When he came out into the hallway, MacD stood there with a little blond girl, still asleep, in his arms. Cabrillo held the deactivated suicide vest in his.
“Clear,” Juan called, and pulled off his and Lawless’s NVGs.
“Clear,” Linc echoed. He entered the hallway also carrying a suicide vest. “What do you want to do with this?”
“We’ll take them with us and deep-six them in Lake Pontchartrain.”
The next part of the plan was a little bit of misdirection for the police. Cabrillo didn’t want them to suspect that this incident had anything to do with terrorism. Linc had been carrying a camelback canteen over his shoulders, but rather than water it contained gasoline. While he started dousing every combustible item in the house, especially the bodies, Cabrillo sprinkled about empty vials commonly used by crack dealers and candles and spoons for cooking heroin as well as medical syringes. He knew the cops would test the drug paraphernalia and that it would come up clean, but he hoped they’d shrug off the anomaly and just be grateful three more dealers were dead. Cabrillo also left a small mechanical scale, and a few hundred-dollar bills inside a cigar box-sized metal case under one of the beds. The scale and lockbox had come from Walmart, the cash from their safe house’s uncirculated cache. The scene was set. Drug deal gone bad. End of story.
MacD waited outside, his sleeping daughter still unaware that her ordeal was over.
Juan was the last one out, and he closed the back door after he tossed a match into a pool of gasoline. By the time they made it through the back-lot jungle, the house was a pyre, with flames arcing through the roof rafters. Wide-eyed children and their families staked out positions on their lawns while overworked firefighters battled a blaze they could not defeat. The house was a complete loss, and by the time it was finally out, a duffel bag laden with the now-traceable weapons and two vests packed with explosives was at the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, Lawless, his parents, and his little girl were headed to the coast, and a nondescript rental car was halfway to Houston. MacD would join the Oregon after spending a couple of days with his family.
20
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS HAD PASSED SINCE THE FAX FIRST came through to the White House. More than eight thousand men and women were put to work trying to figure out who was behind it and how it had been accomplished. Agents from every department in the country were mobilized, even if some were kept in the dark as to the exact nature of their search because the incident had been classified above top secret.
Indecision gripped the Oval Office. The demonstration of the adversary’s power had been convincing, but his demands went too far. The president couldn’t meet any of them if he hoped to maintain national security and perhaps even keep his job. To his credit, the latter was a much lesser consideration.
He’d been given advice and speculation from across the spectrum. It was al-Qaeda. It was the Iranians. We should give in to the demands. We should ignore them. Ultimately it was his call, and no matter which way he looked at the ultimatum, he saw no viable exit strategy. He’d tried calling the Israeli prime minister to float a balloon about simply announcing the U.S. was suspending financial aid in the short term, but the call was mysteriously cut off as soon as it became clear that America would clandestinely still continue supporting the Jewish state. Somehow the most secure telephone in the world could be listened in on and disconnected at will.
A technician from the NSA had explained to him that it was impossible, but the evidence lay dead on his desk. He tried having the call come from another phone not connected to the White House switchboard and it too ended before anything substantive was said. His only option, however cumbersome and slow, was to send a diplomatic courier to Jerusalem to tell the prime minister what the United States intended to do.
He was behind his desk, staring off into middle space, when Lester Jackson knocked and entered without permission. The doors to the Oval Office were too thick for much sound to spill through, so the president hadn’t heard the fax behind Eunice Wosniak’s desk ring.
“Mr. President, this just came from them.” He carried a fax like it was a decomposing muskrat.
“What does it say?” he asked wearily. If they made it through this crisis, he’d already decided that this would be his one and only term. He felt like he’d aged a hundred years since yesterday morning.
“All it says is, ‘We meant immediately. Their blood is on your hands.’ ”
“Whose blood?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing much happening in the country, according to the major news outlets. Sir, this could still be an elaborate bluff. They could have inside people in Troy, New York, that killed the power, and there’s some powerful software that could hack our phone system.”
“Don’t you think I don’t know that?” he snapped. “But what if it isn’t? What if they carry out another attack? A lethal one? I’ve wasted enough time already.”
Stung, Jackson’s voice went formal. “What are your intentions, sir?”
The president knew he was taking out his frustration on one of his oldest friends. “I’m sorry, Les. It’s just ... I don’t know. Who could have ever foreseen something like this? It’s hard enough ordering men and women in uniform into harm’s way. Now our entire civilian population’s at risk.”
“That’s been our position for a number of years,” Jackson pointed out.
“Yeah, but we’ve done a pretty good job of keeping our shores safe.”
“We’ve been lucky as much as we’ve been good.”
“That hurts.”
“Because it’s the truth. There have been several public incidents, and some secret ones, where the terrorists were too incompetent to carry out their attack, attacks we had no idea were coming.”
“And now we know one might be heading straight at us but have no way of stopping it.”
Eunice burst into the room, her face ashen. She turned on the television over by a grouping of sofas. She left, weeping. A network anchor’s face loomed on the center of the TV screen.
