The Crimson Code

by Rachel Lee

  "Call my cell when you've finalized your plans," Lawton said. "I want to be there with the takedown team."

  "I will call you with the plans," Renate said. "But you need to stay with our people, on ready alert."

  "I don't like it," Lawton said.

  "You don't have to," she replied. "It's as you told Mr. Ahsami. I'm the boss. You're the help."

  28

  Prague, Czech Republic

  Lawton didn't like the arrangement at all. He had no team to lead, and no way to monitor the Czech police. In truth, he was simply sitting in a hotel room, waiting for the telephone to ring. Renate was on her own, working with a team of armed Arabs who might well be the very terrorists they were looking for.

  He understood her reasoning. It was even more dangerous for Ahmed Ahsami to believe that he and Renate were here in Prague without any backup. So long as he was here with a nonexistent operations unit, ready to back her up, Ahsami had to respect the possibility that Lawton could intervene if need be. And given the Arab attitude toward women, Renate would indeed be safer with them than Lawton would. At least he hoped so. On very rare occasions, sexism had its advantages. But that didn't mean he had to like it.

  The first thing he'd done upon returning to the hotel room was to call Rome and ask for a check on Ahmed Ahsami. Jefe had called him back within a half hour, transmitting a brief biography and a photo. Yes, the man Lawton and Renate had met at the bank was indeed Ahmed Ahsami. Yes, he was a minor Saudi prince and a senior official in the Saudi oil ministry. But one fact bothered him. Ahsami's nephew, Yawi Hassan, had been killed a few weeks ago in Vienna, part of the terrorist cell that the combined U.S.-EU operation had taken down. Somehow Ahsami was connected to Black Christmas. And Lawton intended to find out how.

  He'd ordered dinner from room service—roasted veal and vegetables in a peppery Bordelaise sauce—but he was too nervous to eat it. The intense bite of the sauce had set his stomach alight with the very first mouthful. So the food sat on the tray, growing cold, as he paced the hotel room, waiting for his cell phone to ring.

  When it did, he nearly knocked it off the table in his rush to grab it. "Renate?"

  "I'm fine," she said, obviously picking up on his anxiety. "They've reconnoitered the target, and we're ready to go. Is everything set there?"

  "Yes," he said. "Ahmed Ahsami is who he says he is. But there's a catch."

  "What's that?" she asked.

  "His nephew was in the Black Christmas cell that was taken down in Vienna last month. And if his nephew was involved in Black Christmas…"

  He didn't have to finish the sentence.

  "We can discuss that later," she said. "We're moving out now."

  "Be careful, Renate."

  She paused for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was different. Muted. Sincere in a way he had rarely heard. "Thank you."

  * * *

  Renate was dressed in a burka. This had been, she realized, another reason why Ahmed had brought her along. Veiled, save for her eyes, her blond hair and Western clothing concealed under the flowing black robes, she would attract no attention as she moved with Ahmed's men.

  As a show of trust, Ahmed had given her an Uzi machine pistol with a collapsing stock. It, too, vanished beneath her robes. His four men were similarly armed, and Renate could tell they were well trained. There was a coldness in their eyes and an efficiency in their movements that could only be born of experience. They reminded her of Niko and the other Office 119 operations men she had met. Men who were accustomed to violence, up close and personal. Men who had mastered their fear more than once and knew they would master it again. Killers.

  But she, too, was a killer. She didn't like it, and she doubted she would ever face it with the cold, ruthless, mechanical efficiency that these men showed. Still, she had killed a man in Idaho and another in Rome. She had done it face-to-face. She had seen the surprise in their eyes, the shock and pain, and the emptiness as life left them. The first time had sickened her. But in Rome, she had felt only anger.

  Was that how it was? Was that all that divided so-called civilized people from terrorists, murderers and savages? Simply having done it…the act of taking a human life? Had she become no different than the people she hunted?

