Slightly mollified, Harris jerked a thumb at the two observer seats right behind him. “Well, strap yourselves in.” He leaned across to his co-pilot. “Let's get this crate moving, Sam. We're on the clock now.”
The two Air Force officers busied themselves with the controls and brought the big plane rumbling out onto the apron, taxiing slowlv toward the main runway. The roar of the C-17's four turbofan engines grew even louder as Harris pushed the throttles forward with his left hand.
After Jon and Peter buckled themselves in, the loadmaster handed them each a helmet with a built-in radio headset. “Air-to-ground transmissions are pretty much it as far as in-flight entertainment goes,” he told them, raising his voice over the howl of the engines.
“What? You mean there are no stewardesses, champagne, or caviar?” Peter asked with a horrified look.
Almost against his will, the C-17 crewman grinned back. “No, sir. Just me and my coffee, I'm afraid.”
“Fresh-brewed, I trust?” the Englishman asked.
“Nope. Instant decaf,” the Air Force sergeant replied, smiling even more broadly. He vanished, heading for his own seat down in the aircraft's cavernous cargo bay.
“Good lord! The sacrifices I make for queen and country,” Peter murmured with a quick wink at Smith.
The jet swung through a sharp turn, lining up with the long main runway. Ahead, a Southwest Airlines 737 lifted off and banked north. “Air Force Charlie One-Seven, you are cleared for immediate takeoff,” the tower air traffic controller's voice crackled suddenly through Smith's radio earphones.
“Roger, Tower,” Harris replied. “Charlie One-Seven is rolling now.” He shoved the four engine throttles all the way forward.
The C-17 accelerated down the runway, gaining speed fast. Jon felt himself pressed back against the padding of his seat. Less than a minute later, they were airborne, climbing steeply over the patchwork of houses, freeways, and parks of Albuquerque.
* * *
They were flying at thirty-seven thousand feet somewhere over West Texas when the co-pilot leaned back and tapped Smith on the knee. “There's a secure transmission for you, Colonel,” he said. “I'll switch it to your headset.”
Smith nodded his thanks.
“I have a situation update, Colonel,” Fred Klein's familiar voice said. “Your target is also aloft and heading east for Andrews Air Force Base. She's approximately four hundred miles ahead of your aircraft now.”
Jon worked that out in his head. The C-17 had a cruise speed of roughly five hundred knots, which meant Kit Pierson's FBI executive jet would touch down at Andrews at least forty-five minutes before he and Peter could hope to arrive there. He frowned. “Any chance of delaying her? Maybe have the FAA put her plane in a parking orbit until we can get down?”
“Alas, no,” Klein said crisply. “Not without tipping our hand entirely. Arranging this flight was tricky enough.”
“Damn it.”
“The situation may not be as dire as you think,” Klein told him. “She has a confirmed meeting at the Hoover Building first and there's an official car standing by to take her straight there. Whatever else she plans isn't likely to take place until later, which should give you time to pick up her trail in D.C.”
Smith thought about that. The head of Covert-One was probably right, he decided. Although he was pretty sure that Kit Pierson's real purpose in returning to Washington went far beyond simply delivering a personal high-level briefing for her Bureau superiors, she was going to have to play the game as though it were.
“What about the vehicles and gear I requested?” he asked.
“They'll be waiting for you,” Klein promised. His voice sharpened. “But I still have some very serious misgivings about involving Howell so closely with this operation, Colonel. He's a bright fellow… maybe too bright, and his fundamental loyalties lie outside this country.”
Smith glanced at Peter. The Englishman was staring out the cockpit side windows, seemingly wrapped up in watching the vast panorama of drifting cloud masses and seemingly endless flat brown countryside over which they were flying. “You'll have to trust me on this one,” he told Klein softly. “Back when you signed me on to this show, you told me you needed mavericks, self-starters who didn't quite fit into everybody else's neat little tables of organization. People who were willing to buck the system for results, remember?”
