthwhile price to pay for saving millions of lives, for saving this country, for saving civilization.’

Victor said, ‘Adrianna, we’re facing terrible choices, we all know it, but hyperbole and exaggeration isn’t going to help us—’

She let her voice rise. ‘What hyperbole? What exaggeration? Come on, Victor. You know your history. You know what we’re up against. Let’s say we do nothing about immunization. Let’s say that we depend on Monty and his bright young men and women to intercept the attack teams. I’m sure they’ll be successful in most cases. But they’re not perfect. Let’s say a handful get through…what next? You’re still looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. Panic. Collapse of our economy. Perhaps even the end of us as a functioning superpower. What then? I’ll tell you what then. Meetings are held in Tokyo and Moscow and Paris and Berlin and even in poor London, and decisions are made. Compromises. Appeasement. Surrender. From the politicians in those nations who don’t want mass graves in football stadiums or wheatfields as a consequence of cooperating with us in our war on terror. And I know it’s a fucking cliche and all that, but by then the terrorists win. And how long before sharia — Islamic law — is imposed in Paris, in Amsterdam, in some of the Asian countries? How long?’

Underneath the table, Adriana could feel her legs begin to tremble. ‘You’re correct, Victor. There are terrible choices ahead for us. Quite terrible. But there are choices, nonetheless. One choice is to do nothing, and hope that our border security and other forces intercept the attack teams. The other choice is not to wait on hope. It’s to act, and I’m sorry, but that’s the only choice I think is available.’

She was about to continue speaking when the lights flickered.

Flickered again.

And then there was a loud thump, coming from above.

And in a moment, Monty and Brian were standing up, their hands now gripping pistols.

The trembling in Adrianna’s legs increased.

CHAPTER TEN

Hamad Suseel tried to ease the pain in his gut and the anxiety in his heart with the soothing thought that in a very few moments one of two wonderful things was about to occur. The first was that he was finally going to begin his jihad against the unbelievers, and if all went well he would be on his way home before the evening was out, thinking about the victory that he had achieved. And the second was that he was going to begin his jihad against the unbelievers, and if all didn’t go well he would still enter Paradise and meet his mother and father and older brother, and feel joy at such a reunion.

He drove his rental car carefully into the lot of what was called an office park. There were buildings of stone and glass, plain cubes that showed no beauty, no design. Not even that mongrel in this mongrel country, Frank Lloyd Wright, would have enjoyed seeing these pieces of crap built on such rich land. As a younger man, Hamad had dreamed of being an engineer or an architect, learning to construct better homes than those concrete pieces of shit that the UN built for his family and others outside Jenin, but the education he dreamed about never happened, of course. His education involved the endless intifadah, stealing copper wire and other metals for money, throwing rocks and paving stones at Israeli armored cars and tanks, and going to bed hungry at night while his father dozed in the corner and spoke dreamily during the day of the family farm that had been lost, back in 1948.

There was an old black-and-white photo of the family farm, creased and faded, which was passed around family gatherings, like one of the relics the Christians loved to possess and collect, and Hamad never had any patience for this reminiscing. Remembering past glories was the sign of losers. Like the Greeks recalling their ancient knowledge and the Italians their ancient empire, many of his family members and others were content to sit still and moan about their misfortune at the hands of the Jews and the British and the Americans.

But not Hamad. And especially not after that night when an American-built helicopter — an Apache Longbow, built in Kentucky — had been aiming for some visiting Iranian mullah in a Mercedes, traveling down one of the narrow and dingy streets of his village, and the first missile had missed the speeding car and had gone instead into one of those concrete cubes put up by the UN, hiring out corrupt contractors who poured cheap concrete and not enough reinforcing bars, so that when the missile exploded the two stories pancaked into a heap of dust and debris, crushing the bodies of his mother and father and older brother.

No, not after that night. After that night, Hamad cared about one and one thing only: to do whatever was necessary so that in a very short time what was left of America would have its people dreaming about and remembering their past glories, their past achievements, before the righteous in the world had risen up and had ground them into dust.

There. An empty space. He parked his rental car, felt his hands shake for just a moment as he switched off the engine. Where to put the keys? In his pocket? Or leave them in the car? What made the best sense?

He looked at the keys, proud now that his hand was still, like the disciplined warrior he was. The keys went back into the ignition. He would leave the car unlocked. He stepped out into the cool morning air on this Christian Sabbath day and went into the rear of the car. He was wearing a light blue jumpsuit with the name Hank embroidered in red thread over the left breast, and over the right breast was a badge that said Colonial Flowers. He felt slightly disgusted at having to be dressed like a common trader. His intelligence, his dedication, his skills deserved better than this. But then he remembered how it had begun, back near Jenin, when the Sudanese had talked to him.

The Sudanese had been tall and very black, the blackest man that Hamad Suseel had ever seen. But he was a fellow believer and had come to spend some time in their village, speaking to the elders and the members of the brotherhood — the fighters, the holy warriors — and it was during these times when Hamad had sat alone in the corner, not saying a word, just watching. It had been a month since his family had been murdered by the Jews and the Americans, and never in his life had he been so cold. Even in the warmest nights he needed two or three blankets, for the coldness in his heart would cause him to shiver.

The Sudanese, with his piercing dark eyes, seemed to have noticed his quiet nature during the meetings, for on the third night he had spoken to him alone. The conversation had been quick and to the point.

Al-es salaam,’ the Sudanese had said.

‘And the blessings of God be upon you,’ Hamad had replied.

‘I know what happened to your mother and father and brother. For that you have my sympathy.’

‘You are too kind.’

The Sudanese had cocked his head for a moment. ‘I am told that during the month since the attacks, you have not fought back. Why is that? Are you waiting for the right moment?’

Hamad clenched his fists, standing in the dark alley that stank of garbage and the open sewer. Why, he had thought, why had it come to us that cities in other countries — and on their flickering television, they all knew what other cities looked like, even if they could not actually smell them -never had this kind of stink, this kind of filth, this kind of grinding day-to-day oppression from invaders with clean uniforms and good meals and warm homes to go to at night?

‘No,’ he had said. ‘I am waiting for the right target.’

The Sudanese had nodded at that. ‘Go on, my friend. I would like to know what you mean by a “right target”.’

Then it came out, in a torrent.

‘What use is this kind of fighting?’ Hamad had said. ‘Our brave boys and girls wear martyrdom belts, they go into pizza shops and buses and playgrounds and kill themselves and other boys and girls, and sometimes old men and old women too. Oh, such glory, such honor, such bravery! For generations their actions will be celebrated in song and verse, like those of the blessed Saladin!’ he added in a mocking tone. And he wondered if he had spoken too harshly, but the Sudanese seemed to appreciate what he had said.

‘Yes, yes,’ the black man had said. ‘I agree.’

Hamad had then said, ‘The bombs, the shootings, the rock-throwing — what does it accomplish? It makes us bitter. It makes us beggars to the world, asking for scraps of money and support, for bags of rice and beans from the UN, for occasional kind words from the French and the Russians and the Americans. And for what? The Jews have gotten stronger, we have gotten weaker, and when we are not ignored, we are laughed at. Laughed at!’

The Sudanese had said, ‘And? What is to be done, then?’

Hamad had said, ‘What is to be done is to strike hard, and to strike hard at the heart. That is what must be done. To wait patiently, to plan, to think ahead…and that is what I have been doing these past days, as I continue to mourn my mother and father and brother. I am planning to kill some big shot, some important American. They come here, every now and then. All puffed up and proud. The head of the CIA. The Secretary of State. The Secretary of Defense. Somehow…somehow, I will find out when such a man or woman is coming here, and then I will kill them. By a bomb in the street. Or from the air. Or from a bomb around my own waist. Whatever it takes. And no doubt I will die in the process, but justice will be done.’

The Sudanese had suddenly shaken his hand. Hamad had felt queasy for a moment at having the man’s dark skin touch his own, and the Sudanese had said, ‘We will speak later.’

And speak later they did. In the early morning hours the next day, as the Sudanese was preparing to leave, he had said, ‘There is need for a thoughtful man such as yourself, Hamad. Will you come with me, to fight your war? And not here, but in America?’

‘Of course,’ Hamad had said and had left at once, not even bothering to pack anything. For the Sudanese said everything would be taken care of, and the Sudanese, Hamad quickly learned, always told the truth.

Hamad opened the rear door of the rental car, took out the long cardboard box with the red and white ribbons. Again, he felt like a fool, but the moment was a fleeting one. He was no fool. He was a warrior.

He walked the distance to the squat glass and metal building, pasting on a phony smile that all Westerners loved to see on dark-skinned men who came to their country. He took his time going up the walkway, the box in his hands. He supposed it should have felt heavy and awkward in his grip but it was as though he was carrying a bag of rose petals, it was so light.

Up ahead was the arched trellis, and Hamad recalled what was there. He’d been told by the someone who had sent him e-mail messages once he got to the United States who had also told him what was beyond the trellis and the glass doors. He took a breath, and just as he reached the trellis—

He broke into a run. The cardboard box falling open in his hands, the bandoleer with the Russian-made RGN-86 fragmentation grenades coming out and over his shoulder, in his grip the folded-up and cut-down Chinese-made SKS-12, a cheap piece of shit that wasn’t good at long distance, but distance wasn’t his concern, what mattered was close-in firing, and in seconds he was through the doors. There, just as predicted, a large-titted whore sat behind the desk and before she could even react he fired three times into her chest, making her fall back with a squeal and a spray of blood and tissue on the wall behind her.

Discipline, Hamad thought, discipline. There were videos out there of brave fellow warriors, standing and holding their rifles like they were fire hoses, proudly spewing dozens of rounds at a target. Oh, how mighty they looked — and how stupid! For it took whole seconds to empty a clip, and for a disciplined force facing you — like the British SAS or American SEALs or the Israeli Shin Bet — all it would take would be one or two well-placed shots in response to send you to Paradise. Which was why he had only fired three times. There was neither time nor ammunition to waste.

A quick check to make sure that the whore was dead -she certainly was — and Hamad started towards the hallway behind the desk. There were office doors on either side, both of them unlocked — such bad security! — and he opened each one and tossed into each small office a hand grenade. Women and men were there, at their desks, looking up at him with surprise, with fear, with concern, but none of them reached for a weapon, none of them did a damn thing. He felt this sudden rush of exultation, knowing that the Sudanese had been right, it had been right to fight them in their home, for here, they were not brave, they were like children, and like children in his village they died where they stood or sat.

After tossing in the hand grenades, he slammed the doors shut, ducked down and placed his hands against his ears and opened his mouth as the explosions ripped through each office. Perfect, it was going perfectly. He got up and kicked open each door again, and this time he let the fire discipline slip just a bit as he hosed down each room, but making sure that his shots were well aimed at the slumped bodies sprawled on the floor, over the desks, and against the walls.

There. Done on this floor. Hamad popped out the spent magazine and punched in a fresh one, worked the action, got to the entrance of the elevator, and slid open the keypad. The number sequence from the e-mail message that he had memorized over and over again came into his mind and he punched in the numbers. Waited. Managed to hear the whine of the elevator coming up to this level. Stepped back and held the Chinese assault rifle up to his shoulder. The doors popped open and his finger was tight on the trigger.

Empty.

The elevator car was empty.

Praise God.

Hamad stepped into the elevator, pressing the button for the lower level so hard that he hurt his thumb. Moved to one side. The elevator went down and the anxiety and pain in his gut were now gone. Gone, gone, gone. This was what it must have been like to be under arms with Saladin, defeating the Crusaders outside Jerusalem, watching their banners with their Christian symbols tumble to the dust. To be at the outskirts of Constantinople, moving in through the walls, seeing the Christians cover their faces in fear. To be in the cockpit of that American Airlines aircraft, flying towards Babylon, seeing the tower of Babel, the hated one, grow and grow in one’s view.

The sweet feeling of the Holy Warrior.

The elevator came to a halt. The door slid open.

He went forward, to continue the fight.

