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  “Am I in jail? Am I dead? Fuck no. Did I stroll away with a hundred billion dollars in numbered accounts? You bet your left nut I did. Am I still raking in about a couple of mil a week from that shit? You can bet your right nut on that one. So, yeah, I put the DMS to work for me and they don’t even know it.”

  “Not even Church?”

  “Maybe Church,” Vox conceded after some thought, “but he can’t do jack shit about it. He can’t want to kill me more than he already does. So, call me when Ledger’s dead.”

  Vox disconnected.

  For several moments LaRoque held the phone to his ear with his right hand and stared at the face of the priest in the compact mirror he held in his left.

  Then it was gone. LaRoque blinked. The mirror now held only his own reflection.

  “You made the right choice,” said the priest.

  The Scriptor slowly raised his eyes and stared at the wizened figure who now sat across from him in the back of the limousine. The priest had eyes the color of toad flesh, and his skin was as sallow and thin as old parchment. When he smiled, his teeth were white and wet.

  Charles LaRoque smiled back.

  “Thank you, Father Nicodemus,” he said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Golden Oasis Hotel

  Tehran, Iran

  June 15, 8:28 a.m.

  I walked back to the hotel, and with each step I tried not to scream. I wanted to run back, but I didn’t dare draw attention to myself. It was bad enough I was sweating and probably looked nervous and guilty. There were so many ways this could play out, most of them bad, and I didn’t know how we were going to play it.

  Inside my head the word “nuke” kept echoing.

  About every third car on the street was either a police sedan or a military jeep. Even though the rescue of the hikers wasn’t in the morning papers, it was clear from the activity on the street that the government was mobilized. Although the hikers had been illegally arrested and unfairly held, Iran had never budged from its stance that the kids were spies and that they’d crossed the border. At the time Echo Team went wheels-up to come here, the State Department had not yet decided how to announce the event. A lot of it, I knew, depended on whether we were successful, on the physical and mental condition of the rescued hikers, on the degree of resistance during the raid, and whether we got caught. The mission had gone by the numbers except for the end; and though I had no doubt Top had managed to get the kids out of the country, at least one American still had boots on the ground here.

  If John Smith or Lydia had missed their rides, then the math got more complicated. The local government needed only one of us to create a media shit storm. The fact that there wasn’t yet that storm suggested that none of my people were in the bag. I did not want to be the one to let the team down; and I had no illusions about Church dispatching a team to haul my ass out of jail. There was no political profit in that. He’d disown me and wipe my records.

  That’s exactly as comforting as it sounds.

  I knew that Church was advising the president and the secretary of state about how to spin this thing. Spin control for global disasters was one of his most endearing talents.

  And, of course, there was the whole nuke thing. Talk about skewing the math. Rasouli oversaw much of the nation’s misinformation and propaganda and he was the one who wanted me to find the nukes. Did that mean he was influencing the manhunt process? No one had a physical description of me, at least no one attached to the rescue; but Rasouli and his sniper psycho babe were able to spot me and put a laser sight on me at a coffee shop. How’d that happen? Even with Hugo Vox advising them, how’d they know where to acquire me?

  “Joe,” a voice said.

  I spun around, sure that someone stood right behind me, whispering in my ear. But I was alone on the street. The voice … I knew that voice.

  Her voice.

  “Grace?”

  My heart was pounding and the ground under me felt like it was tilting. But there was no one close enough to have spoken my name.

  Chances are that no voice spoke and that I was crazy as a loon. Chances, not guarantees.

  Grace.

  I searched for the echo of her voice, of that one word, inside the fractured darkness of my mind, but it, like she, was gone. Tears wanted to burn their way out of my eyes. I wanted so badly to find a place of shadows, a doorway or the back of an abandoned car, somewhere I could hide. Ever since Rasouli dropped the first two bombs on me—Hugo Vox and Grace Courtland—I felt like things were starting to unravel inside my head. It made me feel as if everyone was looking at me, as if everyone knew who and what I was.

