Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 8:47 a.m.
When the delivery man knocked on the door I nearly jumped out of my skin. I leapt to my feet and spun toward the door. Ghost gave a low growl and took up a defensive stance next to me. He was too tactful to mention that I spent five seconds scrabbling inside my jacket for a pistol I wasn’t carrying.
I peered through the peephole and saw a teenage boy in a kufi.
Before he could knock again, I opened the door and he handed me a package, accepted a tip, and departed without saying a word. He threw some cautious looks at Ghost, though, as if aware that this was a ferocious mankiller for whom a packet of goat strips would not assuage a savage hunger. Ghost apparently had the same thought and glared at his retreating back until I closed the door and told him to knock it off.
Inside the package was a carton of Bistoon cigarettes, which I threw out. The other items in the paper sack were the battery and a cell-phone charger wrapped together with a blue rubber band.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and slid the battery into the phone and was delighted to see that it was already charged. I should have given the kid a bigger tip.
Our DMS phones have a USB port, and I fished out the flash drive and plugged it in. It did not look particularly damaged from the outside, but then again the outside was plastic. I was more than a little surprised-or maybe “suspicious” is the appropriate word-that Rasouli gave me the original rather than a copy. I was glad he did, though, because once I uploaded what I could I was going to find a way to get the flash drive into a diplomatic pouch for an expedited trip across the ocean. Once Bug got his sweaty little hands on it I was sure the drive would yield up everything there was to find.
Could Rasouli have had that in mind? Did he know about MindReader? Sure he did, he knew Vox.
My gut turned over. Every time I thought I had a grasp on how much damage-past, current, and potential-that could be laid at Vox’s feet, something came along to broaden my perspective. MindReader was an ultrasecret system and part of its strength lay in the fact that the bad guys didn’t know about it, or if they did they didn’t know what it could do. Vox did. That meant that anyone he told, every government or terrorist organization, would be scrambling now to upgrade their computer-security protocols. Common knowledge of MindReader’s intrusion properties could easily create a new spike in security technology for computers. Grace Courtland once told me that the whole Chinese GhostNet program was their response to rumors that something like MindReader existed. And Vox himself had clearly financed some big-ticket research because he had provided the Seven Kings with the only cellular phone system that MindReader couldn’t trace or crack. Bug, the DMS computer hotshot, said that designing such a system could not have been done by accident, it had to have been created specifically to thwart our computer.
I plugged the flash drive into the USB port on my phone and immediately got a bunch of read-error messages. The thing had been in someone’s stomach, so that was no surprise. However, I went through the steps to do a forced upload of bulk data and soon images were whipping across the screen too fast for me to see. Damaged or not, there was a lot of stuff on the drive. The upload failed twice and I had to repeat the steps, but eventually I got the UPLOAD COMPLETE message.
I scrolled back through the contents at a slower speed until I found a series of JPEGs, one of which was the picture Rasouli had showed me. It looked so innocent, so nondescript in its metal case. And though I know that machines have no personality, I could not help but ascribe the word “evil” to it, as if the malign intent of its creators had been somehow transferred to the device during its construction.
I took a breath, engaged the code scrambler, and punched a speed dial. The phone rang three times.
“Go,” was all Church said, which is more than he usually gives when he answers a phone.
“Boss, I have a Firehall One situation.”
“Is there a finger on a trigger?” His voice sounded as calm as if I asked him who pitched for the Orioles last night.
“Unknown. But… from the vibe I got from my source I’d say this is something coming at us rather than already here.”
“Tell me.”
“I just uploaded the contents of a flash drive to the server. It’s damaged goods. It’s filed under my name and coded for you, eyes only.”
I could hear him tapping keys on his laptop as I spoke.
“Okay, I have the data. Where did this originate? Who’s your source?”
“You’re going to love this,” I said, and told him everything. He did not interrupt once, and I hoped that he was alone because this was going to really test his Vulcan calm.
After a short pause, Church asked, “Were you able to verify his connection to Vox? Could Rasouli have simply thrown the name at you to win your trust?”