“I remember,” Klein said. “And I meant it.”
“Well, I'm bucking the system right now,” Smith said firmly. "Peter is already basically focused on the same problem we are. Plus, he's got skills and instincts and brainpower we can use to our advantage."
There was silence on the other end for several seconds while Klein digested that. “Cogently argued, Colonel,” he said at last. “All right, cooperate with Howell as closely as you can, but remember: He must never learn about Covert-One. Never. Is that understood?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die, Chief,” Smith answered.
Klein snorted. “Fair enough, Jon.” He cleared his throat. “Let me know once you're on the ground, all right?”
“Will do,” Smith replied. He leaned forward to check the navigation display, which showed their position, distance from Andrews, and current airspeed. “It looks like that should be sometime around nine P.M., your time.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
La Courneuve, Near Paris
The grim, soulless high-rise housing projects of the Parisian slums, the cites, rose black against the night. Their design — massive, oppressively ugly, and intentionally sterile — was a monument to the grotesque ideals of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who thought solely in cold, utilitarian terms. The projects were also a testament to the penny-pinching of French bureaucrats — who wanted only to cram as many of their nation's unwanted immigrants, most of them Muslims, into the smallest possible spaces.
Few lights shone around the graffiti-smeared concrete bulk of the Cite des Quatre Mille, the “city of four thousand,” a notorious haven for thieves, thugs, drug dealers, and Islamic radicals. The honest poor were trapped in a de facto prison essentially run by the criminals and terrorists among them. Most of the street lamps were either burned out or broken. The charred wrecks of stripped cars littered the potholed streets. The few stores in the neighborhood were either barricaded behind steel bars or else reduced to looted, blackened rubble.
Ahmed ben-Belbouk drifted through the night, a shadow among other shadows. He wore a long black raincoat against the night air and a kufi cap to cover his head. He was a little less than six feet tall, and he cultivated a full beard that masked some of the acne scars that pockmarked his round, soft face. By birth French, by heritage Algerian, and by faith a follower of radical Islam, ben-Belbouk was a recruiter for the jihad against America and the decadent West. He operated out of a backroom office in one of the local mosques, quietly and carefully screening those who heeded the call to holy war. Those he judged the most promising were given false passports, cash, and plane tickets and sent outside France for advanced training.
Now, after a long day, he was at last returning to the bleak, grimy welfare apartment graciously provided for him by the state. Counting the secret funds at his disposal, he had money enough to live someplace better, but ben-Belbouk believed it was better to live among those whose loyalty he sought. When they saw him sharing their hardships and their hopelessness, they were more willing to listen to his sermons of hatred and his calls for vengeance on their Western oppressors.
Suddenly the terrorist recruiter noticed movement along the darkened avenue ahead. He stopped. That was odd. These were the hours when the streets of this district were usually deserted. The timid and honest were already cowering at home behind their locked doors, and the criminals and drug dealers were usually either still asleep or too busy indulging their vicious habits to be out and about.
Ben-Belbouk slipped into the darkened door of a burnt-out bakery and stood watching. He slipped his right hand into the pocket of his
raincoat and felt the butt of the pistol he carried, a compact Glock 19. The street gangs and other petty criminals who preyed on the residents of the Cite usually steered a wide berth around men like him, but he preferred the option of providing for his own security.
From his place of concealment he watched the activity with growing suspicion. There was a van parked near the base of one of the smashed street lamps. Two men in coveralls were outside the vehicle, holding a ladder for a third technician working on something up near the top of the dark metal pole. Was this supposed to be a crew from the state-run electricity company? Sent here on some quixotic mission to again repair the streetlights already destroyed ten times over by the local residents?
