Again she groaned. Her eyelids quivered, then opened. Her nose wrinkled with the stink of the raw gas. For a moment she didn’t focus, but then she saw the man and froze. Her mouth opened in a scream.
“Quiet,” he warned. He showed her his knife. “Or I’ll slash your throat right here.”
Her feet kicked against the grass as she tried to wriggle away. “Leave me alone!”
The man snarled and backhanded her, connecting with a solid slap. She yelped in pain. Then he grabbed her bicep and hauled her up the hill, struggling and kicking, hanging onto the laptop with his free hand. At the top he manhandled her behind the low wall, then turned, pulling a road flare from his pocket. Behind him the two men in the Peugeot watched from the side of the road.
From her position Flinders couldn’t see the BMW, but in a flash of horror she realized what he was going to do.
“No!” She squirmed, bucking to wriggle out of his grasp. She had to stop him. The man backhanded her again, knocking her to the ground. She tasted blood.
He spat out a string of harsh words in Arabic.
Then he twisted the cap off the flare, slashing the ignition button against the striker. It flashed into flame.
With a triumphant smirk, he stepped back and lobbed the flare into empty space.
TWELVE
NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
AT the fourth checkpoint an emotionless guard scrutinized Rachel’s pass, then waved her through into the employee parking lot. Slotting her car, she got out, looking at the sleek twin modern office high rises whose black one-way mirrored glass reflected a shadowy panorama of the thickly-forested Maryland landscape. This was NSA Headquarters, a complex of fifty buildings linked by thirty-two miles of roads and protected by a labyrinth of barbed wire fences, surveillance systems, cement barriers, and armed patrols. Those dark mirrors, she knew, were composed of two panes of bulletproof glass sandwiched between five inches of sound-deadening empty space and swathed in Tempest protective copper shielding, designed to keep any kind of electromagnetic radiation signal from escaping to the ears of electronic eavesdroppers. NSA had no problem at all keeping its secrets safe.
At the Canine Street entrance she entered the pentagon-shaped Visitor Control Center, inserting her blue security badge into the CONFIRM terminal. Then she swiped the card again to enter a private elevator to the basement of OPS 2A, the tallest building in the complex. From here she passed the SSOC to the black rectangle that was the OPS 2B building and rode another private elevator to the eighth floor. Walking past the Russian Technical Library, she entered a covered passageway that lead into OPS 1, the original A-shaped NSA headquarters built in 1957.
The swipe of a second card clicked open the lock of Room 2W 105. She entered a small reception area with an empty receptionist’s desk—a desk that never had been and never would be occupied. At an inner door she waited while a recognition scanner ran a beam over the trabecular network of her iris. Unlike biometric systems that scanned fingerprints or DNA samples, an iris scanner can’t be fooled, especially when combined with a live tissue verification module. Even identical twins—who share duplicate DNA—have unique iris patterns.
When the lock clicked open she entered a windowless room whose whitewashed walls were bare except for an oversized LCD monitor. A conference table and chairs for eight sat in the middle of the space, and at the east end, an oak desk. Seated behind the desk was a man she knew only as Sanctuary. Long ago his true identity had been wiped clean from databases world-wide. He was in his mid-forties, with balding salt-and-pepper hair and eyes the color of graphite.
Nodding a wordless greeting, Sanctuary settled himself behind his desk, thumbing on the two monitors that faced him: one computer was dedicated to classified work and Intelink, the NSA intranet whose highly secure databases gave him access to raw intelligence reports and intercepts, linked to the NSA, DIA, FBI, CIA, and NRO; the second for unclassified. There was also an ultra-secure laptop. Three phone systems sat on the desk as well: one for internal calls; a secure STE encrypted phone for external communications; and a red line that could put him instantly through to Tomilin in the Hart Senate Office Building. No phones connected to the White House—the President had no idea that Sanctuary existed.
Waiting for Sanctuary to speak, Rachel reflected on her two bosses. They couldn’t be more different. Even though he came across as cold, almost robot-like, Sanctuary was a consummate professional, a dedicated patriot to his country, and seemingly unconcerned with anything but national security. He reminded her of her parents, both soldiers killed in service to their country, who had instilled in her a love for America and a reverence for the flag and what it stood for.
But Tomilin…
Thinking about him, she suppressed an internal shudder. Although she’d never caught him ogling her, she had the gut impression that he would like nothing better than to get her into bed. The image of his flame-red hair and the nose stuck on his face like a wedge of cheese flashed through her mind. He was not in any way a good-looking man. Yet he was the toast of DC and a known womanizer. What on earth could any woman find attractive in him? It could only be money. To Rachel, he was the worst kind of hypocrite, wrapping himself in all the propaganda of politics, yet in truth only interested in stuffing his pockets with cash at the expense of the American people.
If this thing was about oil, then Tomilin would find some way to profit from it.
And his friend Charbonnet was on exactly the same page.
Clearing his throat, Sanctuary spoke in a deliberately modulated voice. “So what news does Mr. Tomilin have for me today?”
