“The Caldwell I know’d suck blood from a bat,” Elena said.
After a long moment, Jameson said, “Maybe he’s the guy you ought to waste.”
“He can’t die. He reanimates himself every night in his coffin.”
“What about the terrorists?” Jamie asked. “Do you have a plan for stopping them?”
“Sure. Hunt them down and kill them.”
“Some plan.”
“Right now it’s the only plan,” Elena said.
“Caldwell doesn’t even care about terrorist attacks on U.S. soil?” Jamie asked.
“Caldwell can’t afford to care,” Elena said. “If he looks into these terrorist groups too deeply, he’ll find Shaiq’s checkbook.”
“What about the nuclear industry?” Jamie asked. “They won’t help?”
“They’re corporations, and like someone once said, corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. Therefore, they do what they like.”
“The nuclear power industry doesn’t even care about attacks on their own power plants?” Jamie asked.
“It costs them too much money to protect those sites, so why should they care?” Elena asked. “Anyway, if a nuclear site goes up in flames, the company that owns it doesn’t pay for it. They just declare bankruptcy, and the principals go onto their next money-making scheme. The taxpayers get stuck with the bill.”
“That’s cold,” Jamie said.
“It’ll get even colder for you if Caldwell’s bloodhounds catch us,” Elena said, moving in close, staring at him intently. “So you can’t be seen helping us. You need deniability.”
“No way you’re doing this without me.”
“Cross that line, there’s no going back.”
“I’m never going back. I’m not letting you get away again.”
“We’re offering you plausible deniability. You can say we held a gun to your head. Even if you help us, you can still walk away.”
“Never happen.”
“You don’t know me. If you did, you wouldn’t even like me. I don’t like me much myself.”
“But I do like you. I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you.”
“You don’t know what I do. You don’t live in my world. You’re just a tourist.”
“I’m a tourist who’s not going away.”
“But these guys we’re going up against, they’re no ordinary psychopaths. They hate life and would just as soon be dead. They see themselves as half-dead already.”
“So let’s finish the job for them.”
With the towel still wrapped around her head, Elena roughly dried her hair. Dropping the towel on the bed, she shook her hair loose. All the time she kept her eyes focused on Jameson’s. Placing her hands around the back of his neck, she pressed her hips tightly against his and kissed him.
“All this talk about death and destruction is getting you hot,” she said, releasing him from the kiss.
Still staring hard into Jamie’s eyes, she finished drying her body with the covering towel and dropped it on the bed.
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“Too long.”
Again, Elena put her hands around his head and pulled his lips onto hers, her tongue probing his mouth, circling his teeth and lips, darting in and out, around and around. One hand dexterously untied his black belt and reached beneath his karate gi. He groaned, and his body sagged.
“‘The wind in the air, the sea on the rock,’” she said softly.
“‘And the way of a man with a maid,’” he whispered hoarsely, finishing the quote.
Pulling off his gi, Elena pushed him onto the bed, kissing him again long and hard.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” Elena said, her words hoarse. “I’ll never leave you again.”
Lazily, languorously she worked her way down his chest and stomach with her lips and tongue, assiduously exploring his navel, then continuing down his abdomen.
“Anything you want,” she said, pausing to look up. “I don’t care what. I will do anything for you … to you.”
All the while, her wide, expressionless, unblinking eyes remained locked on his—eyes empty as the void, unreadable as God, fathomless as the abyss.
3
“What’s life worth without a little violence and terror?”
—Adara Nasira
Jules sat in Jameson’s living room with Adara and Rashid. They were staring wordlessly into the fireplace’s blazing maw.
“Elena and Jamie have known each other a long time?” Adara finally asked, breaking the silence.
“Ten years, at least,” Jules said. “She was with the CIA’s bin Laden Unit on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and Jamie, who was a Marine Corps captain, was assigned to assist her. She also ran some of the Agency’s assassination ops in that region and was responsible for eliminating some very important al Qaeda leaders. In return, Osama ordered her eliminated, so she and Jamie saw some very hairy shit. They did capture her in the end. She was held hostage in the Pakistani desert country for five weeks. Imprisoned in a scorchingly hot spider hole, overrun with rats, scorpions, and tarantulas, abused day and night in every conceivable way, she still never gave them a single name or location. Jamie led the raid that got her out. The doctors said another week in that hole would have killed her.”
“Jamie did all that?” Adara asked.
“And took four bullets in the shoulders and legs doing it,” Jules said.
“How did he go from black ops to earning cybersecurity billions?” Rashid asked.
“By the end of his second tour,” Jules said, “he’d burned out on the war—felt the whole thing was a hopeless waste. He resigned his commission and came home. But he didn’t return empty-handed. He and Elena had worked closely with some cyberanalysts in Afghanistan, and he’d learned a lot about hacking encryption systems. He had an intuitive understanding of how to design unbreachable security systems—and then how to hack them. Once he was home, Elena hooked him up with some private contractors, and after he learned the business end of the security industry, it was just a skip and a jump to setting up his own firm and developing his own new, improved security programs. His systems were so revolutionary they changed cybersecurity forever. They’re the best, most bulletproof, most sophisticated made. He peddles them to everyone, particularly foreign intelligence services.”