Brian Doyle looked over at Monty, surprised at how quickly the man had gotten his weapon out, not even knowing that the military guy carried. Damn, he was good.

Monty said, ‘Elevator?’

‘Only place in and out,’ Brian said. ‘Adrianna, get to the farthest office. Mine, I guess. Lock and barricade the door, start working the phones.’

‘Brian, I—’

‘Lady, shut the fuck up and move. We don’t have time to talk.’

Monty said, ‘We’ve wasted enough time already. C’mon!’

They went out of the conference room. Darren at least was moving right, he shut and locked the conference-room door behind them. He and Monty raced down the hallway. Brian’s weapon felt heavy in his hands. He looked around, thought about dragging some furniture out for cover, but there was the sound of the elevator motor working as the elevator car came down. Monty was kneeling down, flat against the far wall, his own pistol held out in a two-handed grip.

Brian instantly knew what Monty was doing. Holding the weapon out, flattening himself, narrowing his silhouette for whatever offensive fire might be coming from the elevator car. Brian imitated the serviceman’s stance. He held his own pistol out, wished for a hand-held radio right at this moment — wouldn’t it be fucking excellent to call in a 10-13 and get some serious backup here? Like the muscle boys from Emergency Services. That would be—

Monty said, ‘Care for some advice ?’

‘Would love some advice.’

‘That door opens up, we see anybody we don’t recognize, anybody not showing proper ID, anybody threatening in any way, we blow their asses into next Tuesday. Got it?’

‘Yeah, got it.’

‘Another thing. If Stacy’s there, if she’s being held as a human shield, if she’s being held hostage—’

‘No time for that. It begins and ends right here.’

‘Yeah.’

It seemed like the elevator motor was louder. Brian thought of something and said, ‘Monty?’

‘Yeah?’

‘How come you won’t tell anybody what branch of the service you’re in?’

‘No time for that, pal.’

The elevator doors slid open.

Hamad stepped out, SKS-12 ready. He thought he saw movement. He wasn’t sure. He moved forward and—

Brian felt his finger squeeze the trigger as he noticed the barrel of a weapon sticking out through the open elevator door and—

Hamad came forward, seeing nothing, moving and—

A blow to the head.

And it was done.

Brian caught his breath. Coming out of the elevator, a 9mm Uzi in her manicured hands and a protective vest over her lovely torso, was Stacy Ruiz. She was alone. Brian and Monty stood up and she said in a measured, even voice: ‘We’re in lockdown for a while.’

‘What’s up?’ Monty said.

Stacy kept her voice even, though Brian sensed there was trembling going on somewhere back there. ‘Just got word. Tiger Team Four got hit, outside of Hartford.’

‘How bad?’ Brian asked.

‘Bad enough. We’re at Threat Condition Delta for a while. We’ve shut down the upstairs.’

Monty nodded, put his weapon away. ‘The noise we heard down here — shutters?’

Stacy slung the Uzi over her left shoulder. ‘Yeah. Doors locked automatically, the metal shutters slid down over the ground-floor windows. And I switched us over to auxiliary power, just in case. You probably saw a power flicker down here. We’re now on recycled air. Pretty much nothing can get in here and hurt us except for a suitcase nuke, and I don’t think one will be wasted on us at the moment.’

Brian said, ‘Good move,’ as he returned his own 9mm to his shoulder holster.

Stacy’s eyes flashed at him. ‘just doing my job, that’s all.’

Monty said, ‘Thank the Christ somebody is. Come on, let’s spread the news.’

They went back to the conference room door, still locked, and their pounding and shouts didn’t produce any response. Monty said, ‘Guys back there are too good. Phone?’

‘Inside the elevator,’ Stacy said.

Back to the elevator and Monty handed the phone over to Brian, pulling the receiver free from a receptacle under the panel. ‘Hope you can remember your own extension.’

‘I believe I can.’

He dialed the four digits and it was picked up after the first ring. ‘Scott.’

‘Adrianna, it’s all right. Stacy’s with us. We’re in lock-down. Threat Condition Delta.’

He could hear her breathing on the other line. ‘Brian?’

‘Yes?’

‘If you’re under any duress, please say the phrase “not a chance”. If everything’s all right, please say the phrase “you bet your life”.’

He said, ‘You bet your life, and your fucking ass, that we’re fine. Okay?’

Adrianna hung up. Monty looked on. ‘That’s the second time you’ve dropped an f-bomb on the princess this morning. She’s a sensitive lady. I don’t think she’s gonna like it.’

‘Yeah, well, what’s she going to do? Send me back to New York? I’d love to go to New York City right now, honest to Christ I would.’

There came the sound of the conference room door being unlocked and opening up, and Brian shook his head as he led Monty and Stacy into the room. Only one of the two doors was open, and Victor was there, hands shaking, aiming a fire extinguisher at the three of them. Frozen carbon dioxide cloud versus automatic weapons. A hell of a last stand, if it had to be done. Then they all sat around the conference room table, Stacy now looking embarrassed, holding the Uzi in both her manicured hands, and Brian noted that after she put the weapon’s safety on she slid it under the table.

But she kept the vest on, which Brian found distracting. He’d rather looked forward to the view of her cleavage, he thought as the afternoon dragged on and the phone rang a few times and they received word that nine of their colleagues had been killed up in Connecticut. None wounded. There were six survivors from the lower level of the building.

Adrianna looked around at them and said, ‘We’re done for the day. We’ll take the Final Winter matter up again, tomorrow morning, seven a.m. Please be prompt.’

As he stood up, Brian was surprised that Adrianna hadn’t looked right at him with that comment about being here on time. Then he was surprised again when she came up to him and said, ‘Brian, do you have plans for dinner?’

‘Not a one.’

‘Good. Please join me at my place, will you?’

Brian thought back to how the day had started, with the news of the upcoming anthrax attacks. Then he pondered on the thought that they would have to come up with a plan to immunize hundreds of millions of people without their knowledge and consent and tried to absorb the implications of the news that a terrorist attack had knocked off some of their comrades.

And now there was a dinner offer from the princess. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’d be fine.’

All in all, Brian thought, walking with Adrianna to the elevator, it had been one hell of a day.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Adrianna Scott lived a fifteen-minute drive from the office park, in a collection of townhouse condos that called them-selves Fox Hollow Estates. Brian followed her Toyota Celica with his own rented Lexus — why the hell not, if you’re working on the road, why not rent something fancy? — and he took a space next to hers. Within a minute or so they were in her home, a narrow two-story building that was the end unit of a row of dwellings.

Adrianna turned on the lights in the kitchen as they went in. She said, ‘I get to pay extra each month for the privilege of living on an end unit, and most days I think it’s worth it. Means there’s at least three walls that don’t bring in sound from the neighbors. Hold on, will you? I want to go upstairs and change. I’ll be right back down. Grab something from the fridge, if you’d like. Oh. And one house rule, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’ve been here sixty seconds, and already you’re tossing rules at me?’

She ran a hand through her hair, the gesture making her look tired. ‘No shop talk, not for a while. About today or about what happened up in Hartford. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about it later.’

‘Usually I hate rules, but that’s a good one.’

Adrianna went upstairs to the left and Brian went to the kitchen, which was off to the right. The kitchen was small but tidy. Even the cookbooks seemed to be sorted by size. He went to the refrigerator, opened it up. Saw a collection of Heinekens on the bottom shelf, picked up one of the green bottles and popped it open. He debated whether to pour it in a glass or not and decided what the hell. He took a sip from the ice-cold bottle as he wandered through the rest of the condo. The floor was polished hardwood and next to the kitchen was a small dining area — round wooden table with four wooden chairs. Beyond the eating area was a living room — couch and two chairs, television set on a dark wooden stand, and a set of bookshelves.

He went up, examined the books. Medieval art history, it looked like. And the history of Rome as well. Some reference books. And a Second World War history book: The Army That Never Was. He picked .it up, gave it a quick glance, saw what it was about. The story of General George Patton and how he was assigned during the build-up to the Normandy invasion in 1944 to be in charge of a mythical army group that the Germans thought was going to invade France. He remembered seeing something about that in the George C. Scott movie. He put the book back on the shelf.

Near the bookshelves was a fireplace, closed off. On the mantelpiece were two old brass candlesticks, flanking a photograph in a thick frame. Brian went forward, examined the photo. A much younger Adrianna Scott, standing behind an older woman who was sitting in a formal chair. Both women were wearing black velvet-like dresses trimmed with lots of white and red ribbons. Adrianna’s hands were on the shoulders of the older woman. He took another sip of beer.

‘My aunt,’ Adrianna announced, coming into the living room. Gone were the charcoal-gray skirt and black pullover, replaced by dark blue sweat pants and a white sweat shirt that said NAVY in big blue letters. The ponytail was gone as well. Now her hair hung loose, and she suddenly looked smaller and younger.

‘Nice photo,’ Brian said.

‘Thanks,’ she said, reaching up to gently stroke the frame. ‘It was taken right after I graduated from high school in Cincinnati. Auntie Elyse raised me after my parents died in a car accident. She was the only real family I had, and I splurged some money to have this photo taken. Auntie Elyse said no, I shouldn’t spend the money, but I did. And I’m glad I did…she passed away soon after the photo was taken.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said. ‘Sorry, too, about your parents.’

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘I lost mom and dad when I was five years old. Don’t have many memories of your parents when you’re five years old. And I was fortunate — well, if that can be said — I’m fortunate that I got to stay with Auntie Elyse. I couldn’t live in our old house — and she was a good mom to me, as good as a woman could be, taking care of her niece.’

Adrianna turned to him, still looking small and young. ‘Now it’s just me.’

Brian didn’t know what to say. She shrugged and said, ‘And I know it’s been a while, too, but I’m sorry about your dad.’

The beer bottle felt slippery in his hand. ‘Thanks. And thousands of other people lost loved ones that day, too. I’m no different.’

Adrianna said, ‘All right. We drifted into shop talk and that was my fault. I’ll get dinner going, if you promise to take off that jacket and try to relax.’

Brian raised the Heineken bottle to her in a toast. ‘That’s a deal.’

The coat did come off, and Brian debated for a moment about taking off the shoulder holster. What the hell, it was dinner — the holster and the pistol came off and he put the rig on one of the living-room chairs, draping his coat over it. He then joined Adrianna in the kitchen. She worked well and efficiently, defrosting and then heating up some alfredo sauce, quickly stir-frying some chunks of chicken and pieces of vegetables, boiling some pasta, and within a half-hour they were seated at the round table, eating the fettuccine dish and drinking glasses of a Californian pinot noir. A few minutes after he started eating, Brian said, ‘You’re not very talented, you know.’

‘Excuse me?’ Adrianna said, fork held in mid-air.

‘You heard me. You’re not very talented as a chef.’

‘I’m not?’

He was enjoying the expression on her face but decided to take a bit of mercy on her. ‘No, you’re extremely talented. This is the best meal I’ve had in a long while.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I think.’

‘No, I’m not being a jerk,’ he said. ‘I save that for other times. After a while, Adrianna, Red Lobster or Chili’s or any other variation of a chain restaurant gets to be boring. This is a treat.’

Now Adrianna smiled. ‘Okay, thanks. This time, for real. No thinking.’

‘Very good.’

They ate for a while longer and she said, ‘Ask you a personal question?’

‘Go right ahead.’

‘Why did you become a cop?’

Brian smiled at her. ‘What makes you think I had a choice?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Sorry. Old and no longer so funny joke. You see, being a cop was the family business. Dad was a cop, granddad was a cop, both uncles and a number of cousins were cops. There you go. I got out of high school, worked a couple of jobs here and there, and took the test. There was no real thinking about it. I just did it. That’s all.’

‘Uh’huh.’

He took another bite, chewed and swallowed. ‘All right. That was my boring story. Now it’s your turn. How did you end up being an officer with the CIA?’

‘Very good,’ Adrianna said, rewarding him with another smile.

‘How’s that?’

‘Most people call us agents. We’re not agents. We’re officers.’

