by Dana Haynes
Upstate New Jersey
Daria found a construction site in New Jersey and pulled in. The site appeared to be vacant and had a couple weeks’ worth of trash and debris to show for it. It included a rusty, corrugated covering, perfect for hiding electrical equipment during rain and snowstorms. She parked beneath it.
She had to find a secure way to contact Collin Bennett-Smith and explain her no-show at Grand Central. She just had to hope he hadn’t been swept up in all of this—whatever this was.
She rested her forehead on the steering wheel a moment, feeling the adrenaline drain away. She had orchestrated the fake bank robbery and the bomb scare to gain access to the command vehicle. She was positive an intelligence agency was behind her surveillance and the obvious trap in Manhattan.
Dee Jean D’Arc …
Daria … you are burned.
Then there was the question of the dark-skinned man she had seen crossing the street back in Manhattan. She was furious at herself for not attaching a name to the face, but she was sure she had seen him before.
Daria got busy searching the truck. It took her all of two minutes to confirm the rig belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency. When did I make an enemy of them? she wondered. Among the first things she found was a thermos of coffee. She also found a baggie with a roast beef sandwich and a bag of salt-and-pepper Kettle Chips. Such good hosts, the CIA. Her next big find was a folder with a file on the operation. She was a little surprised that a CIA hit-team would bring paper documents, but perhaps the op had come together too fast to brief everyone beforehand.
She noted the name of the takedown operation: Pegasus? Her Greek was rusty. Wasn’t that some kind of horse?
A horse? Bastards. Why not go all in and call her a fat cow?
She doffed the capelike coat, sat at a command desk, massive boots up on the table, ankles crossed, drank coffee, ate the sandwich and chips, and began studying the file. There was no word on her old friend, Colin Bennett-Smith. But the first name she saw floored her.
Khalid Belhadj.
Syrian assassin, soldier, and spy.
That’s the man she’d seen crossing the street.
Belhadj!
She swore in a half-dozen tongues.
Belhadj?
When she recovered from the shock, she read on. According to the CIA, Daria wasn’t meeting Bennett-Smith. She was meeting Belhadj. And (or so said the file) she would be selling him a sniper rifle. Their target: the president of the United States. The CIA mission had been to capture or kill both Daria and Belhadj.
The wording was crystal clear. There were no colloquialisms, like terminate or remove. The file said capture or kill. Both outcomes were sanctioned.
She read the file, front to back. She scrounged around for a pen and discovered a hidden cache; a Ziploc baggie of three chocolate chip cookies. It was maybe her best discovery yet.
She nibbled the cookies and read the file again, front to back, this time jotting notes.
The situation was very bad. Much worse than she’d imagined.
She and Khalid Belhadj? If the CIA believed all this, who was spoon-feeding it to them? Who had sent her the fake e-mail from her old friend, which lured her into the killing field?
And who had dredged up the ancient code from her childhood, warning her at JFK that she was walking into a trap. Dee Jean D’Arc.… That code predated Colin Bennett-Smith and Shin-Bet and her service in the Israeli Army. For Daria, that code predated puberty.
It was the code of a long-dead woman.
Meanwhile, there was the Belhadj problem. Was this his operation? The man wasn’t known as brilliant but he was famous for his dogged determination. What he lacked in imagination he more than made up in guts. Yes, she thought, Belhadj had the balls to carry out a mission on U.S. soil.
But why her? Why drag Daria into this? They had never met. To the best of her knowledge, the Syrian bastard didn’t even know she existed. To her, his was just a face studied in scores of PowerPoint presentations, dozens of computer searches.
Finished with the file, Daria searched the command vehicle again. She found a locked steel cabinet. She recognized it as a weapons cache. She retrieved one of the truck’s fire extinguishers, pleased that Americans are so thorough in their safety protocols. She turned the tank upside down and used the nitrogen propellant to freeze the lock on the steel cabinet. She reversed the extinguisher, right-side up, and brought it down heavily on the lock.