“I don’t think so. Vox told him to tell me that he vetted Grace and she was clean. He said ‘She wasn’t one of mine.’”
There was a longer pause. “Interesting.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“Rasouli made no move to arrest you?”
“Just the opposite,” I said. “Rasouli teased me by saying that one of the devices might be in the U.S. He couldn’t have been more vague if he’d spoken in code, though.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“I’m not sure I’d believe him if he said the desert was made out of sand. But…”
“Where are you?”
“My hotel room.”
“Bug might be able to salvage more of the damaged files. I’ll reroute a local asset to pick up the flash drive. Wait for his call.”
“I don’t think I should leave the country while-”
“You’re not. You’ll be taken to a safe house you can use as a staging area. We’ll evaluate the situation so be prepared to go after that device in Iran. I’ll have Echo Team rendezvous with you there.”
“Speaking of my team… did everyone make it out okay?”
“Everyone but you. Safe and sound and over the border.”
“Outstanding. What about the packages?”
“The three young people are with their families. They’ll go to London for a thorough physical, and we’ll have them home in forty-eight hours.”
“Not seeing anything in the news.”
“Iran hasn’t acknowledged the incident. There’s some question here about how they’ll play it. Fifty-fifty split between them producing dead soldiers and claiming that we launched an illegal attack that resulted in casualties; or they reach out to us on the sly and agree to a public statement that they worked with us to insure the safe release of suspected spies who have since been cleared. My money is on the latter. State is prepping a variety of responses,” he said.
“Be nice to have the good guys win. Those three kids were pretty tough. They didn’t break, and we both know the Iranians didn’t go light on them.”
“Admirable,” Church agreed, and that was about as sentimental and weepy as he ever gets. “What do you need, Captain?”
“I’m equipment-light. I need weapons and gear. Can your asset drop that stuff off?”
“I can arrange weapons, but he won’t have a field kit. Echo Team will bring the party favors. And I’ll have Bug send you the latest disarming protocols.”
“Once last thing, Boss,” I said. “Do you think this is the return of the Seven Kings?”
“Impossible to say at this juncture,” he said. The line went dead.
In my best impersonation of Church I said, “Why, thank you, Captain Ledger, damn fine work.” Ghost gave me a look and went back to his dried goat.
I studied the picture of the bomb. Jesus. Someone wanted to nuke the entire Mideast oil fields.
Understand, I gave just about half a warm shit about the whole oil wars thing. I cared even less about the politics of it. But there were hundreds of millions of people in the region. I thought of all the people coming and going in the cafe. Their families, their kids. All of them. Working, eating, sleeping, loving, and living on top of four, maybe six, nuclear bombs. Maybe more.
I stood up, swayed for a moment, then ran like hell into the bathroom, dropped to my knees in front of the toilet and vomited. It was so immediate and desperate that I could hear myself screaming as I threw up.
My stomach spasmed on empty and I dropped the lid with a bang. Ghost was in the doorway, barking at me, scared and nervous. I pulled some toilet paper off the roll and wiped my mouth.
“It’s okay,” I gasped, reaching out with a trembling hand toward Ghost. He gave my knuckles a nervous lick. “It’s okay.”
I flushed the paper and used the sink to pull myself upright. I ran the water on cold and stuck my face down into the spray. I rinsed out my mouth and tried to spit out the taste of terror.
The shakes hit me then and I had to ball my hands into fists as I walked into the bedroom. You can only play it like Mr. Cool for so long before the realities of emotion and brain chemistry show up to kick your ass and prove to you that you’re just as human as everyone else. Maybe Mr. Church has a lock on invulnerability, but I haven’t cracked the code yet. I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried not to cry.
In the movies, Bruce Willis doesn’t cry. He’s a stoic. He’s also working off a script that he knows has a happy ending. I wasn’t. What if it came down to me to stop these things? Me and what I can do pitted against the potential loss of life that numbered several hundred million. I’m one guy. A year ago I was just a cop.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, and I could hear the raw horror in my own voice.