‘Yep. And I’m not most people, as you’ve noticed. So. On with your story, boss.’

She shrugged. ‘Not much to it. Went to college after high school — Northwestern. Majored in medieval history. Got good grades but towards the end of my four years came to that chilling conclusion: what use was a medieval-history major? Only thing ahead of me was grad school, and I was getting tired of the school routine. Then the student newspaper ran an advertisement, saying the CIA was recruiting college grads, and I went in for an interview, did an okay job, and got a follow-up phone call a couple of months later. That’s it.’

He shook his head. ‘No, that’s not it.’

‘What?’

‘Good try, boss, but that’s not it. There’s a hell of a jump from being a medieval-history major to entering the CIA. It’s not like dumping all that book learning about the Middle Ages to become a lawyer or an accountant. That’s not it. So. What was it?’

She toyed with a piece of pasta with her fork, looking down at her plate, and then she looked up. ‘Nicely done, detective. Nicely done. You still looking for an answer?’

‘That’s what I do. Ask questions and look for answers. Go on.’

Adrianna carefully put the fork down, like it was a move she had practiced by herself. She dabbed at her lips with a napkin and said, ‘Remember what it was like in the early ‘90s?’

‘Sure. I was there.’

‘Uh-huh. The collapse of the Soviet Union, China coming around to a market economy, peace even breaking out in Central America and parts of the Middle East. It was the “end of history” — remember that? Everyone was going to play nice and everyone was going to adopt the Western ideals of democracy and freedom. Yeah. Right. That’s when I looked at my history and remembered the last time this old globe had a solitary hyperpower, around the time of Christ.’

‘The Romans.’

‘No gold star for that answer, detective, because it was an easy one. So there I was, looking at my beautiful country, and I got scared. I had a sense that history hadn’t gone away, was still out there, ready to bite our ass. That while we were obsessing over who controlled Congress, who got a blow job in the Oval Office, and how many stock options certain dotcommers were getting, serious men with serious grievances were getting ready to do us harm. That was when I decided to respond to that CIA advertisement, and I’ve never regretted it, not once.’

‘And when was this?’

‘A few years before 9/11.’

And what were you doing then?’

‘Classified.’

That made Brian smile, ‘Please, boss…’

Adrianna laughed. ‘Truth be told? Your basic research analyst. That’s all. Then after 9/11… lots of things changed at Langley. Stuff that still isn’t known publicly.’

‘Like to share?’

A small shrug. ‘You know what’s the biggest problem the CIA faces?’

‘A good dental plan?’

Again, he was pleased to see her smile. ‘Actually, we have an excellent dental plan. No, the problem with the CIA is that there’s a huge gap between the management and the officers, whether those in the field, in embassies or in Langley. Whatever work the officers did… we called it the silo effect. Information from different departments and groups would go up to supervisors, without cross-checking, without cross-referencing. Like grain silos on a Kansas plain, reaching up, inaccessible to each other. And that was within the CIA. Within the so-called intelligence community — more like a dysfunctional family than a community, if you ask me — it was even worse, with silos marked NSA, CIA, FBI, National Reconnaissance Office, so forth and so on, reaching up. Before 9/11, I was tasked to an inter-agency group that recommended breaking barriers, designing small, mobile intelligence teams that would have maximum authority and minimal oversight. When our report was done, it was filed and forgotten, and I went back to analyzing crude-oil output in Kazakhstan. Then the planes hit, my name and others were pulled from that group, and there we are. Hopefully, problem solved.’

Brian eyed Adrianna curiously as she talked, sensing something was going on behind those quiet brown eyes. This was the longest he had ever spoken to her, face to face, and he was surprised at how much he was enjoying it. He said, ‘Seems like lots of problems yet to be solved.’

‘Yeah, ain’t that the truth.’

They ate in silence for a while, and he helped her bring the plates and silverware and glassware into the kitchen when they were done. The crockery was rinsed and placed in the dishwasher, and from outside he heard the yelps and squeals of children playing. Through the large living-room window he could see three or four boys and girls on a grassy lawn, playing with large plastic balls and bats. Adrianna stood beside him and folded her arms, watching with him. Something felt out of place inside Brian as he thought about his son Thomas. Growing up without having his boy near him, not being able to teach him those one hundred and one important things — how to play basketball, how to rollerblade, how to correctly hate the Red Sox — sometimes made him clench his fists in anger at the oddest moments. Like right now. He shouldn’t be in Maryland with this attractive and odd woman. He shouldn’t be working with the Feds. He should be home where he belonged, working out the difficulties of his new relationship with Marcy and seeing Thomas as much as possible.

Adrianna said, ‘You know how many places there are in the world where this can’t happen? Where children can’t go outside and play without fear of being shot or bombed or stolen? Plenty of places. Plenty.’

She motioned to the lights coming on in the surrounding condo units. ‘There are people out there who have put their trust in us, Brian. Who trust us to protect them and their children. Trust us so that they can wash up their dinner dishes and send their children out to play without worrying that they will be kidnapped, or blown to pieces by a suicide bomber, or die choking to death from something invisible dropped upon them from the sky.’

Brian said, ‘I guess the time for shoptalk has arrived.’

‘It has.’

‘All right.’

Adrianna turned to him and he was conscious of how close she was, the light fragrance of whatever scent she had on (so unlike Marcy, who would sometimes drench herself with some flowery concoction after spending time and money with an aromatherapist), and just how delicate her eyes looked. She said, ‘I’m going to need your help tomorrow, Brian.’

‘In what way?’

‘Come,’ she said, ‘let’s sit on the couch, where we can talk comfortably.’

Brian sat down on the couch while Adrianna went to the kitchen and returned with two tiny glasses that each seemed to hold a thimble-sized amount of sherry. He wasn’t particularly fond of sherry, but he decided that being polite wasn’t going to kill him. He sipped a bit at the sweet liquid and said, ‘Once we thrash out the Final Winter scenario and the immunization options, what are you looking for?’

‘I’m looking for you to speak up for the only immunization option that can work. That’s what.’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t like the idea of secretly immunizing a couple of hundred million people. Too drastic, too overwhelming. ‘

She seemed to sink down into the couch cushions, ‘I agree.’

That surprised him. ‘You do?’

‘Of course.’ Adrianna put her glass down on the empty and clean coffee table and put both of her hands behind her head. ‘It could turn into an utter fiasco that would make that swine flu screw-up look like the greatest public health project of the last century. There’s no doubt that some people out there will react poorly to the vaccine. We will end up putting some people in the hospital, will no doubt kill some very old and very young people, as well as some who are already very ill, News of what we’ve done could send all of us to jail for life, if it gets out. It would bring the Tiger Teams out into the open and destroy the progress we’ve been making in protecting those kids out there and their families. And, of course, the damn vaccine might not work.’

‘Good points,’ Brian said.

‘Yes,’ she said, dropping her hands to her legs. ‘Yes, all good points, and I keep on looking at it and looking at it and… damn it, Brian, what else is there? What else can be done?’

Brian tried to think of what to say. Different things went through his mind as he heard the squeals of the children out there, safely at play. What to do? Remembered his Academy training, the times when his shooting skills were challenged by pop-up targets that either posed a threat or didn’t. Shoot or not? Live or die? Don’t just stand there, the instructor had said. Do something!

‘I don’t know what else can be done, Adrianna. I really don’t. I only know that the option that’s out there, if it’s the only one, sucks.’

She nodded. ‘Sucks wind.’

‘And what do you want me to do tomorrow?’

Adrianna rubbed at her eyes and said, ‘Monty will be in support of the immunization. Victor and Darren will be arguing against. But I guess that you’ll be supporting it. Even if you don’t like it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of who you are, Brian. A cop. A cop who’s been out on the streets, knows the depths of evil that some people can sink to, and knows how to cut through the bullshit and be realistic. For Victor, his universe begins and ends in a laboratory. For Darren, it begins and ends on a computer screen. Intellectually, they know what we’re up against. But you, Monty and myself, we know the evil that men can do. Up front and personal.’

‘You know about evil, eh? And where did you come across that knowledge?’

And by God, for the briefest moment Brian felt as if he had burrowed through her defenses and seen the real Adrianna, for her expression flickered like a picture coming into snap focus and then broke up, back into something indistinct. And when she’d been in focus, her expression had been bleak and had suddenly reminded him of a case from a couple of years ago. An old woman, a survivor of the Holocaust, in her apartment, sitting in a stiff wooden chair, looking down at her husband — another Holocaust survivor — who lay on the floor, dead. Knifed in the heart by a sixteen-year-old boy who could barely spell his own name and who had been trying to rob the apartment. The look on the old woman’s face… as if God, having tortured her years earlier, had saved up one more awful torment for the end of her life.

‘I’m sorry,’ Adrianna said, her voice now snappish. ‘That’s classified, Brian.’

‘Oh. All right, then. Look, why don’t—’

‘Hold on,’ she said, a hand scrambling around the couch cushions. ‘It’s the top of the hour. I want to catch the news.’

Her hand emerged with a television remote, which she pointed at the television screen. It popped into life and she selected a cable news channel. The young male anchor looked somber and at his side on the screen was a graphic, showing a map of Connecticut with a rifle superimposed over it.

‘… We go to Bloomfield, a community north of Hartford, Connecticut, where a workplace shooting has left nine dead earlier today.’

The anchor tossed the link to a young blonde female reporter who was standing in front of a length of yellow police tape, microphone in her delicate hand. ‘State and local police are investigating a workplace shooting here at Tompkins Consulting, a business firm specializing in software in Bloomfield, Connecticut. While no police official will speak on camera, it is believed that a disgruntled former employee — not yet identified — entered the workplace and began shooting. Eight employees were killed before the shooter turned his weapon on himself and committed suicide.’

‘Kimberly, do police have a motive yet on what caused this former worker to return to kill these people?’

‘No, they don’t, and—’

Adrianna clicked off the television. Brian shook his head. ‘Some cover story, Adrianna.’

‘Has to be done.’

‘How the fuck did it happen?’

‘Intelligence leak, someplace. How else? You can bet the lights will be burning late tonight in Langley and other places, trying to find out how those clowns learned about this.’

Brian said, ‘Too fancy.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Intelligence leak. Sounds very hush-hush, very fancy. Like somebody in the pay of al-Qaeda or whoever, giving out information for money or because they’re being blackmailed. Somebody high up. Hell, they’ll probably find out it was something as simple as somebody getting drunk or getting laid and letting out the story of who actually worked at the site of Tompkins Consulting. Adrianna, look, people talk, people gossip. Information loves to travel, loves to find a welcoming place. All it took was a piece of information finding its way to a cell here in the United States, and there you go. Nothing fancy. Just rather fucking direct.’

Adrianna smiled. ‘See? That makes a lot of sense. In fact, I’ll pass your suggestion along, at our daily conference call. Told you I liked your cop mind. Suspicious, cuts through the chatter… a true asset, Brian. A true asset.’

Something about that made Brian laugh and when he saw her expression he said, ‘Just for a second, I thought you said something about my ass. A true ass.’

She laughed in return and said, ‘Oh, you have quite a nice ass, Brian.’

That got his attention. ‘Really? You think I have a nice ass?’

Adrianna seemed to blush — if that was possible. A hand rose up to her lips and she said, ‘I’m sorry. That’s the sherry talking. Or the wine. Or both.’ She got up from the couch and Brian followed, sensing again that whatever he had learned about her these past months had only revealed the faintest background glimmer of what made her tick.

And damn it, that flip comment, about his butt…why had it made him grin like a teenager, happy that the It Girl in high school had noticed him in the hallway between class? Before he knew it, his coat, gun and shoulder holster were in his hands as Adrianna gently shepherded him to the front door.

At the open door Brian turned to say something and she was there. His free arm went out and around her slim waist, and he pulled her close. He kissed her and she responded, folding her body into his, pressing her pert breasts against his chest. He felt the eagerness in her open mouth and smooth tongue. The embrace went on for long seconds until she pulled away and kissed him firmly on the lips. He returned the favor.

