by Marc Cameron
A small hand with manicured black nails grabbed the rusted hook and gave it an impatient twist. Metal scraped bone and Cooper groaned reflexively, choking on his own blood. His eyes fluttered as he watched the woman stuff the satellite phone in the pocket of her jacket.
That’s right, he thought. Take the phone outside with you. . . .
He wracked his foggy brain, trying to remember how much of the text he’d completed. He’d hit send the moment he’d heard the noise, just before the woman hit him. He hoped it was enough.
The beam of a second flashlight played across the stone floor. A set of black boots clicked into view.
“I have it, my darling,” Valentine Zamora said, broken, distant in Cooper’s ears, as if coming through a long pipe. “Can you believe it? It is actually mine.”
“It means you are rich?” The woman’s voice was whiskeyed and raw, as if she’d been screaming for three hours at a rock concert.
“I am already rich.” Zamora giggled, a high-pitched, almost feminine sound. “No, no, no. This will show the world that your precious Valentine is not a person to shove about like a little child.”
Cooper strained to hear more. Through the gathering fog, and unable to turn his head, he could only see the murderous couple from the waist down. They stood together, arm in arm as if watching a sunset, waiting for him to die.
“It is amazing!” Zamora stomped his foot. “Baba Yaga is mine.”
Baba Yaga.
The words struck Cooper as cruelly as the rusty hook. He’d feared as much, even alluded to it in his text, but the reality of hearing it spoken filled him with overwhelming dread. He fought to stay conscious, suddenly cold beyond anything he’d ever experienced. Years of training barked inside his head, screaming at him to get to his feet and do something.
Baba Yaga was an intelligence black hole, a poisonous soup of Cold War theory and whispered stories of gray-haired Soviet spies.
No longer able to focus, Cooper’s mind drifted back and forth from his mission to thoughts of his family in Virginia. By slow degree the bone-numbing chill melted into waves of enveloping warmth. His breaths grew shallow and further apart. There was nothing he could do, no matter how great the threat. His eyes gave up a single tear as they fluttered shut for the last time.
A crimson ribbon seeped from the wound in the young American’s neck and dripped to the broken stone below, mingling with the blood of countless slaughtered lambs.
Turkmenbasy, Turkmenistan
The Caspian Sea
Two grubby boys in thigh-length wool coats and tattered ski hats carried the wooden crates along the weathered planks and onto the deck of the cargo ship. A stubby vessel, the Pravda was not quite seventy feet long. It was hardly big enough to be called a ship, but Zamora preferred not to think of his precious cargo heading out to the world’s largest inland body of water in a mere boat.
Monagas stood with his thick arms behind his back, shouting savage threats to keep the lazy boys motivated.
Zamora sat at the stern next to the thick-hipped woman on boxes marked as tins of sturgeon caviar. He held a phone to his ear. A sly smile crossed his face, twitching the corners of his pencil-thin mustache. The woman leaned back on both hands, eyes closed, face to the sun.
“Hello, Mike,” Zamora said, speaking louder than usual, as was his habit when he was talking to someone halfway around the world. He kept his voice sickeningly sweet. “How are you?”
“Mr. Valentine,” Mike Olson answered. His breathy Texas drawl was almost giddy. “I’m fine, sir. How are you?” He pronounced Zamora’s name like the lover’s holiday. It was a convenient and easy-to-remember alias.
“Just fine, Mike, just fine,” Zamora said. His English was accented but flowed easily due to his time at American universities. “Listen, I talked about a donation to your program, but I’ve come into a sort of a windfall. I’d like to do something . . . I don’t know . . . more significant in nature.”
“Deanne and I are so grateful to you, sir,” Olson answered. “You’ve already been so generous.” The sound of a children’s choir singing to the soft notes of a piano purred in the background. “And the kids appreciate the support. To date, we’ve heard from over three hundred. They’re flying in from all over the U.S. for the event—from all denominations and cultures. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, a group of Baha’i children from Illinois. Imagine, so many ethnicities and religions, uniting their voices for peace, right here in the Bible belt.”
