12:32 P.M. Eastern Time, September 19th
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Silence reigned on the seventh floor of the CIA Headquarters, silence unbroken but for the noise of a small fly buzzing near the ceiling.
A lull before the storm, Harry Nichols thought as he sat outside the office of CIA Director David Lay. It was the reason he was here.
For the thirty-eight-year-old field officer to be invited up to the seventh floor, the inner sanctum of the Agency’s top officials, meant trouble.
He could count on one hand the number of times it had happened before in his time at the CIA. And every time it had been a prelude to a mission. And not just any mission. Something special. In his line of work, special meant dangerous.
He got up from his seat on the couch and crossed over to the window, gazing out over the city, over the Potomac to Washington, D.C. His nation’s capital.
The capital of the land he had sworn to defend. No matter what the cost.
Over the fifteen years he had worked for the CIA, he had learned the cost. All too well. The cost of missions gone wrong, the price of failure. The bittersweet taste of victory when it had been achieved with the blood of his friends, his comrades.
To look at him, one would have never suspected who he was, what his job entailed. He stood about six-foot three, his frame deceptively lean. The build of a runner, not a weightlifter, though he did both. There was little about his physique to hint of the tightly controlled violence he was so capable of unleashing.
Clear blue eyes smiled disarmingly from a smooth-shaven face that had been long weathered by the elements, the smile so often nothing more than a facade to conceal the man that lay beneath. A cover, like so much of the rest of his life. He had sacrificed much to serve his country.
His hair was black and wavy, parted neatly to one side. To look at him, dressed as he was in a blue suit jacket, matching pants and a white shirt, one would have guessed him to be nothing more than a business executive, or perhaps one of Langley’s many analysts. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.
A Colt 1911.45 automatic was beneath the jacket, carried fully loaded in a paddle holster on his hip, even here on the seventh floor of the CIA. He rarely went without it.
The door opened behind him. A woman’s voice. “The director will see you now.”
He turned, a smile passing across his face. “Thank you, Margaret.”
“Go on in.”
Director Lay glanced up from his computer as Harry entered. In his early sixties, Lay was a big man, carrying the weight of someone who had spent most of their career behind a desk. Which he had, but no one would have called the desk of DCIA easy or stress-free. His graying hair was testimony to that fact.
“Have a seat,” he instructed. “I’m glad you could get here so quickly. I understand you’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since your arrival from Mexico City last night.”
Harry shrugged, taking a chair in front of the desk. “Kinda had to catch the red-eye back. Understood something hot was on tap.”
“There is. Good work with Calderon, Nichols,” the director said abruptly. That was all he said about the three dangerous months that had led up to the assassination of the drug lord. That was all that would ever be said. Silence was golden. “I trust you’ve had lunch?”
“I grabbed a quick bite in the Operations Center cafeteria.”
“Good. This will take a while.”
“What’s going on?”
Lay handed him a thin folder. “Recognize this man?”
Harry flipped the folder open and briefly studied the 8x10 photo inside. “Moshe Tal,” he announced calmly, his voice betraying none of his inner confusion. “Israel’s foremost archaeologist.”
“You know him?”
“By reputation only. A modern-day Indiana Jones, so they say.”
“Whoever ‘they’ are, they’re right. He’s a cowboy.”
“So I’ve heard. Not too much regard for the conventions of the business. Where’s he fit into this picture?”
The CIA director snorted. “He is the picture. Six months ago he obtained permission from the Iranian government to conduct an archaeological dig in the Alborz Mountains, apparently in the ruins of a medieval Persian city.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Harry interrupted. “They allowed an Israeli archaeologist inside their borders?”
“It’s already sounding rather strange, isn’t it?”
“You’d better believe it. How large of a team does Dr. Tal have with him?”
“The team was very small. That’s another one of his trademarks. Fifteen in all including Dr. Tal, thirteen Americans and an Australian woman named Rachel Eliot.”
“No other Israelis?”
A grim smile creased the director’s face. “They obeyed their government’s injunction to stay out of Iran.”
“Our citizens didn’t? Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Because they usually don’t.”
“Wait a minute, director,” Harry said, suddenly holding up his hand. “You said the team was very small. What’s happened?”
