By Dawn's Early Light

by Grant R. Jeffrey

  “The ghost town photo was shot at the time of prayer, just as this one was.” Kenyon spoke up, squinting through his glasses at Michael as if he needed to readjust his picture-logged vision. “We’d write it off as a fluke, but the phenomenon was repeated in this shot—of a different camp.” He slid another photograph toward Michael.

  “And this one.” Townsend flicked another picture in Michael’s direction. “That’s Osama bin Laden’s terrorist training facility in Afghanistan. Apparently it’s been cleared out, too.”

  Michael glanced at the other photo in his hand. “And this one?”

  “Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley,” Dixon reported. “Near Taanayel, about ten miles west of the Syrian border. The Israelis have been trying to shut down this training camp for years, but they had nothing to do with this mass desertion.”

  Michael dropped the photos, then ran a hand across his jaw. “We got Arabs disappearing anywhere else?”

  “Sudan and Iran,” Blanchard said, crossing his arms. “Most of their camps cleared out last month. We thought they were just repositioning their troops, but now those camps are active again. Wherever they went, they’ve already come back.”

  Michael leaned against the table for a moment, quietly evaluating the photographs in light of the information he’d received that morning. “Can I see the Sudan photos?” He looked at Blanchard. “And the latest photos from Russia might be helpful—see if you can find shots of a military installation close to Moscow.”

  As Blanchard picked up a phone and murmured into the receiver, Dixon rolled his chair to a computer terminal. “That’d be Pushkina. It used to be a KGB training camp, but they’ve been using it to train Arab terrorists for the last several years.” Dixon tapped on the keyboard, and a moment later a series of photos appeared on the screen. Michael walked forward, glancing for a moment at the analyst’s personal space. A Polaroid of a pretty woman and two little girls adorned Dixon’s monitor, an odd juxtaposition with the stark photo on the screen.

  “This is the largest training camp in Sudan, capable of supporting a thousand men,” Dixon said, clicking to enlarge the picture. “And this is our latest shot. This morning the place was humming again, but last month it looked as deserted as a summer resort in midwinter.”

  Michael leaned forward. “Center in on that cluster of men there in the corner. Can you magnify?”

  “You bet.” Dixon’s keyboard clattered, and within an instant the image zoomed up at them. The gray stick figures became six men, three wearing traditional Arab dress, the other three in darkish uniforms. Michael saw the glint of a star upon one man’s shoulder.

  “Those look like Russians to you?” he asked, feeling the silence behind him. The others had risen from the table to gather around Dixon’s monitor, and their silence confirmed his suspicions.

  “The Russians have always been Palestinian allies,” Dixon said, magnifying the picture again. The Russian general came into focus, and though the shadow of his cap hid his face, beneath the edge of the man’s cover Michael saw a fringe of blondish hair.

  He looked at Kenyon. “I’ve never met a blond Arab.”

  Kenyon cock-a-doodled a laugh. “Me neither, Captain.”

  “Got the latest Pushkina shots,” Blanchard called from another computer terminal. Michael turned and walked to the section chief ’s chair while the other analysts followed. Without being asked, Blanchard magnified the shot of the Russian training camp. A plume of smoke hung over a series of chimneys, more than two dozen military vehicles crowded the parking area. By all appearances, the camp was populated—heavily. If they pulled up an infrared shot, Michael knew the place would be crimson with heat.

  Without speaking, Michael pointed toward a cluster of men outside one building. Blanchard pulled the computer’s cursor over the area and clicked again. The shot enlarged, displaying a group in khaki uniforms without insignia. Each of them was dark-haired, and one man was tilting his head toward the sky, displaying a dark moustache and beard. Another wore a kaffiyeh, held in place by a double agal cord around his head.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Michael remarked dryly, meeting Blanchard’s gaze, “but I don’t think the Russians adopted Arab headwear even when they were fighting in Afghanistan.”

  “That one is a Palestinian for sure.” Dixon thrust one hand into his trouser pocket. “Russian officers don’t wear beards.”