Adrianna smiled. ‘Later, Brian.’

‘How much later, boss?’

‘When we get Final Winter under control… it’s going to be a good time to take a long break from running a Tiger Team. I… it’s a lot of pressure, my dear friend. A lot of pressure. And right now, engaging in a somewhat improper relationship with a subordinate—’

‘One of my favorite positions is being subordinate,’ he responded, liking what the phrase did to her expression.

‘Maybe so, detective, but now’s not the time.’

Brian was still holding her and she stood still, seeming to enjoy his touch. Then her tone grew somber and she said, ‘Bloomfield.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I knew two of the Tiger Team members up there. Man and woman.’

‘There are survivors — that’s what the news said.’

She shook her head. ‘No, I got the call, earlier today. They’re both dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Tears came to Adrianna’s eyes and she said, ‘I am, too. But that doesn’t mean we stop.’ She took a deep breath. ‘September eleventh. I was in my cubicle when the word came down about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We got the order to evacuate, because Langley’s a goddamn easy target to find. So we did. Later on, we found out about something else that had happened that day. It seems the director wanted the entire building evacuated, everybody out, and the head of the Counterterrorism Center at Langley said no, we needed to keep some of his people working up on the sixth floor, at the Global Response Center. And the director said, they’re at risk. They could die if the building was attacked. And the CTC head said, well, then they’re just going to have to die. Just like that, in the space of that conversation, the entire culture of the CIA changed. Just like that.’

Another kiss on the lips, and Brian knew that was not a ‘wanna spend the night?’ kiss but a ‘come on, get your ass out of my house’ kiss. Adrianna said, ‘That’s where we’re at, Brian. The war isn’t over there, it’s right here. In Bloomfield, or in the airstream over our cities. And this is a war we have to win. Have to.’

He reached up, touched her cheek. ‘Okay. You got me, boss.’

‘Good.’ Another smile.

And as Brian turned to go out into the evening, he said, ‘Oh. One other thing. You also have me for tomorrow, to support you. Got it?’

‘Seven a.m., Brian. Seven a.m.’

Adrianna Scott folded her arms and from her kitchen window watched Brian Doyle make the short walk to his parked car. He did have a nice ass, she thought, smiling. Then another thought came to her, about what had just happened this evening, and she was surprised at the spike of guilt that shot through her. She’d thought that guilt was something she had under control, over the years of experience and training, but there it was. Guilt at having lied to poor Brian Doyle, her own personal New York cop.

She hoped that when the time came he would forgive her.

Brian Doyle got into his car, tossed the shoulder holster, gun and coat next to him, and backed out from the parking space. He looked up at the lit windows of Adrianna’s place, and thought about the day just gone and what had happened up in Bloomfield. He guessed he should have offered to spend the night — on the couch, of course — pistol within easy reach, because he had a thought of another nameless holy warrior breaking into her home tonight, to do her harm.

But hell, she was CIA. Trained in counterterrorism and God knew what else. She could take care of herself.

Still… there was a feeling, and as Brian headed back to his own place he knew what that feeling was. Guilt. At having lied to Adrianna tonight and on many other occasions. Brian had lied before on the job, often and with great gusto, but this particular spate of lying… it stuck in his craw.

He hoped that when the time came she would forgive him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was now seven p.m. on Monday. Tiger Team Seven — a/k/a Foreign Operations and Intelligence Liaison Team Seven — had been meeting for twelve hours, and now, finally, it was done. The arguing had gone on, back and forth, back and forth, throughout the long day, and at one point Adrianna had had tears in her eyes, and so had Darren, her NSA guy. Voices had been raised, hands had been slammed down on the conference-room table, and now Adrianna had called a halt. It had gone on too long. Her mouth tasted like it was filled with fuzz, her legs had been quivering off and on all day, and now she held her knees firmly together.

It was time.

She said, ‘My friends… we’ve talked and debated our response to Final Winter for the whole day. This evening, at midnight, I need to make a recommendation to the Tiger Team director. I need to tell him what the group feels, what our response to Final Winter is going to be. So the question before the house is: What is your reply to this question? Do we or do we not recommend that our response to Final Winter should involve the covert immunization program? Monty?’

His dark brown eyes looked at her, unblinking. ‘Yes. Without a doubt. I don’t see how else we can do it.’

She nodded, switched her focus to her cop. ‘Brian?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing else to add?’ she asked.

‘Enough talk. You’re just going to have to sell it to the Director later on. That’s when the talking will resume.’

‘True. Darren?’

The tears were back in the eyes of her NSA representative. ‘I…God help us, yes. We can’t allow the population to be exposed to what’s being planned. Not doing anything is worse than what we’ve outlined.’

The shaking in Adrianna’s legs resumed, no matter how hard she pressed them together. ‘Victor?’

His face was pale and sweaty, and it looked like his hornrimmed glasses were about to slide down his nose. He played with a few keys on his laptop and said, ‘Before I answer, I just want to reaffirm one thing. All right? Just one more thing.’

‘Victor…’

‘It will only take a second, Adrianna. Please. Can’t you give me one more goddamn second?’

‘Say your piece, doc,’ Monty said. Adrianna kept quiet. The doctor said, ‘The very first field trials on the airborne vaccine show that in one one-hundredth of one percent of cases there will be an acute reaction. And in the majority of those cases the reaction will lead to respiratory seizure and death, especially among the elderly, the very young, and those with deficient immune systems, like AIDS patients or cancer patients undergoing treatment.’

No one said anything. The doctor looked around and said, ‘People, I just want to make sure that you understand. The most optimistic scenarios say, if this is approved and proceeds, that we might be able to expose about one hundred million people to the airborne vaccine. And based on what we know from the field trials, within a month or so of this happening there will probably be ten thousand dead. Do you understand that? Do any of you fucking understand that? We in this little room and those few people who oversee us, we’re about to condemn ten thousand Americans to death over the next several weeks. And why? Because we’re scared. That’s why.’

The silence was heavy, oppressive, as though some inert gas had slipped into the room and rendered speech impossible. Monty cleared his throat and said, ‘Doc, we know the numbers. You threw them at us this morning, right when they started. Ten thousand dead… a hell of a number, doc, a hell of a fucking number. And I’m gonna have nightmares sleeping tonight, trying to get my mind around that number. But I’m thinking about another number. I’m thinking, even if we get every attack team out there that’s coming in except for one — if just one slips through, in the space of a few weeks from now we’ll have a hundred thousand dead. Or two hundred thousand dead. And that’s only if we’re very, very lucky. And then we’ll have to live with the fact that we could have saved most of those people, if we had acted instead of sitting on our hands. And if we’re not that lucky, if two or three teams make it into Manhattan and Chicago and Los Angeles, then you’re talking a million casualties. A million casualties and a collapsed economy and UN peacekeepers in the streets and—’

Victor raised his voice. ‘You don’t have to tell me that! I know that already!’

Monty shrugged. ‘You were repeating yourself earlier. I was just repaying the favor. C’mon, doc, shit or get off the pot. Adrianna needs your answer.’

Victor took his glasses off, rubbed at his eyes. ‘I just want all of you to know the cost. That’s all. The cost. Because when we go to trial — and we will, one of these days, someday down the road — I want my conscience to be clear. I’ll want to know that I told everyone the cost.’

Brian said, ‘Yeah, we’ll remember that doc. And I’ll be happy that we’re sitting in a functioning court room in a functioning country to go to trial. Like Monty said, you’ve got to—’

‘Yes,’ Victor said.

Victory, Adrianna thought, sweet and total victory. ‘I’m sorry, Victor, could you repeat that?’

‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘Yes, and God help us all.’

‘Yes,’ Darren said. ‘God help us all.’

With the decision having been reached a sense of energy and purpose came over the group as if, having put the decision behind them, they could now move on. Adrianna felt the mood change but wasn’t fooled by it: these few people in here would be haunted for the rest of their lives for what they were about to do.

She picked up a pen, went to a legal pad. ‘Victor? To reaffirm what you said this morning, we’ll have enough vaccine by month’s end?’

‘Just barely,’ he said, his voice sullen. ‘We’re looking at immunizing the top five or six population centers, ten if we’re lucky — which means a lot of rural areas will be on their own. But the war-gaming all shows the attack teams striking at city centers. No other place makes sense. The rural areas will have to muddle through.’

The doctor moved from his chair, reached under the table and pulled out a shiny metal case. He undid the clasps and opened it up, revealing black foam inside. Nestled inside the foam was a metal cylinder about the size of a small fire extinguisher, colored dark green, with yellow letters and numbers on it. ‘Here’s a mock-up of one of the dispersal units. Each one like this can administer about one hundred fifty thousand vaccine units…’

Monty whistled and Darren said, ‘The fuck you say.’

‘Nope, that’s right. One hundred fifty thousand vaccine units. Now. Here’s the challenge, and I’m sure this is going to be the second question you’re asked tonight, Adrianna, by the coordinator. The first question being, of course, are you out of your ever-loving mind?’

She nodded, knowing what Victor was saying. ‘Absolutely. The second question will be, how do we administer the vaccine by a covert method. Victor, haven’t your folks come up with any delivery options?’

The doctor passed the cylinder to his right, to Darren, who examined it before passing it on to Brian. His hands now free, Victor said, ‘Yeah. Initially, the vaccine was going to be kept in ready reserve, at CDC and infectious-disease centers across the country. Way it was figured, if there was an anthrax attack on a city the first response would be to quarantine and treat those exposed with Cipro. Secondary response, outside of the quarantined area, would be to set up the airborne dispersal area. Like major parks, boulevards, sports centers. Anyplace where you could get a concentration of the population so you could immunize them quickly and in large numbers. Oh, there wouldn’t be much in terms of efficiency — some of the vaccine would end up drifting away — but to do it quickly, with large numbers, that’s how the preliminary plans came to be developed.’

Now Victor looked directly at Adrianna. ‘But now…well, we’re in a whole different universe. First, doing it covertly, and second, doing it over a large number of cities. Any suggestions?’

Wait, Adrianna thought, just wait. Monty came to her rescue. ‘Airborne dispersal, of course. Helicopters? Crop-dusters?’

Brian spoke up. ‘Not possible. Don’t you think it’d be all over the news, crop-dusters and helicopters arriving at the same time over the ten largest population centers? And how do you keep it secret, an operation like that? Not going to happen.’

‘Military, then,’ Darren offered. ‘Best way of doing this, keep it all in-house.’

Monty shook his head. ‘Maybe you could do it for a couple of cities, but not for ten. Most military craft don’t fly in and out of civilian airports, or transit civilian airspace. Same problem with news coverage. If you start having military aircraft suddenly appear over civilian airspace, then the questions will start.’

Victor seemed to want to say something, but kept his mouth shut. His hands on the tabletop in front of him seemed to be trembling. Adrianna said, ‘Those canisters, Victor. How can they be installed on aircraft? What kind of support mechanism would you need? Would a pilot have to activate the canister?’

‘No, you wouldn’t need a pilot,’ Victor said sullenly. ‘You could have it set up automatically, as simple as possible. You’d have a dispersal-control mechanism hooked up to the canister. Place the canister in a secure location. Set a radio altimeter switch in the canister so that when the aircraft carrying it rises up to three thousand feet the radio altimeter arms the canister. When the aircraft goes below three thousand feet, the canister begins dispersing the vaccine because of the change in altitude registered by the radio altimeter. In fact — shit, you know, that might work. That just might work.’

Adrianna kept quiet. It was important that the entire group take part in the process, have a stake in whatever outcome was chosen. Darren said, ‘Well, tell us, doc. What would work?’

‘What do all these population centers have in common? Airports. That’s what they have in common. Aircraft coming into airports all the time. Not a problem. Nothing unusual. Nothing to attract attention. If you time it just right…’

‘Shit,’ Monty said. ‘It could be done in just one night, right?’

Brian said, ‘Who are you going to get to do it? American Airlines? United? You think they’d take part in something as crazy as this? Not going to happen. Not in a million years.’