Baha’i, Zamora thought. His Iranian mother would have a fit at that. “Very nice,” he said, running his fingers like a spider up the woman’s thigh beside him. “I have something very special in mind. One of my colleagues will be in touch shortly.”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Valentine,” Olson gushed. “We could make a real difference here.”
“Yes,” Zamora said, “I do believe we will.” He ended the call.
Giggling loudly, he tromped his feet against the deck of the ship as if he was running in place before finally leaning back beside the thick-hipped woman.
“What is it?” She opened her eyes, blinking against the bright sun. He could just make out the tiny dark hairs that ran along her upper lip. Sometimes he thought she could grow a better mustache than him if she’d wanted to.
“Nothing, really.” The corners of his pencil-thin mustache twitched. “I was just thinking of how I will get our Yemeni friends to blow the buckle off the Bible belt.”
“You’re tickling me, my darling.” The woman put her hand over his, pressing it hard against the inside of her thigh. “You know I’d rather be slapped than tickled.”
“As you wish.” Zamora gave the soft flesh inside her thigh a rough squeeze.
The woman yawned. “In any case, before you can blow up anyone, we have to get your precious cargo past the authorities and all their radiation detectors.”
“We will put Baba Yaga in the normal pipeline, hide her in plain sight, so to speak. As long as the containers aren’t specifically interrogated by sensors we will be fine.” He grinned, pounding a fist repeatedly against his knee as if he couldn’t contain himself. “While we go south, Monagas will continue on to Finland with the loose material. Do you know what they call it?”
She shook her head, causing her black bangs to shimmer in the chilly breeze. “What, my love?”
“MUFP.” He giggled again, putting a hand to his mouth. “Isn’t that a funny word? It reminds me of the sound you make when you are . . . you know . . .”
“MUFP?”
He winked a dark eye. “Missing Unaccounted-For Plutonium.”
December 15
Harborview Hospital
Seattle
Trauma doctor Eileen Clayton was standing beside Birdie, the charge nurse, leaning over the other woman’s desk to show off photos of her new grandbaby, when a heartrending wail curled in from the waiting room. Birdie shivered at the sound, searching for her Crocs under the desk with the toe of her stockinged foot.
“What the hell was that?”
Clayton took off tortoiseshell reading glasses and shoved them in the pocket of her scrubs. She was a tall, African American woman, and her extremely short hair accentuated high cheekbones and the length of her neck. Like Birdie, she wore pink scrubs. Her natural smile fled as another wailing moan rose from the waiting room.
At fifty-one, Clayton had been a doctor for long enough to hear her fair share of pained cries for help, but this one chilled her to the bone. She leaned around the wall that separated the office from the waiting room. An attractive young woman in a stylish brown leather jacket clutched her stomach just outside the registration window. Grisly black mascara blotched both eyes, making her look like a maniacal raccoon, and ran in long lines down a round face the color of bleached bone.
“Get this out of me!” Her voice was a ragged hiss, the torn cry of a damned soul.
Dr. Clayton ran from the reception office to the lobby, followed by Birdie. They caught the girl just be
fore she collapsed.
“Have you taken any drugs, sweetheart?” Birdie.
The girl looked up, squinting as if trying to figure out where she was. “I don’t . . . I mean . . .” She vomited, missing Birdie by inches. “Ooohhh, please let me die. . . .” She threw her head back and howled in pain, voiding the contents of her bowels. She let loose a string of vehement curses, shrieking as if she’d drunk a bottle of acid.
Birdie helped steer the dizzy girl around the mess on the floor, guiding her toward the nearest trauma room. She shot a glance at Clayton. “If her head starts spinning around, I’m leaving her to you.”
With all the screaming, the ER instantly became a buzzing hive of activity. Clayton and Birdie got the girl out of her soiled clothing.
“Note the navel jewelry. We’ll need that out if we do an MRI,” the doc said, touching the gaudy stainless-steel butterfly hovering over the girl’s belly button. “Looks like it may be difficult to remove.”
A male lab tech with a receding hairline struggled to start an IV while a heavyset nurse checked vitals.
Her eyes narrowed in concern. “106.4,” she said, popping the plastic thermometer cover into the trashcan.