  This was no time for self-analysis, she knew. And yet, something within her screamed out for justification, for a reason to feel she fought with the angels and not alongside the devil himself. Since Black Christmas, she had been on a mission of vengeance. She had tried to tell herself that she was simply doing her job, working to bring the perpetrators to justice. But she knew better. She had known better all along.

  Now she was going into battle alongside men who were very likely part of the same organization she was supposed to be fighting against. Ahsami's nephew had been in the Vienna cell. Had that cell been the one that bombed a church in Baden-Baden? She had stepped into a shadowy maze, where no one was what they seemed. In truth, the only person left that she truly trusted was Lawton Caine. And what had he said, just before they hung up?

  Be careful.

  She would be careful. Not for herself. For him.

  "We're here," Ahsami said quietly. "It's the next apartment building."

  "Yes," she said. "I see."

  "Stay back, with me."

  "Ahmed…"

  "I have no doubt of your capabilities," he said. "Your eyes frighten me, and I do not frighten easily. You would kill in an instant, just like my men. But they have worked together for months. Each knows how the others will react, whatever should happen. You don't know them, nor they you. Let them do what they must, Renate. Let not your cold eyes grow colder."

  "Let's get on with it," she said. "I will stay back with you, but I'm going to be in the room. And I want them alive. We need to question them. Dead bodies can't talk."

  "I understand," he said. He lifted a hand to his face, as if he were brushing away a fly. In fact, he was lifting a wrist microphone to his mouth. "Go."

  The men were in motion almost before the word was finished. They moved swiftly, silently, a single organism slipping through the darkened hallway, up the stairs, then coalescing around a door. Silent hand signals and brief nods were their only communication as stun grenades were readied. One of the men kicked the flimsy door open, and the grenades flew in. The organism moved in behind them, no longer silent, words barked out rapid-fire in Arabic.

  Less than a minute later, it was over.

  "Clear," Ahmed said. "No one is there."

  "Then we search the place," Renate said, stepping forward. "And nobody takes anything out unless I see it first. Agreed?"

  "Agreed," he said.

  The apartment was small and cramped. Renate went first to the kitchen, holding a hand over the stove burners, then to the oven door, then to the electric coffeepot on the counter. All cold. She opened the refrigerator and saw only a single wedge of goat cheese, carefully wrapped in plastic, and an unopened bottle of milk.

  "No one had dinner here tonight," she said. "No sign of breakfast or lunch. He probably left yesterday."

  "Yes," one of Ahmed's men said. He seemed to be the leader of the team and had obviously undergone the same training she had. "He has left for some time now."

  "He's already left for the next operation," Renate said. "We need to know where he went. I want every scrap of paper. Every photograph."

  Ahmed repeated her instructions in Arabic, and the men set to work. Kasmir Al-Khalil was a careful man. A framed diploma on his wall indicated an engineering degree. The apartment was meticulously clean.

  Renate tried to build a portrait of the man who lived here, the man who had loosed ricin on the Prague subway. He would be precise in every detail. He would keep careful notes. The question was, would he keep those notes after an operation was concluded? There was a blank space on the desk where a laptop had obviously been, cords to the printer and modem clipped precisely in spring clamps on the back of the desk. Had all of his notes gone with the computer?
/>   Probably not, Renate reasoned. A small filing cabinet beside the desk was packed with papers, carefully indexed. Bills that he had paid, with printouts of the electronic transactions that had paid them. Tax records, to the last receipt. No, this was not a man who would trust his life to a computer file that might be wiped out by a single power surge. The evidence was here, in this apartment, somewhere.

  Ahmed's men were rifling through the bedroom and bathroom, and she could see they were doing a thorough job of it. Here in the front room, apart from the desk and filing cabinet, there were only a faded sofa and a stained dinette table with a single chair. She made quick work of the sofa, finding nothing. She went through his files, page by page, knowing all the while that he would not have been so foolish as to keep records of his operations in so obvious a place.

