“Someone looks chipper today,” Guy Hirschbeck said.
Blunt rolled his eyes and gave him a dismissive wave. “Your pop gun isn’t going to work against this tank. I think this week has already proven my point about why we do what we do.”
“We’ll see about that,” Hirschbeck said.
Blunt’s cell phone buzzed with a text message from Preston: “Call me ASAP”. He shoved the phone back in his pocket and turned his attention to Hirschbeck, who called the meeting to order.
“Gentlemen, this meeting should be rather brief. The budget oversight committee has decided that we need to strike only $150 million from the defense committee’s proposed budget,” Hirschbeck began. “We’d prefer that you not trim anything out of the budget from the military. In other words, this needs to be removed from special projects.”
“For goodness sake, Guy, why don’t you just challenge me to a duel?” Blunt said.
Hirschbeck’s eyes narrowed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Did you not see the latest security briefing? A dozen members of Al Hasib were taken out thanks to one of our special projects.”
“I’m not here to influence your decision,” Hirschbeck said as he leaned back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head. “You make your case among your colleagues. I’m just here to let you know what needs to be done.”
Blunt grunted and shook his head. “So, it’s just a coincidence that Project Z here has a budget of $150 million? You’re unbelievable.”
Hirschbeck leaned forward and slapped the table. His eyed widened as he cocked his head to one side. “Maybe it’s a conspiracy.”
“It’s not a conspiracy,” Blunt said as he slammed his fist on the table. “It’s a damn vendetta.”
Hirschbeck stood and collected his papers. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll let you hash this out amongst yourselves and report back to the committee on what you decide. You have until the end of today.”
Blunt watched his nemesis stride across the floor and exit the room. He waited until the door shut before he spoke.
“This is a bunch of bullshit if you ask me,” he said. “I hope every one of you understands the importance of Project Z and what it means to our national security.”
Glenda James, the young senator from New York, held up her hand. “I think I can speak for the rest of this committee when I say that we have no idea what this special project of yours is comprised of. And I dare say that it certainly appears like a conflict of interest for you to be a part of it.”
“With all due respect, there’s a conflict of interest for each and every person in here on every project, if that’s how you want to look at things,” Blunt said. “But not with mine. There is no conflict—only my interest in securing the safety of this great nation.”
She held up her index finger. “It’s simply a project you oversee with no outside oversight. That’s quite a bit of money to have at your discretion.”
“Well, Senator James, just look at the results. No international incidents, yet we have—most recently—eliminated a dozen high-level Al Hasib agents.”
“And what of Karif Fazil?” she snapped. “Was he among the dead?”
“We haven’t been able to confirm that yet, but we do have agents on the ground investigating.”
She crossed her arms and let out a long sigh. “You make it all sound so rosy—yet not a single person here can verify what you’re saying.”
Blunt shrugged. “The secrecy of this program is what makes it so successful.”
“Very well then. We have one other program that could stand to face some trimming, and that’s our missile defense program, which is still in development. Several members on the committee have spoken with me about this already, and I think that’s what this committee’s decision will come down to.”
Blunt stood. “Fine. You know where I stand. Not sure that I need to do any more convincing at this point. You know where to count my vote.” He collected his papers and stuffed them in his briefcase before turning toward the door. He stopped and spun around. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Senator James. The nation’s security is at stake. We’re all a little bit safer this morning because of this project.”
She nodded. “We’ll take that under advisement.”
He walked confidently out of the room and shut the door behind him. He let out a sigh before heading directly toward a bench in the hallway. He sat down and called Preston.
“What’s so urgent?” Blunt asked.
“I just got a call from one of my contacts at Metro PD,” Preston said. “They’re reopening the case of Nancy Goetter in light of some new evidence that has come to light.”
“What new evidence?”
“He wasn’t sure, but this can’t be good.”
Blunt let out a string of expletives, drawing the attention of a woman nearby who glared at him while she covered her young daughter’s ears. “I’ll be in the office soon.”
He hung up, and then his phone buzzed again with a text message from Madeline Meissner.
I just received a report from one of my contacts in Iraq that those supposed Al Hasib agents who were killed were locals guarding the compound. The children, however, were indeed killed by the drone strike. Care to comment?
Blunt stared at the screen on his phone.
Everything he’d worked for was falling apart, and he could do little to stop it.
CHAPTER 17
KARIF FAZIL PACED outside the makeshift infirmary, which reeked of urine and sweat. He conceded that, in the absence of any women, the sterilization techniques in the medical unit were far from ideal. Yet, it wasn’t bad enough for him to break his strict rule forbidding women inside the compound.
He rapped on the door, hoping to get an answer from the two local doctors he paid handsomely to attend to Al Hasib’s needs while staging out of their base near Ranwanduz. Waiting less than two seconds and getting no reply, he pounded on the door again.
Another moment later, the door cracked open. “We stabilized him. Would you like to see?” one of the doctors asked.