“Let’s see if we can get your temp down,” Clayton said before patting the girl’s cheek with a gloved hand. “What’s your name, dear?”
“Taylor Bancroft,” she whispered through cracked lips. Wracked with another spasm, she grabbed the front of Clayton’s scrubs with surprising speed and strength. “It was just supposed to be this once—” Too exhausted to even turn her head, she vomited on her chest. Grimacing, she collapsed back on the bed.
Birdie stripped off the dirty gown and tossed it in a tray for testing.
“What was just once?” Clayton asked, helping the nurse put a damp sheet across Taylor’s chest. The poor thing was burning up.
She motioned for the nurses to go ahead with the IV.
“It was all . . . in condoms,” the girl whimpered between ragged breaths. Tears streamed down her face. “Two thousand bucks to swallow, fly into the country, and poop them out.” Bloodshot eyes begged for understanding.
“Easy money . . .” Clayton sighed.
“I know, right?” The girl nodded, misunderstanding Clayton’s comment as approval. Her body tightened as another wave of pain washed over her. “I turned it all over to the guy . . . but one must have leaked.”
Clayton bit her lip. This girl wasn’t much younger than her own daughter. Her clothes were new and of the latest style. She was probably from a well-to-do family. “Do you know what kind of drug you swallowed, sweetheart?”
“I guessed it was coke, but he didn’t tell me.” She stared up at the ceiling, sniffling between frantic gasps. She beat dimpled fists on the mattress. “I can’t believe it leaked! It was double bagged, one condom inside another. I went straight from the airport to the address like the guy told me to.”
“This guy,” Dr. Clayton said. “Can you call him and see what kind of drug it was?”
Bancroft wiggled her jaw back and forth, looking hollow as if she was going to be sick. “No, I mean . . . I just met him at a club in Helsinki.” She licked her lips as the nausea passed. “He’s Spanish, I think.... There was something wrong with his lip he tried to hide with a beard.”
“Where did you go from the airport?” Clayton prodded, more to keep the girl talking than to gather any information. A blood test would show what drug she’d ingested well before they could contact the smuggler who had put her up to this.
Bancroft swallowed hard, squinting at the pain in her head. “Some warehouse down by the pier. It was a place where they stored a bunch of bank machines—you know, like ATMs.” Her body began to shake with sobs. “He told me it was safe. I mean, I just wanted to get a little extra—”
The girl’s eyes sagged in midsentence and the heart monitor went flat.
ER staff swarmed in with the crash cart, pushing medication and attempting to shock her heart back into rhythm. Nothing worked.
“Note time of death at 6:05 p.m.” Dr. Clayton sighed. Less than fifteen minutes after she’d entered the hospital, Taylor Bancroft was dead. In twenty-six years of practicing medicine, she’d never seen anyone without a gaping wound go from ambulatory to flatline that fast.
“Poor kid,” the charge nurse said, pursing her lips. “Wonder what she was doing in Helsinki?”
“Who knows?” Clayton moved to cover the girl’s face with the sheet, and was startled to find wads of blond hair that had fallen out on the pillow.
The charge nurse leaned over the body helping, her hospital ID dangling from her pink scrub top. A series of black dots traveled up the badge next to it.
“Everyone move away now!” Clayton snapped, snatching the dosimeter badge from her own lab coat.
“Shit!” She took another step back without thinking. This was no reaction to drugs leaking from a swallowed condom. In the short minutes she’d been around Taylor Bancroft, four of the small circles were now darker than their corresponding backgrounds, indicating over twenty-five rads of exposure.
Clayton rushed to the door of the trauma room, eyes frantically scanning the waiting area, where a college-age orderly worked on the mess Taylor Bancroft had made on the floor.
“Jeremy,” she snapped. “Leave it alone!”
The orderly looked up, mop in hand. He wore protective gloves, slippers, and a face mask—unlikely to protect him from the real danger. A blank look crossed his face.
“Leave it be!” Clayton said again, terror edging into her normally calm voice.
