Sins of the Assassin

Chapter 4

The bioscanner beeped, refused Rakkim entry to the secret passage that led into the Presidential Palace. First time for that. Nothing worked right anymore. He stood within a small alcove outside the walled complex, a utility shed concealed by thick shrubbery and the darkness. Seagulls screamed overhead. Trucks rumbled in the distance.

Rakkim kept his heart rate at a steady sixty-five beats per minute as the bioscanner swept over him again. ENTRY REJECTED. Rakkim adjusted the Fedayeen knife nestled against his forearm-carbon-polymer, impregnated with his own DNA, the knife didn’t register on any scan. He smoothed it flat anyway. A third failure would set off alarms and armed response. He tried again. ACCEPTED. He stepped inside, the vault-thick outer door sliding shut behind him. Another bioscan required to get past the interior door. He thought of the two bodyguards he had just killed, and the look in the eyes of the tall one as he acknowledged his own death. The bodyguard seemed less troubled by his dying than Rakkim was with his method of killing him. Assassin tradecraft? Where had that come from? He heard Darwin’s mocking laughter echo in his skull as the security door opened into the president’s private corridor, and hated himself for his memories.

Rakkim double-timed down the corridor, wondering why Sarah had called him to the palace. Had the Old One resurfaced? That evil bastard wasn’t going to stop causing trouble until someone killed him. Rakkim would happily volunteer. Maybe ibn-Azziz, grand mullah of the Black Robes, was stirring from his stronghold in New Fallujah, Rakkim’s sighting of al-Faisal part of some new offensive. Rakkim just hoped nothing had happened to General Kidd-the Fedayeen commander was the president’s most loyal, and most important, supporter. Without the Fedayeen backing him, the president was just a well-intentioned figurehead. General Kidd had survived two assassination attempts in the last year. If anything had happened to him…

Rakkim opened the door into the president’s wood-paneled library. President Kingsley slouched behind his cluttered desk, exhausted, his fine white hair sticking up on one side. Sarah and Spider stood studying a holo-graphic map of North America that covered one wall-the Islamic Republic shaded light green, the Bible Belt in red. Lights pulsed in the current trouble spots in the Mormon Territories, highlighted the incursions into California and Arizona by the Aztlán Empire, the Mexicans attempting to reestablish ancient boundaries. Spider held on to a chair for support-a short, stocky Jewish genius, hair everywhere, twitching from the disease that was slowly killing him. Sarah smiled at Rakkim, then went back to the map.

The president scowled. “Glad you could make it, Rakkim.”

Rakkim didn’t let his surprise show. Kingsley took pains to maintain a semblance of good humor, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. What had happened?

“You are late, Rikki,” soothed Sarah.

“Al-Faisal is in town,” said Rakkim. “I tracked him to a tech store in the Zone.”

“Al-Faisal here?” Spider looked at Sarah. “Have you heard-”

“I don’t give a shit about al-Faisal.” The president tossed a chunk of jagged, twisted steel from hand to hand, a treasured piece of wreckage from Newark, the climactic battle of the Civil War. “The Black Robes are the least of my concerns.”

“What’s wrong?” said Rakkim.

“Wrong?” said the president, his watery eyes sunk into a nest of wrinkles. “What could be wrong? Allah watches over us, guides our every action, does he not?” He set the paperweight down, then came from behind his desk, a handsome man, formerly robust but slightly stooped now, even with the back brace that no one was supposed to know about. “I want you to go back to the Bible Belt. Save the nation, noble Fedayeen. Be the hero again.” He started for the door. “Sarah will fill you in on the details.”

The door clicked shut. Deniability, that’s what this sudden exit must be about. The president had sent Rakkim on other covert assignments. New Fallujah. The Mormon Territories. Rakkim had air-dropped into Pakistan, to follow up on a sighting of the Old One; slipped into the Aztlán Empire to find out what the Mexicans were up to. The president had always briefed Rakkim himself. Not this time. Tonight Sarah got the job while the president kept his manicure clean in case anything went wrong. President-for-life Kingsley was a great man, a moderate who had almost single-handedly kept the Islamic Republic united, and kept the fundamentalists at bay. But he was still a politician.

“What’s al-Faisal doing here?” said Spider.

“Not now.” Sarah walked to the wall map, took the remote from Spider’s trembling hand.

She was still the same woman Rakkim had fallen in love with, but her responsibilities as secret advisor to the president had taken their toll. So had the covert existence they lived, her rarely going out in public, and the necessity of constant security measures. A brilliant historian specializing in the transition between the former and the current regime, she had been forced to eliminate all contact with friends and colleagues. The strain showed. Sarah was still slender, her eyes just as lively, but her playful instincts were muted now, reserved for moments when they were alone. She had cut her dark hair shorter a year ago, said it was easier. He missed it curling past her shoulders, brushing against him while they made love.

“Rikki?” Sarah nodded at the map. The central region of the Belt-Tennessee and the Carolinas-filled the wall. “You know who Colonel Zachary Smitts is, don’t you?”