“And after Elena returned to D.C., they began seeing one another again?” Adara asked.
“For four or five years,” Jules said. “In many respects, they were a good match, but then one day Elena stumbled across an ISIS/al Qaeda/TTP consortium, bankrolled with Saudi money and run by Pakistan’s ISI. She believed nukes were involved, and she completely dedicated herself to it, 24/7. She also suspected that the opposition had a mole in the Agency and that she was being monitored and followed. She feared something horrible was about to happen. She couldn’t tell Jamie about her work—it was completely classified—and she was paranoid as hell about it. She especially feared he’d get hurt if they continued to see each other. She’d been abducted in Pakistan and knew what it was like. So she stopped seeing him. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell him why. She couldn’t even give him a plausible lie. He knew her too well—better than almost anyone. It was as if he was her secret sharer, her alter ego, her second self.”
“And he was smart,” Rashid said.
“Infuriatingly smart,” Jules said. “He’d have recognized the deception in a nanosec.”
“How many people know they were seeing each other?” Adara asked.
“Only me,” Jules said. “They’re both almost pathologically closemouthed, and since they were in the same business, they did not publicize personal relationships. When they broke up, they did so in secret and in silence.”
“‘The course of true love never did run smooth,’” Adara said.
“You just wrote my epitaph,” Jules said. “In their case, however, the breakup was hardly poetic. They’d fallen in love, but suddenl
y Elena was trapped in a world so lethal, love could not exist. She was up against people willing to burn, rape, torture, and kill.”
“And nuke the earth,” Adara said.
“Correct,” Jules said.
“But now she and Jamie are back,” Rashid said.
“So it seems,” Jules said.
“And we just happened to need him,” Adara said.
“That, too,” Jules conceded.
“You seem to know her pretty well,” Rashid said. It was a statement, not a question.
“I’ve known her a long time.”
“How long?” Adara asked.
“Pretty much forever,” Jules said.
* * *
Forever might have been an exaggeration, but Jules had known Elena since the seventh grade—long before Elena became a CIA superstar. In fact, she’d been the child of crime—the one-quarter-Mexican daughter of a Southwest Texas meth manufacturer.
Meth’s essential ingredient is ephedrine, which her father purchased in bulk from illegal Mexican dealers and trucked north over eighteen hundred miles of porous desert border country. Three times a year, Elena’s father would drive Elena down to Mexico to get the “eph.” They took a camping trailer with them, which they used to haul a ton or more of the ephedrine back over the border. Her father would then spend the next four months in the southwest desert country, camped out next to abandoned shacks, in which he cooked meth for his brutal consortium of Hells Angels distributors.
Elena was a skinny kid with her father’s dark hair and dark eyes. She also possessed an affinity for violence that sometimes shocked her teachers, even her father. Not that she was angry or mean. For the most part, she was amazingly even-tempered, never resorting to force unless seriously provoked. But when assaulted, she responded with overwhelming ferocity.
Born with a vertiginously high IQ, she was surprisingly disciplined and was one of the school’s most gifted students. The teachers liked her and encouraged her. They also liked that she had a burning sense of injustice and did not tolerate bullies. She was especially quick to defend the more vulnerable pupils—special ed students, obese children, slow learners, those who were unusually short or simply odd-looking or -acting. To some extent, she was the only law and order on that ethnically mixed, routinely violent school yard.
Jules’s father was an army sergeant stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, and her mother was a nurse. They moved to El Paso just as Jules was entering the seventh grade, and middle school had proven a difficult transition for her. She had gone to a relatively small grade school in Idaho, and was now sent to a junior high nearest the base that had nearly two thousand students entering seventh grade. Most of them were Mexican and many of them were gang affiliated, and life for the vulnerable, the timid, the unprotected was hellish.
The first day, Jules came home with a black eye and a bloody nose. She told her parents she’d slipped on the curb. The second day she came home with two black eyes and skinned knees. The next day during Jules’s third lunch period, six fat, tattooed, gangbanger girls in dirty jeans and even dirtier T-shirts assaulted her behind the school. Knocking Jules on her back, two of them held her down while the biggest of the three pounded her head on a concrete curb, demanding her lunch money.
Elena, who was standing nearby, had finally had enough. The dark-haired, dark-eyed girl yanked the two of them to their feet by their long black hair and banged their craniums together so hard the whack! cracked like a rifle shot, and the two girls collapsed, unconscious. Elena knocked the third attacker to her knees, then finished her off with a forehead kick.
The rest of Jules’s tormenters fled.
Elena reached down and helped Jules up.
“Let me know if those girls give you any more shit.”
Jules and her parents viewed Elena as a hero, a savior, but the school’s attitude was less adulatory. According to school rules, all participants were equally responsible. Because Elena had given one of the girls a concussion, their parents contacted the authorities and pressed to have Elena prosecuted. The lawsuit, which the girls’ parents brought against the school for its failure to protect the three gangbangers from Elena, made the principal anxious to punish and expel the girl.