Rachel smiled, picking up the faint currents of animosity in his tone. There was no love lost between the two men, even though Tomilin was officially Sanctuary’s superior. They rarely spoke to each other. This was the reason Rachel acted as the liaison between the two offices.
In broad strokes she filled him in on the discovery of the icebreaker hulks sunk in formation on the Gakkel Ridge and Tomilin’s concern that the Russians were trying to get a monopoly on the Arctic Ocean oil reserves.
Sanctuary slumped back in his chair and thought about it for a moment. “Okay. I want you to start looking into these icebreakers. Who bought them? Where did they come from? Let’s start from there and start putting the pieces of the puzzle together.”
THIRTEEN
Alexandria
WHEN the truck slammed into them, April yelled at Skarda and Flinders to get out, then shouldered her own door open, flinging herself into open space as the X5 crashed against the grassy embankment. But her timing was thrown off. Bouncing off a hillock of earth, the BMW was rocked by a jarring thud. Her forehead smacked against the side panel and she flew out backwards, hooking her foot inside the door and smacking the back of her skull on the ancient terrace.
For a while she lay crumpled in a heap, half on the marble, half on the grass. Then consciousness slowly seeped into her brain and she snapped to her senses, instantly alert like a wild animal, her brain registering the shadowed shape that was Skarda slumped in the passenger seat, the sharp odor of raw gasoline, and the slow arc of the falling flare.
A split-second later she was charging up the steep hill toward the road.
The flare had almost finished its descent when she lunged out, throwing out her long arm to catch it. It gave out a faint hiss as she snuffed it out in the grass. Out of sight, beyond the crest of the hill, she could hear Flinders’ desperate screams and cries for help. April’s legs pounded. She reached the summit, taking a instant visual snapshot: Flinders with her back on the gravel, kicking and flailing; the muscular Egyptian stooped over her, trying to grab her bicep to haul her to her feet; the battered Peugeot in the background with the man’s two accomplices looking on with grins stamped on their faces.
At the top of the hill she rose to her full height. “Hey. Lose this?”
The man spun around to see April standing there, smiling, casually holding up the burnt-out flare.
His expression turned ugly. He swore and charged at her, raising the knife over his head. Sidestepping him easily, she lowered her shoulder and rammed him in the stomach, then straightened her spine, using his own momentum to send him flying over the stone wall. A satisfying crack came to her ears as his neck broke on the hard ground.
She stormed at the Peugeot, where the two men sat staring with stunned faces. Then the Egyptian on the passenger side slid over into the driver’s seat, twisted the ignition key, and the black car took off in a roostertail of gravel.
April stooped to Flinders. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I think so.”
“Okay. Wait here.”
April pitched down the hill. Skarda was conscious, dragging his tall frame out of the X5’s door. She grabbed him by the armpits and hauled him free.
In the distance they heard the whoop-whoop of police sirens wailing toward them.
___
Two hours later they were at the Misr Station, where Skarda bought three tickets on the Turbini, the express train between Alexandria and Cairo. The police lieutenant who questioned them had been sympathetic to their story of the truck coming out of nowhere, especially when he learned that the dead man was a local criminal with a long list of charges against him, including attempted murder. And Skarda had made sure to push an envelope stuffed with Egyptian pound notes across the desk. In Alexandria the cops expected baksheesh.
In the chilled air conditioning of their first-class compartment, Skarda watched the flat expanse of desert begin to plateau into a series of low terraces stacked upon each other, cut up by wadis and an occasional deep ravine slashed out of the sand by a rainstorm. Across from him April sat with her eyes closed, meditating, her body swaying slightly to the thrumming jostle of the train. Sightseeing was of no use to her—she was using the downtime to recharge her batteries. Next to her, Flinders bent her head over the monitor of her laptop, her eyes fierce with concentration.
Surreptitiously he studied her. He had no doubt about his growing attraction to her.
But he knew he wasn’t ready for romantic involvement. That would come later, when he somehow managed to achieve a private peace. But when that would be, he had no idea.
For a moment he succumbed to the rocking of the train and let his eyes close. Then, opening them again, he watched her in silence.
The train jerked and she glanced up, seeing him staring at her.
She gave him a warm smile, then dropped her face back to the computer screen.
FOURTEEN
Alexandria
KHALID FAHMY sprawled out in a ratty chair and sucked in smoke from an L & M Red, languidly exhaling into the fetid air of the apartment. Usually he smoked cheap shisha tobacco from a hookah, but lately he’d been paying heed to the government warnings about throat cancer, so he’d switched to cigarettes. But the filters made them tasteless, so he broke them off. Settling deeper in the chair, he blew out another cloud of smoke. Now that the dark-haired American woman had killed Hakim, he was at loose ends, bored and unsure what to do. He glanced over at Ahmed, who was idling flipping through the channels of a pirated satellite dish signal.
Idiot.
All Ahmed was supposed to do was stick the other bitch with the needle and then they could have delivered her to the hotel and gotten paid.
But everything had gone wrong. It was Hakim who had taken care of the business arrangements and now they had nothing. No money. No future. Khalid surveyed the peeling paint and black stains on the walls and collapsed further into the cushions, depressed.