“Yeah…I know the Colonel.” Memory carried the smell of bacon and coffee flavored with chicory. Twelve years ago Rakkim had been eating breakfast in a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. His second insertion as a shadow warrior. The Colonel’s picture hung over the counter, not the usual airbrushed glory of the fake warrior, but the Colonel in a filthy rebel uniform, unshaven, an unfiltered cigarette dangling from his lip. Portrait of a young man, hard and handsome under the dirt, a backwoods Elvis with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder instead of a guitar. The Colonel had looked back at him from the picture, tired but unbeaten…look what you made me do. A trucker had sat at the counter beside Rakkim, tugged at his hat toward the photo. Rakkim had done something similar a few moments later, raising his coffee cup to the photo before he drank-oblique mirroring, a way to bond with a subject without him being aware of it. “His people love him, I know that much. He’s a smalltime Tennessee warlord sitting on some prime real estate. Civil War hero. Brutal but smart. He stopped our advance along the eastern front. Saved Tennessee and the Carolinas. Did it outmanned and outgunned too.”

“He’s not small-time now, and he’s not outmanned or outgunned anymore either.” Sarah scrolled through the map, zoomed in on Atlanta. Closer. The satellite imagery jerked, went to static. She toggled the remote. The image sharpened for a moment, then broke up. She threw down the remote, glared at Spider. “I thought you fixed the digital filter.”

“I tried,” said Spider. “The chaff’s slipping into lower orbits. Reception is getting worse across the board.”

“I’m…sorry,” said Sarah.

“I’ll keep working on it,” said Spider, “but for now, forget the real-time map.”

Last year, a weather satellite had exploded after hitting a chunk of space debris, probably an uncharted leftover from the Chinese fiasco of 2007. The effects of this recent strike were catastrophic-pieces from the weather satellite had struck another satellite, which had disintegrated, causing still more debris, and so on and so on. Within a week, nineteen satellites had been destroyed. Hundreds of remaining satellites had been moved into other orbits, but there was now a layer of fragments circling the earth, a spreading ring of metallic chaff disrupting the global grid. Television and telecommunications still functioned, if intermittently, but spy satellites had been rendered nearly useless.

“The president should be here, not dump this in your lap,” Rakkim said to Sarah.

“He had to leave for an emergency session in Geneva,” Spider said. “The big boys are getting restless now that they’re blind.”

“Oh.” Rakkim covered his embarrassment. “Fine.”

What no one had considered until too late was that the prevalence of highly accurate spy satellites had maintained a semblance of world peace for the last twenty-five years. Once the Russians could no longer read the date on the fifty-yuan coin in the Chinese president’s pocket, they had to act accordingly. So did everyone else.

Sarah went back to the large map, circling Tennessee with the laser pointer. “In the last few years, our best estimates are that the Colonel has quadrupled the territory under his control, and increased his army to at least twenty thousand men. A few months ago the Tennessee governor ceded Knoxville to him to avoid a confrontation.”

“Too bad we don’t have somebody like the Colonel as joint chief,” said Rakkim. “The Mormons would be hunkered down in Salt Lake instead of giving the mayor of Denver night tremors.”

The Bible Belt was less a nation than a conglomeration of armed individuals with a common enemy: the Islamic Republic. The central government had little offensive capability, but woe unto the attacker foolish enough to invade. The South was a wasp’s nest, and every bandit and warlord carried a sting. Unlike the Islamic Republic, where private citizens were forbidden to own guns, in the Bible Belt everyone carried weapons. In spite of the danger, Rakkim had been comfortable in the South-there was an ease to life there, a strange sweetness to the days and nights. The Belt was poor, even poorer than the Islamic Republic, but there was the bracing certainty that no despot would have a chance against an armed citizenry. The Colonel might be a monster to his enemies, domestic and foreign, but were he to brutalize his own people, he would not long survive. The Islamic Republic was by nature more autocratic; only President Kingsley’s moderation ensured the limited freedoms that citizens of the Bible Belt considered their God-given right.

“The Colonel’s up to s-s-something,” said Spider, teeth chattering. Leader of an underground network of Jewish tech-geeks, sought by the Black Robes for twenty years, Spider had risked his life to save Sarah and Rakkim in the past. He raked a hand through his tangled beard. “I missed it, but S-Sarah…Sarah put the data together.”

“I got lucky,” said Sarah. “One of our people in-country sent a report about increased heavy truck traffic in the Great Smokies, well beyond any construction projects we were aware of. So I did some checking.” She highlighted Thunderhead Mountain in southeastern Tennessee. “The trucks are going here. The Colonel’s also moved in troops. Not masses of them, and he’s moving them in slowly. He doesn’t want to draw attention.” She looked at Rakkim. “I wondered why.”

