by Jack Mars
Luke studied Susan’s face. She had aged. The lines in her skin had deepened and become creases. The skin itself was not as firm and buoyant. Somehow, she had kept her adolescent beauty well into middle age, but in six months as President, time had caught up with her.
Luke thought of the youthful, middle-aged Abraham Lincoln becoming President, a man so energetic and physically powerful he was renowned for his parlor trick feats of strength. Four years later, just before he was assassinated, the stress of the Civil War had turned him into a frail and wizened old man.
Susan was still beautiful, but it was different now. She looked almost weathered. He wondered what she thought about it, or if she had even noticed it yet. Then he answered his own question—of course she had noticed it. She was a former supermodel. She probably noticed the smallest changes to her appearance. For the first time, he noticed the dress she was wearing. It was deep blue, very fancy, and clung perfectly to her shape. The neckline was ruffles—there, but understated.
“Hey, nice dress,” he said.
She gestured at it with mock disdain. “This old thing? It’s just something I threw on. You did know we were having a ceremony today, didn’t you?”
Luke nodded. He knew. “It’s amazing,” he said. “The way they put this place back together exactly the way it was before.”
“It’s a little creepy if you ask me,” Susan said. She glanced around at the high-ceilinged room. “I lived at the Naval Observatory for five years. I love that house. I wouldn’t mind living there the rest of my life. This place is going to take some getting used to.”
They lapsed into silence. Luke was here simply to pay his respects. In another minute, he was going to ask her for a car, or preferably a helicopter, to take him out to the Eastern Shore.
“So what do you think?” she said.
“What do I think? About what?”
“About the meeting we just had.”
Luke yawned. He was tired. “I don’t know what to think. Do we have nuclear weapons in Europe? Yes. Are they vulnerable? It sounds like they could be more secure than they are. Beyond that…”
He trailed off.
“Will you go?” she said.
Luke almost laughed. “You don’t need me in Belgium, Susan. Just put an extra security detail at the base there, preferably Americans, and preferably carrying loaded weapons. That should do the trick.”
Susan shook her head. “If it’s a credible threat, we should get to the source of it. Listen, we’ve been playing footsie with the Belgians far too long. There have been too many attacks coming out of Brussels, and I’d like to break those networks. It’s beyond the pale that after the Paris attacks they didn’t put all of Molenbeek on lockdown. Sometimes I wonder whose side they’re on.”
Luke raised his hands. “Susan…”
“Luke,” she said. “I need you to do this. There’s something that didn’t get covered in the meeting. It makes all of this a lot more urgent than you might think. Kurt knows about it, I know about it, but no one else who was there knows.”
“What is it?”
She hesitated. “Luke…”
“Susan, you called me yesterday and had me fly out to Colorado on two hours’ notice. I did as you asked. Now you want me to go to Belgium. You say it’s important, but you don’t want to tell me why. You know my wife has cancer? I only mention that so you know exactly what you’re asking me to do.”
For a second, he thought he was going to tell her more, maybe tell her everything. He and his wife had split up. She was from a wealthy family, but Luke didn’t want any money from her. He just wanted to see his son on a regular basis, and Becca was threatening that. She had been gearing up for a custody battle, but now, suddenly, she had cancer. She was probably going to die. And still she wanted to fight. The whole thing had knocked Luke off his feet. He had no idea what to do or where to turn. He felt completely lost.
“Luke, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you. It’s hard. We’ve been having a lot of problems, and now this.”
She was staring directly into his eyes. “If it helps any, I understand. My parents died when I was young. My husband seems to have checked out of our marriage, and become a recluse. I don’t even blame him. Who would want more of what they’ve been putting him through? But he’s taken my girls with him. I know what it’s like to feel alone—I guess that’s what I’m saying.”
Luke was surprised that she would open up to him like that. It made him realize how much she trusted him, and made him want to help her even more.
“Okay,” Luke said. “Then tell me why this so important.”
“There’s been a data breach at the Department of Energy. No one knows the extent of it yet, whether it was accident or was planned. No one knows anything. A lot of information is just gone, including thousands of legacy nuclear codes. No one can even say whether that matters—would they even still work? It’s going to take some time to get this sorted out, but in the meantime, the last thing we can afford is to lose a nuclear weapon.”
He sat back. He would go. With any luck, he would get over there, knock a couple of heads together, tighten up the security protocols and be back in a couple of days. In his mind’s eye, he saw Gunner in the backyard shooting baskets.
By himself.
“Okay,” Luke said. “I’ll need my team. Ed Newsam, Mark Swann. And I’m down a member. I need an intel officer to replace Trudy Wellington. Somebody good.”
Susan nodded and flashed a smile of gratitude.
“Whatever you need.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
5:15 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time)
The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean
“Are we ready for this, kids?”
The six-seat Learjet screamed north and east across the afternoon sky. The jet was dark blue with the Secret Service seal on the side. Behind it, the sun began to set. Luke gazed out his window to the east. It was already dark ahead of them—it was late fall, and the days were getting shorter. Far below, the ocean was vast, endless, and deep green.