  She returned to the kitchen. The records would be here. She opened the cupboard doors and found only a few mismatched dishes. They had probably come with the apartment, along with the sofa and table. The pots beneath the counter were clean and neatly stacked, largest to smallest, all the handles pointing to the left. Precision.

  The knives and silverware in the drawers were set out with equal precision, stacked neatly, with no wasted space. Everything gave Renate a greater sense of the man who lived here. His operational notes would be stored in the same way. Stacked neatly, with no wasted space. They would not be exposed to cooking grease or food spills. That ruled out the stove, ventilation hood and the space beneath the counters.

  Somewhere clean. Somewhere that he could get to them easily. Somewhere that no one else would think to look. Somewhere safe. Inviolate. Almost hermetically sealed.

  She opened the freezer. Four neat stacks of frozen dinners. Nothing else. Nothing else, and yet…on one of the sixteen frozen dinners, just one, a corner of the box was raised. It was out of place. And she knew it was what she was looking for.

  She pulled the boxes from the freezer and set them on the counter. The flaps at the ends of the boxes were still glued closed, or had been glued again. Most likely it was the latter. She tore one open.

  A sheaf of papers, carefully wrapped in plastic. Condensation on the outside of the plastic obscured the papers for a moment, but when she tore the plastic away, her heart slammed in her chest.

  Plans for the church in Baden-Baden.

  Kasmir Al-Khalil had murdered her parents.

  Washington, D.C.

  Kevin Willis and Miriam, plus three other investigators, rapidly sorted through all the papers Katherine Dixon had delivered. She had brought an astonishing number of boxes. In fact, Miriam concluded, she must have been gathering them for a long time, at least since her brother's death.

  With every passing minute it became evident that a team of investigators and lawyers, given a few months, would be able to nail Jonathan Morgan to the wall on any number of illegalities.

  But they didn't have months. They might only have days. Or, worse, hours. Kevin himself was looking increasingly disturbed, and every ten minutes or so he would look up from the papers he was going through to remind everyone that they didn't need an airtight case; all they needed was enough to get into the West Wing and go after Bentley.

  "We can build the case later, people. Right now I need a smoking gun on Bentley, and only Bentley."

  They all knew it. The reminders were merely Kevin's way of tamping down his growing anxiety.

  "Hey, Kevin," somebody called from the doorway. "You need to see this. POTUS is making a live speech."

  Kevin's gaze met Miriam's instantly. She saw the dart of fear in his and felt it herself as her heart slammed.

  Kevin stood up. "Keep looking, people. And hurry. Miriam, come with me."

  Two doors down, in a break room, Harrison Rice's face filled a thirty-six-inch television screen. Miriam felt a jolt of shock as she looked at him; he must have aged a decade in the weeks since Black Christmas.

  "…with great difficulty and much prayer," he was saying. "After the terrible events of Black Christmas, we and the other civilized nations of this planet believed we could treat these perpetrators as criminals, hunting them down wherever they hid. I'm sure you all recall the successful raid in Vienna a short time ago. We all hoped that would be merely the beginning of our roundup of the worst terrorist force this world has ever seen."

  He lifted his head, looking directly into the camera. His face was deeply lined with sorrow—and something else. Fear? Miriam wondered. Good God, he looked horrified.

  "Then," he said heavily, the smallest crack in his voice, "we saw the terrible, terrible ricin attack in Prague. My heart, and I'm sure the hearts of all Americans, goes out to the victims and their families. As you know, we have sent all the medical aid we can. We have made every humanitarian effort we can after all these strikes.

  "But, my fellow Americans, I have reached the conclusion that that is not enough. We are no longer safe anywhere in this world, not in our churches, not in our subways, not in our offices, or even the sanctity of our homes. I can no longer call this terrorism. I call this war.

  "As a result, I am officially asking Congress to declare war on all terrorists worldwide. I am not talking about seek-and-arrest missions anymore. I am talking about real war. We will use every technology, every weapon, at our disposal, bar none, to erase these vermin from the planet. What happened on Black Christmas is not going to happen again. What happened in Prague is not going to happen in this country. Not on my watch. We will declare war, and then we will unleash our military to take any and all actions it deems necessary to protect our shores.