Fazil pushed his way past the doctor and stormed into the room, stopping at the edge of the bed. He leaned over Hawk, studying him closely.
Hawk’s eyes were closed, face flushed, body limp—all giving him the appearance of a lifeless man.
“Are you sure he’s not dead?” Fazil asked as he felt for a pulse on Hawk’s neck.
The other doctor stepped back from Hawk’s bed, giving Fazil more room. “No, he’s very much alive—just sedated. It appears he had an epileptic fit of some sort.”
“And you’re certain he’s going to be fine?” Fazil asked.
“I’d stake my life on it.”
Fazil stroked his chin and pondered for a moment the idea of bringing in another doctor for a third opinion, but there wasn’t time. In a worst case scenario, he could subdue the American infidel and carry on with the theatrics after his next planned attack. It’d likely make a big splash in the international media and serve as an additional recruiting tool.
However, Fazil enjoyed the drama in what he did. It explained why he chose to minor in Theater and Performance while earning his Mechanical Engineering degree. He won the lead role of Tevye in Berkeley’s production of Fiddler on the Roof and soaked up the adulation of his progressive thinking classmates who hailed his ability to ignore several millennia of Muslim-Jewish avarice and embrace his part. But that was Fazil’s best performance—convincing everyone who knew him that he didn’t care about such things and was a modern man devoid of such prejudices. The fact was he hated every minute of it as he paraded himself around on stage as a member of a group of people he hated more than anything.
For Fazil, the world was indeed his stage, and he wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to deliver a stroke of genius that had fallen to him by the way of sheer luck. If he were given the opportunity to script how he would inspire the worthy Muslims to join his cause, he was convinced he
wouldn’t have been able to conjure up a better idea—literally cut off the head of an American spy and the son of a world-renowned weapons tycoon, cutting off the heads of one of the American military branches in a more figurative sense. It’s the only way it could be done. Any other way would seem novice and might as well not be done at all.
But Fazil wasn’t one to let opportunity slip through his fingers—he never had before, and he especially wasn’t going to now.
He paced around the room once more before coming to a stop in front of the doctor in charge.
“Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”
The doctor nodded.
“How much longer before he wakes up?”
“Twenty minutes, a half hour at the most.”
A grin spread across Fazil’s face. “Excellent.” He turned toward one of the lieutenants flanking him. “Tell the camera crew that we need to be ready to broadcast within the hour, and tell Samil to get ready as well.” He winked at the man. “And make sure his sword is extra sharp.”
CHAPTER 18
ALEX WENT BACK TO HER OFFICE and checked for any messages from Hawk. Nothing. She hadn’t seen any calls come through on her encrypted cell phone from him, but she considered the possibility that he was in a difficult position and needed to contact her another way. One of the secure lines into the building was the only other way aside from email, and he’d been dark far longer than she felt comfortable with.
It had been nearly forty-eight hours since she last heard from him, but she tried not to let herself worry. With the lack of chatter coming out of Iraq, she figured he must’ve been okay and survived the drone strike, if that’s where he was. If Al Hasib broadcasted the images of dead children for propaganda, they certainly wouldn’t miss a chance to show an image of a dead American spy killed by an American drone—if anything, to mock them. No matter how much she told herself that everything must be okay, she found the silence deafening.
She picked up her phone and called Mallory Kauffman at the CIA.
“Did you find him?” Mallory asked.
“A lot of good it did me,” Alex answered.
“What happened?”
Alex sighed. “I uncovered a fishing expedition—probably some vendetta against Blunt. They needed someone to spy on Blunt and turn him in.”
“Don’t they realize he’s doing this under the auspices of the federal government? There’s nothing illegal about his black ops program.”
“Apparently, someone thinks he has too much power or doesn’t like the way he’s doing things.”
“Well, from what I gather, the program was supposed to reduce drone strikes.”
“Reduce them, not eliminate them,” Alex clarified. “Though Blunt was warned by one of our operatives not to use a drone against Al Hasib’s hideout in the Iraqi mountains—a directive he ignored.”
“It’s his prerogative.”
“That’s why we have operatives like the one I work with. He’s a trained assassin who can either slip in and infiltrate their ranks or take out key leaders with sniper shots. Whatever works.”
“It might be getting results, but not the kind of results someone more powerful in Washington wants. All it takes is a fickle leader with a burr in his saddle.”
“I hate this town,” Alex said as she let out a long sigh. “There’s a reason why nothing ever gets done around here. Too many insecure men with inflated egos.”
“It’s like high school all over again.”
Alex chuckled. “Don’t remind me. Those were four years I’d prefer to strike from my memory.”
“Too many guy problems?”
“Among other things.” Alex paused and tried to direct the conversation back to the original reason she called. “Look, I need to know more about Joel Cochran. If someone is trying to take down Firestorm, I need to know who it is and let Blunt know so we can stop them.”
“Fine. Just give me a second.”