  Michael crossed his arms and looked up at the tiled ceiling, his habitual pose for deep thought. “So—someone in Moscow issued the Palestinians an invitation to Pushkina, and they responded en force. But why?”

  “Does that fit with your information?” Blanchard asked, watching with a keenly observant eye.

  Michael lifted his brow. He wasn’t at liberty to say what they had learned from Echelon, but the photographic information certainly supported the intel.

  “What about the Sudanese?” Dixon pointed toward his monitor. “Why did they get invited to the party a month earlier than everyone else?”

  “The camp will only hold so many.” Kenyon squinted toward Michael again. “Maybe this Russian crash course in whatever is only being offered to a select few at a time.”

  “Then who’s next?” Michael breathed the question in a whisper, but all three analysts returned to their computers and began to tap at their keyboards. “We’ve still got activity in Iran,” Townsend volunteered. “It’s been constant. No vacation.”

  Dixon’s chair squeaked as he looked over his shoulder. “I’ve got two camps in Lebanon with a constant reading, too.”

  Blanchard lifted his hand. “Flag those and the Iranian camps, too. We’ll want to know if they migrate northward in the next few weeks.”

  Michael crossed his arms and pressed a finger to his lips. “You’d better watch Iraq, too.” He looked at Blanchard. “Flag every military installation, not just the training camps. Let me know if there’s a sizeable exodus—or if Russian uniforms start showing up.”

  “Roger that.”

  “And I’d like to take some of these photos with me. I’ll sign for them.”

  “No problem, Captain. We know where you live,” Blanchard answered, giving Michael a wry smile. He plucked several of the key photographs from the table, then thrust them into a folder and handed the package to Michael. He gestured toward the corridor. “Want me to walk you out? The labyrinth can be a little confusing.”

  Michael stepped aside. “Thanks.”

  Blanchard led the way out of the network of cubicles with an ease that could only have come from years of working in the place. Just before they reached the security checkpoint, however, he stopped and regarded Michael with a level gaze. “I’ll make a report to my superiors, of course. I suppose you’ll do the same?”

  Michael gave him a polite smile. “As soon as I return to the office.”

  “Very good.” Blanchard thrust out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Reed.”

  Michael returned the handshake, signed for the folder at the security desk, then paused in the bright sunlight outside the building. He breathed deeply of the fresh air, then pulled his cell phone from his pocket, and punched in the number for the direct line to his office. Gloria answered on the first ring.

  “I’ve got a bit of a situation here,” he said, unlocking his car, an ebony ’68 Corvette convertible. “I need you to call the White House and alert them that I’m coming over. I’ll need ten, maybe fifteen minutes with the president ASAP.”

  If Gloria was surprised, she gave no sign of it. “What if they ask . . . why?”

  Michael switched the phone to his other hand as he tossed the classified folder onto the passenger seat, then shrugged out of his coat. “Ask for the president’s secretary and tell her Daniel Prentice sent me. That’s all you’ll need to say.”

  “Fine.”

  Michael switched off the phone, then tossed it onto the passenger seat as he lowered his lanky frame into the convertible. A half-smile crossed his face as he inserted the key and listened to the engine
roar. Amazing what Daniel Prentice’s name could accomplish. Michael scarcely knew the computer genius, having met him just before the outbreak of the Gulf War, but he’d been well-acquainted with Brad Hunter, the Navy SEAL who escorted Prentice in and out of Baghdad before the bombing began. Brad must have mentioned Michael to Prentice, for one day last spring, four months after Prentice’s mysterious disappearance, an e-mail message had appeared on Michael’s NSA computer.

  Hi, Mike:

  I hope you’ll remember me, and I trust you’ll be willing to help, if only for Brad’s sake. We need someone to function as quiet eyes and ears, and instinct tells me you’re the man. The world is about to change, my friend, and SS can’t be sure of anyone.

  If anything unusual goes down in the Middle East . . . if anything at all causes you concern in the next few months, go directly to Casa Blanca and tell them I sent you. Then speak freely.

  I know I can count on you.

  Daniel P.