Director Lay opened his desk drawer and took out another folder, handing it across. “That’s why you’re here. They’ve disappeared.”
Harry’s only reaction was raised eyebrows. “Indeed.”
“They disappeared five days ago,” the director nodded. “The whole team. Every last one of them. It’s all in the folder there. Every blessed thing we know about it.”
Harry opened the folder, taking out a couple of glossy photographs, clearly enhanced from a satellite.
“The first one is from the 13th. Because of the number of Americans in the team, we were doing a daily satellite overpass of the camp. Just to make sure nothing happened to them.”
“But something did.”
Lay nodded. “Correct. The first photograph, digitally enhanced from the KH-13 overpass, shows a bustling camp,” he noted, referencing the Key Hole spy satellite. “Almost everyone is present in the photo. One of the Americans, Joel Mullins, is missing, but on thermal scan, we picked up a heat signature from inside one of the tents.”
“So, he was probably inside.”
“Likely. Now take a look at the second photo, taken on the 14th. What do you see?”
“Nothing,” Harry said slowly. “No people, no tents, nothing. It’s all gone.” He looked up. “It’s been five days now. Anything?”
“Yes.” The DCIA pulled a third photograph from his desk and handed it over. “Take a look at this.”
Harry did as he was told. His eyes opened wide. “What on earth are they doing there?”
“That’s what I need you to find out.”
1:05 P.M.
A beach
Atlantic City, New Jersey
“Cut that out!” Thomas Parker spluttered, waking up abruptly from his nap as water splashed over him.
The thirty-six-year-old New York native looked up at the young woman standing over him, at the now empty bucket in her hands, water dripping suspiciously from its rim. Mischief glinted in her dark eyes. She made a quick motion as though to toss it at him, giggling uncontrollably as he rolled off the blanket into the sand.
“I said, cut it out, Julie!” he protested, the sand sticking to his wet chest.
“Are you going to make me?” she laughed, dancing away from him as he grabbed for her ankle.
He leaned back, slicking his wet brown hair back from his forehead, gazing up at his girlfriend. “No, probably not. But sooner or later-” he shook his finger at her. “You’ll see.”
“I’ll see what?”
At that moment, his cellphone rang and whatever his reply might have been was forever lost as he reached for it. Words were blinking on-screen: SECURE CONNECTION. It had to be Kranemeyer. And that didn’t bode well for his plans for the evening. He stood and glanced over at Julie.
“This is private,” he warned her, rapidly tapping in the code sequence for the encrypted line.
“What is it, another girlfriend?” she demanded, watching his face closely.
He shook his head, grinning back at her.
“No, it’s my boss.” He stepped another few feet away from the sun umbrella he had been lying under. “Thomas speaking.”
“Where the devil are you, Parker? I tried your home phone, but I couldn’t reach you there.”
“I’m on vacation, sir. Why would I be at home? I’m in Atlantic City, taking in the surf and sand.”
“Well, your vacation’s over. I need you back at Langley right away. Something’s come up.”
“Right away?” Thomas with palpable reluctance, glancing back at Julie. He was going to have fun explaining this one.
“Listen, Parker, I want you back on base as fast as possible. We’re deploying. Do you have any further questions?”
“No.” The tone in Director Bernard Kranemeyer’s voice made it clear that none were desired. And Thomas hadn’t survived nine years in the National Clandestine Service by pushing his boss to the edge. “I’ll see you in a couple hours.”
“Good,” was the curt reply as Kranemeyer hung up. Thomas stared at the phone for a couple seconds before putting it away.
“What was that all about?” he heard Julie ask.
He picked her jeans up from the back of a beach chair and tossed them at her. “Get dressed,” he instructed tersely. “We’re leaving.”
“Why?” she asked, still holding the pants in her arms.
“I’ve got to go back to work,” he shot back. “Now let’s get moving!”
2:03 P.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
“Parker is on his way back from Atlantic City. Zakiri was out in Seattle visiting his family, got back in this morning on United. Richards is coming up from the Farm.” Bernard Kranemeyer reported, referring to the CIA’s training center in Quantico, Virginia. “I think that about has it, right?”
“ Wrong,” Harry stated, folding his arms across his chest. Light flashed from his eyes. “I’d like to know why you’re sending my team in to do what a diplomatic envoy should be able to accomplish? Not to mention how you ever got an anti-war president to authorize this incursion.”