The bearded man's eyes narrowed, and he spat silently to one side. The very thought was ridiculous. Representatives of the French government were despised in this district. Policemen were mobbed on sight. BAISE LA POLICE, “screw the police,” was the single most popular graffiti. The coarse, obscene phrase was spray-painted on every building in sight. Even the firemen sent in to put out the frequent arson blazes were greeted with barrages of Molotov cocktails and rocks. They had to be escorted by armored cars. Surely no electrician in his right mind would dare to set foot in La Courneuve? Not after dark — and certainly not without a detachment of heavily armed riot police to guard him.
So who were these men, and what were they really doing? Ben-Belbouk looked more carefully. The technician on the ladder seemed to be installing a piece of equipment — a small gray rectangular plastic box of some kind.
He ran his gaze along the other street lamps in sight. To his surprise, he noticed identical gray boxes mounted on several of them at precise, regular intervals. Though it was difficult to be sure in the dim light, he thought he could make out dark round openings on the boxes. Were those camera lenses? His suspicions hardened into certainty. These cochons, these pigs, were setting up something — a new surveillance system, perhaps — that would tighten the government's grip on this lawless zone. He could not allow that to pass without resistance.
For a moment he debated whether or not to slip away and rouse the local Islamic brotherhoods. Then he thought better of it. In the inevitable delay these spies could easily finish their work and vanish. Besides, they were unarmed. It would be safer and more satisfying to handle them himself.
Ben-Belbouk drew the small Glock pistol out of his coat pocket and moved out into the open, holding the weapon unobtrusively at his side. He stopped a few paces away from the trio of technicians. “You there!” he called out. “What are you doing here?”
Startled, the two holding the ladder turned toward him. The third man, busy tightening screws on the clamps holding the box to the utility pole, kept working.
“I said, what are you doing here?” ben-Belbouk demanded again, louder this time.
One of the pair at the ladder shrugged. “Our work is none of your business, m'sieur,” he said dismissively. “Go on your way and leave us in peace.”
The bearded Islamic extremist saw red. His thin lips turned downward in a fierce scowl, and he brought the Glock out into plain sight. “This,” he snarled, jabbing the pistol at them, “makes it my business.” He moved closer. “Now answer my question, filth, before I lose my patience!”
He never heard the silenced shot that killed him.
The 7.62mm rifle round hit Ahmed ben-Belbouk behind the right ear, tore through his brain, and blew a large hole in the left side of his skull. Pieces of pulverized bone and brain matter sprayed across the pavement. The terrorist recruiter fell in a heap, already dead.
* * *
Secure in the concealing shadows of a trash-strewn alley some distance away, the tall, broad-shouldered man who called himself Nones tapped his sniper lightly on the shoulder. “That was a decent shot.”
The other man lowered his Heckler & Koch PSG-1 rifle and smiled gratefully. Words of praise from any of the Horatii were rare.
Nones keyed his radio mike, speaking to the pair of observers he had posted on nearby rooftops to watch over his technicians. “Any further sign of movement?”
“Negative,” they both replied. “Everything is quiet.”
The green-eyed man nodded to himself. The incident was unfortunate but evidently not a serious threat to his operational security. Murders and disappearances were relatively common occurrences in this part of La Courneuve. One more meant little or nothing. He switched to the technicians' frequency. “How much longer?” he demanded.
“We're almost finished,” their leader reported. “Two more minutes.” “Good.” Nones turned back to the sniper. “Stay ready. Shiro and I will dispose of the body.” Then he looked back at the much shorter man crouching behind him. “Come with me.”
* * *
About one hundred meters from the place where Ahmed ben-Belbouk now lay dead, a slender woman stayed prone, hidden beneath the stripped and burnt-out chassis of a little Renault sedan. She was dressed from head to foot in black, with a black cotton jumpsuit for her torso, arms, and legs, black gloves, black boots, and a black watch cap to conceal her golden hair. She stared at the image in her night-vision binoculars. “Son of a bitch!” she swore under her breath. Then she spoke softly into her own radio. “Did you see that, Max?”
“Oh, I saw it,” confirmed her subordinate, posted farther back in the shelter of a small copse of dead trees. “I'm not sure I believe it, but I definitely saw it.”