“The Colonel is excavating a region below the summit of the mountain.” Spider coughed into a handkerchief, idly checked the results, and tucked it back into his pocket. “At least a half-dozen test tunnels have been drilled. We thought at first that he was mining coal, or high-grade minerals, but that wouldn’t explain the presence of his troops or his secretive actions.” His mouth set. “We just got an indication that he’s looking for something else.”

The map whirled, brought up the Gulf Coast.

“Two days ago the Colonel brought a finder named John Moseby to the site,” said Sarah.

“Man and his crew worked New Orleans,” said Spider. “Very good, from all reports.”

“A beads-and-booze looter?” Rakkim laughed. “The Colonel must be desperate.”

“Moseby’s not a typical looter,” Sarah said carefully. “As I said, he’s a finder. Lost, missing, he’ll bring it back, no matter the risk.”

Rakkim watched her. She was trying to tell him something. The presidential office might be secure from outside surveillance, but that didn’t mean the president didn’t have cameras and laser microphones of his own installed.

“What’s the Colonel looking for?” said Rakkim.

Sarah glanced at Spider, then back at Rakkim. “This mountain…it may have been a repository for certain weapon systems of the old regime.”

“Black ice?” Rakkim shook his head. They had called him off al-Faisal for this? Black ice was what the military called the covert programs from the previous regime. Off-the-books projects funded on a scale no current government could match, projects worked on by a scientific elite whose expertise could only be guessed at. The Holy Grail of advanced weaponry. “Bullshit.”

“The old regime had so many black-ice programs under way that even the leadership didn’t know about all of them,” said Sarah. “Not all of them were accounted-”

“I’ve heard those stories my whole life,” said Rakkim. “Mind-control lasers. Antipersonnel nanobots. Prototypes stashed down mineshafts, hidden under lakes, locked away in abandoned missile silos as the old regime collapsed. Thirty years and nobody has found anything. And not because we haven’t looked. They’re just stories, Sarah. If the Colonel wants to dig up a mountain, let him. It’ll keep him out of trouble.”

Sarah grabbed his wrist, turned it so the veins showed. “Those cellular injections you got as a Fedayeen recruit, where do you think they came from? Those injections that made you quicker and stronger, that gave you superior vision and hearing, and amped up your rate of healing.” Her fingers dug into his wrist. “Did you ever wonder where the research for those DNA boosters came from? Did you? It was a black-ice project from the old Americans. The chief scientist was a good Muslim. He died bringing us what he could.” She let him go, her face white, surprised by her own anger. “Black ice is real.”

Rakkim kept his voice level. “Do you have any evidence that weapons were stashed in the mountain?”

“Any evidence would be somewhere in the wreckage of the Pentagon.” Spider sat down with a sigh. “Th-th-that’s a six-point-five-million-square-foot haystack. Thirty-four acres of radioactive files and fried computer drives. If we don’t know exactly where to look, even the best hot suit in the world isn’t going to protect somebody sent to find out what’s in the mountain.”

“So, the answer is no,” said Rakkim.

“B-based on the resources the Colonel’s committed to the excavation”-Spider’s head lolled on the back of the chair-“one would conclude that he, at least, is convinced there’s something very valuable in the mountain.”

“The Colonel is virulently anti-Muslim,” said Sarah. “We can’t take the chance-”

“He was a patriot last time I was there,” said Rakkim, “not a hater.”

“He’s a hater now,” said Sarah.

“Why me?” said Rakkim, still suspicious. Sarah was holding something back. “Doesn’t the president trust General Kidd anymore?”

“The president trusts the general with his life,” said Sarah.

“Then why doesn’t the general send one of his shadow warriors to do the job?” said Rakkim. “It’s been over three years since I’ve been in the Belt. Why not send someone with fresh insights, fresh contacts?”

“They did.” Sarah’s lower lip quivered. “They did, Rikki.”

“Two-two months ago…” Spider stuttered; a tic jerked the skin under his right eye. “Two m-m-months ago the general sent one of his best shadow warriors to find out what was going on…” Spider tried to speak, gave up.

“A week later, the man failed to report,” said Sarah, her emotions under control again. “So the general sent another warrior. Same result. Nothing. No contact at all.”

“It’s a particularly in-insular region, as I’m sure you know,” Spider said.

“General Kidd will brief you whenever you want,” said Sarah.

Rakkim walked over to her. Rested his hands on her hips. Looked into her eyes. Waited until her breathing steadied. He embraced her, tilted his head so none of the security cameras could read his lips. Pretended to kiss her ear. Whispered, “Why me?”

Sarah rested her head on his chest. Reached up and drew him closer, her hands cupping his face. They were wrapped in each other’s arms, safe from cameras and microphones. She kissed him, whispered, “Because…the man the Colonel called on to help with the excavation…John Moseby…you know him. He’s a shadow warrior suspected of going rogue eight years ago. You cleared his name. You confirmed his death in action. John Moseby’s real name is John Santee.”

They swayed in the middle of the room while Spider averted his eyes, the map of the Belt blinking over them.