An elderly couple and a haggard mother with her small sleeping toddler sat along the far wall of the waiting room. Two fishermen types in wool sweaters and rubber boots occupied the center seats, staring up at the wall-mounted flat screen above the child’s head.
“Everyone outside,” Clayton yelled, summoning all the bravado she could muster. “The ER is closed.”
Taylor Bancroft’s insides had been cooked from radiation poisoning—and every drop of fluid that had escaped her body had turned the ER into a hot zone. If the deadly stuff wasn’t still inside her, then it was floating around somewhere out there—in the hands of someone sick enough to smuggle it into the U.S. inside a college student’s gut.
DIRTY
In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it.
—ERWIN ROMMEL
CHAPTER 1
December 16
1110 Hours
Arlington, Virginia
Jericho Quinn twisted the throttle on his gunmetal-gray BMW R 1200 GS Adventure, feeling the extra horses he needed to keep up with the frenetic thump of D.C. traffic. Six cars ahead, the man he wanted to kill activated his turn signal, then moved a forest-green Ford Taurus into the left lane.
The big Beemer was a leggy bike, aggressive like a mechanical predator from a science-fiction movie. Tall enough to be eye level with passing cars, it flicked easily for what some considered the two-story building of motorcycles.
Even locked-on to his target, Quinn was watchful. Riding on two wheels required constant awareness—as his father constantly chided: Ride like everyone else is on crack and trying to kill you. In truth, though he’d been riding since he was a small boy in Alaska, each time he hit the street awakened an intense hyperawareness, like the first time he’d tracked a wounded brown bear, worked outside the wire in Iraq, or kissed a girl.
Following the Taurus in the heavy afternoon traffic took concentration, but every on-ramp and intersection, every car around him, presented a possible assault. The Brits called them SMIDSY accidents—Sorry, mate, I didn’t see you. There was hardly a summer growing up that Quinn or his brother, Bo, hadn’t been consigned to some sort of cast due to such encounters with absentminded drivers.
And still they rode, because it was worth the risk. When they were younger, he and his kid brother had come to the conclusion that miles spent on the back of a motorcycle were like dog years—somehow worth more than a regular m
ile.
Now Quinn tracked the little Ford like a missile, taking the left off 395 at the Pentagon/Crystal City exit, then the ramp to the Jeff Davis Highway. He stayed well back, leaving three vehicles as a cushion between him and his target, accelerating then tapping his brake in a sort of fluid Slinky dance. The Taurus moved into the right lane. Quinn glanced over his shoulder, then, with a slight lean of this body, took the right lane as well.
He wore a black Transit riding jacket of heavy, microperforated leather and matching pants against the humid chill of a Washington December. The Aerostich suit was waterproof with removable crash armor to guard against any asphalt assaults. Quinn’s boss had seen to it that the Shop, a subunit of DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—added level IIIA body armor for traditional ballistic protection along with a few other modifications like a wafer-thin cooling and heating system to bolster the suit’s amazing versatility. His Kimber ten-millimeter pistol, a small Beretta .22 with a XCaliber suppressor, and a thirteenth-century Japanese killing dagger, affectionately called Yawaraka-Te—or Gentle Hand—were all tucked neatly out of sight beneath the black jacket. A gray Arai helmet hid Quinn’s copper complexion and two-day growth of dark beard.
They’d come from downtown, outside the Capitol on Constitution Avenue, under the Third Street Tunnel and onto 395. Though it was lunchtime, rush hour in D.C. seemed only to ebb slightly during the business day and the low winter sun glinted off a river of traffic. The Taurus looked remarkably like eighty percent of the other sedans on the road and Quinn had to concentrate as he moved from lane to lane to keep from losing track amid the flow.
Knowing who was in the car made the hair bristle on Quinn’s neck. After a year of doing little but sitting back on his haunches and watching, he itched for the opportunity to make a move. Now it looked as though Hartman Drake had given him that chance. People accustomed to a diet of Kobe beef and champagne didn’t suddenly trade it all in for hamburger and tap water. The Speaker of the House of Representatives was certainly used to traveling in more style than the plain vanilla sedan. He had chosen the innocuous Taurus for a reason.