Alex listened to Mallory clicking away on her keyboard, interspersed with several confused sounds. “Is everything all right?” she finally asked.
“That’s strange,” Mallory said. “I can’t find anything on Joel Cochran.”
“What do you mean you can’t find anything?”
“I mean, he’s gone—wiped out of the system. It’s like he never existed.”
“How does that happen?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen records get classified all of a sudden, sometimes while I’m looking at them. But I’ve never seen somebody vanish like this.”
“I’m guessing you’ve got no idea who could pull of something like this.”
Mallory chuckled. “Well, yeah. The head of the CIA or the President.”
Alex listened as her friend pounded away on her keyboard. “Aren’t there any breadcrumbs anywhere in the server?”
“I swear, this is starting to make me think I imagined the entire Joel Cochran file.”
“But you didn’t—did you?”
“No! Of course, I didn’t. I know what I saw. I gave you his address, right? It was the same guy who attacked you, right?”
“Yeah, but he’s just—gone? I wonder why.”
“I wonder who,” Mallory said. “There aren’t that many people who could hack the CIA’s server and make this file disappear.”
“Nobody internally could do it?”
“Hypothetically, you could. But you’d have to have access to the CIA’s servers. And it’s not like it’s just in one location. The CIA mirrors its files to three locations in case of a disaster.”
Alex tapped her pencil on her desk for a moment in thought before speaking. “So, what you’re saying is that his file would have to be deleted on site in all three of those locations?”
“Exactly. Whoever this is, isn’t playing around.”
“Oh, great. This is the last thing I need.”
“Good thing you’re a spy, right?”
Alex sighed. “Right now, I’m not much more than a handler for some black ops program that apparently someone with a ton of power doesn’t want me involved with.”
“But you can figure this out. Just remember your training.”
“With your help, maybe.”
“Alex, I don’t know if I can help you much any more after seeing this. If someone starts poking around and finds out that I was the one who accessed these files, I might get called onto the carpet about it. And that’s the last thing either of us want.”
“You covered your tracks, right?”
“Don’t worry about me. I never implicate myself when going off book. They’ll never be able to trace this back to me.”
“Good.”
“But if they were—” Mallory let her words hang for a moment.
“So, what you’re saying is I’m on my own then, right?”
“I might be able to help you in the future. But for now, I need to cool it. Too much activity could draw unnecessary attention to myself.”
“Okay. Just let me know if you hear anything. I need to get this sorted out, but I’ll do it on my own.”
Alex hung up and started to pace around her small office space. She put her hands on her head and let out an exasperated breath.
She wanted to stay at the office and wait for a possible call from Hawk. But she had bigger problems to handle, like the very existence of Firestorm. She grabbed her keys and exited the building.
Alex had to know who Joel Cochran really was, and there was only one way to find out.
***
A HALF HOUR LATER, Alex knocked on the door of Joel Cochran’s apartment at the end of the hallway and waited. After several moments, she rapped again on the door. Still nothing.
She looked behind her and knelt down to see if there was any light coming from the apartment. It was all dark. Again, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one saw her before picking the lock. Following a few seconds of cajoling, it clicked open. Alex slowly turned the door and walked inside.
“Hello?” she called
. “Joel, are you here?”
She waited a second before she turned the lights on—and gasped.
The room was completely bare.
She rushed outside and checked the number on the door. Fishing her phone out of her pocket, she searched for the text message Mallory had sent with all of Joel Cochran’s information. She double-checked the address in the message with the number tacked to the door. It was the same.
Mouth agape, she dialed Mallory’s number. She scurried through the apartment, turning on every light in search of some sign that someone hurriedly moved out. If there was a clue, she didn’t see it.
Come on, Mallory. Pick up.
“Hi, you’ve reached Mallory. I can’t come to the phone right now. You know what to do at the beep.” Beep.
Alex hung up and dialed again. This time the call went straight to voicemail.
She shoved the phone in her pocket and headed for the door when she was met by a gruff elderly gentleman.
“Excuse me, Miss, but how did you get in here?” the man asked.
“I—I was in here earlier this evening, and I thought I’d dropped an earring here,” she said as she fiddled with her ear.
“That’s impossible—unless you broke in earlier this evening.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody has rented this apartment in over two years.”
“It’s been vacant that long? In this housing market?”
He nodded. “So, you mind telling me the truth this time? What are you doing in here?”
“I already told you the truth, Mister.”
“I’m afraid that’s about as far from the truth as you could possibly get, Miss Duncan.”
Alex glanced at the man and decided to make a run for it. And she almost made it. But he firmly grabbed the back collar of her shirt, whipping her head back as her body lurched forward.
The man slammed her head into the wall and watched her body crumple to the floor.
CHAPTER 19
DURING ALL THE COMMOTION, Hawk figured he could sneak a peek as he feigned unconsciousness during his fit. Fortunately, he’d seen enough before one of the doctors had jammed a needle into his arm and knocked him out.
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