  Michael put the car in reverse and pulled out of the parking space, remembering how the e-mail had puzzled him for weeks. The note’s meaning was clear enough, and SS undoubtedly stood for Samuel Stedman. The fact that the sender had managed to hack into the NSA’s computers tended to reinforce the idea that Daniel P. could only be Daniel Prentice—not just anyone could penetrate the NSA’s elaborate system safeguards.

  But Prentice was supposed to be dead.

  For a while the world believed Prentice had murdered Brad Hunter and his wife in their home on Christmas Eve. For several weeks the police and FBI expended every effort to find the computer genius while the press set off on a veritable manhunt. The press continued its Daniel Prentice feeding frenzy throughout the winter. Reporters camped out across from Prentice’s Park Avenue apartment and his office in Mount Vernon, New York. A few members of the media trooped down to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Prentice’s mother lived in a retirement community and steadfastly refused to make any comments about her son. The tabloids concentrated on Prentice’s hasty marriage to Lauren Mitchell and the lurid details of the Hunter murders. Throughout January and February of the year 2000, the tab rags’ headlines screamed, “Did Daniel Kill Lauren, Too?”

  As the year 2000 advanced, however, the talking heads stopped babbling about Daniel Prentice and gave him up for lost. The genius who had implemented the Personal Identification Device and the Y2K-compliant national computer network had apparently vanished, leaving his company to be run by his board of directors and his estate in the capable hands of his lawyers.

  Michael pulled out onto the highway, drumming his thumbs against the steering wheel as he negotiated the heavy Washington traffic. The members of the media weren’t the only people searching for Prentice. For weeks after receiving the mysterious message, Michael had applied himself to the business of locating the computer genius. The press had already hacked a wide trail. By searching public records, reporters had learned that Prentice married Lauren Mitchell on Christmas Eve 1999. Apparently the couple fled Washington after Brad and Christine Hunter’s murder, and they had tried to broadcast a news report from an abandoned military base in the wilds of Canada—hardly a logical action for murderers intent on escaping justice. The transmission was inexplicably cut short, and the mystery heightened when, a week later, patrols in the area discovered charred broadcasting equipment, a pistol, and a man’s body in a blackened heap of rubble. The Feds never released the dead man’s name, but the tabloids assumed the body was Prentice’s. Since no trace of Lauren Mitchell Prentice was found, conventional wisdom assumed she died of exposure in the wilderness, where wild animals scattered her bones.

  Michael tried to back-trace the e-mail message that had appeared on his computer; he accessed every capability of the NSA’s formidable mainframes, but no dice. The signal had been bounced from satellite to satellite, from network to network, and no one had a clue where the message originated. On a hunch, Michael tried replying to the message and tracing his reply, but the NSA mainframe couldn’t follow his message once it entered the domain at prenticetech.com. The agent who handed Michael the report grinned and said, “If this guy is alive, he’s so deeply embedded in cyberspace not even Echelon could flush him out.”

  Michael hadn’t heard from Prentice in six months, but he was certain the guy was alive . . . and no murderer. Prentice was a computer genius, not James Bond, and he didn’t have a killing bone in his body. Though he had undergone two weeks of basic military training before the excursion into Baghdad, Prentice seemed a lot more at home behind a computer desk than on a military mission. When Michael had watched a fumbling Prentice try to lock and load an M-16, he’d decided that if not for those GQ model looks, the guy would be definite nerd material.

  The blast of a horn jerked Michael’s attention back to the traffic light. He felt a slow burn singe the tops of his ears as he lifted his foot from the brake. No telling how long he’d been sitting there, lost in the mystery surrounding Daniel Prentice. He punched the accelerator and moved out, leading the pack as the Corvette thundered toward Pennsylvania Avenue.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Moscow

  1800 hours

  AS VLADIMIR MOVED DOWN THE CORRIDOR, DRAWING HIS SECURITY DETAIL after him like the Pied Piper, Alanna Ivanova closed the door, engaged the deadbolt, then turned and moved across the foyer, her slippers carelessly clacking across the marble. An audible sigh passed through her, a cascade of weariness that ended when she dropped into the overstuffed chair at the edge of the Persian carpet. She kicked off the annoying froufrou slippers and propped her feet on the edge of a glass-topped table that would cost any other Russian a year’s salary. She closed her eyes, her concentration dissipating in a mist of fatigue.