The cabinet revealed an elegant and opulent array of CIA weapons. She smiled. Handguns, shotguns, stun guns, sniper rifles with sights, Tasers, machine guns. Even a Browning Automatic Rifle. “These are a few of my favourite things…” she sang softly.
She dug around some more and found a gym bag with a change of clothes. The owner must have been around five-eight: his clothes could be altered to fit her and she felt foolish in the clubbing outfit.
She took the thermos of coffee and a couple of energy bars and shoved them into a tote. She found a personal cell phone. She almost dialed Ray Calabrese’s mobile from memory but paused. It would be better if Ray stayed well clear of this mess for the time being. She would fill him in later, if necessary. She pried the back off the mobile and scanned it for CIA tracking chips. She found one, ripped it out, ground it under her heel, and jammed the mobile into the tote.
Daria prepared a carryall with a change of clothing, all the money she could find from the agents’ bags, and enough weaponry to start—and finish—a decent firefight. She moved forward to the cabin of the truck and checked the front and side windows. She’d drawn no police and, as near as they could tell, no CIA.
She took the Project Pegasus (a fucking horse?) file, jammed it into the bag, threw open the rear door of the truck and hopped out.
Khalid Belhadj stood behind the command vehicle and pointed a Springfield Auto at her clavicle.
Colorado
Two time zones to the West, Will Halliday finished his breakfast—a frosted Pop-Tart and instant coffee—and stepped out of the mountain cabin he and Asher Sahar’s two mercenaries were using as a base.
The mercenaries both asked about the logic of staying in Colorado after ripping off and killing the Secret Service team and blowing up a river levy. Better to put as much space between them and their crimes as possible, no? But Halliday had insisted on holing up in the isolated cabin.
The mercenaries were named Sacchs and Veigel, so of course the big, blond American insisted on calling them “Sex” and “Violence,” which he accompanied with a horselaugh and a slap on the shoulder every time he said it. Neither Sacchs nor Veigel thought the joke was very funny.
The coffee was vile and Will Halliday stepped outside the cabin to toss the last half-cup into the grass. He took a deep intake of breath, marveling in the pine-forest aromas of the place. He had grown up in rural areas not unlike this hunting cabin. He didn’t miss not being city-bound.
“Yo! Sacchs!” He called back into the three-room, two-story cabin.
Moments later, the taciturn mercenary emerged with his jacket and shades.
Halliday slapped him on the back. “Gimme a hand.”
Together, the big American and the dour Israeli managed to get the titanium metal canister and its cooling unit out of the panel truck and hauled it about twenty yards to a two-engine Piper Cheyenne II, which sat on a long field of grass behind the cabin. The devices were heavy as they lifted them up into the fuselage, which stood high on its tricycle landing gear. The canister and the cooling unit were sophisticated, state-of-the-art technology, and while Sacchs was a good soldier, he was no rocket scientist. He didn’t know why, once the devices were stored in the fuselage, Halliday made him hold the canister stable as the ex–Secret Service agent tapped an eight-digit string of numbers onto the device’s keypad.
Halliday checked his watch, counted to ten seconds, then tapped five more keys.
“Good. It’s stable,” he said.
Sacchs grunted and backed his torso out of the
fuselage. He turned, wordless, and began walking toward the cabin.
Halliday inhaled the fresh air and watched the Israeli walk away. He leaned into the cockpit. From beneath the pilot’s left-hand seat, he retrieved one of the many disposable, prepaid cell phones that Asher Sahar preferred. He hit speed dial 1.
The connection clicked. Halliday said, “I picked Sacchs.”
Asher Sahar’s voice came back soft, calm, and slightly sibilant. “He is infected?”
“Sure is.”
“Veigel?”
“Twenty yards away and inside the cabin. No way he’s infected. Not from the canister.”
Halliday listened to the hiss of long-distance static. “Thank you, Will. Now … I suppose we’ll see what happens.”
“We sure as shit will! See you mañana.”
Halliday hung up, then disassembled the cell phone and spread its parts around the grassy field.