‘Then perhaps somebody else, another outfit,’ Adrianna said, the shaking of her legs continuing. ‘Not a passenger air-line, but an airline that—’

Darren spoke up, and Adrianna had to prevent herself from shouting in glee at his suggestion.

‘The General,’ he said. ‘We get the General to do it, that’s how.’

The expressions on everyone’s faces changed. Nobody needed an explanation of what Darren had just said. Former Air Force General Alexander Bocks, nearly ten years ago, had used his experience as a cargo-shipping officer in the Air Force to create one of the most successful airfreight airlines in the world, AirBox. His black-and-yellow Air Boxes could be seen on most streets in major cities in the United States and Canada, and the men and women delivering the packages coming out of the Air Boxes wore uniforms that were clear knock-offs of Air Force apparel. He was also a firm supporter of the current administration and of the latest installment in the round-the-clock struggle that characterized the new war on terror.

Darren spoke up again. ‘Adrianna, this is more in your department’s line but it’s always been rumored, at least-in my agency, that General Bocks has always been…well, cooperative when your agency or others have needed transportation assistance. True?’

Adrianna tried to keep her voice calm and level. Finally, at long last, success…

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘General Bocks has been very cooperative in the past in helping us move assets from parts of the world where traditional air service is under constant surveillance. Air cargo doesn’t get the kind of scrutiny that the typical airlines receive.’

Brian said with a smile that made her shiver for a moment, ‘Care to say what you mean by assets?’

She smiled right back at him. ‘Packages containing sensitive equipment. And, on a few occasions, packages that contained sensitive people.’

Monty said, ‘Can it be done? Adrianna, do you think you can do it?’

She looked at each and every one of them and said, ‘Yes, I do. I really do.’ She took a breath. ‘Victor, I’m going to need a timetable of when the canisters will be available to be shipped, and where they can be picked up. Darren, I need the latest information you have on the traffic analysis and intercepts of the anthrax attack teams. Monty, come up with a briefing on border security and the hunt for the Syrians, and what recommendations I need to bring to our border people. Brian, give me a recommendation of how we can bring in local law enforcement to look for the attack teams without word getting out.’

Adrianna yawned suddenly, which caused the men to laugh — a good sound. She looked at her watch and said, ‘I’ll need this information by eleven p.m. At midnight I’ll be making a presentation to the Director. And tomorrow…Tuesday, right? Right. Tuesday, I want this place empty. You’re all going to take the day off, all of you — and that includes me as well — because we need to come back to work rested and refreshed. It’s going to be one long fucking haul to do this right.’

Adrianna stood up, her legs no longer shaking, her stance firm and strong, and she said, ‘Thank you. Thank you all for your work. You can’t even begin to understand how much this means to me.’

And then she turned aside to hide the expression on her face.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The meeting of the Tiger Team leaders took place in the basement of an obscure building on the outskirts of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The conference room’s main table was long and the mood was somber as Adrianna took her seat and looked up at the Director sitting at the other end, overseeing the twelve Tiger Team leaders, all of whom sat still and quiet, their laptops open in front of them. He had once been a Deputy Director of her own agency — a former colonel in the US Army Special Forces — promoted after a tour of duty in Afghanistan in that bitter fall of 2001. Outside Kandahar he had lost most of his left leg to a Soviet-era land mine, and had been tapped to head the Tiger Teams after his recovery. It was midnight and coffee, tea, doughnuts and juice drinks had been placed on a table in the corner of the room, but nobody was eating, nobody was drinking. It seemed to Adrianna that the mood in the room tonight just didn’t go with people munching goodies.

The Tiger Team leader sitting closest to the Director was an older woman from the National Reconnaissance Office, whose name Adrianna had already forgotten and whose hands were quivering as she presented her report. She had been stationed at the facility in Connecticut, and was the senior surviving officer from yesterday’s assault. Though her hands shook as she went through her report, her voice was clear and to the point. The terrorist had gained entrance by moving quicker than anyone had anticipated. The female security officer on the ground floor had apparently just returned from a bathroom break when the terrorist entered. The personnel on the ground floor also did not respond in time to the assault, though the alarm system should have been activated. Due to a security breach that was still being investigated, the terrorist had had the proper keypad authorization to use the elevator to descend to the lower level, where he had been shot by one of the personnel on that floor who had responded to the alarm activation.

Adrianna joined in the discussion with the other Tiger Team members, being careful not to probe too deeply or too forcefully. She knew that she was going to be in for a rough time of it later, and wanted to save her energy and her voice for then. The other Tiger Team leaders persistently and quietly interrogated the National Reconnaissance Office woman, and when the questions finally dribbled away she gave a quick glance of thankfulness to the Director that her ordeal in the conference room had ended.

The Director said, ‘Jonathan . .

A heavyset man with a thick, black beard streaked with gray spoke up from the other end of the table. ‘Sir?’

‘I want your team to take the lead investigating the intelligence failure that led to the Connecticut facility being breached, and summarize the lessons to be learned. Within twenty-four hours, I want a directive to all Tiger Teams with your recommendations for increasing security without decreasing operational effectiveness. Understood?’

‘Perfectly, sir.’

‘Good. I also want an interim report within a week on the shooter: who he was, and how in hell he knew where to go and how to get there. I know you won’t have all those answers, but I’ll want some of them.’

‘You’ll get it, sir.’

The Director turned his attention to the woman at his side and said, ‘One more question, Leslie, if I may.’ ‘Certainly, sir,’ the NRO woman said.

The Director said, ‘Who killed the intruder?’

‘Simon Hannity. On loan from the Marine Corps.’

The Director nodded. ‘Why?’

The NRO woman looked confused, but Adrianna had an idea where this was going.

‘Sir?’ the NRO woman asked, her voice no longer so confident.

It seemed like the Director was trying to keep his temper in check as he spoke clearly and slowly. ‘Why was the intruder shot and killed? Why wasn’t he captured? Or wounded?’

She said, ‘Simon felt that it was the only option available to him. And…’

‘And what?’

Her voice quivered. ‘Simon had been talking to one of the personnel on the ground floor. He had heard the grenade blasts, the shots, the screams. He… wanted that man dead.’

‘Don’t we all?’ the Director said. Then he leaned forward: ‘But only after we capture the fucker and wring him dry and find out everything we can about him. Do you get that?’

The NRO woman nodded. The Director said, ‘I want this Simon character released from service, and sent back to the Marine Corps with our thanks. By tomorrow. All right?’

The NRO woman nodded again. Adrianna felt sorry for her. It was the only thing the poor woman could do.

But her feelings of sympathy quickly evaporated as the Director narrowed his gaze, focused on her and said, ‘Adrianna? You’re up.’

Adrianna activated a program from her laptop as she stood up. ‘Thank you, sir.’

When Adrianna first started, she was so tired that she fumbled some of the words and, once, a PowerPoint slide was triggered too early. But as she continued talking she found that she gathered strength and confidence, and she laid out her presentation for Final Winter. She talked about the intelligence findings, the interpretation of these findings, and the recommendations from the other members of her team. She would pause occasionally to see if anyone was interested in asking any questions, but the only response she got from the Director was, ‘Go on, please.’

So she did, right up to the very end. She stood still, her legs not quivering at all, a tiny victory but one she was pleased to have.

The Director said, ‘Anybody have any questions?’

Silence.

‘I have a couple, though,’ he said.

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘General Bocks. Do you think you’ll have any problem bringing him on board?’

‘No, sir, I don’t,’ Adrianna said. ‘I know of his past participation in Agency missions. I’m sure he can be convinced to take part in this one.’

‘And you’re calling it Final Winter?’

‘Yes, sir.’

A slight smile. ‘Seems fairly ominous.’

‘The whole matter is ominous, sir.’

The Director scratched at his chin, looked up at the nearest plasma screen. ‘And you’ll be ready to deploy in just under a month?’

‘That’s correct, sir.’

Another scratch of the chin. ‘And I want to be sure that this is understood, because if word gets out over what’s being attempted, there’ll be merry hell to pay…you understand that, right?’

Adrianna nodded. ‘That was the focus of many, many hours of discussion, sir.’

‘I’m sure.’

She waited, the trembling still not there. Would it end now? Would it?

‘But there’s one more question I have, Adrianna, before you’ll get my approval.’

She couldn’t speak. She just waited.

‘This…bacterial agent that you’re proposing to disperse from these aircraft: it’s completely safe, am I right?’

Adrianna took a breath. ‘Absolutely, sir. It’s been field-tested in many other areas, over the years, by private medical personnel and biowarfare defense units of our military. As I mentioned in the briefing, it’s a variant of the b. sofia bacterium, completely benign to human ingestion. But it perfectly mimics the possible dispersion of an airborne anthrax attack. With the ground sensing stations that are already in place in these target cities, we can detect the bacterium once it’s been dispersed and be able to design computer models that will enable us to better prepare for when we’re attacked with real anthrax. It’s a large-scale research exercise, sir, one that has the potential to give us very valuable defense information in a short span of time.’

The Director looked right at her, like he was trying to psych her out or something, and she stared right back at him. Bring it on, she thought, bring it on. I’ve got everything in place. Everything.

He said, ‘When are you planning to see General Bocks?’

‘Two days, maybe three.’

He said, ‘Good. You look tired. Take tomorrow off. And Final Winter…Adrianna, it’s approved.’

She could barely speak. ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you.’

Adrianna sat down, her legs quivering now like she had just run a marathon, and the screaming inside her mind started, victory, victory, holy victory. She was startled when a man at her right — Gideon, a Tiger Team leader stationed in Los Angeles — leaned over and said, ‘That was something funny you said just then, Adrianna.’

‘What was that?’ she replied, barely focusing on what he was saying.

‘The Director asked about an anthrax attack, and you said, “when we’re attacked”. You’re that certain — that it’s going to be when, not if?’

Adrianna turned and gave Gideon her best smile. ‘Absolutely. It’s going to be when. Not if.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Several hours after the meeting of the Tiger Team leaders, the members of Tiger Team Seven followed their own leader’s instructions and took the day off. Each one of the members did something that day that partially revealed who they were and where they came from, though each would seriously challenge anyone who tried to analyze their activities. It was just a day off, a jewel to be cherished, that was all, and trying to read anything into it was so much bullshit.

Which was true for all the Tiger Team members, save one.

In the small garage in Monty Zane’s rental home outside Greenbelt — he had never owned property in his entire life, though that was going to change once he became a civilian -Monty lovingly polished the bright red gas tank of his Harley Davidson Road King motorcycle. Every piece of chrome and exposed metalwork was bright and reflective, and even the fat tires of his hog had been polished with Armor All. He wiped his fingers on the rag and stepped back, admiring the look of the beast, bad-ass and powerful, all that energy just tied up and bundled in that lovely Twin Cam 88 engine of pure Pennsylvania energy.

The door of the house opened and Charlene stepped out, frowning, her blonde hair freshly washed, just barely touching her shoulders, a towel wrapped around her lovely midriff. ‘Are you going to ride that damn thing or just drool over it?’

Monty laughed, wiped his hands again. ‘You know, babe, sometimes drooling comes from riding things… as you know.’

Charlene smiled and then stuck out her tongue at him. ‘You should be so lucky — which you will be, if you get your muscular ass back here before two o’clock, ‘fore the kids get home. Deal?’

‘Deal, love.’

‘Good,’ she said, walking back into the kitchen, flipping up the towel to show off her shapely butt. ‘Now have a good ride and don’t get killed.’