  I used every ounce of strength and will I possessed to compose my face and show absolutely nothing. It cost me, though.

  The Israelis operated a news and cigarette shop a block from my hotel and I stopped by there and browsed the papers until the shop was empty. Then I drifted over to the counter. The man who ran the place looked and sounded Iranian but I knew for a fact that he was Mossad.

  “Carton of cigarettes,” I said. “Do you still carry Bistoon?”

  He smiled. “We get no call for it, I’m sorry.”

  It was the proper call sign and response that identified me as an American agent. We both glanced around the shop to verify that we were alone.

  “What do you need?”

  “Cell phone battery.” I showed the phone I had, which was a DMS design built on a local model. Even though my unit had some extra goodies built in, it was designed to work on a standard cell battery that could be found anywhere in Iran.

  “I can have it for you in half an hour. Will you wait or do you want it delivered?”

  “Delivered.” I told him my hotel and room.

  He studied my face and frowned. “I will not ask what is troubling you, my friend, but it appears that you are having a bad day.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Before I left I bought a pack of goat jerky. I had a hungry dog waiting for me in my hotel and if I didn’t come back with food he’d sulk all day.

  I paid for the goat.

  “May your day improve,” said the shopkeeper.

  “Yeah,” I said from the doorway. “Here’s hoping.”

  As cops and soldiers cruised by and peered at every civilian with suspicious eyes, I forced myself to walk normally. I willed myself not to be noticeable. I needed to punch and pound the fear and grief and paranoia down into its little box. Walking a few blocks seemed to take absolutely forever. By the time I reached my hotel my hands were shaking so badly I had to jam them into my pockets.

  I climbed three flights of stairs, dropped my keys twice, and finally opened the lock. As soon as I was inside I closed and relocked the door and fell back against it with an exhale that came all the way up from my shoes.

  My dog, Ghost, was waiting for me, wagging his tail and looking at my hands to see if I’d brought him anything. He’s a big white shepherd, 105 pounds of muscle and appetite. Ghost was cross-trained in a variety of useful skills from combat to rescue; and though he was useful in ordinary bomb detection, he couldn’t disarm a nuke.

  I knelt down and hugged him. I kissed his furry head.

  “This one’s going to be a bitch, fuzzball,” I told him.

  He looked at me with those liquid dog eyes that always seem deep and wise. He whined a little, catching my mood or perhaps smelling my fear. Then his whole body went rigid as he stared past me. Not to the closed door, but to an empty space on the wall. I followed the line of his gaze, willing myself to see what he saw, but a dog is a dog and they see things we can’t. No matter how much we want to.

  I listened to the silence, wondering if I’d just heard a soft voice whisper my name again.

  But, no … there was nothing.

  When I looked at Ghost, he was no longer staring at the wall.

  “What is it, boy?”

  Ghost, being a dog, just looked at me.

  I mean, really … what had I expected him to say?
My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on my thighs. Then I fished some dried goat strips out of my jacket pocket and dropped them on the floor. Ghost is peculiar in that he eats his food delicately, one piece at a time, making it last.

  Minutes crawled by as I waited for the Mossad shopkeeper to send over the battery. The thought of those moments being chipped off the block of time remaining until those nukes went active was making my heart hurt. I was sweating and it wasn’t the heat in that stuffy little room.

  I fished for more goat and my fingers scrabbled over the flash drive. That drove everything else out of my head.

  Rasouli said that there were four nukes scattered throughout the Mideast oil fields, and three more unknowns. Maybe one in the States.

  “Holy God…” I breathed. Ghost cut a sharp look at me and gave a soft woof.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Southwestern Iran

  Twenty Kilometers from the Kuwait Border

  Ten Hours Before …

  First Sergeant Bradley Sims saw the army truck stop at a crossroads at the far end of the valley. Roadside lights cast the area in a golden glow. He turned off his headlights, slowed his car, and pulled behind an abandoned grain warehouse where he could observe the street through a chain-link fence. The soldiers began off-loading sawhorse barricades.