Nine
Upstate New Jersey
A satchel full of guns is of little value against a .45 automatic pointed at your chest.
Khalid Belhadj was a tightly wound, compact man, not quite five feet ten inches, with longish hair and a five-day stubble of beard. His nose had been broken and ill-repaired. His eyes were the same blue-gray color as the marble cutting board one of Daria’s lovers used for making bread.
Daria dropped the carryall on the asphalt. “You’re Belhadj.”
“Climb back into the truck, please.” Like many Syrians, Belhadj spoke English with a British accent.
Daria turned and climbed up onto the truck’s steel bumper, then into the truck. She walked halfway to the cab before feeling the floor move as Belhadj joined her. She turned to face him.
He studied the busted-open weapons cache. He spied several sets of handcuffs and keys. He grabbed a set with his left hand and lobbed them to Daria.
She caught them and considered hurling them straight back into his face, but she could tell by his body language he had anticipated that.
Daria cuffed her wrists behind her back. She recognized his Springfield auto as an XD-45, which meant it held a clip of Ten rounds, plus a bullet likely already chambered.
Belhadj made a spinning symbol with one upraised finger. Daria turned her back to him. She felt his hand play along both cuffs but could tell he did so by leaning forward, his shins and balls beyond kicking distance.
“Sit.”
Daria slid into one of the chairs fixed to the steel floor.
Belhadj kept the .45 trained on her chest. But his eyes glanced around the interior of the truck.
“Stealing a CIA command vehicle. My God.”
Daria crossed her knees, knowing it would cause the latex skirt to ride up her tanned thighs. Perhaps she could draw him a little closer. “Pulling a mission on American soil? That’s some rare combination of brave and stupid, yes?”
Belhadj shrugged, the barrel of the auto not moving a millimeter. If he had noticed her very short skirt, he gave no indication. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re saying you didn’t lure me here?”
She could tell by his slate-gray eyes that Belhadj was calculating that last bit of data.
“No,” he said. “I did not lure you here. But now I know who did.”
He started looking around the inside of the truck, paying attention to the forced-open weapons cabinet. “This will be difficult for your Zionist-trained mind to understand, but I am not the bad guy.” He shrugged. “Not today, anyway.”
“No?”
“No. You and I were supposed to stumble into each other so those CIA bastards could capture or kill us. Probably the latter.”
“And why would they do that? You and I have never met.”
Belhadj paused, studied her. A mannequin could not have shown less emotion. “Never met,” he repeated, as if tasting the words. He stepped away from the weapons cabinet. “Are the cuffs too tight?”
Daria shrugged, noncommittal.
“Turn around.”
She swiveled slowly in the seat, causing the skirt to rise up even further on her taut thighs. Belhadj was human (she assumed). Surely he would notice and be distracted. She braced her punk boots under her center of gravity. When he reached for the cuffs, Daria braced herself and—
Belhadj jammed a disposable hypodermic needle into Daria’s shoulder, then quickly stepped back.
“What?”
He shrugged. “It was in the weapons locker.”
She turned to him in fury and could feel the trailer start to spin
“Knowing the CIA, there’s a one-in-three chance this is a narcotic designed to incapacitate us for quiet extraction.”
Daria’s vision blurred. “That means there’s a two-in-three chance it’s a lethal dose. Not for extraction at all.”
Belhadj shrugged again. “Well, that’s the CIA for you.”
Daria blacked out and slid to the floor.
Washington, D.C.
The longtime executive assistant to Stanley Cohen knew when to pull her boss out of a meeting on Capitol Hill, which normally was verboten.
Cohen took the message in the office of a senior Republican House member and stepped out to the stuffy, high-ceilinged corridor of the House Office Building. He waited until congressional staffers—they all looked like teenagers—were out of hearing distance and called his assistant back.
“Did Pegasus obtain its objectives?”
“No,” she said simply.
“They lost the suspects?”
“Oh, they lost a little more than that.”