“Two reasons,” Lay replied evenly. “In the first place, the election is less than two months away, and the last thing the President wants is a hostage crisis overshadowing his bid for reelection.Now that his administration is threatened-well, this is D.C., Harry-
you know the shelf life of morals and values in this town. Bottom line, he wants action, not dialogue. As for the second reason-do you want to tell him, Barney, or shall I?”
Kranemeyer shook his head, reaching for the button on Lay’s desk. “May I, sir?”
The DCIA nodded.
Harry looked from one man to another. There was something going on here that he was unaware of. Another factor. As there typically was when his boss was involved. A former operator himself, Kranemeyer wasn’t called the “Dark Lord” for nothing.
He didn’t know the whole truth. Perhaps he never would. Truth was an elusive quality in the business he was engaged in. But he was about to understand another component.
A moment later, the door from the outer office opened and a short, thin black man entered, holding a laptop computer under his arm.
“Harry,” Director Lay began, “Carter’s going to bring us up to speed on the trailers. Do you have the data with you, Ron?”
“The trailers at the site of the abandoned camp?” Harry asked, reaching out to shake Carter’s hand. The African-American analyst acknowledged him with a curt nod and set his computer down on the director’s desk, clearly consumed by his own thoughts. Harry smiled. He and Ron Carter went a long way back, and he had learned to never underestimate the man’s abilities. Despite his occasional penchant for anti-social behavior, Carter was the best photo-analyst the Agency had, possessing as well a knack for managing field-ops that had caused Kranemeyer to draft him from the Intelligence Directorate two years before.
Carter nodded, setting the laptop on Lay’s desk and swiveling the screen so that all could see. A picture of one of the trailers filled the screen. “I started running the photos through our database the minute we picked them up. It took a while to get a match, but here it is.”
“What were they?”
“They are almost identical to the biological-warfare trailers used by Saddam Hussein in the ‘90s,” Carter stated, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “But these aren’t them.”
“Where did they get them?”
“If you’ll remember, Harry, three years ago a CIA spec-ops team was parachuted into Azerbaijan to interdict a shipment of arms from Russia to Iran.”
Harry closed his eyes and nodded. He remembered all too well. For he had led that mission. He remembered the HAHO-High Altitude, High Opening insertion from the C-130, descending slowly into the wintry Azeri night. Into the darkness below them. He and nine others, two full strike teams, Alpha and Charlie. They had believed the Russians were selling nuclear weapons. And they’d been ordered to stop the convoy at all costs. At all costs, indeed.
Two of the men had been killed on landing, one of them apparently dragged over a cliff by the wind. The rest had been scattered-scattered to the winds. Three of them were never heard from again. He and the four survivors managed to regroup and head for the bridge where they were to intercept the convoy. By the time they got there, the convoy was long gone, only tire tracks in the snow indicating its passage. They had been too late. And then the Azeri military had started looking for them.
The journey to the extraction zone was a memory he wanted to forget. The harsh winter winds tearing into them. The snows. The caves he and the others took shelter in to hide from the helicopters searching for them.
The hunger. The thirst only barely assuaged by eating the snow. The bitter cold. The brief firefight with an Azeri patrol as the Pave Low pulled them from a hot LZ. The names of the men who had perished. Oh, he remembered, all right.
“Yes,” he replied, his tone cold. Emotionless.
“These bio-war trailers were part of that shipment.”
“I see.”
2:19 P.M.
A CIA helicopter
Crossing the Potomac River
“What’s it all about, sir?”
“We’ll find out when we get there,” Jack Richards replied sharply, turning away from his companion and looking out the window, his signature Stetson pulled down low over coal-black eyes. His face was tanned and leathery, his swarthy complexion due in part to his maternal grandfather, a Mescalero Apache. He had grown up on his family’s ranch in Texas, part of the reason his friends called him “Tex.”
A former Marine Force Recon demolitions specialist, the Texan had joined the Clandestine Service five years before, at the age of twenty-nine.
Naturally silent, few people understood him, fewer still could be considered his friends-to say he was bad at making conversation would have been a polite understatement.