CIA officer Randi Russell focused her binoculars on the three men grouped around the street lamp. She watched silently while two more men — one very tall, with auburn hair, the other an Asian — crossed the street and joined the others. Working swiftly, the two newcomers rolled ben-Belbouk's corpse up in a black plastic sheet and lugged it away.
Randi gritted her teeth. With the dead man went the fruits of several months of hard, concentrated research, complicated planning, and risky covert surveillance. That was how long her section of the CIA's Paris Station had been tasked with tracking the recruitment of would-be Islamic terrorists in France. Zeroing in on ben-Belbouk had been like finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. By monitoring his contacts they were beginning to build comprehensive files on a host of very nasty characters, just the sorts of sick bastards who would get a thrill out of murdering thousands of innocents.
And now her whole operation was wiped out — well and truly wrecked by a single silenced shot.
She rubbed at her perfectly straight nose with one gloved finger, furiously thinking. “Who the hell are those guys?” she muttered.
“Maybe DGSE? Or GIGN?” Max speculated aloud, naming both the French foreign intelligence service and the country's counterterrorist specialists.
Randi nodded to herself. That was possible. The French intelligence services and counterterror units were known for playing rough — very rough. Had she just witnessed a piece of government-sanctioned “wet work” designed to rid France of a security threat without the inconvenience and expense of an arrest and a public trial?
Maybe, she thought coldly. If so, though, it was a remarkably stupid thing to do. While alive, Ahmed ben-Belbouk had been a window straight into the deadly underground world of Islamic terrorism — a world that was almost impossible for U.S. and other intelligence services to penetrate. Dead, he was useless to everybody.
“They're pulling out, boss,” Max's voice said in her ear.
Randi watched closely while the three men in overalls folded their ladder, shoved it into the back of their van, and drove away. Moments later, two cars, a dark blue BMW and a smaller Ford Escort, pulled onto the darkened avenue and followed the van. “Did you jot down the license plates on those vehicles?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got 'em,” Max replied. “They were all local numbers.”
“Good, we'll run them through the computer once we're finished here. Maybe that'll give us some idea of which jackasses just kicked us in the teeth,” she said grimly.
Randi lay motionless for a while longer, now
focusing her binoculars on the small gray boxes fixed to a number of lampposts up and down the avenue and on the nearby side streets. The more she studied the boxes, the odder they seemed. They looked very much like containers for a variety of sensors, she decided — complete with several apertures for cameras, intakes for air sampling devices, and short, stubby data relay antennae on top.
Weird, she thought. Very weird. Why would anyone waste money setting up a whole network of expensive scientific instruments in a crime-ridden slum like La Courneuve? The boxes were reasonably unobtrusive, but they weren't invisible. Once the locals noticed them, their life span and that of the equipment they contained would be measured in minutes at most. So why kill ben-Belbouk just because he was starting to raise a fuss? She shook her head in frustration. Without more of the pieces to this puzzle, nothing she had seen tonight made much sense.
“You know, Max, I think we ought to take a closer look at what those guys were installing,” she told her subordinate. “But we're going to have to come back with a ladder to do it.”
“Not tonight, we're not,” the other man warned. “The crazies, druggies, and jihad boys are due out on the streets any minute now, boss lady. We need to git while the gittin' is good.”
“Yeah,” Randi agreed. She tucked her binoculars away and slithered gracefully backward out from under the charred Renault. Her mind was still working fast. The more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed that killing ben-Belbouk had been the primary aim of the men installing those strange sensor arrays. Maybe his murder was just a piece of unintended collateral damage. Then who were they, she wondered, and what were they really up to?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunday, October 17 Rural Virginia
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kit Pierson saw the weathered signpost caught in the high beams of her green Volkswagen Passat. HARDSCRABBLE HOLLOW— [A MILE. That was her next landmark. She tapped the brakes, slowing down. She did not want to risk missing the turnoff to Hal Burke's run-down farm.
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