  "Thank you and God bless America."

  A shudder went through Miriam. "Oh my God."

  Kevin looked at her. "He's stalling."

  "Stalling?"

  "Asking Congress to declare war. He's buying a little time."

  She shook her head. "It's not going to be much, Kevin. Congress will meet tonight, if necessary, to pass the resolution."

  "I know." His fists clenched. "There's one thing we haven't discussed, Miriam."

  "What's that?"

  "There's no precedent for getting a warrant to get into the West Wing or White House. I don't think we can do it. And I don't think Bentley's going to come out of there until this is over."

  She drew a long shaky breath. "We've got to do something! You heard what he said. Any weapons. Any means."

  "I know. I know. Once he has the resolution past Congress, there's going to be no stopping it. Those nukes will be unleashed."

  Just then a reporter came on screen. "We're trying to find a member of Congress to comment on the president's speech, Larry," he was saying. "But they all seem to want to reserve their comments for later. It's my understanding that they're going to suspend all other business to vote on this declaration of war immediately."

  Miriam tuned him out. "I've got it," she said suddenly.

  "What?"

  "Senator Grant Lawrence. He still owes me a favor, and I'm going to call it in right now."

  Without another word, she turned on her heel and strode to her office.

  29

  Saint-Arnans-la-Bastide, France

  Jules Soult watched the American president's speech with a feeling of deep satisfaction. The threat was now on the table. He had no doubt that, when combined with the terrorist attacks, the actions America was about to take would be seen as destabilizing, as a major threat. Especially since he and his men would make the connection obvious.

  Now the people who were still quibbling about the European Constitution because they feared loss of primacy, or because they were xenophobic, would stop quibbling. Instead, the demand would grow for a stronger union, one that could stand militarily against the U.S. and all other dangers, including the Muslim Jihadists. And France, with its nuclear capability, would be seen as the country that should take the lead.

  In fact, now that the president had made his threat, Soult's own people would start the outcry. And as France grew closer to preeminence, Soult would b
ecome more and more the hero, because his men were about to put down the street violence.

  But not just yet. He went to open the safe once again, and from it he took the leather-wrapped ruby pyramid. Few understood its powers, but Soult did. And he was about to go to Strasbourg to make himself a hero.

  When he was done, none would doubt the divine right of Jules Soult to run the European Union.

  Prague, Czech Republic

  Renate and Ahmed Ahsami returned to the hotel and joined Lawton in his room.

  "Ahmed is going to help us decipher these papers that were found," Renate told Lawton. She tossed him the plastic-wrapped packet she had found, then tugged the burka over her head, revealing her jeans, jacket and bulletproof vest. "His men are fanning out in the area around Khalil's apartment to see if they can learn anything about his activities."

  "Good, good," Lawton said. Right now he was feeling like an utter fraud as Ahsami's eyes swept the room, apparently noting the absence of the kind of equipment one would expect to find in a command post. "The local authorities are backing off for now."

  Renate nodded in answer to his lie. "Good. The last thing we need is them moving in right now."

  Something in Ahsami relaxed, and he moved around the room, switching on all the lights. The day outside was turning grayer by the minute, and the room was darkening. He looked different in his black Western clothes, Lawton noted. More catlike. More dangerous. When he tossed his jacket over the foot of the bed, his black turtleneck outlined the body armor beneath.

  "What I want to know," Ahsami said, "is how these people are always one step ahead."

  "Except in Vienna," Lawton remarked.

  Ahmed looked at him, dark eyes burning. "Someone was ahead of us. When I sent my team in to take out the cell there, they were attacked, too. My nephew died, my friends died, and they were called terrorists, too."

  Lawton's eyes widened at this revelation, and he looked at Renate. Her look left no doubt. She believed Ahmed. And Lawton did, too.