He rarely opened his mouth unless he had something important to say, and when he did, people listened. Listened to his experience.
But he was unusual, all the same. He even looked at buildings differently from others. Other men looked at them and admired their architectural beauty or the lack thereof, thought of the people inside, or ignored them entirely. Not Richards. He mentally calculated the pounds of high explosive needed to bring them down. It was good practice.
He was currently teaching a course on demolitions to the new recruits at the Farm, which was why the call of a few hours earlier had surprised him. Deployment orders. Where, he knew not. Looking at the young man at his side, though, he had some idea.
The agent was of Middle-Eastern descent. What country, he had never asked. He had never needed to know…
Davood Sarami finally decided he wasn’t likely to get any more answers from the big Texan, so he copied the older man’s example by staring out the window of the helicopter, staring down at his adopted land.
The nation he had taken an oath to protect. The son of Iranian-American immigrants, he and the rest of his community had received a rude awakening on the morning of September 11th, 2001. They and the rest of the world.
He had sat in his father’s living room, watching as America’s might came toppling to the ground. Watching-and for the first time questioning the faith he had known all his life. Questioning how terrorists could cling to the same holy scriptures that he did, the sacred words of Allah.
And he no longer knew what he believed…
2:23 P.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
“As you already know, if you’ve been following the news,” Lay began, picking up the briefing where Carter had left off, “the situation in Iran has changed dramatically over the last few years. With the rise to power of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps following the death of Khamenei two years ago we’ve seen Iran morph into a true praetorian state under the leadership of former Guards’ commander Mahmoud F’azel Shirazi. The clerical oligarchy of the mullahs is still intact, but exists largely at the good grace of the IRGC.”
He passed a photo across the desk to Harry before continuing. “That’s Shirazi. We had initially hoped that this transition might curb some of the evangelical fervor that had characterized the leadership of Khamenei, but we were mistaken. If anything, Shirazi makes Khamenei’s disciple and successor, the Ayatollah Youssef Mohaymen Isfahani, almost look like a moderate.”
Harry nodded. “That’s a significant statement.”
“Under Shirazi’s leadership, Iran has reached an uneasy detente with the West, but most believe it to be the calm before the storm. They’ve expanded their influence over Iraq, with Iranian-backed Shiite candidates gaining a majority in parliament during the last elections. Much of the same thing is happening all across the Stans,” Lay added, referring to the small Muslim countries north and east of Iran, most of them former members of the Soviet bloc and whose names all ended in “stan”.
“IRGC-owned companies now control between sixty and seventy percent of the Iranian economy, which is not to say they allow any real competition in the remaining percentage. The ranks of the Basij militia have swelled in the last year and it’s believed they have resumed covert negotiations with North Korea. Trouble is coming-it’s only a question of when and where.”
A knock came at that moment. “Come in,” Director Lay called as his secretary entered the room.
“Mr. Richards’ helicopter is landing, sir.”
The CIA director smiled briefly. “Thank you, Margaret.” She disappeared and he turned his attention back to the men in front of him. “Why don’t we go down to the Operations Center and meet up with Richards?”
Kranemeyer took a folder from under his arm and handed it to Harry. “A recruit from the Farm is coming in with Jack. He’s of Iranian descent and speaks fluent Farsi. As of right now, he’s assigned to your team. Things go well on this op, we may make the transfer permanent. This will tell you what you need to know.”
“Right, sir.”
Speed-reading had always been one of Harry’s talents, and he’d read the folders before the elevator reached the level of the Operations Center. By that time he knew just about as much as the Agency was willing to tell him about Davood Sarami, a second-generation immigrant in his mid-twenties. He would know more once he had been able to observe him personally. As to how he would perform-he wouldn’t know about that until they were in the field, past the point of no return. Committed. He hated that.
He preferred to work with men he knew-with men whose abilities were a known quantity to him. Men he could rely upon to do their job.
Men like Thomas, Tex, and Hamid Zakiri, themselves survivors of the Azeri mission as well as many other missions in the years before and since. He knew them all and trusted them. Counted them his friends. But only Hamid, an Iraqi-American Shiite, spoke Farsi.
Harry did, but they needed another who could pass more easily as a native. Hopefully this man would fit the bill…
“So, gentlemen, that is the situation as we have it.” Director Lay looked up from his briefing papers. “Any questions?”