A knock sounded at the door. Now what? Khalid dragged himself to his feet, shaking his head as he turned the lock. A tall woman stood in the opening, her blonde hair sticking up in furrows of spikes and her face strangely bloated. An American? Lost, maybe. Khalid wanted no part of her problems. He hated Western women, anyway. With an impatient hand, he started to close the door, but the woman slapped her palm against it and held it open, grinning like she knew something he didn’t.
Ignoring Khalid’s snapping eyes, she leaned inside to spot Ahmed, who hadn’t bothered to turn around at the intrusion. He was still thumbing through the channels, one by one.
The woman’s nose wrinkled at the stench of body odor and cheap cigarette smoke. “You know what I hate worse than failure?” she asked. The grin had tightened to a hard slash. She didn’t look at all happy.
Khalid knew only a few words of English, and these weren’t those. Eyeing her warily, he half turned to Ahmed. Something in her expression told him to run.
The woman whipped out a pistol fitted with a suppressor.
Khalid’s eyes went wide and he took a stumbling step backward.
“Ahmed!” he cried out.
But it was too late. The woman shot him twice and he dropped to the floor just as Ahmed was twisting himself around in time to receive two bullets in the brain.
“Incompetence,” Jaz finished, and walked out the door.
FIFTEEN
Siwa Oasis, Egypt
IT was just before dawn and still cool when April drove the rented Land Rover away from the fumes and bleating horns of Cairo and headed southwest on the El Baharia-Siwa Road into the barren wasteland that was the Western Desert. The road cut through a level sabkha plain, a salt flat dazzling in the sun, packed down with a layer of small, dark pebbles, each glinting with fierce points of light, broken only by the intermittent sight of oil pipelines and wrecks of abandoned cars and trucks. On both sides enormous sand dunes rose up in the distance, some shaped by the winds into cones or pyramids, others with their summits sheared off flat, like mesas. With every hour of full daylight the scorching heat grew in intensity. By noon, the full force of the merciless sun had heated the Land Rover’s interior to the temperature of a blast furnace, even with the air conditioning cranked to the max. Rivulets of sweat trickled down from Skarda’s temples and his shirt stuck to the skin of his back like a damp paper towel. Even April grumped. Secretly she was hoping for a sandstorm to blow up or another car tailing them in the distance, just to relieve the monotony. By the time they reached Marsa Matrouh, with its white sand beaches and aquamarine waters, it was with relief that they stopped for glasses of cooling watermelon juice.
But closer to Siwa the landscape changed dramatically. As they turned south they could see the silver skeletons of abandoned water drills littering the sand, now that the government had banned farmers from individual drilling. Trees and shrubs began to dot the landscape, sure signs of underground water. Rounding a pass, Skarda got his first glimpse of the oasis: a fertile depression sixty feet below sea level, guarded by the Gebel el-Mawta, the Mountain of the Dead, the necropolis where the Romans and the Ptolemies tunneled tombs out of the solid sandstone to bury their dead. Far in the distance, he could make out the bowl of the Siwa depression, hemmed in by limestone cliffs and low mountains, succumbing on its southern edge to the northwestern shore of the Great Sand Sea, the enormous expanse of restless, shifting dunes and burning salt wastes that stretched east to the banks of the Nile and west across North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean.
April braked around another cliff face, and they passed a donkey cart driven by a young boy. Flinders pointed to her right. Squinting his eyes, Skarda could see salt lakes shimmering in the distance like immense silver coins, flanked by tabletop mountains standing like guardian sentinels. This truly was an oasis in the middle of the desert, with dense groves of short, squat palms and date, orange, and olive orchards watered by hundreds of freshwater springs bubbling up from the sandstone bedrock.
A hot wind battered the Land Rover as they neared the small cluster of dun-colored boxes that formed the village of Siwa, hard-baked in the heat, crowned by a crumbling hilltop fortress that looked like it was made out of sand-colored ice cream melting in the sun.
April scanned the area, frowning in irritation. The town itself consisted of a couple of narrow streets thronged with donkeys, carts, and men pedaling bicycles. “So this is where these pillars are
?” Her tone made it clear that she wasn’t too impressed.
In the back seat, Flinders shifted from side to side in ecstasy, taking in the view. “You can’t forget—Siwa was once an important stop on the ancient caravan trade routes that connected the Nile Valley to Libya and the Mediterranean. Alexander the Great spent nine days in the desert searching for this place, trying to reach the Oracle at Amun, because he wanted to be pronounced a god, the son of Zeus.”
“Was he?” Skarda asked.
“Yes. And then he went on to conquer half the known world.”
That seemed to brighten April’s attitude. “My kind of man,” she said.
___
Their plan was to wait until dark to explore the Oracle, when any tourists would be securely settled in their hotels for the night. Which meant some down time to let Flinders brief them on the physical layout of the temple. Their hotel, built from kershef—a mixture of rock salt, straw, and mud—had no electricity, in keeping with the local environmental codes, so Skarda lit beeswax candles while she booted up her laptop with battery power.
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