These guys looked like they’d been at it for a while. They were stripped to the waist and bathed in sweat. The room was awash.
They heard the door open and turned to us. One in irritation at the intrusion, the other in surprise.
But there was fear in the eyes of both men.
The guy in the chair, though …
Yeah. Well, that was the problem.
He wasn’t breathing.
“Take ’em,” I said, “but keep ’em awake.”
Top took the guy on the left, kicking him in the nuts and then clubbing him to the ground with the stock of his M4. Bunny grabbed the guy on the right and literally picked him up and slammed him against the wall. It shook the whole place.
I rushed to the guy on the chair.
I checked his pulse. Nothing.
I turned him and cleared his airway, then I slashed the flex-cuffs and lowered him to the floor. And began CPR.
Breathing. Doing the chest compression. Doing it right.
Doing it for a long time.
Wasting my goddamn time.
The guy Bunny slammed into the wall groaned and shook his head. “We didn’t mean to,” he whined. “He just … stopped breathing. We didn’t mean to.”
They hadn’t meant to.
But they had.
I sagged back, gasping, sweating. Defeated.
The man was dead.
I looked down at him. Late fifties. Six four. Wasted down to a skeleton. Head and beard forcibly shaved. Beaky nose. Dark eyes that looked up at me, and through me, and into the big black.
Dead.
There was a little bit of irony to it. Just about everyone else in the world already thought he was dead. I’d have been A-OK with that being the truth, too. I’d believed the fiction along with everyone else. I’d celebrated it. Bought a round of Kentucky bourbon for everyone at a military bar. Cheered with the news reports.
Right now, though, I didn’t want him dead.
He had information I wanted. Needed.
He had been a link to something so big that a lot of people might now die because this source was dry, this door was closed.
Because this man was dead.
We stood there, Bunny, Top, and I. Looking down at him. At that face.
Helpless and defeated.
Staring at the slack, dead features of Osama bin Laden.
Interlude One
The Astrid
Gulf of Saint Lawrence
32 Nautical Miles from Gaspé
New Brunswick, Canada
Six Years Ago
Jean-Luc Belmont was a mediocre sailor and he knew it. He’d taken the courses, passed the tests, obtained his license, but in anything except a calm sea on a mild day, he was hopeless. Luckily for him, he had clients who loved to fish, and many of them seemed eager to take the helm and pilot the Astrid, a lush Cabo 44HTX.
The boat had a hardtop enclosure—no pesky canvas—that provided climate-controlled comfort, nice ventilation, and a lovely hull profile. The Astrid could pave a smooth road through five-foot waves and do so in excess of thirty knots. All of which made for an impressive outing with clients who brought their checkbooks along with their Abu rods and Gander reels.
What Jean-Luc lacked in understanding of boats he more than made up for in his understanding of clients. He worked for Belasco Arms, an up-and-coming weapons manufacturer that was making a dedicated run at becoming a real threat to Colt Canada. The Belasco B9C assault rifle was outselling Colt’s C8A1 carbine and their C8FTHB special forces weapon in several key markets. Jean-Luc found that a day on the water hauling in northern pike and other sport fish, combined with lots of very good alcohol, was a great way to do business. Once they were back and showered, there would be steaks and more drinks, as well as some female entertainment for those guys who wanted to leave their wedding rings in their hotel safes.
The four men aboard the Astrid with Jean-Luc were all experienced fishermen and boat handlers, and they seemed to accept as a gift his willingness to turn the boat over to them. They worked the mouth of the Saint Lawrence, and one of the men pulled in an astounding forty-one-inch pike that weighed twenty-six pounds. It wasn’t one for the record books, but it was the biggest of the species any of them had pulled in. They were all jazzed about it, and that amped up the general air of holiday.