“Authorities aren’t saying if this is a terror-related incident. To those of you just tuning in, a commuter train heading from Washington, D.C., to New York City, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela Express, collided head-on with a southbound freight train that had somehow gotten onto the wrong track.”
The image shifted to an aerial view of utter devastation. The trains looked like toys, but toys of a careless child. The lead locomotive was an unrecognizable lump of metal, while three of the train’s five passenger cars had accordioned to half their eighty-seven-foot length. The other two cars and the rear engine had been thrown off the tracks and into the back of a warehouse. The freight train’s two lead locomotives were hidden under a greasy ball of fire, as their thousands of gallons of diesel fuel cooked off. Behind them was a string of derailed boxcars, many of them smashed to scrap and lying at acute angles to the railbed.
“Amtrak officials have yet to release the number of passengers on board,” the anchor’s voice continued over the helicopter cam’s shot, “but the Acela Express is capable of carrying more than three hundred passengers, and, this being a busy commute time, it is expected that the train was near capacity. One official speaking on condition of anonymity has told us a computer switching system makes an accident of this kind nearly impossible and that the engineer of the freight train would have had to physically engage the switch to put his locomotive on the same line as the commuter.”
“Or someone overrode the computer,” the president said, his voice shaky.
“Maybe this is just a coincidence,” Jackson said hopefully.
“Let it rest, Lester. This is no coincidence, and we both know it. I didn’t do what he wanted so he crashed two trains. What will it be next time? Two planes in midflight? This guy obviously has control over every computer system in this country, and, so far, it seems there isn’t a damned thing we can do about it. Christ, the Army will have to go back to using signal mirrors and the Navy semaphore flags.” H
e blew a frustrated breath and made the only decision available. “Has the courier left for Israel yet?”
“He’s probably still at Andrews Air Force Base.”
“Recall him. There’s no point in subterfuge. I want to downplay this as much as possible. No press conference or prime-time speech, just put out the word that all aid to Israel is being suspended until further notice. Ditto military aid to Pakistan.”
“What about the detainees at Gitmo? That was another immediate demand.”
“We’ll release them, all right, but not to their home countries. Let’s ship them to the World Court in The Hague. If Fiona’s right and this guy is rational and reasoned, then I don’t think there will be a reprisal, and getting the Europeans to try them is better than nothing.”
“Dan”—it was the first time Jackson had used the president’s Christian name since he’d taken the oath of office—“I am sorry. I was one of the ones urging that we adopt a wait-and-see attitude.”
“But it was still my call,” the president said, the deaths on the trains preying heavily on his conscience.
“I know. That’s why I’m sorry.” He made for the door and was stopped momentarily.
“Les, make sure everyone keeps working at tracking this psycho and pray he has a weakness we haven’t thought of, because, right now, it feels like we’re facing off against God Himself.”
21
CABRILLO AND LINCOLN CAUGHT UP WITH THE OREGON AT Port Said after the ship had made a transit of the Suez Canal. As much as they wanted to get Gunawan Bahar and his henchman, Smith, they had another operation in the luxury resort city of Monte Carlo. One of the emirs of the United Arab Emirates wanted the Corporation as extra security whenever he traveled. It mattered not that he didn’t really have an enemy in the world. He felt better knowing that Cabrillo and his people were looking out for him while he basked off the coast on his hundred-foot yacht or gambled insane amounts of money in the casino. He got the idea from the Kuwaiti emir, who had used the Corporation in South Africa a few months back. Although they’d arrived late because Juan had been marooned in Antarctica and they’d had to return to pick him up, the team foiled an assassination plot involving some al-Qaeda operatives from Somalia.
No sooner had a chartered helicopter landed the duo on the Oregon’s deck and beat south for the Egyptian port city than her engines ramped up, and soon a miles-long wake marked her swift passage. After dumping his single bag in his cabin, Juan made straight for the Op Center, where Linda Ross had the conn.
“Welcome back,” she beamed. “We’re all relieved that MacD got his daughter.”
Hali Kasim was at his customary seat at the communications workstation. “Just so you know, I’ve been monitoring local media in New Orleans. They’re calling it drug-related arson. No suspects and no IDs on the bodies.”
“There wasn’t much left to ID,” Cabrillo remarked. “How’s our passenger making out?”
For the weeks she’d been aboard the Oregon as a virtual prisoner, though in a velvet-lined cell, Soleil Croissard hadn’t done much but stay in her cabin or watch the sea from the upper flying bridge. She even took her meals in her room. She was mourning her father and working to come to grips with her own abduction. Doctor Huxley, the ship’s de facto psychiatrist, had tried talking with her on several occasions but hadn’t made significant progress.
“Would you believe she snapped out of it?” Linda informed him.
“Really?” Juan was surprised because she’d given no indication when he’d said good-bye just a couple days ago.
“You’re not going to believe what did it either. Eric and Murph, who are panting after her worse than the girl we rescued from that sinking cruise ship—”
“Jannike Dahl,” Juan recalled. “She was the sole survivor of the Golden Dawn.”