Monty kept on smiling as he toggled the garage door opener. When the way was clear he straddled the bike and switched on the ignition, gave the start-up lever a good pop. The Harley roared into life with a satisfying thump-burble-burble and in a few seconds he was down the driveway and out on the road. He checked his Timex. A good four hours of quality driving time ahead of him, no highways, no urban centers, just get out into those blue country lanes that still crisscrossed this marvelous land of his, and he remembered those sweet last words of Charlene. Don’t get killed. Maybe a joke but there was a bit of seriousness back there, remembering what happened to him back on September 10th, that awful year. Monty liked keeping secrets from the civilians he worked for — made his image that much meaner and more mysterious — and he knew that everybody gossiped about the burn marks on his face. There were questions about where he had gotten burned — Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan -and everyone assumed that he had been torched in the line of duty, on some heroic mission, and they all assumed wrong. He had been burned on his day off, and in Mary-goddamn-land, when some kid with a week-old driver’s license had blown through a stop sign and punched through the side of another car in front of Monty. He had dumped the cycle, sliding into the car just as the gasoline cooked off and toasted part of his face. And the day and weeks after, when the hammer came down in Afghanistan, he had been stuck in a burn unit, cursing his luck, as his comrades went out and did a job that they had trained their entire lives for.

Not a heroic story at all, damn it.

The motorcycle now seemed like an extension of him as he drove east, not caring what particular road he took or where he was going. The trip was the destination, that was all, just the feeling of the wind in his face, the scent of things growing, the sights of the farmland out there, still being tilled, year after year.

Monty grinned, thinking of what it must have been like out here a couple of centuries ago. Some of those farm buildings had been out there then, fresh new, home to farmers and grazers, and Monty had no doubt that some of his ancestors had been out there as well, working for the Man, dying and living and praying out there in bondage, and here he was, a descendant of theirs, not only prospering in this country but actually sworn to defend it, and man, that was a good feeling.

He kept on riding.

All right, there was another feeling, the one that gave him a quiet warm glow every time, especially when he was around Charlene, the former Miss Charlene Taylor, second runner-up five years ago in the Miss Virginia USA beauty pageant. For when Monty had started dating that fine specimen of Southern womanhood he had been curious about her past and had done a little checking.

He leaned into a corner, felt the way the tires just gripped that pavement, like the firm touch of a masseuse, never letting go.

Okay, a lot of checking. Monty had always been interested in genealogy and had done a lot of work here and there, trying to trace his family back, which was easy enough until you got into the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then the records became spotty at best — and for good reason, of course, because the black men and women of the South back then had been like survivors in some post-nuclear-war landscape, wandering around shellshocked, trying to scratch out an existence in what was left of the Southern economy, fighting off hunger and cold and the nightriders and the Klan. Keeping good records for a safe and prosperous future would sure as hell have been low on their ‘to do’ list.

Leaned into another corner, really picking up speed, thinking for a moment what might happen if that damn vaccination program didn’t work. What kind of life would it be for his children? Growing up a dead country, scrambling around in the looted and empty cities, hearing tales of what it had been like to be the world’s only superpower, being here and now, starving, wondering what it must have been like to live when you didn’t go to bed hungry at night, every night…

Well, fuck that shit. It wasn’t going to happen to his children.

Then Monty laughed. He knew that he shouldn’t have. But his kids — Grace and Marilyn — wouldn’t Charlene’s ancestors have dropped dead from horror at the sight of those light-brown children? For during his genealogy work on his own side of the family, he had done some investigation into her side and had found out that one of her great-great-great-grandfathers had been a prominent slaveholder and a colonel in the Army of Northern Virginia. Monty had always gotten a big-ass kick out of how that proper Southern colonel would have probably shot himself in the head at the knowledge that one of his descendants would be marrying the descendant of a piece of his property.

And as he rode, the laughter kept coming back, as it always did, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Harley.

Victor Palmer walked into the store, almost sighing with pleasure as the smell of old paper and ink came to him. The store was in an otherwise unimpressive strip mall outside Greenbelt, with a Pizza Hut franchise, a Jiffy Lube franchise, a bunch of other franchises and this little store, called Pulp Planet. Sometimes when Victor came here he thought the only thing Americans were good for were setting up franchises so that a strip mall in Maine looked exactly like one in California.

He stood on the scuffed-up linoleum, looked around at the open bins set up against the walls. He walked slowly to the nearest bin, just savoring the anticipation of what lay before him. Rows and rows of old magazines in plastic sleeves were stacked in rows and he let his fingers brush over the plastic, looking at the brightly colored and lurid covers of the pulp magazines from the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Ah, he thought, that had been the time, back fifty and sixty years ago, when there’d been dozens of pulp-fiction magazines published each month, from westerns to men’s adventure to mystery to science fiction and fantasy. The colors were garish, the stories were often poorly written and the advertisements for becoming a ‘he-man’ or getting rid of blackheads were always hilarious. But there was an energy and spirit to the pulps that had always appealed to him, especially during the grueling days of med school and residency. For he enjoyed losing himself in the spirit of the pulps, written during the Depression and the Second World War and the opening decades of the Cold War when the stories had suggested that, no matter how grim the news, anything was possible. Anything.

Victor rummaged carefully through the magazines, look-ing for his particular favorite, Doc Savage, a pulp character that lived from 1933 to 1949. Doc was the subject of more than a hundred serialized novels, involving adventures all around the Earth, fighting crime, fighting evil, working to make the world a better place. A brilliant physician with the crime-fighting abilities of Sherlock Holmes, Doc kept his offices in the Empire State Building and had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Ridiculous stuff, Victor knew, but he loved these tales of black-and-white morality, about evil men with death rays and secret poison clouds, not with hijacked airliners and weaponized anthrax.

Victor weaved a bit on his tired feet, looking through the Doc Savage magazines, and he remembered one particularly fantastic aspect of Doc’s world: the man believed in the ultimate goodness of humanity and thought that it was diseased minds that created criminals. Doc had a secret medical facility in upstate New York where criminals he had captured were operated upon, to correct the imbalance in their minds and thereby allow them to become useful, productive and law-abiding citizens.

Poor Doc. Victor went to another bin of magazines. Doc never realized — as Victor had, during his first residency at an ER in an inner-city hospital in Atlanta — that some men (and a few women, to be honest) liked hurting people, liked killing people, liked being evil, and there was no miracle operation in existence that could change that. He remembered a bull session with Monty Zane late one night, when Monty had said, ‘You know, when it’s all said and done, the best way to protect this nation is to locate a certain number of men out there who hate us, and dispatch them with a nine-millimeter round to the forehead. Problem is, of course, knowing who they are and where they are.’

How true. Victor rubbed his fingers across the clear plastic, remembered the joy in reading these pulps in those few hours available to him, early on in his medical career. He wished for the simplicity of that time, wished he had never heard of the CDC or weaponized anthrax or any other damnable thing. At the moment he thought it would have been a fine thing to enter the Public Health Service and end up as a small town MD in rural Arkansas or something, married to some local gal who’d worship him because of his education, and where he could haunt the used-magazine and book dealers on the Internet.

What a life that would have been, instead of the nightmare he was in now. A nightmare that was going to get worse, for Victor had no doubt that details of the Final Winter immunization program would most certainly become public, if not this year then next.

And he had already planned that as part of a plea agreement for quickly cooperating with the government, he’d be sent to a minimum-security facility, and be able to bring his collection of pulps with him.

It would only be fair.

Darren Coover sat in a comfortable easy chair in his apartment, the Bose Wave radio in the room set to a local classical station, as he worked on a New York Times crossword puzzle from 1950 while his laptop hummed away at his elbow on a portable desk. He looked over at the laptop, saw that the program he was running was doing its business, quietly surfing sex sites on the Internet — with an emphasis on busty women — and went back to his puzzle. He had long ago lost interest in doing contemporary crossword puzzles — he usually finished the Sunday New York Times one in under an hour -but he did love the challenge of solving posers and he found that doing old puzzles was a hell of a nice challenge.

For one thing, there was a whole universe of cultural phrases and words that were a half-century old that one had to ruminate over before completing a fifty-year-old puzzle, which was a delight. Darren subscribed to a special service that recovered old puzzles from the New York Times microfilm records and mailed them out to subscribers around the world. It was one thing to solve a puzzle involving a play on words; it was something else when you had to remember the name of a Broadway star from the late 1940s.

Remembering. Darren looked up at the laptop, merrily moving along the program that he had sent into its innards. The line from his Dell laptop was linked with a cable modem, and he spent a few moments just imagining the intricacy of sending those packets of information back and forth, back and forth, along the cable line. One cable here out to a utility pole to a switching station to… another memory, this time of a lecture being given back at the NSA campus — known as Crypto City — when a lecturer from MIT came in and stood in a secure conference room, yapping about something. Darren had sat at the rear, idly listening to the guy drone on, when the man had said something interesting. The lecturer asked, ‘How many computer networks are out there in the world today?’ There had been a low murmur and Darren knew it was a trick question, and he had kept his mouth shut until the lecturer had triumphantly said, ‘One. There is just one computer network in the world.’ Everything else was just a subset of this huge network. There had been a low titter of laughter, and the lecturer had just let it slide right over his pointy head.

Because the right answer wasn’t one. Darren wasn’t sure what the right answer was, exactly, but he knew that the numeral one wasn’t it. For there was another network out there, one that belonged to the NSA. It was called HARDWIRE, and it was a network with a 526-bit encryption technology, based on a new quantum mechanics computing system that existed only in Crypto City. HARDWIRE allowed NSA operatives — like himself — to chat with one another.

He looked down at the crossword puzzle, thinking yet again how the current puzzles were no longer much of a challenge. Ah, a challenge — now, getting a handle on Final Winter and what Adrianna had set in motion, that was one hell of a test, and he knew that he should have been satisfied with what was on his plate. But there was something there that he wanted to dig around, something that just didn’t quite make sense. If he dumped that porn program he was running and logged into HARDWIRE -which could take a while: the verification and password protection system made entering the White House look like buying a day pass at Disneyworld — he could chat with some of his co-workers and see what sniffings they had on Final Winter. Not that he didn’t trust what was going on with his Tiger Team. No, sir, not at all. It was just that -well, he liked things to work out right, to make sense. And right now something wasn’t quite making sense. He wasn’t sure what it was. There was just a tingling back there in his mind that bothered him.

Darren glanced up at the impressively built women flashing in and out of existence on his computer screen. Some women — every one of them, in fact — that he saw flash by were merely representatives of binary numerals, like 100101110100111010011100111, and the merest adjustment to that number stream, say, changing the second zero to a one, could make the photo out of focus. Or blur it completely. One switch of a digit could turn something originally designed to arouse men into a frustrating blend of colors and static.

He looked away from the screen. The unfilled puzzle was still in his lap. He remembered his boss’s orders. Take the day off. We need you fresh.

True enough.

Darren picked up his pen and went to work. Now. Who in hell had been the female lead in the Broadway premiere of South Pacific?

Brian Doyle spent part of his day off heading out to a small park near Greenbelt that looked like it hadn’t been maintained since it had originally been slapped together. The park memorialized some cavalry unit from Maryland that had fought for the Union during the Civil War and save for a few benches and a statue of a man on a horse there wasn’t much to the place. Late-night drinking and sex bouts by local high-school students were probably the main recreational activities. Brian pulled into the gravel parking lot, noting with satisfaction that the place seemed empty. Good. That suited him well.

He got out of the Lexus, went to the rear door and took out a heavy black box with a handle in the center. He walked past the statue, down to a grassy field that overlooked a stream. The grass was ankle high but that didn’t bother him. It seemed to be a good day. He put the box down on the grass, looked around. No picnickers, no witnesses. Brian remembered how, some years ago, in a similar park, the body of the White House counsel had been found, an apparent suicide. Now that had been a time, and an eight-year vacation from reality. All that spilled ink and recorded news tape about a pudgy intern and a lecherous president, leading to an impeachment and an incredible waste of media energy and resources.

So. Nobody had asked his opinion about it. All he knew was that Adrianna was correct. While most folk were focused on the trivial, serious men with serious grievances were preparing to do the American people harm. And were continuing their preparations.