Jean-Luc was delighted. All three of the potential buyers worked for companies that provided security specialists and private contractors. Jere Flanders, COO of Blue Diamond Security, was the man who caught the fish. The others were Bill Allen, of Blackwater, and Huck Sandoval, of The Martinvale Group. Technically competitors, but not really. There was a heavy demand for private contractors these days, especially since the Americans pulled most of their people out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The regular soldiers had gone home, but there was a great need for competent field operators who could—and would—pull a trigger.
The fishing party had set out from Gaspé before first light and was well past Forillon National Park on the end of the peninsula. When they saw the humped silhouette of Brion Island, they dropped a sea anchor and broke out their rods. The island was a bird sanctuary and mostly uninhabited except for some government parks people. The day was quiet, the air crystal-clear. The men spent hours fishing, telling lies about past catches, hauling in pike, taking photos with the big ones and then throwing them back, drinking, talking some business.
They were all pretty well hammered when they saw the flash.
“Hey,” said Flanders, tapping Sandoval on the arm. “You see that?”
“Yeah,” agreed Sandoval. “Big flash.”
The sun was in a different part of the sky, and there was no chance this was lightning. They all agreed on that.
They listened and heard a faint throb of noise. Almost felt more than heard.
“Was … that an explosion?” asked Jean-Luc.
Allen nodded. “It damn well was. On the water, too, I think.”
The others nodded, too. They all knew what a blast signature sounded like, and that’s what they’d heard.
“I think that was Semtex,” said Sandoval, but then he shook his head. “No. Too heavy.”
“C4,” said Allen, and again the others nodded.
“Lot of it, too,” said Flanders.
They stared across the water, but there was nothing to see except a small and fading glow.
“Boat?” asked Jean-Luc.
Instead of answering, Sandoval climbed up to the bridge and started the engines. The others pulled up the anchor and stowed their rods. Within two minutes they were smashing through the small waves, racing toward the horizon line. Jean-Luc used the shipboard radio to call it in to the Canadian Coast Guard.
They did not find a boat, and, given the heft of that explosion, none of them expected to. That had been a lot of bang.
What they found were pieces of a boat. Splinters. A lot of pieces spread out over a half mile of water. The closer they got and the longer they looked, the more they were convinced that they weren’t going to find anything. Or anyone.
They were wrong.
It was Jean-Luc who spotted the body.
If it was a body.
It bobbed in the choppy water like a lump of greasy red chum.
Sandoval slowed the boat and swung around broadside to the corpse.
“Jesus Christ,” he murmured.
The body had ragged stumps for legs, one ending midthigh, the other gone below the knee. The left arm was a mangled slab of nothing. The right hung down into the water. What face there was had been burned hairless; the heat had melted its features so that they no longer resembled anything human. It was impossible to tell much about it, except that it had once been male and that it had died badly.
“Poor bastard,” said Allen. “At least it was quick.”
He was wrong about that. They all were.
The bobbing chunk of meat turned over in the water. At first Jean-Luc thought that a predator fish was hitting it from b
elow. A shark maybe. There were more than two dozen species of shark known to visit or live in these waters, though shark attacks were rare. Jean-Luc had seen a brute of a Greenland shark, as well as an eight-meter-long basking shark and a four-meter-long great white. Mostly farther out on the salt, but sometimes here in the more brackish waters.
But that wasn’t it. The body didn’t pitch and jerk the way it would if a shark was hitting it. Instead, it … rolled over.
The remaining arm broke the surface tension of the water and flopped toward the Astrid.
The hand, blackened and raw, opened and closed.
Reaching for the boat.
Reaching for life.
Using the last of his strength to find anything that would let him cling to the world.
The men in the boat cried out. Shocked and stunned. And repelled.
And then Jean-Luc kicked off his shoes, threw his watch and wallet onto the deck, pushed between Sandoval and Allen, and dove into the water. He was no good at piloting a boat, but he could swim. He reached the dying man in eight quick strokes and wrapped his arm around the burned torso.
The man screamed.
It was a high, shrill, and inhuman shriek of agony.