Luke used his typical psych-up lingo, but it was rote. He didn’t feel it. He’d been awake too long. He had too much weighing on him. And he had taken on a job that he probably didn’t need to take.
He and his team used the front four passenger seats as their meeting area. They stowed their luggage, and their gear, in the seats at the back.
In the seat across the aisle from him sat big Ed Newsam, in khaki cargo pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a light jacket. He dropped his sunglasses over his eyes, against the sun streaming in his window. When he was relaxed, as he seemed right now, all of the muscle tension would go out of Ed’s brawny, hyper-athletic body. He was like a flat tire draped across the seat. Ed was weapons and tactics, and Luke had rarely met a man more qualified—Ed himself was about as devastating a weapon as you could ask for.
Across from Luke and to the left, facing him, was Mark Swann. He was tall and thin, with long sandy hair pulled into a ponytail and fancy black-framed rectangular glasses—Calvin Klein. He stretched his long legs out into the aisle. He wore an old pair of faded jeans and a pair of big black Doc Marten combat boots. The boots made Luke smile—the man had never seen a minute of actual combat in his life, not that Luke would want him to. Swann was information systems—a wisecracking former hacker who got busted and joined the government to avoid a long prison sentence.
Swann and Newsam had come back from the Grand Canyon a couple days early—they said it wasn’t the same without Luke and Gunner.
“Babysitting some out-of-date nukes?” Swann said now. “I suppose I’m ready.”
“Worse,” Luke said. “We’re going to babysit some Belgians while they babysit some out-of-date nukes.”
“You really think that’s all there is to this, man?” Ed said.
Luke shook his head. “No. I think it’s deceptive. I think we need to keep our eyes wide open and our heads—”
“On a swivel,” Swann said.
Directly across from Luke sat the newest member of the team—in fact, she wasn’t even really a member yet. This was her first time with them. The Secret Service had borrowed her from the FBI on the recommendation of her superiors. She had barely said a word since they’d boarded the plane. Luke turned his attention to her now.
He had seen her dossier. Her name was Mika Dolan. She had been born in China, but given up for adoption by her parents, who had wanted a boy. She was adopted by a couple of aging hippies who realized late in life that they wanted a child. She grew up first on the coast in far northern California, then in Marin County, just outside San Francisco. She was young—probably too young. Twenty-one years old and already a year out of MIT; 4.0 grade point average, graduated magna cum laude. Tested IQ of 169—genius level, Albert Einstein territory.
Hobbies? She liked to surf. That part blew Luke’s mind a little—she was a tiny little person, with big round glasses, and looked like she had barely been out of the house, never mind out on the water. But apparently, her dad loved to surf the big waves along the Pacific coast, and had his daughter on a board starting at the age of three.
Mika was the science and intel officer, starting her second year at the FBI, and now on loan to Luke. Whatever Mika’s natural gifts were, she had big shoes to fill. Trudy Wellington was a lot of things—emotional, secretive, and quietly dangerous came to mind—but she had developed extensive networks in less than ten years, could access data no one else seemed to have, and was the best scenario spinner that Luke had ever worked with. Trudy was MIT, just like Mika. They had probably given him Mika for that reason.
“Well, Mika?” Luke said. “Would you like to start?”
“Okay,” she said, struggling to maintain eye contact with him. She lifted her tablet computer from the seat beside her. “I’m a little nervous. You guys might not know this, but you’re kind of legendary in my office.”
“Oh yeah?” Ed Newsam said, apparently pleased. “What do they say about us?”
Mika suppressed a smile. “They say you’re a bunch of cowboys. And they told me to try not to get killed while I’m with you.”
Ed shook his head. “They’re teasing you. Not everybody who comes with us gets killed.”
“Only about four in ten,” Swann said. “The rest live, although a high percentage of those are maimed for life. You’ll probably be okay. The Bureau has a pretty good disability package, as I recall. “
Luke smiled, but didn’t join in. Mika was very pretty, and the guys were flirting with her. He would let it go for another minute. It was a good way to break the ice, and maybe set her at ease a bit. This could be a hard-nosed group.
Luke himself felt wistful, not great. He doubted he could join in the banter if he wanted to. He had called Becca before they left. The conversation hadn’t gone well. It had barely gone at all. He had told her he was leaving.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Belgium. Outside Brussels. There’s some concern about nuclear weapons stored on a NATO air base there. A terrorist cell is apparently going to—”
“So you’re just going to leave?” she said.
“I’ll be gone two or three days. I’m just going to inspect the security measures in place, implement some upgrades if necessary, then go into Brussels and question a few people of interest.”
“Torture them?”
“Becca, I don’t—”
“I have a Secret Service agent standing here in my living room, Luke. He just appeared on my doorstep this afternoon. Another one picked Gunner up at school today. Apparently, he walked right into the classroom before the children were even dismissed.”
“Someone tried to kill me last night,” Luke said. “The Secret Service are there for your—”
“Protection, yes, I know. Luke, I have cancer. We were going to break this news to Gunner together. You agreed to that. Now you’re fleeing the country.”