Brian kneeled down in the grass, undid two brass snaplocks and opened up the cover of the box. There, nestled inside and folded, was a set of Highland bagpipes. He took the ungainly tangle of pipes out and stood up. The ebony finish of the tubes was shiny in the sunlight, and he tossed the three drones over his left shoulder, placed the mouthpiece between his lips, and began inflating the bag. As the bag came to life, he recalled the brief and unsatisfactory conversation he’d had with his son Thomas that morning. He had asked questions about school, about Thomas’s friends, about his pitching status on his school baseball team, and most of the answers he received had been the same grunts or ‘Yeps’. About the only time Thomas had been anything like himself was when he’d asked the last question he always asked: ‘Dad, when are you coming home?’

Good question. A damn good question, one that Marcy always asked in that acid tone that shot right through him. ‘What kind of father are you, spending so much time on the road?’ she would always say. ‘What in hell are you doing to your son?’

Brian closed his eyes, felt the leather bag inflate under his left arm. He fingered the chanter with both hands, squeezed the bag, heard the drones — one bass, two tenor — explode with that steady tone, and a second later the chanter squealed into life. He dipped his left knee, slid right into ‘The Heights of Vittoria’, a good tune celebrating a British battle in Italy during the Second World War. From ‘The Heights of Vittoria’ he went into ‘The 42nd Black Watch Regiment Crossing the Rhine’ and then to something more cheerful, ‘Highland Laddie’. The tone and depth of the music cut right through him. He played for a while, letting the music relax him, playing the tunes he loved, which most certainly did not include what he thought were the two most overplayed bagpipe tunes of all time, ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Scotland the Brave’. Brian had taken up the bagpipes, just like Dad, after joining the force, and he had become a member of the NYPD’s bagpipe band, playing at functions throughout the city, from ribbon cuttings to parades to funerals…

God, especially funerals. As he went into a slow march -’Skye Boat Song’ — Brian remembered that dreary fall in 2001, playing at funeral after funeral all over the city. Save for one, that of his father, and he never quite forgave himself for one thing: the tears. He had shed plenty of tears for his fallen brothers in the police department, as well as for the firefighters, EMTs and Port Authority cops. But for one funeral he had remained stone-faced and silent — for his own father’s.

And what kind of son was he, that he would not cry at his father’s funeral?

Brian opened his eyes, played another march, ‘Johnny Cope, Are Ye Walkin’ Yet?’ and tapped his left foot in time with the music, thinking about the pipes themselves, how he hadn’t wanted to pick them up, but now he was enjoying both the music and the history. The history, of course, was of war, for the Highland pipes were known for inspiring Scottish fighters and frightening their foes. Killers in kilts, the Scots soldiers were called, and Brian wondered briefly if the pipes had been played by the British troops a couple of years back when they took Basra from Saddam’s forces.

There. He sensed something, spun around.

A man was standing there with a woman and two children. Holding on to their mother’s hands. Boy and girl. All were dressed for a day off, maybe a drive in the country, a picnic in a deserted park. The man seemed apologetic.

‘Sorry to disturb you, but… well, we were enjoying your playing.’

Brian smiled. ‘Thanks.’

‘And I was wondering…would you mind playing something for my kids?’

‘Sure. What would it be?’

The guy grinned. ‘My favorite. “Amazing Grace”.’

Ugh, Brian thought. He was going to say something short and sharp — like ‘I’ve never heard of it’ — and then he looked at the eager and expectant faces of the man’s children. Thought about Final Winter. Thought about these kids, coughing and wheezing, being brought to an overwhelmed emergency room by their terrified parents. Or maybe even worse…this boy and girl, alive and well, but trying to wake up mommy and daddy in their bed, mommy and daddy who had been so sick and now seemed to be sleeping, but they had been sleeping so long and their skin was so cold…

Brian rubbed at his dry lips. ‘Sure. “Amazing Grace”. Coming right up.’

And he played for the man and his wife and his children, all still alive on this glorious spring day in the United States.

Adrianna Scott looked at herself in the mirror, didn’t like what she saw, and didn’t particularly care. Her face was made up more than she was used to, really highlighting her eyes and her lips. Her aunt would say that she looked whorish and, for once, Auntie would have been right. Adrianna stepped back, looked at the crop-top white tank top that she was wearing, with no bra underneath. Her nipples were showing through fine and clear, and her brown tummy was nice and flat. She supposed that maybe she should have had her navel pierced — some guys seemed to get off on that — but that was too drastic, and besides, her time was short. She spun around, examined the tight white slacks she had on. Underneath she was wearing a tiny bright pink thong and the colored fabric could be seen clearly through the white of her slacks. Perfect. Hot and slutty. Just like she wanted.

She walked out into her apartment, saw up on the mantel the photograph of her and Auntie that Brian Doyle had been admiring the other night. That had been close. She touched the thick frame and then went to the closet, put on a knee-length light green coat, and left the house, carrying her heavy purse in one hand. She got into her car, backed out of her lot, and went to the new Summergate Mall, about a twenty-minute drive from her condo. She checked the time when she got to the mall and drove into the underground garage. Time for once was on her side, and she left the car and strode quickly into the mall, looking like any one of the hundreds of women packed in there tonight.

A good night, a good night for shopping. But Adrianna didn’t plan to buy a damn thing.

Instead, she relied on her training from her early CIA days at Camp Perry — also known as The Farm — where basic tradecraft was taught, everything from using mail drops to shaking a tail, which helped her feel completely confident, an hour later, as she drove away from the underground parking garage in a stolen Chrysler minivan, that she wasn’t being followed at all.

Adrianna allowed herself to feel a quiet tingle of excitement. Her day off was proceeding just as planned.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Adrianna Scott drove west for almost an hour, going over the state line into Virginia. As each mile slid on by a little voice insistently whispered at her, saying that she really didn’t have to go out here tonight, that it was too disgusting and too dangerous, picking up strange men like that. She let the little voice drone on. Sure, it would be easy to turn around and drive back — hell, she might be able to get the minivan back to the mall parking garage before it was even missed — and go home and just have a glass of wine and try to unwind.

But the little voice, while it could be heard, was certainly going to be ignored. The next few weeks were going to be hell indeed, and Adrianna needed this break tonight, needed it bad, and there was nothing that was going to stop her. Her mouth was dry and her tummy was fluttering with excitement, and she wondered if this was what gambling addicts or drug addicts or Internet sex addicts felt like, just before scoring whatever it was that they needed to soothe their frayed nerves and jumpy imaginations.

Maybe so.

But tonight would be the last one. Honest.

Sure, the voice said, just like the one in New Jersey, three months ago. That was supposed to be the last one, right?

Right.

Now Adrianna was off the highway, navigating narrow state roads, heading to her target. She had scoped it out weeks before, and was confident that it would suit her needs. There. Up ahead. There were neon lights there, red, white and blue, marking a local VFW hall. It was a two-story wooden building, white, with darkened windows. Pickup trucks and other vehicles were parked in the gravel lot. She drove into the lot, found a place to park the minivan so that it wouldn’t be spotted from the street, and stepped out into the cool dusk. She shivered. She knew what she had to do. There was no turning back.

Adrianna walked up to the entrance, teetering a bit on the black high heels she was wearing, carrying her heavy purse in one hand.

Inside the place was dark and smoky, a jukebox in one corner playing a country and western tune. The bar was a square structure in the center, surrounded by tables and chairs, and off to one side was a polished wooden dance floor. The place was about half filled, more men than women, and Adrianna sat down in the corner at an empty table. There was a candle in the center of her table, unlit. She looked around, took in the atmosphere of the place. There were framed items on the wall, old Second World War recruiting posters and photographs of tanks, aircraft and ships. There were flags and banners as well, along with the usual bumper stickers plastered along the side of the bar:

Adrianna had to hide a smirk. Imperialism through bumper stickers.

A waitress, a sagging middle-aged woman, came over, wearing jeans and an old gray sweat shirt. Over the sound of the twanging guitars, Adrianna ordered a Budweiser — and then, slipping the waitress a folded-over ten-dollar bill, she ordered something else.

The waitress stood up, her expression shocked. ‘Tell me again what you want?’

Adrianna repeated her order. The waitress looked at the folded bill in her hand and said, ‘Well, I suppose Henry would fit the bill. He’s single, not bad-looking, but I tell you…he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you know what I mean.’

Adrianna sipped from her beer. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

The waitress left and Adrianna sipped the cold brew again, wishing she had ordered something different. But in this place, she reckoned, she’d be lucky if imported beer meant a Coors from Colorado. It was warm sitting there, her long coat over the few clothes she was wearing underneath, but she left it on. She was making an impression, no doubt about it, but she didn’t want to cause such a big stir that a lot of people would remember her later.

There.

A man was coming over, a glass of beer in one hand, a pool stick in the other. She judged him to be in his late forties, close-trimmed beard — which was fortunate, since she liked men with beards, Brian Doyle notwithstanding — and had on khaki slacks and a red flannel shirt. There was a bit of a beer belly developing but, thankfully, there wasn’t a heavy gut. The man grinned and she was relieved again to see that he seemed to have good teeth. This night was turning out to be fortunate indeed.

‘The name’s Henry Spooner,’ he said. ‘Are you really looking for me?’

She looked up at him coyly. ‘My name is Adrianna, and yes, I really was looking for you. Or somebody like you.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Please,’ she said, motioning to a chair, ‘do sit down.’ And of course, as she motioned to the chair, she let the coat slip open so that the white tank top was revealed in all its braless glory, and Henry definitely caught a good glimpse as he sat down. His grin was wider and he said, ‘Karen told me that there was a pretty girl sitting here by herself, looking to meet a single man. A vet who’d served in the Gulf. Was she right?’

‘Yes, she was,’ Adrianna said, gently running a finger around the tip of the beer bottle. ‘But you served in the first Gulf War, am I right? Back in 1991?’

He nodded. ‘That’s a big affirm, lady. Gulf War One, which would have been the last Gulf War, if Daddy Bush had had any balls.’

‘And what did you do when you were there?’

A satisfied smile. ‘Gunner on an M-1A Abrams Tank, First Army Division, Big Red One.’

Adrianna made a point of licking her full lips. ‘Really? That sounds so fascinating…and dangerous.’

A manly shrug. ‘We did what we had to do, that’s all.’

‘Did you…did you kill many Iraqis?’

Another manly shrug. ‘Some. It was real easy for us, in the M-1A. Called it a turkey shoot. Our thermal imaging could spot a T-72 out there, hundreds of meters before they knew we were even coming after them… sometimes you’d get a T-72 popped and we’d have crispy critters out there, smokin’…’

She reached out and gently touched his left wrist. ‘Thank you… thank you for your service.’

His smile was still there but she sensed he was suspicious and she was right — thank you, Camp Perry training — and he said, ‘So. Why are you asking me all these questions? Something wrong?’

Adrianna shook her head. ‘Not at all. You see… my uncle, he was in the Army as well. Served in the Gulf. He was a driver on one of those armored vehicles — the ones that carry troops — what’re they called?’

‘Bradley Fighting Vehicles.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s the one,’ she said, sitting up straighter, making sure that her chest was nice and prominent. ‘He served there as well, and was seriously hurt.’

‘Oh. Sorry to hear that.’

Sure, Adrianna thought, sorry that I’m not flashing you my naked boobs, that’s what you’re sorry about. Aloud she said, ‘Oh, he survived. Somehow an anti-tank round hit his vehicle, damaged it severely. He was trapped inside and would have died, except another soldier, from another unit, pulled him out and saved him. My uncle never knew his name.’

Henry said, ‘Well, sorry to disappoint you, miss, but that wasn’t me. Never did see anything like that, though it sure did happen in other sectors over there.’

Adrianna touched his wrist again. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t understand. You see, my uncle died last year, and he was upset that he had this debt, this obligation, that had never been paid off. That somewhere out there was an Army trooper who had saved his life, and he’d never got a chance to thank him personally. And before he died, so he could get some peace, I told him that I’d go out and find this man, and I would thank him. I travel a lot on business, and I knew I would have an opportunity to find him, whoever he was.’

Henry said, ‘Oh. Okay, I get it.’