Then his grasping fingers closed around Jean-Luc’s shoulder and clung on as the salesman kicked out toward his boat and the reaching arms of his customers.
The Astrid was already punching its way toward the mainland when the Coast Guard arrived.
Chapter Seven
The Resort
208 Nautical Miles West of Chile
October 13, 1:01 A.M.
My guys stood and watched me make the call. I’d rather have knee-walked across broken glass.
“Cowboy to Deacon,” I said.
“Go for Deacon.”
“The tires are flat. Repeat: the tires are flat.”
There was a long pause. Heavy. Pregnant. I could imagine the faces of everyone at the TOC staring at Mr. Church. Via the lenses of the Google Scouts, they’d have already seen it anyway, but this needed a verbal confirmation. Someone had to own it, and that someone was Mama Ledger’s firstborn son.
If I expected Church to fry me, though, I was wrong. Maybe he was bigger than that, or maybe he was saving it for a face-to-face. Or maybe he was simply enough of a realist to accept that this happened. The man was dead before we entered the building. If there hadn’t been the very real risk of a no-win firefight, we could have tried for this building first and maybe gotten here before the interrogators accidentally killed him. We’d X’d that out during the planning, though, because finding him had been half the job. Getting him off the island alive was the other half, and that could not have been accomplished with all those troops awake and trigger-happy. No, it had to play out the way it had. This ending was unfortunate.
Damn unfortunate.
Church even said that. “This is unfortunate.”
“Copy that,” I muttered. “Call the play.”
“Secondary objectives are now in effect, Cowboy,” he said. “A helo is inbound. LZ is the front lawn. Thirty minutes.”
That was that.
I tapped my earbud to leave the mission channel and nodded to Top and Bunny to do the same. Sam would remain in position until the chopper got here.
We squatted down and made a huddle.
“This is messed up, Boss,” said Bunny.
“Yes it is.”
Top pinched bin Laden’s chin with a thumb and forefinger and moved his head side to side.
“Wouldn’t a minded killing this fucker my own self,” observed Top dryly.
“Word,” agreed Bunny.
“Yesterday’s box score,” I said.
Bunny shook his head. “Still can’t believe this is him. I mean … holy shit. You know?”
We all knew. Everyone at the DMS knew. And we were freaked out and furious.
When SEAL Team Six entered Pakistani airspace and breeched the compound in Abbottabad, they thought they were hunting the real deal. The guy who’d orchestrated 9/11. Those heroes went in to do a job, and they did it and earned their places in the history books. Unless this all became public knowledge, they would go on believing it.
Hell, even the president of the United States thought he’d dropped the hammer on bin Laden. We all did, except the conspiracy crowd, who kept ranting that we’d faked bin Laden’s death. They supported this claim by openly wondering why there were no pictures of bin Laden’s corpse.
I could answer that. The semiofficial story was that bin Laden didn’t die from the head shot and was thrashing and twitching on the floor, so they capped off a bunch of rounds to finish him. Those rounds tore up the body to the point that photos would be very nasty. That was only partly true.
Except that there is a different chapter to that story because a bunch of ass-hats from the CIA have been running a long game on everyone.
On the whole world.
Short version is this: The real Osama bin Laden was more than the point man for al-Qaeda. He was also a member of a group of what could, for lack of a better word, be called “financial terrorists.” Or maybe “global criminals” is a better phrase. Not sure. They both seem to apply. The group had set themselves up as a secret society. Called themselves the Seven Kings. And they deliberately and carefully hijacked much of the mythology of other real or imagined societies like the Illuminati, Order of the Temples of the East, the Fraternitas Saturni, the Arioi, the Carbonari, the Ethniki Etaireia, the Palladists, the Order of Heptasophs, and others, including some outright fictional groups like the Priory of Sion, the Millennium Group, and—according to Bug—the Order of the Phoenix from the Harry Potter books. They used the Internet and a disturbing level of computer-hacking savvy to seed their pseudo histories into the pop-culture conspiracy-theory ocean. With all that, a woman who called herself the Goddess began making predictions of disasters. Each of her predictions came to pass. Why? Because the Seven Kings were making them happen. But because the predictions were couched in religious ambiguity, they had the odor of prophecy rather than guilty knowledge. At least as far as the conspiracy-theory crowd went.