“Someone tried to kill me last night,” Luke said again.
“Yes, I heard that part. Did it surprise you? Par for the course, I’d say. Meanwhile, my life is in actual danger, you made a commitment to me and more importantly to your son, and now you’re running away. Again.”
Luke took a deep breath. “Becca, I want to help you. I want to… do everything I can. But you kicked me out of the house the last time I saw you. And the time before that, come to think of it. When I picked up Gunner last time, I met you in a supermarket parking lot because you didn’t want me to come to the house. And I’m not fleeing the country. I’m going to be gone a few days. I assume you’ll still be alive when I—”
She hung up on that line, and he didn’t blame her. It was a horrible thing to say. But she had gone out of her way to make his life a living hell the past several months. Now she was probably dying. Luke was sorry about that. He felt terrible about it, and about their relationship. He felt like a failure in every way—as a father, as a husband, as a person. But the way she was acting wasn’t helping.
Now, aboard the plane, he shook his head to clear it. He had to compartmentalize. He was having problems, yes. He could recognize that he was in deep, deep trouble. He didn’t know how to help his wife. He did not know how to fix any of this. But he also couldn’t bring it with him to Europe. It would distract him from what he was doing, and then he’d become a danger to himself and the people with him. His focus on the job had to be total.
He glanced out the window. Far away, three F-18 fighter jets streaked across the sky, moving fast. Below Luke, white clouds skidded by in the last of the day’s light. He took a deep breath. He looked at Mika again.
“How do you want to do this?” she said.
He made a two-handed gesture that seemed to draw a circle around the group. “The way we normally do it is you give us everything, every piece of intelligence you have, organized in order of importance, unless you have a compelling reason to go in another direction. Assume that we have no prior knowledge about the case at all—that way everybody ends up on the same page, no matter how much intel they came in with.”
She nodded, then looked back down at her tablet. “I can do that.”
“Let’s start with the issue nearest and dearest to my heart,” Luke said. “Who tried to kill me last night?”
“The man’s name was Azab Mu’ayyad,” Mika said. “Or at least that’s what his current passport says. His papers indicate that he’s a graduate student from Jordan and is thirty-two years old. But the man we believe him to be has at least ten aliases, and passports from four other countries. His name in Arabic means ‘traveler blessed by God,’ and it’s likely this is just another self-applied alias.”
“So who was he, really?” Luke said.
She was conferring with her tablet. She gazed into its glowing face, her thumbs moving in a blur. “NSA believes he was a Tunisian mujahid and hitman by the name of Abu Mossaui, which itself is another alias. He’s probably closer to forty years old than thirty, a soldier for hire, and an enforcer among hardline Sunni groups. He was thought to have been active in Sub-Saharan Africa. He may have been involved in the kidnapping and execution of the Somali warlord Fatah al-Malik. There is data to suggest he was in Tanzania in 2011 at the time a beachfront resort there was bombed, killing thirteen members of an Israeli tour group.”
“What kind of data?” Swann said.
Mika shrugged. “Flight records of a man arriving in Dar es Salaam with a name very similar to one of his known aliases. Surveillance photographs of a man in the old city who might have been him.”
“Photographs that might be him,” Ed Newsam said. “A man who had a similar name. Basically, you’re saying nobody is sure who or what this guy was. He was a ghost, in other words.
”
Mika nodded. “He was a ghost, if you like.”
“I do like. And he tried to kill Luke hours after our boy interviewed Don Morris in prison, and found out about a nuke plot in Europe. So they brought in a hitter—”
She raised a finger. “Careful. Luke has a long history of fighting Islamic terror groups, any number of which might want him eliminated, or want to take revenge on him. The two events could be unrelated.”
“Who owns the pickup truck?” Luke said.
“No one owns it,” she said.
“No one?”
“The original truck was a 2009 Ford F-350. It was totaled in a fatal accident three years ago. The owner, who was driving, was thrown through the windshield when the truck flipped in rainy and snowy conditions on a highway in western Pennsylvania. The truck was taken to a salvage yard, where it was sold for parts in a cash transaction to a mechanic allegedly based in Youngstown, Ohio. The mechanic was operating under an assumed identity. There’s a city-owned vacant lot where his garage is supposed to be. The lot is a brownfield left over from a nineteenth-century leather tannery. The site received federal Superfund money in the late 1980s, but was apparently never mitigated. There has never been an auto mechanic shop located there.”
“The truck is a ghost, too,” Swann said. “The mechanic is a ghost. Even the garage is a ghost.”
“And the Superfund money got ghosted,” Ed said.
“Naturally.”
The two men tapped each other’s hands.
“The truck was rebuilt from junked parts of other trucks,” Mika said. “Who did this is unknown. The license plates were stolen from a car stashed in long-term parking at BWI Airport. The registration is a fake, and the construction company it’s registered to is a fake. The insurance cards are also clever forgeries.”
“And the driver from last night?” Luke said.
Mika shrugged. “He abandoned the truck and escaped. There were no identifiable fingerprints—he must have been wearing gloves.”
“I shot him, probably three times.”