“That’s her. Anyway, those two got the bright idea of rigging one of the parafoils we use for combat drops off a winch at the fantail so they could parasail off the ship. To their credit, it worked like a charm, and most of us have had a go at it. But Soleil is the one who can’t get enough. I talked to Hux about it, and she reminded me that Soleil’s an adrenaline junkie. She needed a jolt to remind her she’s still alive.”
Linda hit some keystrokes on the computer built into the arm of the command chair, and an aft-facing camera mounted high on the superstructure came up on a portion of the main view screen. Sure enough, there were Murph and Stoney with Soleil Croissard. She already sported a black parachute harness, and the two men were clipping her to a thin line leading off to a winch. As they watched, Soleil climbed up the transom rail with the drogue chute in her hand. She faced forward, said something to Eric and Mark with a big grin on her face, and tossed the little parachute into the Oregon’s slipstream. The main chute was yanked from the harness in a billow of ebony nylon and inflated, heaving her off her perch in a gut-wrenching ascent.
Toggling the controls, Linda tilted the camera up until they could see Soleil silhouetted against the azure sky. She must have been two hundred feet above the deck, and because of the ship’s speed she would keep going higher and higher if not for the tether.
Cabrillo wasn’t too sure he liked this. A few years back they got it into their heads that they could wake-surf, while the ship was at speed, using a line rigged from an extension pole out of the starboard boat garage. It worked fine for about ten minutes before Murph took a spill and lost his grip on the T-bar. They’d been forced to stop the ship in order to launch a Zodiac to haul his butt out of the drink.
Mark had suggested outfitting some sort of catch net aft of the garage for their next attempt. Juan nixed the whole enterprise.
But if this is what it took to draw Soleil out of her shell, then he supposed no harm was done. “I guess,” he said after watching her for a moment, “that if the UAV ever fails us, we can put a lookout up in that contraption.”
“You should try it,” Linda encouraged. “It’s a blast.”
“And while they’ve been out playing, how’s the research coming?”
“Nada,” Linda replied. “Bahar’s still off the radar, and we can’t find anything that remotely ties him to any criminal or terrorist activities. Oh, wait. One thing. The oil platform. It was part of something called the Oracle Project. Murph found that in a purged accounting file in Bahar’s corporate computer, though now he can’t access it anymore. It’s got a new firewall that he can’t break through.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“So does he. I do have some good news. Langston phoned earlier. Says he has a job for us.”
Juan was shocked and elated. They’d been left out to dry for so long, he didn’t think the CIA would ever use their services again. “What’s the mission?”
“The Chinese have built a new surveillance ship, state-of-the-art. She’s currently off the coast of Alaska. He wants us to persuade them to go home. He said you’d figure out something creative that won’t start an international incident. I told him we needed a week.”
Cabrillo’s gears were already churning when he happened to glance at the video screen again. Soleil was no longer in camera range. He reached across to adjust the camera and saw that she was being reeled back down to the deck. Mark and Eric watched anxiously, making Cabrillo wonder if anything was wrong. When she was back firmly on the Oregon, she yanked one of the chute’s toggles, spilling air from that side and collapsing the canopy. Eric helped her bundle it into a ball while the wind fought to refill it. Mark Murphy was running for the superstructure.
Juan reset the main board to show the ship’s bows cleaving the Mediterranean. When ten minutes went by and Murph hadn’t found him in the Op Center, the Chairman called him in his room.
“Everything all right?”
“I’m a little busy, Juan,” Mark said, and killed the connection.
Rather than wait for the eccentric genius, Cabrillo went down to the forward hold, a vast open space they used for storage when they were running legitimate cargo
es as part of their cover or, when it was empty like now, for repacking chutes. He found Soleil alone. When he asked about Eric, she told him he followed Mark almost as soon as he could.
“Looked like quite the joyride,” he said.
“Not quite the rush I got jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but it was fun.” She had the parachute laid flat on the wooden deck and was tracing the riser lines. It was clear she knew exactly what she was doing.
“How many jumps have you made?”
“BASE or from an airplane? I’ve made dozens of the first and hundreds of the second.”
He saw the haunted look that had dimmed her eyes and sallowed her complexion was almost gone. There were still traces of it when she tried to smile, as if she felt she didn’t deserve a moment’s happiness. Cabrillo remembered those same feelings after his wife was killed. He thought he was dishonoring her memory by laughing at a joke or enjoying a movie. It was nothing more than a way of punishing himself for something that wasn’t his fault, and in time it faded.
“Ever jump the New River Gorge Bridge?” It was an 876-foot span in West Virginia and considered one of the best spots for jumping in the world.
“Of course,” she replied as if he’d asked if she breathed. “You?”
“Back when I was in training for an organization I once worked for, a bunch of us went over and did it.”
“Linda tells me you were in the CIA.” Juan nodded. “Was it exciting?”
“Most days, it’s as boring as any office job. Others, you’re so scared that no matter what you do you can’t dry your palms.”
“I think that is real danger,” she said. “What I do, it’s only pretend.”
“I don’t know. Getting shot by a border guard or having your chute fail at eleven thousand feet has pretty much the same results.”