The Kings’ go-to model for making a lot of money was to covertly fund radical political and religious groups, nudge them toward committing large-scale terrorist acts, and then make billions from the resulting swings in the world stock markets. There are always a lot of people who run for cover as soon as anything happens. “Flight to safety” it’s called. If you knew in advance when something as big as the attack on the Towers was going to happen and were already in position with buy orders and calls, then as soon as the shock waves hit, you start shoveling Franklins into a wheelbarrow.
The attack on 9/11 was theirs.
How’d they orchestrate that so smoothly?
Real simple.
One of the Seven Kings, specifically the King of Lies, was Osama bin Laden.
Yeah. Take a moment with that.
Thing is, that ole Uncle Osama wasn’t doing it for Allah. And he wasn’t doing it in order to further a religious movement. This wasn’t fatwa or jihad for him. And he did not give a naked mole rat’s wrinkly ass about the followers of Islam. For him, it was all about the money. Lots and lots of money. All those deaths, the resulting wars, the ongoing “war on terror”? Shit. Every new death, every new headline, every instance of political divisiveness put more money in his pockets.
His pockets, and those of the other Kings.
Bin Laden, and the other Kings, were essentially apolitical. For them it was all a running con, albeit the most dangerous one in history. Fighting the Kings was a bitch. They were a massive organization, built over decades, with thousands of operatives seeded carefully into world governments, multinational corporations, and law enforcement agencies. They constructed a kind of bureaucracy so sophisticated that any single one of the Kings could run it all. Hell, it could probably run without any of them. As long as the money trickled down from the top—from well-established bank accounts—then the agents b
uried into society would continue to do their jobs. Which meant that they were always ready to strike, to disrupt, to do damage. All it took was a phone call, a coded e-mail, a text message.
And they have continued to stay busy. Kings operations have been ongoing, and we see their fingerprints in terrorist attacks, suspicious oil spills, domestic insurrection in countries that produce key commodities, and so on.
The DMS has been working very hard to tear the whole damn thing down. The King of Plagues, Sebastian Gault, was presumed dead along with the Goddess. The founder of the whole organization, Hugo Vox, the King of Fear, was definitely dead at Mr. Church’s own hand. Two reliable informants—the former assassin Rafael Santoro and a former aide to the King of Plagues, Alexander Chismer—provided us with enough actionable intel to go after the others. I’d spent a lot of time over the last few years making some pretty serious house calls.
The King of War had been a high-level member of the Israeli military. We sent a team to extract him, but he didn’t want to come quietly. He was killed during a mother of a gunfight. Pretty much the same thing happened with a Russian manufacturer who served as the King of Famine. Right around the time we breached his defenses in a remote site in Siberia, he ate his gun. The Italian banker who called himself the King of Gold swallowed eighty Vicodin when his sources told him we were closing in.
We were able to arrest the King of Thieves, a French commodities broker, but he managed to get himself killed while in custody. Exactly how that happened is a matter of some concern, and there’s a hunt for a spook within the marshal’s office.
Bin Laden was the last.
We didn’t want him dead, though. If our theory was right and the Kings organization was essentially running itself, then we needed insight into the infrastructure. We wanted to stop the runaway machine. We placed a lot of stock in swiping bin Laden from the Resort and encouraging him to help us with that.
Now, though.
Damn.
When SEAL Team Six went to Pakistan, much of the intel upon which they acted came from MindReader searches, from clues provided reluctantly by Santoro and willingly by Chismer, familiarly known as Toys. We shared that intel with the CIA, and the mission was set.