Harry hadn’t been listening. He had heard it all before, all of it explained to him back on the seventh floor. So, he had spent his time watching.
Watching the young Iranian, watching his reaction to the briefing. Trying to read his thoughts. Trying to assess them. After a moment, Sarami’s hand went up.
“How many Iranian troops are at the campsite?”
It was a good question. One you should have asked, a little voice reminded Harry. So far, so good.
Lay glanced over to Ron Carter for the answer.
“Initially, our satellite overpasses were only able to catch a few men, perhaps twelve or thirteen soldiers,” Carter replied, stepping forward, his laptop in hand. “However, the last scan, made twelve hours ago, showed at least platoon strength, approximately fifty men, all heavily armed. There are also an undeterminate number of scientists. I believe we can assume that some of them have military training.”
“Triple-A?”
“Negative-satellite shows no formal anti-aircraft capability. Small arms fire could be intense, though, so a direct air assault is inadvisable. We’ll have to set you down a few klicks out.”
“Do we have any idea why the Iranian military decided to set up a bio-war facility there of all places?”
David Lay shook his head. “None of this makes sense. That’s why we’re sending you in. To figure out exactly what they’re doing.”
“Alpha Team is being reconstituted?” Hamid Zakiri asked, speaking up for the first time. Heads swiveled to where the Iraqi agent stood a few feet away, calmly sipping a Pepsi. At five-nine, Zakiri was far from the tallest team member, but he was light and fast. Back in his Army days, he’d set records on the Ranger’s “Q Course”.
“Yes,” Harry replied, in answer to his old friend’s question. Alpha Team as a whole hadn’t officially been mission-ready in over a year, with one or another of its members deployed separately. His own mission south of the border had only been the latest in a string.
“Almost like old times,” Hamid smiled, white teeth showing against his deeply tanned skin. “All that’s left to do is get Sammy back.”
Harry nodded. The departure of Samuel Han after the Azeri mission had left a hole in the teams, a hole they hadn’t permanently filled even these years later. No one could fault him, though. After the losses that winter, he quite simply hadn’t been able to take it anymore. Leaving the Agency forever behind him, he had retreated into the mountains of West Virginia. Rumor had it that he’d become something of a hermit. The stresses of combat did that to people. The loss of friends…
Davood Sarami had been studying the map on the far wall. When he turned back, his tanned face was strangely pale.
“What is it, Davood?” Kranemeyer asked, noting his odd expression.
“Where were these-these archaeologists working? What was it that they were excavating?”
“Does it matter?”
Davood nodded quietly. “It may. It may very much.”
“Ron?”
The analyst turned back to his computer and hit a couple of keys. “Just a moment…let’s see.” He looked up. “The ruins of Rhodaspes. An ancient Persian trade city.”
“ Ya Allah,” the Iranian whispered. Oh, God.
“What’s wrong?” Harry asked, watching the man closely. There was something going on here. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew he didn’t like it…
“Do you know the area?”
Davood looked up, glancing first at the DCS and then at Harry. “No,” he said, answering Kranemeyer’s question first, “I don’t know the area. My parents were born a hundred kilometers away. But Rhodaspes…”
“What about it?”
“The Iranians, they call it the place of the jinn. The city of spirits…”
11:49 P.M. Tehran Time
The campsite
Back and forth, the guard paced across the camp, his sweaty hands firmly grasping his Kalishnikov assault rifle, his eyes peering nervously into the darkness.
A cool night breeze came sweeping over the plateau, startling him. There was something evil about this place. He knew it. He could feel it in the very air.
It was too silent. Nothing, not even the night sounds of animals to break the stillness. Not even the birds came to this place, or so it seemed.
He glanced back at the trailers behind him. What they were used for, he had no idea. And he didn’t really want to know. For there was evil there too. Evil in the hearts of men, as dark as the night surrounding him.
He turned and began his patrol back, his AK-47 still held at the ready, its barrel probing the night ahead of him. It was the only power he still held over this place.
He felt a cough coming and he brought his hand up to cover his mouth.
The cough seemed to tear at his throat and when he pulled his hand away, it was covered with blood.