  Lunacy, that’s what it was. Lunacy and a whopping dose of patriotism had brought her to this place of pretending. She had been so grief-stricken and homesick for anything American that she had fairly leapt at the chance to dine with the American ambassador’s charming wife in the month after Sergei’s death. During that first luncheon meeting, Mrs. Irene Nance had been effusive in her sympathy, generous with her understanding, and completely tolerant of the fact that Alanna had fallen in love with and married a Russian scientist.

  “I met Sergei at the Houston Space Center,” Alanna had told Mrs. Nance over shrimp cocktails. “And though my family certainly didn’t approve, I didn’t think twice about following him back to Russia. I knew he’d take care of me . . . and he did, right up until the day he died.”

  Mrs. Nance made soft sounds of sympathy.

  “I still don’t see how he could just drive into a concrete piling.” Rigidly holding her tears in check, Alanna looked away, then turned the catch in her voice into a cough, and went on. “But I know accidents happen. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life now that he’s gone.”

  She looked down and was surprised to discover that she had completely scraped the polish off her thumbnail. “I’m thirty-two, too young to be a widow.”

  “Don’t do anything for a while, dear,” Mrs. Nance counseled her. “A widow should not make drastic changes in her life for at least a year. You have Sergei’s pension and a place to live. And who knows? Perhaps you can be of service to your own country while you are in Moscow.”

  For ten months Alanna had followed Mrs. Nance’s advice and gone about the slow and painful course of healing. At night she walked along the River Moskva and shivered in the cool evening breeze . . . alone. She steeled herself to the sight of happy couples and small children as she stood in the long queues for food and supplies, growing a callus over the wounded parts of her heart. And she collected memories she would take back to America, for she had loved Sergei and Sergei had loved Moscow. While he had admired the United States and things American, he was a born and bred Muscovite at heart. “Over eight hundred years of history are woven into the fabric of this city,” he often told her as they walked arm-in-arm along the Moskva. “Can’t you feel it? I could never be truly happy living anywh
ere else.”

  Alanna tried to be happy in Moscow, but she had already made tentative plans to return to Houston when she met the ambassador’s wife for coffee in the early part of February 2000. “Wait,” Irene told her, one birdlike hand reaching out to grasp Alanna’s wrist. “Don’t go until you have met Daniel. He’s quite an unusual fellow.”

  “Daniel?”

  Mrs. Nance released Alanna’s arm and lifted her coffee cup. “I don’t know his full name. But he’s a fascinating man, and he has expressed an interest in meeting you.”

  Two days later, Mrs. Nance introduced Alanna to Daniel, a striking man with brown hair, a slight New York accent, and an air of isolation about his tall figure. For a moment Alanna suspected Mrs. Nance of old-fashioned matchmaking, but Daniel seemed to have more important things on his mind. He waited until the ambassador’s wife left the outdoor café table, then leaned forward and told Alanna that she might be of extreme service to the United States by remaining in Russia.

  Alanna suppressed a smile and lowered her voice. “I wasn’t aware that our ambassador’s wife was allowed to recruit spies. Because if that’s what this is about, you’re talking to the wrong woman. I don’t speak much Russian, I happen to like the people here, and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt them. Oh—and I’m generally a coward. Not at all the heroic type.” She leaned back in her chair. “Besides, I don’t know you at all. How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Have you a fondness for spy novels or just an overactive imagination?” Daniel asked, his eyes flat and dark in the sunlight, unreadable. “I can assure you, Mrs. Nance is not recruiting anyone for any government agency. We would just like you to gather information if you can. I won’t ask you to do anything you don’t want to do, but I will tell you that this matter is of serious importance.”

  Daniel looked away, but not before Alanna noticed a faint flicker of unease in the depths of his deep brown eyes. “Please, Alanna. I am acting on my own behalf, and I believe you can help us. Please say you’ll consider it.”