Moreover, Elena’s father had been killed in a run-down, abandoned desert shack the month before, where he’d been cooking methamphetamine. The explosion had blown the shack a half-mile in every direction, and the DEA had only been able to identify him by his teeth.
That Elena now no longer had a home to go to made the school even more determined to send her to a correctional facility.
Jules’s parents did not have much money, but they did have a profound sense of right and wrong. They were not about to let Elena go to a reform school for protecting their daughter from a cadre of psychopaths who, among other things, had been banging her head on the sidewalk. They bailed Elena out of jail, hired the best El Paso lawyer they could find, and fought the case tooth and nail. By the time Elena was acquitted, she was already living with them.
The next year, when Jules’s younger sister, Sandy, entered the school, she was also untouchable. All she had to do was tell the other kids she was a close friend of Elena Moreno, and any would-be attackers faded away, parting before her like the Red Sea.
Soon Elena, Jules, and Sandy were inseparable.
* * *
“I get the sense,” Adara said, “you and Elena are pretty good friends.”
“We have a lot of history,” Jules said.
“The Agency must have frowned on that—a top non-official cover spook being best friends with a New York Journal-World investigative reporter,” Adara said.
“We were careful not to advertise it. Jules isn’t my birth name, and since we weren’t related by blood, and we don’t share a last name, we were able to keep our friendship private. No one had any reason to connect us.”
“But you said you knew her since when?” Rashid asked.
“Junior high in El Paso, Texas.”
“What was El Paso like?” Adara asked.
“Boring.”
“What did you do for fun?” Rashid asked.
“After school, Elena, my sister, Sandy, and I would take off into the desert on my motorcycle and hunt jackrabbits and diamondbacks with her dad’s 12-gauge Winchester pump.”
“Bag any big game?” Rashid asked.
“One time Elena killed a wild pig.”
“No shit?” Rashid asked.
“No shit,” Jules said.
* * *
No shit, indeed. Jules and Sandy had been in a dried-up desert arroyo when they’d stumbled on a litter of piglets. Unfortunately, their mother—a two-hundred-pound feral sow who was maybe ninety feet up the ravine—was highly protective of her offspring and charged.
The beast’s whistling screams scared the girls almost as much as her crazed eyes and curved tusks. Knowing that they couldn’t outrun the animal and armed only with a .22 Colt Woodsman pistol, Jules stood her ground. Taking aim, she began firing.
Elena, who had warned them to stay out of the barranca, was on its rim with her late father’s ancient 12-gauge Winchester pump. When she saw the attack, she dropped twenty feet onto the canyon floor. Fracturing her left ankle, she still managed to stand on her right leg. Pushing her two friends behind her, she raised the shotgun. Taking aim at the charging sow—now less than sixty feet away—Elena pumped round after round of 12-gauge double-ought buck into the shrieking beast. In the canyon’s close confines, the shots were shockingly, painfully loud, but they had no discernible effect on the big pig. The shot pattern was so spread out the blasts didn’t even slow her down. Only with the sixth and final shell did the pattern tighten up enough for the round to break the pig’s right shoulder. Dropping, skidding across the dirt, she stopped less than four feet from Elena’s torn sneakers. Screeching loud enough to wake the damned, the trembling beast rose on three legs, stared at the girls with blood in her eyes, and began stumbling toward them.
&
nbsp; This time, Jules pushed Elena aside and placed the .22 Woodsman directly in front of the sow’s face and put a round in her right eye.
At the same time, Sandy was also on top of the dying pig. Her Buck Omni Hunter 12pt knife in both fists, she drove the blade repeatedly into the animal’s skull.
Elena stared at her two friends.
“You didn’t run,” Elena said.
“Neither did you,” Sandy said.
“I’m impressed,” Elena said.
Refined in gunfire, bonded in the wild pig’s blood, the three girls from that moment on were friends for life.
* * *
Elena and Jameson returned to the living room. Jameson was back in his black gi and leather sandals. Elena’s dark hair was in a ponytail. She wore a maroon T-shirt, Adidas running shoes, and black Levis, which she’d appropriated from Jameson’s closet.
“You aren’t going to believe it,” Elena said, “but guess who just joined the cause?”
“The same guy who an hour ago was going to throw us off the mountain?” Jules asked.
“The same,” Elena said.
“What changed your mind?” Rashid said.
Jameson came up behind her, smiling. “Hey, I couldn’t let you losers have all the fun.”
“Yeah, after all,” Adara said, “what’s life worth without a little violence and terror?”
“You got me,” Jules said.
Jamie allowed them a self-deprecating shrug.
“Then there is the subject of money,” Elena said. “If we’re to counter a series of Saudi-funded nuclear attacks, we’re going to need some instant cash.”
“One of the perks of Jamie’s megawealth is instant cash,” Jules said.
“How much instant cash can you come up with,” Elena said, “without attracting undue attention?”
“How much do you need to finance this operation?” Jamie asked.
“A mill?” Elena said.
“I have more than that here in the house,” Jameson said. “What else?”
“Weapons, ammunition, wheels?” Rashid asked.
“Done.”
“Liquor, drugs, underage sex slaves?” Rashid asked.
“Why not?” Jamie said.
And Into the Fire Page 16