He dropped the assault rifle in panic and began to run, running toward the light of the camp, running toward the trailers. Running and knowing he might be too late. Knowing that the evil had already overtaken him…
2:51 P.M. Eastern Time
NCS Operations Center
Langley, Virginia
“Spirits?”
Davood nodded, a flush growing across his face. “It sounds stupid, I know. But my ancestors believed it.”
“That’s not to the point, Davood,” Director Lay interjected. “Do you believe that it’s true?”
There was a moment of dead silence. “Well?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It is probably nothing more than myth, but when a myth persists…”
Harry crossed the room to the map, gazing up at it. “When did this legend originate, Davood? According to what Ron says, this was a prosperous city at one time.”
“Allah knows. Certainly no one on this earth.”
“I see.” Harry turned back to the directors. “I think we’ll have enough to concern ourselves handling the guards around the site. As for the supernatural,” he smiled, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Right,” Director Lay nodded with a grim smile of his own. “You leave on the 22nd.”
7:14 P.M.
Grove Manor
Cypress, Virginia
Harry parked his car in the small garage he had built on one edge of the property, locking it securely behind him.
His Colt was in his right hand as he strode quickly toward the house, glancing around him in the gathering darkness. The huge oak trees that had given the house its name cast long shadows over him, as did the house itself.
Moving along the cobble-stoned walkway, between waist-high boxwood hedges, he looked up at the tall Civil War-era mansion he had inherited from his mother’s side of the family. It could be seen for miles, a landmark in the small community of Cypress, Virginia. Which was exactly why he was being cautious.
There was no evidence that any of the many enemies he had made over the years even knew who he really was, let alone where to find him. But the absence of evidence wasn’t proof to the contrary. He had lived long enough to know that much, and was only still alive because he knew it.
At the door he slid his hand into the fingerprint scanner, waiting a moment before hearing a faint metallic click that told him the door was open.
If he died on a mission, they were going to have a devil of a time getting inside his house. But if that happened, he would be past worrying about it. And if he lived-well, things could go on as they always had.
He entered the house and slipped through the entrance hall, listening before flicking on the light. Everything was still.
Pausing at the base of the spiral mahogany staircase that led to the mansion’s second floor, he bent low to examine the hair-thin string stretched across the step. It was still intact. No one had been upstairs in his absence.
Harry slipped the Colt back into its holster and took off his jacket, laying it across the back of one of the kitchen chairs. The Iranian mission was bothering him. There were just too many unknowns. The fact that the new member of the strike team was an unknown quantity himself only made Harry feel worse.
He took a coffee grinder from one of his upper cabinets and poured a handful of beans into it, beginning to make his coffee.
Davood’s comment about the place being cursed, he couldn’t shake that, despite how easily he had seemed to dismiss it at the meeting. He had worked in the Middle East long enough to know that much of their mythology had some root in fact. Long enough to know that they should not be rejected out of hand.
He had no idea what they were headed into. He only knew he didn’t like it…
6:45 A.M. Tehran Time, September 20th
The Iranian base camp
“You sent for me?”
“Yes, major, I did,” the scientist replied, looking up as Major Farshid Hossein entered the laboratory trailer. “It’s your guard.”
“Malik?” Came the question as the base commander closed the door behind him. He was a tall man, perhaps in his mid-forties. Wilting under Hossein’s hard stare, it occurred to the scientist that he bore an unsettling resemblance to a falcon, light blue eyes staring out on either side of a hooked nose, above a closely-cropped black beard.
“Follow me.”
He turned and led the way, his feet clicking against the metal floor. He paused outside a sealed metal door and handed a face mask and gloves to the military man. An apologetic smile.
“It’s not enough, but it is the best I can do.”
“The bodies-they are sealed?”
“ Baleh,” the scientist nodded. Yes. He turned, typing in a short code on the keypad beside the door. “This way.”
Cold air washed over the major as he stepped inside, almost taking his breath away. It was a severe contrast to the heat already building in the sun outside. Specially sealed containers lined the room, almost like a row of caskets in a mortuary. They might as well have been.
All of their occupants were either dead or soon to be. Another chill prickled the skin on the back of his neck, but it wasn’t from the air surrounding him.
Something else.
The scientist was pointing down into one of the caskets, its top transparent. Major Hossein stepped over to him. Malik.