  “No! Oh, god, no!” cried the young woman beside him. Rachel had a cinnamon colored shawl wrapped around her head and face, but the eyes that peered out from under the shawl were bright with new tears. “God, please don’t let them take us back.”

  Top pasted on a smile that was filled with far more confidence than he felt. “Not a chance, darlin’.”

  He removed a small pair of high-powered night-vision binoculars and steadied his forearms on the wheel as he peered at the men: checking their uniforms, their weapons, their body language, and apparent combat readiness. You can tell a lot about soldiers by how well they go about ordinary tasks. Mediocre ones slouch through it, as if laziness were the best part of down time. The best ones did everything with a degree of polish and professionalism so that even something as simple as erecting a roadblock was done right and done right the first time.

  The men at the crossroads did not appear to be a gang of slackers.

  Not good.

  He tapped his earbud. “Sergeant Rock to Road Trip. On me. No lights. Stop and listen.” Behind him, scattered hundreds of yards apart, the other two cars crept slowly through the shadows, running without headlights.

  “Okay, ladies and gents,” Top said into his mike, “this is about to get fun. Here’s what I need and I need it now. First, I need a volunteer—snake oil salesman, feel me?”

  “I’m in,” said Khalid.

  “Roger that, Dancing Duck. Green Giant, that means you’re Jack-in-the-box.”

  “Rock ’n’ roll,” agreed Bunny, and he sounded happy about it.

  “Converge on me. I’m Santa Claus.”

  He tapped out of the channel.

  Rachel grabbed his sleeve. “What was all that? What’s happening?”

  Top held up a finger. “My orders are to get you three over the border and into Kuwait. To do that I have to get past that roadblock. I’d go a different way but every other route keeps us in country for at least an hour, and we don’t have that hour. I’ll be straight with you. Best guess is that Iranian military helicopters will be here in fifteen, twenty minutes—we need ten to make it to our LZ and that’s going all out, balls-to-the-walls crazy.”

  “‘LZ’?”

  “Landing zone. We got our own helo coming, but it can’t come this close to a town or we’d start a war that nobody wants. That means that we have to get through that security checkpoint down there.”

  “They’ll know who I am!” she yelped. “They’ll just take me back to that awful place. You don’t know the sort of things they did to us in there.”

  “I pretty much think I do, darlin’. That’s why we’re not going to let you get taken. I need you to do what I say, and help me help your friends. Can you do that?”

  Her eyes were huge and filled with fear, but the young woman was tough and she took a breath that steadied her trembling hands. She nodded. “Okay.”

  “Good. Here’s the plan.” He told her what he had planned, and her eyes went wide with fear and doubt.

  The other cars pulled in behind Top’s. Doors opened and immediately Khalid and Bunny quick-walked the two young men toward the lead vehicle.

  “Everyone in the back,” said Top. “Stay together and stay down. Things might get loud but you will be safe. No questions now. Let’s go.”

  Before he closed the door he made brief eye contact with Rachel, and she nodded and even managed a brave smile. She guided the two young men through the shadows into the back and then squeezed in. There was just enough downspill from the warehouse’s pale security lights to see as she made sure everyone was buckled in tightly. Rachel kept talking to the others, soothing them, calming them. Top reached out and gave her shoulder a single squeeze, then closed the door. He stepped a few yards away and consulted briefly with Khalid and Bunny, and then climbed back behind the wheel of his car.

  “What’s happening?” asked Senator McHale’s son.

  “Rachel will tell you,” said Top. “Then I need you all to be real quiet. Don’t ask questions and absolutely do not talk to me or interfere with me until I say it’s all clear.”

  “Okay,” assured Rachel, and the two young men nodded.

  Top turned away as Khalid switched on his headlights and pulled his car onto the road.

  “Where’s the other man?” asked the girl. “The surfer guy?”

  Top chuckled at that. “Oh, you never can tell where Farmboy’s going to pop up.”