Another touch of her hand upon him. ‘But… you see, it’s nearly impossible for me to do this. I’ve checked the official records of the incident, and there’s no record of this soldier’s name. So I’m doing the next best thing. When I travel, I go to the local VFW or American Legion Hall, and try to thank all the veterans from the first Gulf War that I can. I figure that this way, I just might thank the right soldier, without even knowing it.’

Henry seemed confused, which was fine, especially since the waitress had warned her that he wasn’t particularly bright, which would serve her purpose so well. He took a swallow from his beer glass and said, ‘But there’s one other thing I don’t understand.’

‘Yes?’

‘Karen, the waitress… she said that the girl sitting here wanted to meet a Gulf veteran, but that he had to be single and kinda good-looking. What’s that about?’

Adrianna picked up her beer bottle, gently suckled the top as she took a swallow, and then reached out for the last time and caressed the man’s wrist, making sure he got a good look at her tight slacks, in addition to the white tank top, her nips so hard now that they almost hurt.

She lowered her voice. ‘Maybe I want to say thank you in another way. Interested?’

Henry’s eyes lit up, like little horny diodes back there had just clicked on. ‘God, yes.’

She leaned forward, close enough so that her hair tickled his face. ‘Good. I have a room at a motel, a couple of miles away. Let’s get out of here.’

‘You got it, babe.’

The motel was called the Longstreet Arms, and Adrianna had earlier rented an end unit there. She was on Henry the moment the door closed. She dropped her coat on the floor and her purse as well, and the man grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her close. His beard scratched her face and she kissed him, kissed him hard, and his mouth was open and slobbering and she started bumping and grinding against a thigh, and that got him going, too. His hands grabbed her ass and she forced herself to giggle as she dropped to her knees, started unzipping his jeans.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Jesus, you are one hot babe…God!’

Sure she was, Adrianna thought, deftly pulling his hardening member free from his soiled white underwear — ugh. She was hotter than any other small-town babe he had gotten in the past few years, she thought, he’d have been lucky to get some chain-smoking overweight hausfrau with bad teeth and tattoos from high school sloppily inked on her shoulder blades. Adrianna forced herself not to grimace, not to give in to the gag reflex as she took him into her mouth.

Henry shuddered and leaned back against the door, his hands now in her hair. She continued the repulsive act for a few moments before pulling away and looking up at him, smiling. ‘Time to get comfortable, don’t you think?’

He was grinning, breathing hard, eyes glassy. ‘Oh, shit, yes, babe. You got it.’

Adrianna stood up, took him by the hand, led him over to the bed. The room had light green wall-to-wall carpeting, a TV on a stand, and a bathroom that looked like it got cleaned regularly, every spring and fall. Henry worked fast to undress himself, and she helped him along. She didn’t protest when he pulled down her tight white slacks and pulled her tank top over her head. Now that her breasts were exposed, he growled and grabbed them. She couldn’t help herself when she winced as he worked on her nipples. She gently took a hold of his hands and said, ‘Don’t worry, hon, they’ll be there later. Lay back, now, why don’t you?’

He fell back on the bed and she straddled him, grinding her butt on his erection. His hands went back up to her breasts and then she leaned down to kiss him and whispered in his ear, ‘Want to try something kinky?’

‘Shit, yes,’ he said, grinning. ‘Would love to.’

‘Then close your eyes.’

Henry did as he was told, and Adrianna clambered off the bed, thinking joyfully, there he goes, just like the other ones, thinking with the wrong head. She went down to her purse, snapped it open, took out the two metal instruments, and within a very few seconds she had handcuffed his hands to the headboard of the bed.

‘Hey!’ he protested. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

She was amused to see how small the other head was, now that it was shrinking away. She straddled him again, kissed him on the lips, and said, ‘Shhhh, dear one, everything will be explained shortly. Just keep quiet.’

‘The hell I will!’ he yelled, yanking at his cuffed wrists, the metal restraints rattling against the headboard. ‘You get me out of here, you crazy bitch, I’m not into this kind of kinky stuff, this goddamn bondage, not at all, and if you don’t let me out of here right now, I’ll—’

As he was raving, Adrianna went back to the floor, retrieved her purse, and came back up onto the bed to straddle him. She opened her purse and took out a Black Attack folding knife, which she snapped open. She poked the very point of the blade into his chin, right through his beard. A bead of blood suddenly appeared in the whiskers. Henry froze, his eyes wide with shock and fear, his arms now trembling.

‘Got your attention?’

No reply. She gently moved the point of the blade again, and Henry moaned.

‘Got your attention?’ She asked again.

‘Yes,’ Henry said, his voice thin. ‘Yes, you do.’

‘Good.’

Adrianna took a deep breath, felt the shuddering shame of thrill and excitement flow through her like a heavy slug of maple syrup, just sliding down one’s throat. She leaned over him and said, ‘I want to know more, Henry. Tell me more about your war in Iraq, back in ‘91. Do tell me more.’

‘Wh-why?’

‘Hmm, a good question,’ she said. ‘Hold on. Don’t move, and maybe I won’t hurt you.’

Back to the floor and to her purse, from which she took out a thin leather wallet. She returned to her handcuffed man on the bed — noticing right away the stench now rising up from him, wondering how automatic that was, the body reacting to being put in unavoidable danger — and straddled him again. She was conscious that she was naked, save for the pink-thong panties, but she didn’t really care.

Adrianna held up the leather wallet, flipped it open. ‘See the photo? Not a bad likeness, is it?’

‘Noo…nooo, it’s not.’

‘See what it says?’

‘It says… Adrianna Scott — and, Jesus Christ, you’re a fucking CIA agent! What the hell is this?’

The knife point went back to his chin. He winced and she said coldly, ‘For someone who can walk and breathe at the same time you’re pretty stupid, Henry. We’re not CIA agents. We’re CIA officers. Got it?’

He moaned again. ‘Please… what the fuck do you want? Huh? What the fuck do you want?’

Adrianna leaned into him again. ‘I want you to tell me a story. A story about killing Iraqis. Tell me a story. That’s all. Is that so hard?’

Henry closed his eyes. Another bead of blood appeared in the bristles of his beard. His chest moved rapidly, up and down, underneath her splayed legs. He said, ‘A story… that’s all? A story?’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘And to be fair, I’ll tell you a story in return, all right?’

Eyes clenched shut, Henry said, ‘Our tank was called Killer Kobra. Part of K Company. All tanks had names beginning with the letter of their company. We… we… set off at 0300 hours, H-Day, the day we made our swing out east, heading up into Iraq. The classic left-hand hook. It was flat, rocky land. Great terrain for tanks. Lots of room to maneuver… we’ll probably never have an advantage like that, ever again. We were about twenty klicks north of the border, when we had our first contact… three Soviet-era BMPs, personnel carriers—’

Another jab of the knife. ‘I know what BMPs are, you fool. Go on.’

‘Then…then we saw a T-72, coming up over a sand dune. The poor son of a bitch probably didn’t even know we were there… Bruce, our tank commander, called for a Sabot round… I pulled it up, chambered it… boom!… goddamn thing, we could see the turret spin up… those T-72s were goddamned deathtraps, they were… we motored up and a few minutes later, we slowed down as we went past it… no reason ‘cept none of us had ever seen anything like that, in a real war…’

Adrianna said, ‘What did it look like?’

Henry’s eyes flashed defiance. ‘What the hell do you think? The tank was still burning when we got there… and there were a couple of crispy critters, hanging over the side -didn’t even fucking look like humans… but you know what? They were the enemy — that’s what — we had to do what we had to do… so… anything else?’

She shook her head, feeling her breathing quicken. ‘No… no, I don’t think so, Henry. I think it’s my turn, I do…’

She shifted her weight, felt sweat trickle down her naked back. ‘Before I start, I need to ask you a question. Have you ever heard of Amiriyah?’

‘Amir what?’

‘Amiriyah. It was a bomb shelter for civilians, in a nice neighborhood in western Baghdad. You never heard of it?’

A shake of the head, a clatter of the handcuffs.

Adrianna took the knife, gently moved it across Henry’s right cheek. ‘I don’t doubt it. Why bother? It was just an unfortunate part of the first Gulf War. Everybody remembers Kuwait and the Highway of Death and Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf and the yellow ribbons and the victory parades after the war. Right? Pretty parades in pretty towns, flags and cheering. I bet you went to a parade like that, Henry, right? A nice parade, nothing like those poor Iraqi boys got when their war was over. Most of the Iraqis killed were just poor ignorant farm-boys, many with their first pairs of shoes, and they ended up burned or blown to pieces or turned into dust by you and your weapons.’

Her breathing was really quick now, and she went on, the words tumbling past each other.

‘But let’s get back to Amiriyah, shall we? It was a bomb shelter that was used by hundreds of civilians every night, when the air-raid sirens howled in the air. Ever hear an air-raid siren, Henry? It makes a wailing noise that cuts right through you, turns your guts into water, as you wait for the bombs or missiles to strike. But the civilians who got into Amiriyah, they thought they were safe. It was a bomb shelter. Everyone knew the Americans had smart weapons. Everyone knew they would be safe if they got inside Amiriyah.’

Adrianna had to stop, her breathing was so hard. To her own ears, her voice was changing, the way the syllables were coming out, it was all different. She said, ‘But the Americans weren’t as smart as we thought they were, and they weren’t as smart as they thought they were. For early on the morning of February 13, 1991, the shelter was bombed by the Americans. More than three hundred civilians — mostly women and children — were incinerated. Instantly. Including my papa and mama. Do you understand? My mama and papa, two of the sweetest, kindest and most intelligent people in the world, struck dead by your bombs.’

Henry’s mouth was moving, like he was trying to say something, and she grabbed the identification wallet she had shown him earlier and flung it across the room, spitting out the words. ‘My name is not Adrianna Scott. It is Aliyah Fulenz. I am an Iraqi Christian woman, and I am here to seek justice.’

‘But… but… the CIA… how in God’s name did they… I don’t believe you…’

She felt herself smile. ‘For even as a young girl, I was quite smart, Henry. After my parents were murdered by you, I came to the United States. I lived with an aunt, and soon after I came here I started with my work. My story. My setting up of false identification papers was so easy, even at a young age. And the CIA? Once they started going through my background, they went as far as my high school years. Which was typically American, save that I was an orphan child, adopted by an elderly aunt, who had passed away. So there was no one left alive to contradict my story. No one. No one at all. It was so easy…’

Adrianna brought the knife up to Henry’s chin again. ‘So that was my story. And here’s another one.’ She pushed the knife in again while Henry groaned. ‘I have schemed and worked and planned and now find myself, with God’s help, I have no doubt, in a position of power. Of authority. Of trust and responsibility. And the people who have put their trust in me, they have no idea, not even a concept of what I am about to rain down upon them. For you see, in a few weeks’ time, aircraft will be flying out at night, to all places in the United States. Secreted aboard them will be canisters. Those installing the canisters will believe that they contain something benign. But they won’t. They will be carrying weaponized anthrax, Henry, weaponized anthrax that will be spread across your largest cities. And panicked people, already infected, will stream out into the countryside.’

Henry was whimpering as she twisted the knife against him. ‘Everyone you know and love and cherish will be dead in less than two months, Henry, including your bastard whore empire that runs across the world like some elephant run amok, crushing everything in its path. Do you hear me, Henry?’

‘Please… please, no, don’t tell me any more… why are you telling me this…?’

Another twist of the knife, another moan. ‘Because I’m human, Henry. I couldn’t have gone all these years without telling someone, so every now and then, when the pressure becomes too much, when I feel I’m losing my focus, my anger, I seek one of you out. One who has killed my countrymen, who helped kill my parents, and then I unburden myself…and I feel so much better when I’m finished.’

Henry was crying now. ‘Please… please don’t tell me any more… please don’t say anything more about you or anthrax or anything else…’

‘Why, Henry?’

Snot was oozing out of his nose. ‘Because… because I’m afraid you’re going to kill me, that’s why…’

She nodded.

‘Henry, you’re absolutely right.’

And with that, Aliyah Fulenz took her knife and slit the man’s throat.