It was all he could do not to look away. He had known the man for years. They had fought together against the imperialist forces in Iraq, after the invasion, when his country had started funneling arms and money to the insurgency. The man had saved his life.
And now this…
Malik lay naked under the bright lights, his whole body exposed. There was no place for modesty here. Nor any need for it. His body had swelled, grotesquely so, until he was almost twice his normal size. Every vein was outlined, as though someone had used a dirty-black pencil to highlight them.
But it wasn’t that, it was his very blood that had turned black. He turned, apparently sensing their presence, his bloodshot eyes blinking in the light.
His lips opened, as though he was trying to speak to them. Instead, he coughed and bloody spittle gathered at the corner of his lip.
“How long?” Hossein asked, turning away.
“Twenty-four hours.”
The major shook his head. “Have you any idea what it is?”
“Dr. Ansari will be here from Tehran within two days. I would prefer to reserve my judgement till then.”
Farshid stepped closer, towering over the young scientist. “I don’t have two days. I need to know how to protect my men! What do I need to do?”
“Major, I would rather-”
He never got to finish his sentence. “I don’t have time for what you’d ‘rather’!” Hossein bellowed, picking up the scientist by the collar and slamming him against the side of the trailer. “I want to know what you think this is. Now!”
The young man gulped nervously. “All right. I’ll show you.”
“Good.” Farshid released him, following him down the corridor. The scientist adjusted his glasses and bent over a laptop at one of the workstations.
Another moment and he found the database he was looking for, scrolling down the page. “There.”
Hossein looked where he was pointing and his eyes widened. “Are you sure?”
The young man nodded.
“Allah preserve us…”
12:17 A.M., September 21st
A small Baptist church
The outskirts of Cypress, Virginia
“…so, good-day and God bless you all. You’re dismissed.” The pastor closed his Bible and came down off the podium.
“A good sermon this morning,” Harry said quietly, stepping up to him and gripping his hand in a firm handshake.
Pastor Scott smiled. A tall man, he was one of the few in the church who could look Harry in the eye. He was in his early fifties, his hair prematurely gray, his face lined and worn with the struggle of the years. Nothing about him indicated a man who had an easy time of it. And he hadn’t.
“It’s good to have you back, Harry,” he replied, his voice somehow soft and powerful at the same time. “I was meaning to ask you-I need another man to help serve communion next Sunday. Can you help?”
Harry shook his head. “I’m sorry, pastor. I won’t be here next week.”
“Off again?”
“Yes,” he nodded. Most people at the church knew he worked for the CIA. They just didn’t know what he did there.
He thought Pastor Scott suspected, but the older man was wise enough to keep his suspicions to himself. And he didn’t press.
“Then, may God protect you wherever you go, my son.” He laid a hand on Harry’s shoulder.
“He does, pastor. Trust me, He does.”
“You know, Harry, I knew your parents-before they died. I-well, just take care of yourself.” There was a wealth of meaning in his eyes, some of it hard to interpret. Harry stared into them for a moment, then turned away, giving it up.
“Thanks.” A final handshake and Harry was out the door, heading to his car. His parents. That’s where it had all started, hadn’t it. The murder of his parents, both of them gunned down at the little gas station on the edge of town. Shot by a crazed teenager with nothing more than a.22, a target rifle, for heaven’s sake!
He had been overseas when it happened, running a diamond interdiction operation in South Africa, trying to stop a flow of diamonds that were being used to fund terrorism. He’d succeeded. And returned to find both of his parents dead. The teenager that had shot them put away in prison for thirty years. Out of his reach.
He hadn’t bought gas there since. It had been nine years ago. Perhaps if he had been home, perhaps if he had been there …
He shook his head. His life was filled with perhaps, what if, maybe, the unanswered questions of his past like gaping holes in the trail behind him. Regrets. And he couldn’t turn back. Because there was nothing there for him to go back to. It was all gone.
He could only move forward, fighting his battles one at a time, praying for survival, for victory. He slipped the car into gear, pulling out of the church’s parking lot.
In two days, he would be in Iraq. From there they would launch their operation. Elements of AFSOC, the Air Force’s spec-ops unit, were already being pre-positioned to support them. Two days…