  He gave Khalid’s car a long lead, then switched on his lights and followed.

  The sergeant at the crossroads held up his hand and then patted the air, indicating that Khalid should slow down and stop. Two soldiers converged on the front of the car from either side, using the flashlights clipped to their rifles to sweep the vehicle. The other three soldiers walked around back, their lights and barrels pointed at the trunk.

  Top’s jaw was tight with tension. Timing was going to be critical. If Khalid made an error, he’d be dead in the next few seconds, and then everything would go to shit. He cut a look into the rearview mirror, at the faces of the three freed hostages. They had been held for a year. A whole year carved out of their lives because Ahmadinejad liked using kids as chess pieces in his political games.

  Top knew that firing live rounds would likely result in a major political incident, possibly even a renewed threat of war. But there was no way on earth he was going to let Iran take these college students back.

  He gripped the steering wheel hard enough to make it creak.

  “Papers,” ordered the sergeant, shining a small flashlight directly into Khalid’s face. “Name and destination.”

  Khalid squinted into the light as he handed over his papers, which were in a cheap vinyl folder of the kind most people in Tehran carried. His car was a late-model sedan, suggesting that he was at very least someone of note. Moneyed, or perhaps attached to the massive political machine that squatted over the whole country.

  One of the guards looked in through the passenger window, peering into the footwell and the backseat, but there was nothing to see. Khalid gave them the false name that matched the ID, and spun a quick story about going to have an early breakfast with a business associate in a small border town. If the soldiers had a computer uplink and ran a check, everything would be there to verify the story.

  “Open the trunk,” the sergeant said as he handed back the papers.

  “Certainly,” said Khalid and he reached down to pop the latch. Instead he pulled the pin on a flash-bang and simply dropped it out the window at the sergeant’s feet. The sergeant stared down it, totally shocked despite his training. He started to yell a warning, but instantly the flash-bang burst with tremendous force, battering the sergeant
away from the car.

  As soon as Khalid dropped the device he threw himself sideways and pressed his hands against his ears. The flash filled the night with a brilliant white light. The accompanying bang caught one of the soldiers in its blast radius, and the man screamed and spun away in an awkward pirouette. The other three soldiers whipped around toward the blast and never saw the trunk flip open and two more flash-bangs whip up into the air. The grenades burst five feet above the car hood, catching all three soldiers with its terrible burst of blinding light and crushing noise.

  Then Khalid kicked open the door and Bunny rolled out of the trunk. The soldiers were on their knees or leaning against the car, holding their heads. One of them tried to fight through the pain and bring his rifle up, but Bunny drove an uppercut into the man’s stomach that lifted him ten inches off the ground. Bunny pivoted and grabbed the other two closest guards, knotting his huge fists around the backstraps of their Kevlar vests. He pulled them off the ground, swung them apart, and then slammed them together with a huge bellow of effort. The helmets collided with a sound like a church gong and the men instantly went slack.

  On the far side of the car, Khalid kicked the dazed sergeant in the groin and then hammered the top of his helmet with the bottom of a hard fist. The sergeant dropped on his face and Khalid stepped on his back as he dove at the remaining soldier, who was staggering backward, shaking his head, and trying to pull his shoulder microphone. Khalid slapped the mike out of his hand, grabbed his helmet, and yanked the man’s head down onto a rising knee.

  And then it was over. Five men down, and down hard. Alive, but they wouldn’t feel lucky about it when they woke up.

  Top watched all this with narrowed eyes and no trace of compassion. Like the rest of Echo Team, he’d had some compassion for the cops in the police station. For the soldiers? None at all. The military had been in charge of the hikers for a year and had abused and starved them. If Mr. Church hadn’t given a no-live-fire order, Top knew that his guys would be cutting throats.

  Now was the not the time to play “what if,” though. He gunned the engine and rocketed toward the crossroads, reaching it only seconds after Bunny kicked the barrier out of the way. There was a roar behind them and Top saw Khalid’s headlights flick on.