* * *
In the Shark Tank, Nanette Sylvestri realized that Pegasus wasn’t going to be a quick-and-clean, home-by-dinner kind of operation. She sent her people home, a third of them at a time, with orders to eat and sleep, to be ready for a marathon day to come.
Six hours later, John Brooms’s wristwatch beeped once, softly. He was instantly awake. John extricated himself from the mad maypole of twisted sheets and soft legs and strawberry blond hair in his Georgetown apartment. He kissed the girl in his bed softly, so as not to wake her. He showered and shaved and threw on Hugo Boss. He lingered over his choice of tie for almost four minutes.
He kissed the sleepy girl again, packed his Vuitton overnight kit, and dashed.
* * *
The second the front wheels of the 747 touched down at Reagan National, Ray Calabrese whipped out his cell phone and a small notebook bound with a black elastic strap. He looked up numbers for FBI agents with whom he had worked in the past. The jet hadn’t yet sloughed off all its momentum when a flight attendant caught Ray’s eye. He badged her and she remained seated.
Ray called the D.C. headquarters to make sure the brass there was up to speed with the CIA investigation. He got a friend he’d known since Quantico, and began filling her in.
“Whoa, whoa. Ray? This thing you’re talking about. This was in Manhattan?”
“Yeah.” The 747 veered off the runway and headed toward the domestic terminal.
Ray’s friend laughed into the phone. “Normally, the CIA doesn’t share so good, and you know that. But Manhattan … Hey, Ray. Want the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card?”
Ray grinned. “Hit me.”
She told him the latest rumor about a stolen CIA command vehicle.
* * *
By the time passengers began getting off the 747, Ray had made similar calls to FBI agents in New York City and back home in Los Angeles. He’d scribbled three pages of notes. Information is power, and Ray Calabrese felt armed to the teeth.
A bearded man in a dark suit waited for him inside the terminal. He recognized Ray and flashed him a laminated business card. Most passersby wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was: the man’s CIA bona fides.
“Agent Calabrese?”
Ray shifted his gym bag to his left hand and shook.
“Burke Evans, CIA. We got the call that you were en route. You’re here about the Daria Gibron situation.”
Ray nodded
tersely.
“Did you check in any luggage?”
“No. I came quick and packed light because it’s Daria. Trust me: when she puts her mind to it, she can get into trouble faster than anyone I ever met.”
“So we understand.” The CIA liaison had a soft Southern accent; Virginia, maybe, Ray thought. “She’s on the run, Agent Calabrese. If you can help bring her in…?”
“She’s not your enemy.”
“And we are not assuming anything at this time. But we need to know what she knows. Come on. I’m parked this way.”
They began walking quickly in the direction of ground transportation. Ray reached into the front pocket of his flight-rumpled trousers and pulled out his cell phone.
The CIA agent spoke just loudly enough for Ray alone to hear. “Do you know a Khalid Belhadj?”
“Who?”
“Belhadj. Syrian intelligence. We believe Ms. Gibron is running with him.”
When some people fly, they feel brisk and refreshed upon landing. Ray wasn’t one of those people. He’d been involved in a crash a few years earlier, which had left him with—if not a fear of flying—an intense anxiousness. He felt slow of foot and a little foggy as he dodged people with rolling baggage. “You think she’s running with a Syrian spy?”
“You don’t think it’s possible?”
Ray didn’t answer. Daria had been many things to him. A friend, a fellow fighter, an FBI resource. Possibly, maybe more. But mostly she was an enigma. Could she be running with a Syrian agent? Sure. She’d run with a cadre of Ulster Irish terrorists one time, just to keep tabs on them.
But Ray kept mum.
The smaller man led Ray out of the airport, into the short-term parking lot. They marched the length of the lot, hooked a right at the last row of cars, and kept marching.
Ray frowned at his cell phone. He had no waiting messages. Where was she? “Look, I’m here in an advisory capacity only. But I speak for the highest echelon of the bureau when I tell you, Daria’s on our side. If she’s running with some Syrian, it’s his bad luck. Are we clear on this?”
The agent smiled without mirth. “Advisory capacity?”
